! -450-!Horror Movies No popular genre has proven more reflective of America's unpredictable cultural mood swings than the horror movie. At the same time, no popular genre has proven more conducive to the expression of idiosyncratic nightmare visions than the horror movie. If these claims seem contradictory, even vaguely paradoxical, that is hardly surprising. For the horror genre consists of a group of texts as diverse as they are numerous, as controversial as they are popular, as conservative (or progressive) in their overt messages as they are progressive (or conservative) in their subtler implications. But although the horror genre may be lacking in firm boundaries or essential features, its rich and storied history, which spans the entire twentieth century, exhibits a remarkable degree of coherence. There are at least three reasons why this is so. For one thing, what appear at first to be utterly dissimilar entries often turn out upon closer inspection to conform in crucial ways, whether formally, stylistically, or thematically. For another thing, as is typically the case with pop cultural phenomena, market forces have dictated that the most commercially successful entries would each spawn a host of unimaginative imitators. This in turn has led to a fairly reliable boom-and-bust periodization of the genre. But most importantly, what all horror movies have in common is the intention to transform, through metaphor, symbol, and code, real-life fears—whether historically specific or psychologically universal—into terrifying narratives, uncanny images, and, above all, cinematic representations of monstrosity. Not all horror movies succeed in realizing this intention (many of them fail), but it is the fact that they try that makes them horror movies.

The horror film genre has its roots in the English gothic novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. After the Selig Polyscope Company produced a brief adaptation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in 1908, the stage was set for Robert Weine's masterpiece of German Expressionist cinema, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919). Nosferatu (1922), F. W. Murnau's silent magnum opus starring an emaciated Max Schreck as the decidedly unglamorous, unromantic undead Count, soon followed. Universal Pictures, heavily influenced by the dark, shadowy German style, imported a number of that country's most gifted film technicians in an effort to stave off bankruptcy. It worked—in just a few years, Universal became king of the sound horror movie. Classic versions of Phantom of the Opera (1925), Dracula (1931), and Frankenstein (1931) made household names out of their larger-than-life monster-stars, Lon Chaney, Bela Lugosi, and Boris Karloff. These pictures were exceedingly popular not least because audiences of the time were desperate for entertaining diversions as the Great Depression loomed. Although sober admonitions were issued against such human foibles as avarice, impetuosity, and, especially, scientific hubris, the source of threat in these films was nearly always supernatural. And, to reassure viewers that things would turn out all right, the monster was always soundly defeated in the end.

Universal's reign ended towards the beginning of the Second World War, and the studio eventually stooped to the level of self-parody with such entries as Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1946) and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948). During this period, RKO producer Val Lewton wisely encouraged his directors to avoid the straightforward depiction of violence, and attempt instead to make viewers conjure up images of horror by means of suggestion and innuendo. Jacques Tourneur's Cat People (1942) is without a doubt the most highly acclaimed Lewton production, but

! -451-!the influence of Lewton's cinematic approach and techniques extended all the way into the 1960s, as evidenced by Robert Wise's masterful The Haunting (1963).

America's Cold War anxieties, coupled with advancements in special effects technology, gave rise to a cycle of highly successful science-fiction horror movies in the middle of the century. Some of these films, most notably The Thing from Another World (1951) and The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), focus on man's brave (i.e. "patriotic") battle against a hostile alien threat. Others, such as Them! (1954), reflect American fears of atomic explosion and radioactive fallout. But it was a return to traditional horror film iconography that proved most responsible for the genre's huge popularity boom in the late 1950s. A small British studio, Hammer Films, took advantage of the industry's greater permissiveness with respect to the depiction of violence and sexual activities; starting with The Curse of Frankenstein in 1957, Hammer released a string of highly colorful, gruesomely detailed versions of the Universal classics. American International Pictures quickly followed suit, churning out its own series of campy horror-comedies, starting with I Was A Teen-age Werewolf (1957). AIP also acted as distributor for Mario Bava's atmospheric Italian masterpiece, Black Sunday(1960), as well as for Roger Corman's cycle of Edgar Allen Poe adaptations, most of which starred Vincent Price as a mentally unstable aristocrat. In these color gothics, lavish set designs and extravagant costumes served to reflect the decadence of Poe's characters. Price also starred in William Castle's best-known gimmick horror film, The Tingler (1959), which made use of "Percepto" technology—really just theater seats equipped with electric buzzers—to shock audience members during key scenes.

