There was a sense of freedom and cynicism in the 1970s that is now long gone. United States and world cinema, brutalised by the horrors of the Vietnam War and the death of the flower-power generation and its high hopes, reflected this growing disgust with the status quo.
It’s hard to imagine, from our modern vantage point of mass censorship, “Homeland Security” Gestapo-like control, Pentagon-funded war films and propaganda disguised as Hollywood product — but, for a brief moment in the 1970s, film in general was allowed to reflect accurately the distaste and revulsion for the government and the military that seems almost impossible to imagine today.
Then a clampdown started, and this truthfulness disappeared forever. Not strictly horror, but capturing the feeling of the times, the Rolling Stones concert documentary Gimme Shelter — showing an on-screen murder in the crowd – kick-started the era. In the United Kingdom, Stanley Kubrick pushed the envelope of what constituted “horror” and caused much uproar with his A Clockwork Orange.
The apocalypse was clearly on the minds of the mainstream cinema in the early 1970s, from Clint Eastwood’s bunny-boiler slasher flick Play Misty for Me to Michael Crichton’s bio-warfare horror film The Andromeda Strain, in which world audiences saw probably their first glimpse of dead children, struck down by an extraterrestrial virus. (The western as a genre was used to discuss the unfolding horrors of the age, and dealt a final killing blow, first in 1969 with The Wild Bunch and then in 1974 with Soldier Blue.)
The ever-rich mind of Richard Matheson appears yet again, with the 1971 remake of his I Am Legend story, retitled The Omega Man, as well as another of his stories — the ultimate haunted-house flick The Legend of Hell House (also read Hell House).
The “God is dead” era, which had began with Rosemary’s Baby a few years earlier, now raised its swivelling and vomiting head on the mainstream stage, with 1973 film The Exorcist. First read about the original inspiration for the novel at The Haunted Boy, and read The Exorcist.
On the indie side, in 1972 the horror genre took a big brutal leap forward, with Wes Craven’s low-budget film showing that horror can come into your home and hurt your parents, in the now dated but still disturbing The Last House on the Left.
Ex teacher and documentary filmmaker Tobe Hooper mixed raw pseudo-documentary style and B-grade horror genres — by taking parts of serial killer and cannibal Ed Gein’s story and creating a whole new wave of horror with the visceral and deliberately raw Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Browse through The Saw Is Family.
Up north, icily cerebral Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg began his career, and in 1974 released his second film The Parasite Murders, followed in 1976 by his casting of porn actress Marilyn Chambers in Rabid — quietly setting the standard for another form of horror: the uncompromising, yet unsettlingly elegant, medical horror of the “church of the new flesh”. Read Body Mutation and Disease in the Films of Cronenberg.
Brian de Palma’s 1973 film Sisters showed us the first blast of a new filmmaker who would release with the genre-creating Carrie in 1976. John Carpenter was also bubbling under — first with his revamped western Assault on Precinct 13, followed by — as the decade drew to a close — the film that kick-started a whole new genre unto itself, Halloween.
Honorary mention has to go to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s still disturbing and horrific masterpiece (and recreation of Dante’s hell) using Nazi-occupied Italy as the stage on which to re-enact De Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom. Read about the 1976 cruel masterpiece at Salo: 120 Days of Sodom and Censorship and assorted further articles on Salo at the British Film Institute and Salo Review.
In mainstream cinema, there was a big bloody shark in Jaws, Ira Levine’s feminist horror film Stepford Wives, the arrival of the Anti-Christ with The Omen (1976), and a film that, if memory serves, was banned here but which captured the urban paranoia of the 1970s beautifully — Looking for Mr Goodbar.
The next wave of horror, becoming increasingly vicious, gore-filled and realistic, was foreshadowed by two films mainly — although the Last House on the Left release in 1972 pre-empted them all. The films were the 1978 “raped female takes justified revenge” exploitation flick I Spit on Your Grave and the 1979 release of Abel Ferrera’s The Driller Killer (also see Abel Ferrera).
Horror doesn’t always have to show blood or gore at all. In Australia, Peter Weir had raised eyebrows with his earlier films but it was a magical and beautiful “daylight horror” film that caught the world’s eye — see Picnic at Hanging Rock and A Tribute to Picnic at Hanging Rock — followed by his apocalyptic and haunting end of the world vision, The Last Wave. Also read review.
To get a sense of the seemingly rapid flood of newer and nastier horror films as the new decade loomed, read this Introduction to Video Nasties. Also read part three of The Italian Horror Film: The Gore and the Glory.
In Italy in 1980, amid the (by today’s standards) tame so-called video nasties, came a big leap forward — predating the fake documentary Blair Witch Project by decades. It was the still-notorious Cannibal Holocaust. Read Cannibal Holocaust Review. (The mixture of genuine animal killings, along with the whole fake documentary style of the film, caused director Ruggero Deodata to be pulled into court to “prove” that he hadn’t actually killed his cast.)
