Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [116]
In all his explorations of the undead, George Romero never quite matched the triumphs of his first two zombie hits, despite remaining consistently productive, finding more success in a blend of gore and comedy than in true terror. He had trouble with the transition from low-budget movies to Hollywood, although he made several movies, like Creepshow and Monkey Shines, that were pleasing entertainments with occasional moments of fright. But even he admitted these didn’t entirely work as exercises in terror. “The only really scary movie I made, I think, was Night of the Living Dead,” he says. After a decade without a Living Dead movie, he made another small comeback with a series of zombie movies on low budgets that found a new generation of cult fans.
At a recent horror convention in New York, sponsored by the magazine Fangoria, Romero and most of the original cast of Night of the Living Dead fielded over an hour of questions. The crowd asked the actor Russ Streiner to recite lines from movies made over four decades ago. Streiner, who played a policeman, gamely played along to cheers. Other cast members dutifully told stories with which they had been regaling convention crowds for years. It sounded like work. The audience wanted to hear from Romero the most, but he was fairly quiet, letting the others bask in the glory. When the inevitable questions about the politics of the movie were asked, he chuckled to himself and said that he didn’t care about it much.
It’s tempting to say that classic low-budget movies like Night of the Living Dead and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre were flukes, happy accidents that could not be repeated because part of their secret was their novelty. But that’s not quite right. These were the product of a brand of moviemaking that encouraged collaboration. Hooper needed Henkel to ground his monsters in reality, and Romero built his scripts with the help of collaborators. When Hollywood embraced horror, the outsiders became insiders. “What happened is that kids who grew up with our horror movies, they’re now running studios and writing reviews,” Craven says. The next generation saw the New Horror as the classics; scary movies in the eighties and nineties were actually much more reverent to the movies of the past. The younger artists didn’t look to cinema verité and Pinter and Bergman. They borrowed from Craven, Hooper, and Romero.
De Palma distanced himself from horror, moving into gangster movies, comedies, and more mainstream action. He had a few huge hits (Scarface, The Untouchables, Mission: Impossible) and a couple of spectacular bombs (Bonfire of the Vanities, Mission to Mars). While the themes he explored did not change very much—he remained focused on voyeurism—his movies started to seem more impersonal, in part because they were larger productions that were sometimes based on material that could not be toyed with. His most fertile artistic period remained the dozen or so years he made taut thrillers about knife-wielding stalkers and the creeps who spy on them. Blow Out, a 1981 movie, returns to all his old obsessions: exploitation movies, conspiracies, split screens and 360-degree shots, a voyeur-hero searching to save the girl and find the truth. John Travolta plays a soundman from Philadelphia embarrassed about his work and fascinated with re-creating the horrible tragedy that he thinks he overheard. In one scene, Murder à la Mod