In 1960, two films—Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho and Michael Powell's Peeping Tom —effectively initiated a whole new era in the history of horror cinema by making their monsters not just human, but psychologically realistic. The killers in these movies—both male, both normal enough on the surface—are driven by instinctual drives and irresistible compulsions to commit murder against sexually transgressive women. Making disturbing connections between male-upon-female voyeurism and the objectification of women, between gender confusion and murder as substitute for sex, these two films suggest in the most vehement of terms that monstrosity is as likely to be located within (at least if you are a male) as without.

The majority of horror movies to come out in the 1960s and 1970s—though by no means all of them—followed the lead of Psycho and Peeping Tom, and audiences were treated to a not-alwaysso-impressive array of deranged psychotics, demented schizophrenics, homicidal maniacs, and general, all-purpose, knife/machete/chainsaw-wielding madmen. And the occasional madwoman. What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) was the first in a series of "menopausal murder stories" starring aging actresses whose characters are driven to perform grotesque acts of violence in the best Grand Guignol spirit. In Halloween (1978), John Carpenter's phenomenally successful slasher (or, more precisely, stalker) movie exemplar, the Psycho / Peeping Tom elements, though still operative, are finally overshadowed by an intense, life-or-death game of terror waged between the (now masked, now superhuman) psycho killer and the film's only surviving female. Partly to create space for sequels, partly to exploit the insecurity and paranoia of modern viewers, open-ended narratives soon became the order of the day. Following directly on the heels of Halloween came the outer-space slasher Alien(1980), the campier, bloodier, and just as

! -452-!popular Friday the 13th (1980), and a host of progressively less original and less successful slasher variants.

Although Hitchcock, "master of suspense" that he was, typically eschewed focus on bloody spectacle in favor of tension building sequences and the occasional shock effect, another director of horror movies working in the 1960s, Herschell Gordon Lewis, took precisely the opposite approach. His low-budget, independently-produced "splatter films"—given such transparent names as Blood Feast (1963) and Color Me Blood Red (1965)—promised to make up for their lack of narrative suspense with an abundance of gory close-ups. Although Lewis' films appealed only to a small number of hard-core horror fans, they achieved a kind of cult status, and, whether directly or indirectly, have exerted a powerful influence on the genre. Tobe Hooper's much-discussed Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), in which a male family of unemployed slaughter house workers set their sights on a group of vapid teenagers, can be seen as (among other things) a slasher/splatter hybrid; the film's tagline, for example, reads "Who will survive, and what will be left of them?" Canadian writer-director David Cronenberg, whose disturbing and highly-original works include Scanners (1980), Videodrome(1983), The Fly (1986), and Dead Ringers (1988), has been highly praised and harshly criticized for raising "body horror" to an art form. Few if any would say this about Sam Raimi, whose "splatstick" cult faves The Evil Dead (1982) and Evil Dead II (1987) somehow manage to find the humor in gore. And in Italy, legendary horror film directors Mario Bava, Dario Argento, and Lucio Fulci made successful contributions of their own to the splatter subgenre with such entries as Bay of Blood (1971), Deep Red (1975), and Zombie (1979), respectively.

Because of their emphasis on male-against-female violence and the heinous nature of the crimes they depict, the slasher and splatter subgenres (to the extent that these are distinguishable) have repeatedly been accused of exploitation, misogyny, even sadism. Wes Craven's Last House on the Left(1972), Meir Zarche's I Spit On Your Grave (1978), and Abel Ferrara's Driller Killer (1979) were all banned in England under the controversial "video nasties" bill that passed through Parliament in 1984. Brian De Palma's Dressed To Kill (1980) raised the ire of feminists by featuring a male transvestite who murders (punishes?) women for their promiscuity and/or sex appeal. And John McNaughton's Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1990), denied an R rating by the MPAA in spite of favorable reviews by such prominent critics as Roger Ebert, was finally released (unrated) four years after sitting on a distributor's shelf. That there are misogynist messages in many of these films is undeniable; recently, however, attention has been drawn to the fact that, in a number of slashers/splatters, female ingenuity and the employment of self-defense are actually championed. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the rape-revenge cycle of horror movies that appeared in the late 1970s-early 1980s.

