Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [88]
It was becoming increasingly hard to ignore the fact that horror, the genre that long called the drive-in theater home, was the driving force behind the dramatic expansion of the reach of Hollywood. Just as opportunities for horror were opening up, the low-budget directors who pioneered the genre were looking elsewhere. Studios didn’t trust them with a large budget, but many of these artists also wanted to make different kinds of movies. After getting wounded by the critical and personal attacks on his debut, The Last House on the Left, Wes Craven briefly swore off horror and tried working on the kinds of movies that his mother would not be embarrassed by. He wrote a naturalistic drama about a divorced father and his kids, a comedy about beauty contests, and a liberal historical drama about an attorney general court-martialed from the army for reporting American atrocities. There were no takers.
Estranged from his wife and on his own, Craven languished, crashing with friends, working intermittently, dabbling in writing jokes for a nightclub act, driving a cab, and quickly going broke. He had had a taste of success, even though it was a strange kind, and he wanted it again. The pressure increased when Peter Locke, an old friend, approached him with the idea that he should take advantage of the popularity of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and The Exorcist.
Craven’s second horror movie, The Hills Have Eyes, which opened in 1977, places a lost family in the middle of the desert, where they are abducted by a mutant gang of maniacs. For those who suspected that the extreme elements of Last House were coming from a personal place, the film provided some confirmation, or at least evidence of continuity of interest. It shared the same central themes as The Last House on the Left—in which the sins of the father haunted the children of dysfunctional families (the original title was “Blood Relations”) and the most civilized among us have the potential for barbaric violence. And there was the same cynicism about the lies that good people tell themselves.
The movie was inspired by a story of the Sawney Bean family, a cave-dwelling Scottish clan who, legend has it, robbed, killed, and ate travelers in the seventeenth century. Craven read accounts of their exploits in the newspaper archives of the New York Public Library. The Hills Have Eyes also displayed his new awareness of the conventions of the horror genre. Craven borrowed a plot device from Rosemary’s Baby (the trick of a phone call to the protagonist that looks reassuring but is actually a fake) and an aesthetic from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, hiring Tobe Hooper’s set designer, Robert Burns. Shot in the California desert, the movie looks even more scruffy and barren. Craven was no longer a novice. His camerawork was polished and deliberate and the style integrated with the storytelling. But inevitably, the shock of something new was gone.
By their second or third movies, directors were expanding their artistic reach, but they were also becoming more defined by the conventions of the genre, in part because they had helped create them. Craven and Romero made their first movies on instinct and passion, but now they were engaged in a much more conscious dialogue with the expectations of a horror fan. That’s not to say they approached those expectations the same way. Craven, for instance, loved the grittiness and authenticity of Chain Saw while John Carpenter, never as interested in the realism of horror, responded to its comedy, ignored by most audiences, who were too terrified to laugh.
Carpenter, who marveled not