Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [42]
The only major critic who detected a seriousness of purpose was Roger Ebert. Early in his review of the movie, he clings to a notion of horror inextricably tied to the world of ghosts and goblins. “I don’t want to give the impression, however, that this is simply a good horror movie,” he writes. “It’s horrifying, all right, but in ways that have nothing to do with the supernatural.” In his mind, what made this something new was Craven’s uncompromising intent to go as far as he possibly could. “The violence in ‘Last House on the Left’ is not exhilarating,” he wrote. “It does not act as a catharsis. It is not escapist . . . it is just there, brutal and needless and tragic. I still believe ‘Last House on the Left’ is a movie of worth, of a certain dogged commitment to its unsavory content.”
Despite his praise for The Last House on the Left, Roger Ebert did not always embrace horror. In a story for Reader’s Digest in 1970, he wrote that he had not seen a horror film in a decade, revealing just how peripheral the genre was to the cultural menu. He goes on to describe a matinee performance of Night of the Living Dead as a parent’s nightmare. Children screaming and crying, families walking out. “I don’t think the younger kids really knew what hit them,” he wrote. “They were used to going to movies, sure, and they’d seen some horror movies before, sure, but this was something else. This was ghouls eating people up—and you could actually see what they were eating. This was a little girl killing her mother. This was being set on fire. Worst of all, even the hero got killed.”
The condescension and indifference to horror by the rest of the mainstream press opened up a market for smaller publications catering to a small circle of fans, with circulations in the hundreds or thousands of dedicated readers. But the impact of these publications turned out to be much greater than their readership would suggest. Cahiers du Cinéma regularly covered low-budget horror for cineastes, but its American counterparts were read by fans, some of whom turned into future directors. These little obsessive publications were the connective tissue that brought together the budding artists of horror. None was more influential than Forrest Ackerman’s Famous Monsters of Filmland.
As a kid, George Romero stayed up nights in New York curled up in bed reading old copies. George Lucas was a dedicated reader, and even Steven Spielberg has said that the magazine helped get him hooked on movies. Rick Baker, the six-time Oscar winner and titan of Hollywood makeup, describes learning from the magazine that makeup artists were real creative forces behind the great monster movies. John Carpenter has said getting the letter from Ackerman asking for fifty copies of the fanzine he wrote was the “high point of his career.”
In an age before the Internet and video, FM, as it’s called, helped fans find the hidden gems and publicize small-scale cult hits like The Last House on the Left and Night of the Living Dead long after they opened. It was the bible of fantasy films throughout the sixties. It also was perhaps the most innocent of the fantasy publications, steering clear of politics or harsh reviews. It was a magazine for the Old Horror. Besides publishing adoring, pun-filled profiles of Boris Karloff, FM demystified the movies with secrets revealed about the makeup and special effects of the most popular monsters of Hollywood.
FM was founded in 1958 when the old Universal films began to be shown on television. James Warren, an editor, saw an opportunity. After he returned from a science-fiction convention in London where he took a jaunt to Paris and saw a monster magazine, Ackerman, then an agent for fantasy writers, told Warren that he could do something similar for an American audience. Over blueberry pancakes, Ackerman told Warren that he could use the photos from his collection of 35,000 stills, boasting that he had seen every fantasy film since 1922. Warren thought he would try one issue. The original