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career woman who has it all: the rich husband, the bustling career, the baby on the way, and the hot younger man. In the first third of the movie, she loses everything. Her husband leaves her, her career falters, and the affair grows cold when the other man discovers that she’s only interested in his body. Then there’s a pain in her stomach, sending her to the hospital where the doctor tells her she’s had a miscarriage. She is given two options: invasive surgery to remove the fetus or waiting for it to flush out on its own. Choosing the latter, she retreats to a spooky old family home where she waits alone, literally and figuratively dying inside. Her state of mind fraying, and the perspective shifting inside her head, she hears strange childlike sounds and pitter-pats on the stairs while a stalker enters her home. At the same time, the fetus starts to come out. Throughout the scene, the question lingers: Is what she’s seeing real or imagined?

Just like in the seminal horror movies of the seventies, the source of the horror, the fetus, is unknown and stuck in a strange in-between. There is confusion about what is real and an ambiguous ending. The victim is similar to the fragile but passionate isolated women of Polanski’s horror films of the sixties, and the miscarriage taps into the reproductive anxieties that gave us Alien (the horror of the stomach again). I refined it down to a three-minute pitch and met the producer at an elegant bar in Beverly Hills where Adam Sandler, wearing black sunglasses and long white shorts, was shooting a movie out front. I sold the idea with gusto, lingering on the scares of the empty house and the trauma of the doctor’s office but mostly the creepiness of waiting for this mysterious thing to come out of you. He listened patiently through the entire pitch, occasionally nodding his head and never seeming as distracted as the short-attention-spanned executives in movies. When I was done, he said politely that the idea would never work in Hollywood.

“First off, you break an ironclad rule: the female hero cannot have an affair,” he said with the calm of an analytic philosopher pointing out an error in logic. That was not nearly as surprising as his second issue. “And the miscarriage, you know, it’s just too unpleasant.”

The horror genre has come a long way since the seventies. It’s hard to imagine anyone working in exploitation movies in the seventies suggesting that a script’s main problem is that it’s too unpleasant. The most unpleasant thing possible is what Wes Craven and Dan O’Bannon and John Carpenter were trying to put on-screen. That was the point. As the audience has grown, the tactics of the genre have completely changed, which is to be expected. They are not appealing to young men in trench coats anymore. That’s not always a good thing.

EPILOGUE

They’re selling postcards of the hanging.

Bob Dylan, “Desolation Row”

THE TWENTY or so men—and one woman—sitting around a long table in a Hollywood restaurant have blood on their hands. Buckets of it. In fact, they are responsible for hundreds of the most violent and disgusting deaths of all time. They do it for money, fame, and a kind of pleasure that many Americans find perverse. They are horror directors. The semiregular get-together, referred to as “Masters of Horror,” is mostly just friends with a common interest making small talk over dinner. It briefly evolved into a macabre television series with episodes directed by many of the party guests, but when Mick Garris, a journalist and director of several Stephen King adaptations, organized the event, he was not thinking about anything more than hanging around and talking shop.

As soon as directors arrive, they break up into cliques. Eli Roth, director of Hostel, wearing a tight black T-shirt and a sly smile, chats animatedly with Robert Rodriguez, who directed From Dusk Till Dawn and Sin City. They discuss the success of the latest Hollywood remake, censorship, and the idiocy of the press. Tan, groomed, and outgoing, Roth has the swagger and ease of the captain of the