How big scares came to the big screen

The history of 1970s Hollywood tends to focus on auteurs such as Scorsese and Spielberg, but a new book puts the spotlight on the less-often-celebrated horror genre, writes JOHN BYRNE

WHEN THE veteran producer and director William Castle was first presented with the option to acquire the rights to Ira Levin’s 1967 novel

Rosemary’s Baby

, he wasn’t overly enthusiastic. Castle – a populist showman of the old-school, best known for gimmicky horrors such as

The Tingler

(1959) – quickly weighed up the pros and cons before deciding, initially at least, to pass. “The bottom,” he said at the time, “has gone out of horror.”

According to Jason Zinoman's new book, Shock Value: How a Few Eccentric Outsiders Gave Us Nightmares, Conquered Hollywood, and Invented Modern Horror, this terse statement summed up the lowly status of horror, as a commercial entity, in late 1960s Hollywood. Major studios largely viewed the genre as the tawdry and low-brow preserve of grubby independents. It was disreputable, "illegitimate", and, crucially, no longer capable of guaranteeing decent returns on investments.

Rosemary's Baby, did, of course, eventually get made, with Castle relegated to the role of producer and enfant terrible Roman Polanski installed as director. Its release in June of 1968 represented, Zinoman claims, both the passing of a torch and the beginning of a new kind of horror. Out went the stylised pop-Gothic camp from the likes of Castle and his favoured leading man Vincent Price; in came the grim, naturalistic, counter-cultural nihilism of Polanski and his contemporaries. While such a simplistic reduction might do the cinematic horror of the early- to mid-1960s a disservice, it's hard not to see 1968 as a watershed year.

It was, for example, the year in which the restrictive Motion Picture Production Code was finally scrapped in favour of a modern film classification system, thus paving the way for a more violent and explicit cinema. It also saw the release – several months after the premiere of Rosemary's Baby– of George Romero's seminal Night of the Living Dead. If Polanski's film had announced the birth of a subtler, more ambiguous, more "legitimate" horror cinema, then Romero's signalled the arrival of horror as a visceral, gruelling, taboo-breaking assault on the senses.

What distinguishes Zinoman's book from the dozens of other volumes that have interrogated the "New Horror" of the 1960s and 1970s, is that it's not simply a work of film criticism, but one firmly rooted in reporting. The inspiration for the approach came from Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, a title that candidly – and occasionally, pruriently – documented the rise of the "New Hollywood" of Scorcese, Coppola, Spielberg et al.

“I read that book in 1998 and thought it was a rigorously reported account of these great films of the 1960s and 1970s that mapped a transition in the business and art of making movies in Hollywood,” Zinoman says. “The only thing was that my favourite movies, the movies I loved growing up, were almost completely blocked out of the narrative. Biskind’s attitude towards horror was that it was a peripheral thing.”

To help restore horror to a position of centrality in the narrative of the era, Zinoman decided that he couldn’t just rely on previously published histories. He needed to hear the tale of a tumultuous period in American film-making directly from the mouths of the film-makers themselves. Obtaining unguarded co-operation wasn’t always easy.

“The hardest part about the book, by far, was getting that access,” Zinoman says. “For some of the people in the book it took years of finagling. One of the few people I couldn’t get to was Roman Polanski. He was literally impossible to get to. He was behind bars during a lot of the time I was writing the book.”

The biographical insights Zinoman gleaned from the numerous interviews he did manage to conduct – with the likes of John Carpenter, Wes Craven, William Friedkin, Tobe Hooper and Brian De Palma – inevitably invited speculation about how events in film-makers’ personal lives informed the thematic preoccupations of their various films. Zinoman acknowledges that such speculation could, if unchecked, have easily veered into the realms of pop-psychoanalysis, but maintains that the book’s focus on direct reporting and testimony helped ensure that the suggested connections were never too fanciful.