Backing up a bit, for those who choose to downplay the revolutionary significance of Psycho and Peeping Tom, 1968 inevitably marks the birth of the modern horror movie. Rosemary's Baby, Roman Polanski's paranoid urban gothic, stars Mia Farrow as an ingenuous young newlywed who moves into a Manhattan apartment building only to discover that her kind old neighbors are really devil-worshipping witches. Conspiring with Rosemary's husband and obstetrician (among others), they have effected a diabolical plan to make Rosemary the mother of Satan's child. Based on the best-selling novel by Ira Levin, Rosemary's Baby effectively taps into

! -453-!fears and anxieties surrounding pregnancy and childbirth. Because the film is shot almost entirely from Rosemary's point of view, it succeeds in conveying her growing sense of alienation and despair as she struggles to find someone she can trust in a huge, unfriendly city.

Also appearing in 1968 was George Romero's Night of the Living Dead, widely considered to be among the most distressing horror movies of all time. Made for only $114,000 (in stark contrast to the big-budgeted Rosemary's Baby), and unrated at the time of its release, this no-frills black-and-white film centers on a small group of isolated individuals who try, with little success, to stave off the murderous advances of an ever increasing army of flesh-eating zombies. Although notable for its excessive gore and apocalyptic overtones, Night of the Living Dead is effective primarily because it conveys so well the claustrophobia and hysteria of the trapped party, and because it vividly portrays the horror of seeing members of one's own family turned into monsters before one's very eyes. Not without socio-political implications, Romero's film also serves to register the dissatisfaction of America's "silent majority," and illustrates the breakdown of patriarchal order under highly-stressful conditions.

Rosemary's Baby and Night of the Living Dead were followed by a slew of movies which locate the source of horror within the nuclear family. If Psycho and Peeping Tom made the monstrous human, these films brought the monstrous home, making it not so much human as familiar. More than ever before, generic horror conventions were now being put to use, especially by auteur directors, in the service of social statement. One finds in this period movies such as Deathdream (1972), Bob Clark's tale of a young solider, killed in combat at Vietnam, who is temporarily brought back to life—unfortunately as a vampiric zombie—by his mother's passionate prayers. Larry Cohen's It's Alive! (1974) re-presents the Frankenstein legend in distinctly modern terms, giving the role of ambivalent creator to the father of a grotesquely deformed baby-on-a-rampage. Not all of these films were low budget, independently-produced affairs. In his eagerly anticipated 1980 adaptation of Stephen King's The Shining, for example, Stanley Kubrick uses haunted house conventions primarily as a means of exploring the real-life horrors of alcoholism, child abuse, and domestic violence. Even the plethora of "revenge of nature" films that came out in the late 1970s after the massive success of Steven Spielberg's PG-rated Jaws (1975), were most of them family horror movies at heart. Participating in a tradition that goes at least as far back as Hitchcock's The Birds (1963), and, arguably, all the way back to James Whale's Frankenstein (1931), these pictures—Squirm (1976), Piranha (1978), and Alligator (1982), to name a few—externalize the manifest source of horror, all the while insinuating that what should be most feared is something lying within the individual, the family, or the community at large.

By far the most acclaimed and talked about family horror movie of the 1970s and 1980s was William Friedkin's The Exorcist (1973). Winner of two Academy Awards and nominated for eight others, this film was the subject of intense media scrutiny from the time of its initial release. Loosely based on a reported real life exorcism, the film chronicles the efforts of a disenchanted priest to save the life of a young girl who has been possessed by demonic forces. The display of Christian iconography in the presence of foul sexual language, nauseating special effects, and graphic exhibitions of self-mutilation outraged many religious groups. But stripped of its demonic-possession theme, The Exorcist provides a moving commentary on, among other things, the uselessness of modern medicine when confronted with unknown illnesses, the crises of guilt and

! -454-!responsibility faced by single mothers, and, in general, the difficulty parents have comprehending and responding to their often aggressive, hormonal children. Although inspired by The Exorcist, and highly successful in its own right, Richard Donner's own "satanic child" film, The Omen (1976) lacked its predecessor's underlying concern with domestic issues. Instead, it terrified viewers with threats of the apocalypse, and, what ultimately amounts to the same thing, the infiltration of evil agents into the political sphere.

