Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [120]
My loving family has been an essential support system and huge influence throughout my career. As a kid, it always struck me that my mother never walked out of a play or a movie and quickly changed the subject to what’s for dinner. She analyzed and debated and employed preposterous amounts of hyperbole, which was fun to listen to and very good training for a future critic. My father was more likely to argue about sports or politics, but he inadvertently planted the seeds of my interest in the fantasy genre in first grade by patiently reading C. S. Lewis’s Narnia books every night before I went to sleep. That was a tremendous gift.
The most irreplaceable help on this project came from two literaryminded lawyers. My old friend Nick Joseph was the first person to teach me about the highbrow pleasures of lowbrow art as well as the lowbrow pleasures of highbrow art. His taste and intellectual rigor had an impact on me in high school and were invaluable in editing an early draft.
The person I depend on most, however, is my wife Agnès Dunogué, who, besides being the love of my life, thinks deeper and faster than anyone I have known. She has provided critical counsel at every stage of the book, talking through ideas, giving advice and perspective, and finally, a crucial edit. She has done it all happily despite not particularly liking horror movies at all. The poor woman has sat through more vampire slayings and zombie beheadings than anyone who doesn’t care for that kind of thing should. Yet she never complained, not even when only weeks before giving birth to our daughter Penny, I insisted on rewatching Alien and The Brood, movies perfectly engineered to traumatize a pregnant woman. Clearly, I am very lucky.
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
2 Cunningham didn’t know: Author interview (hereafter “AI”) with Sean Cunningham; David A. Szulkin, Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left (Godalming, UK: FAB Press, 1997).
2 He hardly seemed to fit: AI with David Cameron.
2 “Toughstuff”:AI with Chapin.
2 “Are you allowed to do this in America?”: Ibid.
2 “Don’t worry: it’s just a joke”: AI with Craven.
4 “Cutting was at times”: AI with Terence Winkless.
4 “I just don’t have his kind of money”: Ibid.
6 Rules about obscenity: Mark Harris, Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood (New York: Penguin Press, 2008).
6 The “Midnight Movie”: J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum, Midnight Movies (New York: Da Capo Press, 1983).
6 Many of the adventurous mainstream directors: Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ‘N’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999).
8 “Steve King says”: AI with George Romero.
8 Horror, he argued: Ron Rosenbaum, “Gooseflesh: The Strange Turn Toward Horror,” Harper’s, September 1979.
CHAPTER ONE
11 Castle had directed: William Castle, Step Right Up! I’m Gonna Scare the Pants Off America: Memoirs of a B-Movie Mogul (New York: Pharos Books, 1976), pp. 185–86.
12 Put the whole thing in 3-D: Christopher Sandford, Polanski: A Biography (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
12 “Even if they ban it”: Castle, Step Right Up!, p. 187.
13 Of the four proposed endings: AI with Pat Cardi.
13–14 He made movies: AI with William Immerman, Roger Corman.
14 But Evans knew: AI with Robert Evans.
16 “I direct Rosemary’s Baby”: Castle, Step Right Up!, p. 192.
17 Robert Evans sold him: AI with Evans.
17 In a short appreciation: Carlos Clarens, An Illustrated Guide to the Horror Film (New York: Paragon Books, 1967).
18 In July: The Mike Douglas Show, June 12, 1967.
18 In other interviews: Victoria Price, Vincent Price: A Daughter’s Biography (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1999), p. 275.
19 After he testified to Congress: David Hajdu, The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), pp. 274–318.
19 Tired of playing: Price, Vincent Price, pp.