Given that the 1970s was something of a "golden age" for jittery, anxious and insecure cinema, it's perhaps unsurprising that the book depicts the decade's key horror figures as alienated outsiders who were "frequently at odds with their parents and other authority figures". Though Wes Craven might now seem a respectable establishment figure, his rejection of parental influence and control was, perhaps, most explicit and overt. Raised in a rigidly conservative Baptist environment, Craven channelled his unsublimated rage and frustration into the relentlessly brutal The Last House on the Left(1972). Craven's mother may never have watched any of her son's horror films, but they were, the book suggests, clearly informed by her disapproval of his chosen path. "Maybe Last Housewas just flying in the face of my mother's judgment," he admitted to Zinoman. "You want to see violent? You want to see sick? Here it is!"

While some of the influences that the profiled film-makers’ admit to are unsurprising – the cosmic horror of HP Lovecraft, for example, seems to have left its mark on many – others are more revelatory and less expected. In the works of Craven, John Carpenter and, particularly, William Friedkin, Zinoman traces a connection to the nihilism and violence of 1960s theatre.

"Friedkin's first movie was actually an adaptation of Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party," he says. "So when he said The Birthday Partyinfluenced The Exorcistthis fascinated me. I don't think people who are interested in horror often probe that connection. But every one of these guys had a story about the influence of Ionesco or the influence of Beckett."

This connection, Zinoman suggests, influenced how the "New Horror" film-makers dealt with what he calls "the monster problem". While most horror films invest time in building up tension, suspense and a sense of anticipation about the ultimate source of the film's horror, the revelation of the monster is often a tension-shattering anti-climax. Inspired by the more oblique strategies of 1960s theatre, films such as Rosemary's Babyand The Exorcistsolved this problem by deliberately withholding information and keeping the "monster" largely off-screen.

John Carpenter's Halloweenopted for a slightly different approach. The masked "monster" that is Michael Myers is shown in considerable detail, but, crucially, he reveals and represents nothing. His blank and expressionless face, and apparently motiveless violence, was, Zinoman maintains, "rooted in a conceptual idea that the scariest thing in the world is something you can't understand".

The critical and commercial successes of these innovative films ultimately led to a mainstream re-appropriation of the genre in the 1980s. The development of “sequel culture” and “franchises” dragged monsters back out of the shadows and made them stars. During that decade, Zinoman says, “a lot of the creative energy went into how to show a monster, instead of how to not show a monster”. We now knew their names, their back-stories, their motivations, and nothing was ever quite as unsettling and terrifying again.

Shock Value: How a Few Eccentric Outsiders Gave Us Nightmares, Conquered Hollywood and Invented Modern Horrorby Jason Zinoman is published by Duckworth, £18.99

FRIGHT CLUB

BLOOD FEAST

Herschell Gordon Lewis, 1963

Herschell Gordon Lewis’s notorious splatter-fest marked horror cinema’s first foray into gore. It was the first film to explicitly show graphic dismemberments, eviscerations and disembowelments. The first to wilfully revolt its audience. It may not have connected with mainstream audiences in any significant way, but it beat George Romero to the punch, and anticipated horror’s abiding love of blood, guts and prosthetics.

THE EXORCIST

William Friedkin, 1973

One of the highest-grossing films of all time, and the film that, more than any other, served to “legitimise” horror and thrust it back into the Hollywood mainstream. Nominated for 10 Academy Awards, it was, Zinoman says, “one of the rare horror films that became part of the national conversation”. Its apparent earnestness and seriousness of purpose inspired a slew of “worthy”, self-consciously “high-brow”, generally dreary imitators.

THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE

Tobe Hooper, 1974

If The Exorcisthelped prove that horror could be respectable, Tobe Hooper's unforgettably ferocious shocker gleefully celebrated the genre's grindhouse disreputability. It had, according to Wes Craven, a "wild, feral energy that I have never seen before, with none of the cultural Band-Aids that soften things . . . I was scared sh*tless."

From its lurid title to its memorable tagline (“Who Will Survive, and What Will Be Left of Them?”), it remains possibly the most influential horror film of modern times.