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backlash was inevitable, appearing most forcefully in, of all places, Harper’s Magazine. The left-wing magazine with a literary pedigree rarely covered horror films, let alone low-budget ones emerging out of small-town Texas. But Stephen Koch took exception in an article titled “Fashions in Pornography” that began, “‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ is a vile piece of sick crap.” It got worse. The article reads like the last desperate protest against the introduction of brutal violence into the entertainment diet of mainstream America. For one thing, the sloppy description of the movie suggests that the author spent more time grinding his teeth than paying attention. Repeatedly, he refers to the movie as “pornography,” as if it showed an endless, unblinking amount of gore. As evidence, he describes the movie as reveling in necrophilia (wrong, cannibalism), chain saws killing multiple women (nope, just one), and the self-immolation of a character (huh?).

The setting, he says, is the Texas Panhandle and the carefully managed pacing, which especially in the final third moves deliberately slowly, is called “hysterical.” At one point, Koch compares the movie to snuff. At another he says it’s so imagistic that it makes no sense. “André Breton said the simple surrealist act would be to take a revolver into a crowded street and fire at random,” he writes, with this dismissive quip. “They seem to have read Breton down in Texas.” But the real target of this attack was not the movie or its supposedly cynical producers, but the community of intellectuals who allowed it to flourish.

Expanding his attack to what he calls the movement of “film buffery,” Koch blames a wider snobbish and amoral obsession with movies for missing the obvious degradations of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. He singles out Peter Bogdanovich as “King Buff” and the journal Cahiers du Cinéma, a booster of Romero and Craven, as leading the charge. This new intelligentsia, he argues, in battling the self-seriousness of high art, prized style over all else, encouraging the moral corruption of the genre.

As wrong as he was about so many things, Koch did accurately capture one thing. The New Horror was always described by its critical defenders as a radical attempt to shock its audiences with visions more graphic and confrontational and real than had been shown in the past. This ignored just how connected the genre is to the past, how self-conscious these new directors were. Hooper, Bogdanovich, Polanski, Carpenter, and Romero were making movies that were as much about movies as they were about monsters. They were sold as honest and frighteningly real, but these films were made in a film language that was either referencing or dialoguing with the movies of the past. Targets and Rosemary’s Baby pointedly included cameos by Boris Karloff and William Castle to underline the engagement with the Old Horror. And Craven and Romero flat-out stole the plots of their movies, and part of their fun was in deciphering the conversation between the past and the present. The two most common shots in the horror films of this era are the shaky camera that shifts your point of view and a close-up of an eye, watery and stretched open. Both of these images emphasize the act of watching, making connections between the victim of violence and the act of taking in a movie. Nothing so much as the ad campaigns makes this self-consciousness more obvious. They told audiences that what they were seeing was real or reminded them, with fake reassurance, that it was not. It made you wonder.

CHAPTER EIGHT

HE LIKES TO WATCH

Nobody was really surprised when it happened, not really, not at the subconscious level where savage things grow.

Stephen King, Carrie

VIVIENNE DE PALMA attempted suicide over the Christmas holidays after discovering her husband was having an affair. Anthony De Palma, an emotionally remote orthopedic surgeon, promised his wife that he would stop cheating. But she didn’t believe him. The tension in this upper-middle-class Philadelphia family exploded into full-fledged