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THINGS THAT WENT BUMP
When I was a kid growing up in central
Florida, Saturdays were typically a hyperac
tive rush of Freakies cereal, bike rides, long
explores, stealing stuff from construction sites
to build a bitchin' fort, playing in a creek
that we realized later was a sewage culvert
(I am now proof against all diseases) and
highly improbable imaginary teamups between
Tarzan, Colonel Steve Austin and Lucan the
Wolf-Boy. At two in the afternoon, however,
all activity would abruptly cease so we could
run inside and turn on the TV for Channel 44's
"Creature Feature."
One of the last great monster-movie shows,
"Creature Feature" was my weekly introduc
tion to the best and worst horror movies ever
made—Roger Corman's Edgar Allan Poe movies
with Vincent Price, the monsters-in-the-Old-
West epics of William "One-Shot" Beaudine,
Oliver Reed in Curse of
the Werewolf, Godzilla
versus everybody—
more creeps and
ghouls and guys in
rubber suits than you
could number. The
guy in charge was
"your ghost, Dr. Paul
Bearer," a wonderfully
seedy and disreputable
character in a Van
Dyke and undertaker's
coat with the best
"heh heh heh" in the
business, like Harry
Dean Stanton with
Karl Childers' voice.
Dr. Paul would sit in
his haunted-castle
set, cracking bad jokes
with his pet spider and
leading into commer
cials with fake prod
ucts like "Hell Monte's
Scream Beans." Between the movies (always
two), he'd go up to his music room, sit at his
Frankensteinway piano, and lip-sync to Tom
Lehrer songs like "Poisoning Pigeons in the
Park." Dr. Paul filled my Saturday afternoons
with all the blood and cheese that the preado
lescent mind could stand and then some. He
made me a lifelong fan of scary movies.
This was the 1970s, however, and while
my young self watched square-jawed heroes
defending their screaming girlfriends from
giant grasshoppers, the scary movie was
changing. The bloodsucking and scenery-
chewing of Christopher Lee was giving way to
the demonic possession cf Linda Blair and the
flesh-chewing of George A. Romero's zombies.
Directors like Roman Polanski and Brian De
Palma ushered in a more ambiguous breed of
monster, rooted more in modern anxieties than
ancient legend, while Wes Craven and Tobe
Hooper and John Carpenter put knives and
chainsaws in the hands of purely human freaks
and turned them loose on the neighborhood.
These young directors were the vanguard of
what became known as "the New Horror."
New York Times writer Jason Zinoman
chronicles the rise of the New Horror in his
new book Shock Value: How a Few Eccentric
Outsiders Gave Us Nightmares, Conquered
Hollywood and Invented Modern Horror
(Penguin, 2011), and it's pretty much assured
of finding a place on fans' shelves between
The Psychotronic Film Guide and the complete
run of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine.
Where it belongs, however, is right next to
Peter Biskind's seminal history of '70s film,
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, because the story
Zinoman tells is the flipside of Biskind's. The
New Horror is the New Hollywood reflected
darkly.
In the arena of "mainstream" cinema,
the rise of director-oriented film and the
visions of auteurs like Coppola, Scorsese and
Spielberg swept away the final remnants of
the old studio system. So, too, was a sea-
change happening in genre film, with movies
like Rosemary's Baby, Carrie and The Exorcist
coming out of major studios and going into
actual theaters instead of drive-ins. Realizing
(as they should have for years) that big-
budget horror can yield big-ticket returns, the
major studios got back into the scary-movie
business, turning directors and writers who a
decade before would have been relegated to
the ghetto of rubber
suits and corn-syrup
stage blood into stars
in their own right.
Devoting a chapter
to the lives of each
of the directors now
considered the genre's
pioneers—Wes Craven,
John Carpenter,
Tobe Hooper, Brian
De Palma, George
Romero— Zinoman
examines how these
filmmakers transformed
a combination of dys
functional families,
personal demons and
a love of old-school
monster movies into
unprecedented cin
ematic experiences
that have become
the templates for
everything on the
screen that frightens us now. As Dracula and
Frankenstein’s monsters shaped horror in the
middle-20th century, Zinoman shows how
Leatherface, Michael Myers and Regan MacNeil
have shaped it ever since.
Every story has a redheaded stepchild, even
in a book full of them, and Zinoman devot * a
lot of space to the late and underappreciated
writer Dan O'Bannon. Once John Carpenter's
partner—they co-created the cult sci-fi/hor
ror/comedy Dark Star—O'Bannon spent most
of the decade developing projects on his own
with little success until his pet idea about a
reptilian extraterrestrial stalking the crew of a
ship in deep space found its way into the right
hands and became Ridley Scott's Alien, argu
ably the most influential scary movie (besides
Spielberg's Jaws) of the decade and indispens
able in the renaissance of science-fiction film
that came in the '80s.
Shock Value could—and should—have
been longer. Zinoman has ample material for
a second edition or a companion book, and
he should consider doing it. What we do have,
however, is a thoughtful book about an often
demonized subject. Zinoman has written a
book about scary movies that is nonetheless
for adults, without the sensationalism that
riddles most books about the genre, and valu
able for cinephiles of all kinds. It's a book for
both Dr. Paul Bearer and Robert Osborne fans,
for those who see a difference between them;
/ certainly don't.
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