Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [49]
When the movie was released in 1966, its fury and profanity were a revelation, loosening the standards for obscenity for the next generation of Hollywood dramas. In the same period, the plays of the Angry Young Men of English theater and the absurdist school of drama were increasingly popular. They were nihilistic, violent, and brutal. Plays like Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros (about a world where everyone turns into animals—think Invasion of the Body Snatchers), Edward Bond’s Saved (featuring the senseless stoning of a baby), and Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days (a play about a woman stuck in a mound of dirt) were more horrifying than anything at the drive-in. These dramas were rooted in stylized language, turning small spaces into tormented portraits of cracked minds. Friedkin, like Craven and Carpenter, was drawn toward this brand of drama. But more than Albee or Beckett, he was inspired by the crisp poetic plays of Harold Pinter, especially after seeing a San Francisco production of The Birthday Party.
Pinter’s first produced play tells a story of psychological menace about a man hunted down in a boardinghouse by two interrogators for no understandable reason. They attack him, insinuate betrayal, and level criticism that approaches coherence but never quite gets there. When they drag him off, it’s not clear what happened. Melding the madness of Kafka with the absurdism of Beckett, Pinter introduced a new dramatic and ambiguous style. Who were these interrogators? They seemed like comic caricatures, and yet there was a sense of foreboding about them. They chattered away, but what was left unsaid seemed most frightening, hiding something truly awful, like the monster waiting at the other side of the door.
The cryptic language worked on Friedkin’s imagination. “It was like listening to Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring for the first time. It was something completely different and powerful and emotional,” he says. “When I saw The Birthday Party, which was way before I read The Exorcist , it prepared me for an ambiguous kind of storytelling as being more powerful than nailing things on the nose.”
It also inspired him to adapt the play, and in translating it to film in 1968, he worked closely with Pinter. The impact of stage drama on the great directors of scary movies of the sixties and seventies remains vastly underrated. In her review of Jaws, Pauline Kael quoted an unnamed older director who said of the lean, cinematic style of Steven Spielberg: “He must have never seen a play.” That was simple snobbery. However well versed in Molière and Ibsen the young director might have been, after developing close working relationships with Tony Kushner (who worked on Munich) and Tom Stoppard (Schindler’s List) arguably no Hollywood studio director has relied more on great dramatists.
Howard Sackler, who won the Tony and the Pulitzer Prize for his production of the boxing play The Great White Hope, helped rework the screenplay of Jaws. The cast was also filled with stage veterans, and so was that of The Exorcist, which starred Lee J. Cobb, the original Willy Loman, as the detective and Jason Miller, the writer of That Championship Season, as the priest. But no playwright had a greater influence on horror than Pinter.
Friedkin says Pinter’s key insight is the virtue of not explaining away the mystery of a scene. When actors would ask the playwright about motivation or speculate about character history, Pinter responded with stony silence. All that mattered, he told them, was on the page. He told Friedkin his