Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [44]
The classic horror film serves a healthy, cathartic purpose: to purge us of our fear of death. We confront it in the safety of the movie theater, shudder, and then realize it was fake. Clarke argues that this is the kind of thing we do for kids. Adults must face up to the ugliness of the world. Ebert may be worried that the film will disturb people, he argues, but that is the point. “What makes ‘Night of the Living Dead’ so remarkable, and so artistically beautiful, is that in its concluding scenes,” Clarke writes, “it bypasses its purging function as fantasy and moves into a mode of heightened realism.”
This passionate intellectual defense of a then fairly obscure movie represents a major shift in thinking about horror. In a time of war and cynicism and political unrest, resorting to fantasy was not just old-fashioned. It was a kind of surrender. Even though Romero was inspired by films from the fifties and had no intention of responding realistically to the issues of the day, that didn’t matter. Meanwhile, you would never know from reading FM about the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. or the race riots in Watts or Woodstock or Watergate or any of the other seismic shifts in the culture. That was part of the point. For Ackerman, horror meant evil and the bizarre and monsters, but then the lights went on and you had a good laugh at yourself.
“Monsterism,” Ackerman wrote in his fiftieth issue in 1968, “is not exactly at the peak of popularity . . . but we plan to carry on.” Ackerman held firm to his vision of good clean fun; but in the cult underground theaters, the New Horror imagined a wholly different kind of world. These were darker movies, and they fit the spirit of the times. Ackerman, for his part, continued manfully through the seventies, with dwindling readership. FM suffered from increased competition by the end of the decade, notably from a vigorous rival, Fangoria, that combined obsessive coverage and a punched-up style and passionate commitment to gore that Ackerman generally steered clear of. On the cover of Fangoria was usually a close-up of some hideous gash-filled face or half-eaten zombie. The modest consideration of Cinefantastique and the childlike wonder of FM had given way to a sticky new aesthetic. The monster wasn’t merely the misunderstood soul anymore. He was a drooling killer who would rip your arms off and serve you for dinner.
Ackerman knew something was changing in the late sixties when he saw Night of the Living Dead for the first time. He didn’t care for it, but what really captured his attention was not the undead gnawing on human flesh. It was the sight of small children watching the movie, cowering at this shocking violence. It baffled him. He had built an entire career on understanding what makes little kids tick, and this proved to be a complete mystery. After the movie, Ackerman, always friendly, walked up to a child, who was maybe eight years old, and asked what he thought. “I loved it!” he said, running out the door, thrilled. Ackerman stood there, truly horrified.
CHAPTER FIVE
SHOCK OR AWE
What an excellent day for an exorcism!
Regan, The Exorcist
FIVE YEARS after Norman Bates interrupted a perfectly good shower, another unfriendly exchange took place at the Bates Motel. It occurred during the final episode of the weekly television series The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, an anthology of mysteries and scary stories hosted by the director playing an even more archly droll version of himself. It was shot on the set made famous by Psycho. The teleplay for the episode, “Off Season,” was written by Robert Bloch, author of the novel that was the basis for the movie. That it included a creepy, sinewy character running a motel seemed like an in-joke. This time, however, the manager stayed on the periphery of the story, while the focus remained with a policeman, who, after prematurely