As Romero made his various sequels to the original Night of the Living Dead, Italian spin-offs emerged from Lucio Fulci, including Zombi 2. This was renamed for UK release, and caught up in the video-nasty scare by one of its many other titles — Zombie Flesh Eaters. Other non-zombie but “demon”-related films got a kick-start at the beginning of the decade, such as Lamberto Bava’s still-fun Demons.
Mainstream horror in the 1980s went through a “brat pack” phase, showing us that maybe it was pretty cool to be a vampire. Using more than a nod towards Peter Pan, Lost Boys — the Kiefer Sutherland film about vampires in modern California — entered the mass consciousness of a new generation of horror fans. Read The Lost Boys and assorted reviews. Here’s an online film script of The Lost Boys and Wikipedia Lost Boys.
But it was a beautifully crafted Katherine Bigelow film about vampires, which never even mentions the word, that had possibly the last word on the vampire mythos living amid the urban reality — Near Dark and Near Dark review.
The decade began well, with Cronenberg’s ultraviolent 1983 classic Videodrome as well as Carpenter’s homage The Thing (the original version, geeks noted, was playing on TV sets during his earlier Halloween).
The werewolf genre was introduced to the mainstream thanks to John Landis’s American Werewolf in London, but for many horror fans, it was Joe Dante’s The Howling that brought the fur and fear back into the wolf-man genre. Read The Howling.
In New Zealand, Peter Jackson, the Lord of the Rings trilogy director, was stumbling towards glory with his insane and low-budget zombie-alien tribute, 1987’s Bad Taste, followed by the much slicker, and massively gory, Dead Alive!.
In The Netherlands, Dutch film maker Paul Verhoeven had been showing off his skills with a series of well-crafted films, but before he moved to Hollywood and lost the plot, it was his 1983 film De Vierde Man (The Fourth Man) that shook the horror geeks. Read a useful overview of Verhoeven’s work at Senses of Cinema.
In reaction to the 1980s’ increasingly slick and “brat pack”-style horror films, the underground and indie cinema became darker and grittier, if that was possible — 1986, for instance, saw the release of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. Also see Henry.
David Lynch, whose earlier short film Eraserhead had demonstrated that a new kind of horror was possible, brought a curious (and blackly funny) “modern American gothic” to audiences with his 1986 film Blue Velvet. Read The Evil That Men Do and The Universe of David Lynch.
Of all places, it was Belgium that gave the horror genre a much-needed kick — with a darkly funny and vicious fake documentary in 1992 about a serial killer, called (in English) Man Bites Dog. Also read Man Bites Dog review.
The remainder of the 1990s seemed to be taken up by Hollywood teen-slasher films, endless sequels with numbers after their names. Freddy, Jason, Scream and similar spin-offs began to dominate the market, as horror as a genre became more and more focused at what seemed to be designed for a 14-year-old viewership. The Blair Witch Project briefly regurgitated the “found footage” fake documentary genre done 20 years earlier in Cannibal Holocaust, and the Blade series of film went back to making vampires seem cool and trendy. Silence of the Lambs and M Night Shyamalan’s products began to be carefully marketed as “not horror films” — in order to lure audiences in to a genre now almost entirely focused on carefully “non-offensive” concepts.
More honorary mentions have to go to a couple of Euro directors who have pushed horror into new areas, such as Michael Haneke’s brutally vicious Funny Games, which confronts the audience directly by challenging their voyeuristic “pleasure” in even watching the sadistic violence of the film. Read here and a negative review of Funny Games. Then read De-Icing the Emotions.
The other honorary mention must go to the frighteningly sordid “story in reverse” film by French director Gasper Noe, titled Irreversible — and read another review.
But all was not lost on the horror front as the 1990s ended — in Asia, the next big leap forward had already quietly begun. Read Hong Kong Horror: The 90s and Beyond. Now look over the list of titles, and follow the links to read about Asian Horror Film 1996-2002.
At the time of writing, Asia still seems to be where the fear and horror is coming from. The US/European horror genre is clearly formulaic and derivative — as well as overdue for whatever constitutes this generation’s idea of “totally immoral, offensive and gross” filmmaking.
Time will tell what comes next …
This last horror-related column and the previous two weeks’ worth reflect mostly my own tastes (if one can call it that). For space reasons, I’ve omitted a lot of very important films (where’s The Shining, for instance? Angel Heart? Cat People?). There simply isn’t space for more than a general overview. For those of you who have enjoyed the last week or two of titles and info, and who want to dive into this interesting cinema of the horrific and grotesque, you might want to browse through The Strangest Films of All Time. And then browse through The Modern Horror Film 1968-1998. Then, for a choice of directors on whom to read up, see Horror Film Directors.
Until the next time, if the thing under the bed doesn’t get me …
Quick picks
Read part one and part two