Jason Zinoman : Shock Value

The Wall Street Journal, July 23, 2011

Like the ideal victim in the rougher sort of slasher flick, the Motion Picture Production Code was clean-cut, gradually gutted and took a while to die. But there's no need to mourn. Its slow passing (the code was finally scrapped in 1968) threw open a door through which tumbled the horror that turned the 1970s into a golden decade for the darkest of cinema. Born again in "Rosemary's Baby" (1968), the Devil became a superstar in "The Exorcist" (1972). Meanwhile, monsters terrified the multiplex in movies such as "Night of the Living Dead" (1968), "The Hills Have Eyes" (1977) and "Alien" (1979), and Michael Myers established himself as the first of a series of serial killers busily butchering their way to a franchise.

Jason Zinoman's "Shock Value" chronicles the rise of what is sometimes called "The New Horror," telling its story through the films of the group of directors at its center, including George Romero, John Carpenter, Wes Craven, Tobe Hooper, the often overlooked Dan O'Bannon and, slightly to one side, Brian De Palma.  The originality and intelligence of the best of these directors were remarkable. As Mr. Zinoman points out, they benefited from an interlude in which censorship was ending but the domination of special effects had yet to begin. They filled that gap with their imagination, creating spaces in which fear could grow and myths could thrive, most notably in Mr. Hooper's "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" (1974), hallmark and herald of a new American gothic:

"The last look on [Sally's] face sums up the spirit of the New Horror: crying, exhausted and terrified, she stares at the monster from the back of a pickup truck. . . . Raising his buzzing chain saw to the sky, Leatherface, wearing a jacket and tie, spins around under the blazing sun, thrilling to the madness of the moment."

Didn't we all?

Even if Mr. Zinoman's gossipy and engaging book won't teach students of horror much that they don't already know, it will serve as a fine introduction to the revival of a genre whose popularity had plummeted from peaks once crowned by Castle Dracula and Frankenstein's Tower, if not quite so far as its author would like you to believe.

As Mr. Zinoman tells it, outside grubby grindhouse and the drive-in's exuberant wasteland, the cinema of terror found few takers in the America that Eisenhower left behind, but that's to exaggerate. The genre had no cachet, so the h-word was probably more rarely deployed than it should have been, but how else to describe movies such as 1962's "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?" More horror was out there than Mr. Zinoman admits, but it hid in plain sight.

Indeed, if "Shock Value" has one key flaw, it is that its author sometimes forces the facts to fit his thesis—of horror's death and rebirth—rather than the other way around. Mr. Zinoman thus makes almost no reference to television, a medium with room for twilight zones amid the Cleavers and their Munster kin.

Equally, with some savage Italian exceptions (films by Mario Bava and Dario Argento), foreign influences on horror's revival are largely overlooked. Mr. Zinoman regards "Psycho" (1960), with its brutality, killer's-eye perspective and avoidance of the supernatural, as a precursor of what was to come. He has nothing to say, however, about Michael Powell's "Peeping Tom": a contemporaneous British film that covered similar  territory with greater sophistication.

Mr. Zinoman's thesis of a horror resurrection is greatly helped by the argument that what came back was not the same as what went before. "New Horror" is an elusive term, but the author does his best to distinguish it from both its predecessors and pure exploitation fare, not least by highlighting the way its directors liked to play with cinema and its lore. Cinematically literate movie-makers like Mr. Craven relished the self-congratulation implicit in making films that were often "about" film. The scenes in which the power-tool-assisted killer of "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" is bullied by his family, for instance, are meant to evoke the pathos that enveloped Frankenstein's original monster. Similarly, themes of voyeurism run through Mr. De Palma's work, challenging movie audiences to ask what it was that they were really doing in those auditoriums.

Such arguments can only be pushed so far. Mr. Craven's 1972 "The Last House on the Left" may (loosely) be based on Ingmar Bergman's "The Virgin Spring," but the involvement of a chain saw reveals more the nature of this unlovely shocker than its vaguely Nordic antecedents. John Carpenter may have sprinkled "Halloween" with allusions to film history, but it was the panache, style and cleverness with which his tale of a lethal spree was directed (and, yes, that soundtrack) that made it a movie to take seriously. Above all, there was the nature of the killer, Michael Myers himself. He stood for nothing. He was nothing. He had no motive. He had no meaning. As Mr. Zinoman understands, it is this that makes him so terrifying. The audience is left in the dark. And that darkness is a frightening place.

But even this was anticipated, as Mr. Zinoman concedes, by the sniper in Peter Bogdanovich's "Targets" (1968), a strikingly smart film, co-starring Boris Karloff, that elegizes the passing of horror's old guard. As such, it signaled the arrival of the New Horror a little ahead of Mr. Zinoman's schedule, something that returns us to the question of what was so new. Mr. Zinoman never quite pins that down. Maybe that's just as well. To do so would be to create too narrow a framework for the sprawling survey of 1970s fright movies that this book really is.

And, unlike Mr. Zinoman, don't read too much into the success of these films. Humans have a taste for the grotesque and the gruesome. Our fairy stories, folk tales and literature are filled with ghouls, ghosts and slaughter most foul. The horror film has been around since the dawn of the movies. It should come as no surprise that the fortunes of the genre took a dramatic turn for the better by taking a blood-drenched turn to the worse.