Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [114]
“It’s not as easy as it looks,” says Joseph Zito, who directed Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (which was, of course, far from it). He refers to slitting a woman’s throat. William Lustig, whose cult hit Maniac revealed a talent for chopping scalps, nods his head in agreement. They discuss the special-effects maven Tom Savini, who used his experience as a veteran of the Vietnam War to re-create the look of dead bodies with an impressive veracity. Less interested in the science of makeup and special effects is Larry Cohen, the director of It’s Alive. Like a Borscht Belt comic, he joked about starting a Masters of Horror summer camp. “Every year we could kill one camper,” he says.
Nearby, working on their salads, are Wes Craven and Tobe Hooper. They are quieter than most of their peers, who are clearly happy to be in their presence. The younger directors grew up on their movies, back when you couldn’t see them on cable television or in clips on YouTube. As Roth explains, the way that kids first learned about horror movies in the seventies and eighties was usually from unreliable sources such as the big brothers of your friends who reported back about every grisly act of cannibalism and head chopped off. Hearing about these movies secondhand gave them the power of legend even before they had become popular cult hits. Roth says he hates the term “torture porn.”
Hooper smiles somewhat bashfully when a discussion breaks out about the first time the directors saw The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Don Coscarelli, who straddles these two eras and made the splendid 1979 hit Phantasm, describes seeing the movie as a spiritual epiphany. “[They] created the horror film, and we’re all copying them,” says Tim Sullivan, the director of 2001 Maniacs. “They should be talked about like Scorsese and Coppola.” Minutes later, Roth stands up to make a toast. “I want to thank you,” he said, looking toward his elders, “for providing so much material for me to steal.”
TALK TO most of the directors of the classic horror movies from the sixties and seventies and you might detect a weary look on their faces. They appear to be tired of their early hits. They rarely topped them. In fact, most of them didn’t even come close. New Horror movies were supposed to be the start of a great career, not what fans would still be talking about four decades later. When asked what he’s most proud of in Night of the Living Dead, Romero, who left Pittsburgh in the first decade of the twenty-first century and is sitting in a modern apartment in Toronto, sighs and looks straight ahead, saying: “Honestly, it was just finishing the movie. That’s what I was happy with.” Problem is: he will never be finished. New audiences keep returning to it, and every few years when he’s promoting a new zombie movie (Land of the Dead, Diary of the Dead, Survival of the Dead), he’s asked repeatedly about the original zombies.
The 1980s should have been a great time to be Tobe Hooper. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre had become cultural shorthand for a certain glamorous depravity. In the opening shot of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, a yellow cab drives through the smoky streets of Times Square while the voice of the title character thanks God that the rain has washed away the grime and corruption of the city. It’s an iconic portrait of dirty, hellish New York. Amid the porn dealers and liquor shops and sex trade is a movie theater. On the marquee it promotes in capital letters: THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE.
Hollywood was suddenly interested in the directors who made the scariest movies of the seventies. They had devoted fans and young critics on their side. And yet, many of the artists who made the influential New Horror movies stumbled in the following decade. Hooper had long felt that his audience didn’t appreciate the humor in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, so when he made