Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [9]
THE DEFINITION of the horror film was fairly narrow in the late 1960s. It almost always involved the supernatural. In one of the first serious histories of the genre, An Illustrated Guide to the Horror Film, published in 1967, the critic Carlos Clarens gives only brief mention to movies about human killers. In a short appreciation, he describes Psycho not as a horror movie but as a “pathological case study.” He also argues that the purpose of the horror movie was not merely to scare, but to sublimate those fears. “The more rationalistic a time becomes the more it needs the escape valve of the fantastic,” he writes, arguing that horror films allow man to curb his natural tendency of violence.
At the time, the most important figures in the genre were actors. Horror directors were largely unknown and considered easily replaceable. Stars like Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, and Boris Karloff were the main attraction. But no one in horror was bigger in the sixties than Vincent Price. Speaking with a slightly fey, mellifluous ghost story voice that provided a steady sound track to several decades of movies that made little kids shake, Price would play, in movie after movie, a man haunted by the past. As the star of a series of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations directed tastefully by the prolific independent producer Roger Corman, he specialized in ominous characters frightened by the dead and surrounded by the putrid, crumbling buildings of a gothic world that no longer existed. There was something sneaky about his performances, a sexual ambiguity and camp humor on display. He seemed on the verge of a wink, his eyebrows ready to arch. This style made him a popular talk show guest. In July, around the same time that Castle discovered Rosemary’s Baby, Price guest-hosted an episode of The Mike Douglas Show. The subject was horror movies.
Douglas might have been the least frightening man in America. He flashed an easy smile that had a brightness matched only by the white set of his television show. The generation gap didn’t exist in this happy world of canned gags, silly sketches, occasional songs, and glib, sunny banter. Nor did any political discord or any of the cultural divides of the sixties. Douglas was for everyone, parents as well as kids—or at least that was his goal. When asking Price to describe the essence of the genre, he sounded like a bemused nineteenth-century anthropologist looking to explain an exotic indigenous tribe to a civilized nation. At the start of the show, the host posed this question: How do you make a scary movie?
Price responded with a little, mischievous smile, the kind he was known for. “An essential part of any horror film is a cape, preferably blood-red,” he told Douglas, stressing that costume is key. Cobwebs are important. The atmosphere must be gloom and doom, including rain, lightning, and thunder. Then he sang a song, punctuating the rhymes with a theatrical scowl. Price telegraphed what he thought many people already believed—this whole genre was absurd. In other interviews, Price would say that he didn’t like the word “horror,” which connoted, he felt, something insubstantial. He preferred “gothic melodrama,” but his banter served a promotional purpose. Horror needed a makeover.
To show that the violence and scares of the genre were nothing for parents to worry about, Price emphasized that horror was pure escapism. Its appeal was not in confronting demons, but in making them go away. After the actor made his case, Douglas introduced the German psychiatrist Fredric