About Flagpole. (Athens, Ga.) 1987-current | View Entire Issue (Aug. 24, 2011)
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. 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