Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [109]
Cunningham tried to copy Halloween, but the elements he stole were not those that made the movie truly unique. He added lots of gore and made the connection between sex and death even more direct, but missing was the truly radical character of Michael Myers. The plot was a fairly simple mystery: someone was killing teenagers at the recently reopened Camp Crystal Lake, which shut down two decades earlier after a pair of counselors were killed. One year before the double murder, a young camper named Jason drowned, hinting that the ghost of this boy was haunting Crystal Lake. But the killer actually turned out to be his mother, angry that the counselors abandoned her son to drown because they were occupied having sex. So she killed more counselors. And when she died, that made Jason angry. Instead of a horror movie about the bogeyman, this story was about just another lunatic with mommy issues.
Then came 1981: the year everyone’s head exploded. Nazis’ faces melted in Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark, and the splattered skull of a pompous panel member in David Cronenberg’s Scanners looked like a pumpkin dropped from a skyscraper. In The Fury, which premiered three years earlier, Brian De Palma destroyed the entire body of John Cassavetes, his head popping off and rocketing into the sky (Roman Polanski surely approved). Technical advances pushed the genre in new directions, as sophisticated uses of liquid and foam latex, as well as primitive animation, allowed audiences to see the body distorted and destroyed with a new level of detail. While movies like The Exorcist and Alien did include some trailblazing special effects, the explicit on-screen violence of movies like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and The Last House on the Left was discreet compared to the carnage of the following decade. This was because effects back in the seventies were expensive and what was possible was limited.
The rise in the stature of effects had a huge impact on horror, and that was most clearly apparent in the evolution of the werewolf movie, the classic horror subgenre that perhaps depends most on special effects, since the transformation from man to beast is crucial. In the original The Wolf Man from the 1940s, the full moon metamorphosis takes place in darkly lit rooms, and the sequence connected shots together—first the hand, then the feet breaking out of the shoes, and ending with the roaring yell of the beast. Hammer Productions emphasized sexual repression and romance in its early sixties remake The Curse of the Werewolf, but you never saw the monster, who remained almost entirely offscreen until the end. But in the 1981 hit An American Werewolf in London, John Landis staged the scene in a brightly lit room with an immobile camera hanging up high, like a shot from a blimp observing the madness with a cool distance. The horror moved into the light. Michael Jackson loved the movie, and two years later hired Landis to make the landmark fourteen-minute music video Thriller, starring Vincent Price as the narrator. It was in the style of Night of the Living Dead. It included an elaborate on-screen transformation. Today’s werewolves inevitably employ computer-generated imagery (CGI).
A little freedom can be a good thing, but too much can paralyze. John Carpenter composed his memorable propulsive synthesizer score for Halloween because he didn’t have the money to hire an accomplished composer. If Romero had more resources, he said he would have made an art film instead of Night of the Living Dead.
Part of the reason that Spielberg kept the shark in the water in Jaws was logistical. The mechanical monster never worked. The crazed, sweaty faces in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre reflected the reality that shooting a cheap movie in Texas in August is a horror in itself. The Last House on the Left captured a documentary feel by using handheld cameras, because Wes Craven didn’t know about dollies. There was an element of innocence about the business in the low-budget films of the seventies that allowed the directors to do things differently,