Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [43]
Distributors were cool to the idea at first, but a story in Life magazine about the new horror craze aimed at teenagers renewed interest. Warren instructed Ackerman to start the magazine with one instruction: “I’m an eleven-year-old. Make me laugh.”
So he did. To be precise, it was an eleven-year-old with a weakness for goofy jokes and aging stars. “Monsters are good for you” was the title of the opening article. It argued, half-seriously, for the cathartic value of horror films: “A vampire a day keeps the doctors away.” As directors started making a more realistic and political brand of horror in the late sixties, FM lost ground to less sentimental rivals. Leading the way was the obsessive Castle of Frankenstein, which started publishing in the sixties, featuring a stable of cerebral fantasy writers including Joe Dante, who would go on to become a director of films such as Gremlins. Its editor, Calvin Beck—a shy, skinny man widely rumored to be the inspiration for the character of Norman Bates (his overbearing mother accompanied him everywhere, even midnight movies)—saw his readers as educated, engaged fans, who cared about more than just movies. That opinion was tested when Beck started attacking Nixon and his policies in Vietnam. “Please leave the social commentary to Walter Cronkite,” wrote one fan from Minnesota. “The world of fantasy is just that: fantasy. And I don’t want to read your views on Nixon especially when it interferes with my excursion into another world.”
Beck did not back down, arguing that commentary on current events has been at the center of many of the most important films of the genre, singling out Night of the Living Dead. He argued that apathy in the face of political monsters is what brought us Hitler. Still, Beck made sure to say that he understood the reader’s complaint, defending escapism: “There’s no doubt that total ‘escape’ into a world of fantasy and whimsy is not only normal but a safety valve in order to cope with reality.”
Castle of Frankenstein slowly grew in circulation, but remained a shoestring operation and was soon eclipsed by Cinefantastique, an even more sober publication that premiered in the fall of 1970. Frederick Clarke, its editor, also went further in articulating a vision of the new kind of grittier, more serious horror film that would have more in common with the work of D. A. Pennebaker than James Whale. Its first issue began with a photo of the moon and an essay titled “How’s Your Sense of Wonder” that could be a manifesto for the New Horror: “Cinemafantastique. Pretty pretentious for a monster film magazine, isn’t it? Hah!” it began. “You think so! Well good, because we intend to tackle the subject with our pretensions intact.” The essay, penned by Clarke, goes on to attack the mainstream press for ignoring these films. “Those poor mainstream critics. Their brains have turned to marble. They haven’t entertained an original thought since high school. Their sense of wonder has atrophied.”
On the cover was Catch-22. Inside were critical reviews of Fellini’s Satyricon alongside stories about exploitation pictures like Scream and Scream Again and Eugenie . . . the Story of Her Journey into Perversion. This expansive coverage made the argument that even people who didn’t think they were horror fans actually were. What stood out was the respectful tone afforded films that were dismissed by all other publications as cynical trash. Soft-core porn received lines such as “Taken on its own terms . . .” In the third issue, Clarke launched a theory of the New Horror that proposed Ebert’s dismissal of Night of the Living Dead as what was wrong with the current coverage of the genre.
Clarke wrote that Ebert completely missed the movie’s intent. The kids weren’t scared of the graphic violence, but of “its humorless realism, its austere mood and the tone of absolute authenticity.” Clarke goes on to explain how the undead represent the anonymous majority that is the face of authority in our society. The fear