Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [2]
The story of the killer stalking the babysitter from inside the house was an old urban legend, but it had yet to become a movie trope. Screened at the USC film school, the fifteen-minute short Foster’s Release was later shown at the Edinburgh Film Festival, and largely forgotten. Its director, Terence Winkless, a soft-spoken student with experience acting on television, didn’t care much about horror. He saw it as a lark, and the thought of expanding this movie into a feature did not occur to him.
When Winkless moved on to create something closer to his heart, Wallflower, a soulful meditation about the challenges of being an artist, he received written criticism from his classmates, mostly anonymous, except for one pointed assessment. “I don’t know anything from the ending. Nothing happens one way or the other,” it stated brusquely. “Cutting was at times very effective but you kept coming back to that side medium shot.” The critic signed his name JHC, the initials for John Howard Carpenter.
John Carpenter would go on to direct his own heavy-breathing stalker babysitter movie less than a decade later. Halloween became one of the most commercially successful and artistically influential horror movies ever made. Winkless worked on a few films, including cowriting The Howling, but his career never took off. The way he describes it, Foster’s Release could be considered the Rosetta Stone of modern horror. “John took it from me no question,” Winkless says with no bitterness in his voice. “But I don’t blame him. He was smart. I was too much of a purist to turn Foster’s Release into something bigger. That’s fine: I have a good life. I just don’t have his kind of money.”
The year after Halloween opened, inspiring countless imitations with similar masked serial killers prowling outside of houses, Dan O’Bannon’s screenplay for Alien, a movie that he had been thinking about since his film school days, revolutionized the monster movie. The success of these two movies, which can be traced back to the USC film school in the early seventies, completed the horror genre’s transition from queasy exploitation fare to the beating heart of popular culture.
This book tells the unlikely story of how John Carpenter, Wes Craven, Dan O’Bannon, and several other innovative artists over the course of about a dozen years invented the modern horror movie. In the 1960s, going to see a horror movie was barely more respectable than visiting a porn theater. You watched scary movies in cars or in dirty rooms with sticky floors. Critics often ignored the genre, and Hollywood studios saw its box office potential as limited. Religious groups and politicians sometimes protested, but more often, mainstream adult audiences didn’t pay attention. These young filmmakers revived the genre, and the results of their work can be seen almost every weekend when a major horror movie opens.
Magazines and television channels are now dedicated to horror movies. Popular video games are based on movies like Alien. Universities teach exploitation cinema. Museums curate festivals of low-budget movies that were picketed when they opened. In terms of the box office, zombies and vampires are as close to a sure thing as there is in Hollywood. Relentless serial killers have become the subject of Oscar-winning productions such as The Silence of the Lambs and No Country for Old Men.
The publishing industry has long relied on that indestructible commercial artist Stephen King, but now Twilight helps drive the business, and the undead have brought a new generation to the stories of Jane Austen in the bestseller Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Some of the most popular shows on television include serial killers (Dexter), demons (Supernatural), zombies (The Walking Dead), and vampires (True Blood). A-list actresses such as Jennifer Connelly and Naomi Watts now are scream queens. Pop stars like Lady Gaga are just as likely to dress in gothic style and strike zombie poses as to project a bubble-gum