Although the proportion of horror movies within the overall film population continued to increase well into the 1980s, by the end of the decade it was obvious that a staleness had set in. Halloween was up to its fourth sequel in 1989, Friday the 13th its seventh, and the overuse of narrative and technical conventions was (not surprisingly) accompanied by a decline in viewer interest. But with Jonathan Demme's Academy Award-winning The Silence of the Lambs (1991) selling the mystique of the serial killer to mainstream audiences, the horror-thriller-suspense hybrid received a massive boost in popularity. In the mid-1990s, glossy, big-budgeted, star-powered films such as Copycat (1995), Se7en (1995), and Kiss the Girls (1997) focused on the gruesome handiwork of charismatic, creative serial killers and re-flected public fascination with those who commit mass murder on principle (or so they would have us believe), not merely because of some underlying psychosexual disorder.

Other, more conventional horror movies of this period sought to supernaturalize the serial killer. Inspired by Wes Craven's modern classic A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), in which a once-human child murderer takes revenge on those who lynched him by invading the dreams of their offspring, films such as Child's Play (1988), The Exorcist III (1990), The Frighteners (1996), and Fallen (1997) either give supernatural powers to a serial killer or else give serial killer characteristics to a supernatural being. Another Wes Craven movie, Scream, was a sleeper hit in 1996, and became the first in a slew of neo-stalkers. These highly self-reflexive works, which include Scream 2 (1997), Halloween H20 (1998), and Urban Legend (1998), contrive to satirize stalker film conventions while still providing genuine scares; they succeed in this task only insofar as they are able to avoid too heavy a reliance on the very conventions they are mocking. Despite the fact that almost all of the neo-stalkers to come out in the late 1990s have done quite well at the box office, many critics view the ever-increasing emphasis on parody, intertextuality, and pastiche as signs that the genre has exhausted itself, and that a dark age in horror cinema is imminent.

In spite of such gloomy predictions, judging from the horror movie revivals of the late 1950s, early 1970s, and mid-1990s, it seems safe to declare that no matter how grim things may look at times, the genre's eventual return from the deadness resulting from excess, imitation, and oversaturation is inevitable. At least as inevitable as the next wave of young people desperate to consume accessible texts in which their ambivalent attitudes towards society, family, and self receive imaginative—and so relatively safe—communal expression. Unless, of course, America's self-proclaimed moral guardians finally succeed in having laws enacted which would place strict limitations on the freedom of horror movie writers and directors to (re-)present our collective nightmares in the bloodiest of hues. Even then there would be no real cause for alarm; for the most committed of the lot would in that case surely go back to the Lewton-Tourneur-Wise school of "fear by suggestion," and rediscover ways of horrifying viewers that do not depend on the so-called "spectacle of death."

! -455-!—Steven Schneider

FURTHER READING:

Grant, Barry K., editor. Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film. Metuchen, New Jersey, Scarecrow Press, 1984.

Jancovich, Mark. Horror. London, B. T. Batsford, 1992.

Kellner, Douglas, and Michael Ryan. "Horror Films." Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1988, 168-193.

Prawer, S. S. Caligari's Children: The Film as Tale of Terror. New York, Oxford University Press, 1980.

Schneider, Steven. "Monsters as (Uncanny) Metaphors: Freud, Lakoff, and the Representation of Monstrosity in Cinematic Horror." Other Voices: A Journal of Critical Thought. Vol. 1, No. 3, 1999, http://dept.english.upenn.edu/~ov/1.3/sschneider/monsters.html. March 1999.

Skal, David J. The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror. New York, Norton, 1993.

Tudor, Andrew. Monsters and Mad Scientists: A Cultural History of the Horror Movie. Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1989.

Waller, Gregory, editor. American Horrors: Essays on the Modern American Horror Film. Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1987.

Williams, Tony. Hearths of Darkness: The Family in the American Horror Film. Madison, Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996.

Wood, Robin. Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan. New York, Columbia University Press, 1986. Copyright © 2009, Gale, Cengage Learning. All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. !