Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [3]
Even our politicians communicate in language created by the horror film. In early 2008, a thirty-second advertisement appeared on televisions sets across the country, commanding the focus of the nation, and for a moment, it seemed to shift the momentum of the Democratic presidential primary. It began with a two-story suburban house in an ominous shadow. The glow of the windows stood out like twinkling eyes through the darkness. Someone was home. The frame of the picture moved unsteadily, swooping downward in a rush, bobbing back and forth, approaching, retreating, suggesting that a threat is out there, staring at the house. The screen dims to black and the telephone screeches. It keeps ringing. Shots of a little girl sleeping inside the house flash for a second, then a close-up of a peaceful baby. “Someone is out there,” a gravelly baritone says. Where? The phone rings louder and louder and louder until the music swells, a shock of light intrudes on the screen, and a new voice announces calmly: “I am Hillary Clinton, and I have approved this message.”
In the subsequent controversy over the ad, no commentator noticed what was stunningly obvious: Hillary Clinton had made a horror movie. Not just any horror movie, either; this potent short video borrowed conventions that can be traced back to a very fertile cultural moment when John Carpenter put the audience in the perspective of the killer in Halloween.
Horror has become so pervasive that we don’t even notice how thoroughly it has entered the public consciousness. It’s on television, in the movies, and in the show that goes on in our minds when we go to bed at night. The modern horror movie has not only established a vocabulary for us to articulate our fears. It has taught us what to be scared of.
In the late sixties, the film industry was changing. Rules about obscenity and violence were in flux. The “Midnight Movie” was reaching a young audience that embraced underground and cult films. Starting in the second half of 1968, the flesh-eating zombie and the remote serial killer emerged as the new dominant movie monsters, the vampire and werewolf of their day. A new emphasis on realism took hold, vying for attention with the fantastical wing of the genre. Just as important was how the writers of these movies shifted the focus away from narrative and toward a deceptively simpler storytelling with a constantly shifting point of view. Movies were more graphic. The relationship with the audience became increasingly confrontational, and that was a result largely of the new class of directors who were making low-budget movies for drive-in theaters and exploitation houses across the country.
This cultural shift took place at the same transitional period when some of the most ambitious Hollywood movies in history were being made. Many of the adventurous mainstream directors who belong to what is known as the New Hollywood got their start in horror. Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, and Peter Bogdanovich refined their craft on low-budget scares before moving on to what most people in the movie business considered more mature work. At the same time, another class of directors more committed to genre was getting started. George Romero, David Cronenberg, John Carpenter, Wes Craven, and Tobe Hooper reinvented the conventions of the horror films outside of Hollywood, while William Friedkin, Brian De Palma, and Roman Polanski smuggled more prestige horror productions into the studio system. Never in the history of the movies had so much talent been put to work frightening audiences.
Movies like The Last House on the Left and Night of the Living Dead rarely received sustained and serious consideration from critics, and while that has changed in the decades since they opened, the source of their inspiration often remains misunderstood. Alfred Hitchcock is usually cited as the godfather of the genre, but his relationship with the younger horror directors is much more complicated and tense than assumed. Comic books, monster movie