Brian Cooney - Final Essay

The History of Modern Horror Films

When people think of modern-day horror films, they think of such movies as SAW and HOSTEL and THE HILLS HAVE EYES remake. Why are these films so popular? There is one reason and one reason only. They have massive amounts of blood and guts flying everywhere throughout the film. Why has this transformation taken place? People used to demonize films like these to the point where they would be banned from most theaters, making little profit. Films like this would never have been produced without the revolutionary ways of depicting violence that occurred within the films of the late sixties and seventies. If Eli Roth had gone to a production company in 1970 and said “I want to make a film in which backpackers go to Slovakia for sex and drugs, but get brutally tortured and murdered instead.” they would have thrown him out the door and never glanced at his name again. Horror films of the seventies, through the use of extreme violence and some creative villain/victim ideas, made the genre a goldmine of success and set the standards the horror films of today still follow.

There had to be something, of course, that compelled the brave filmmakers of the seventies to make the films they did. These filmmakers were bold because they made their films their way, regardless of what the studio wanted or what might sell the best. The two horror films of the late sixties that led the way for other subgenres were ROSEMARY’S BABY (1968) and NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968). ROSEMARY’S BABY turned out to be very troubling and unique because it showed the loving husband character as just another cult member who has no concern for Rosemary. Normally, a husband focused on a new-born child is supposed to be very loving and supportive. He is definitely not supposed to murder his wife after she gives birth to the child, as portrayed in the film. Roman Polanski, being the controversial filmmaker he is, used the shock effect of displaying seemingly normal citizens turning into protectors of the anti-Christ. While the idea of bringing a monster into the world, Frankenstein or Dracula, was not a new idea, the fact that this was going on within a typical American family was staggering for audiences. The home was always a safe haven that served as protection from evil, as long as the door was locked. Bringing in evil into the household was ingenious and started an entire decade’s worth of horror films centered around the family. The success of ROSEMARY’S BABY led to other satanic films such as THE OMEN (1976) and THE EXORCIST (1973). The subgenre of the occult became almost as popular as the hippie/hillbilly counterculture represented in some of the late sixties and early seventies films.

The idea of the counterculture was represented in both BONNIE AND CLYDE (1967) and EASY RIDER (1969). A similar counterculture was transferred over to the horror genre with THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (1974) and THE HILLS HAVE EYES (1977). The counterculture, in this case, is the free-living, ungoverned hippy/hillbilly type. While they were the “good guys” in Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider, horror filmmakers thought they would make better villains. The counterculture turned from a peaceful and generous community to a murderous country family and a bunch of inbred cannibals. This was effective because the idea of the standard American family being insane had never crossed anyone’s mind. In most films previous to the sixties, a character would be killed for doing something wrong, such as rebelling against society or performing unethical acts. Reasonably innocent characters were never chain-sawed to death or raped by radioactive deformities. Sure, they smoked pot and wanted to have premarital sex, but did they deserve to die? TCM had people asking ridiculous questions that filmmakers would use for inspiration again and again by the later seventies and early eighties such as HALLOWEEN (1978) and A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET (1984), now considered classics. Before the seventies, no one on screen had experience such heinous acts. The family remained a stable concept in horror films throughout the decade and continues today in films such as THE RING (2002) and SAW (2004).

The plot structure of many horror films of the seventies, as well as much more recent releases after the millennium, revolves around the family as either the victim or the villain. In THE RING, the story is about finding out more information on a girl’s history and who her family may have been, while SAW ends up being about a man’s struggle to reach and save his family before the antagonist does. The family so commonly used in horror films because it can be depicted in so many different ways.

Another concept in seventies horror films that found its way into mainstream filmmaking was having the setting somewhere in which people usually feel safe. These interesting locations provided extra scares for the audience during and surely after the movie was over. Some settings and situations of seventies horror films included: a summer camp for children, inside someone’s dream, babysitting experiences, visiting graveyards, adopting a child, having a baby, and many other regular situations which become nightmares for the characters in the films.
The early seventies marked the termination of a certain type of horror film: the hammer horror film. These are considered to be all of the movies that have to do with the original universal monsters and their minions. There are so many “…. Of Dracula” films or “Frankenstein’s …..” and the early seventies were virtually the last time we saw the Cushing/Lee combination. They were the biggest stars of the hammer era, and without new ideas or a new star, the genre would obviously have to give way to something else.

Horror films were so widely made during this period that there became new genres of horror films. There were slasher films and psychological thrillers following hammer films. While most of the seventies were dominated by monster movies and occult films, HALLOWEEN (1978) created the now endless genre of the slasher film.

Generally, slasher movies are synonymous with poorly made, atrocious movies. The vast majority of slasher flicks basically has no plot, a bad script that is read by even worse actors, and usually serves no purpose other than to shock the audience through blood and gore. HALLOWEEN, the original, is considered to be an exception to these claims. It was admirable from the directing to the acting all the way to the insanely simple, yet terrifying music. Granted the plot was a little thin, custom for slasher films, but John Carpenter’s brilliant direction and the debut feature film of the future scream queen Jamie Lee Curtis made HALLOWEEN one of the biggest box-office smashes in history. Unfortunately, as Hollywood often does, because of HALLOWEEN’s immense success, the industry barreled out as many as they could possibly make and wore out the genre, at least for a little while. The slasher genre has, for some reason, been the only genre of horror to withstand the test of time. Every single month there will be a new trailer for some slasher film. They have gotten even worse, though many thought this was impossible since the “Let’s see how many sequels we can squeeze outta this one!” days. It does not matter if it is Halloween or Valentine’s Day, there is still some gory-looking, plot-lacking film coming out in a few weeks. Much of the population (prominently teenage males) are suckers for these gore-fests and waste their money seeing every one that comes out. It is just smart business to keep producing something that people are naive enough to spend their money on. The theaters will still sell out opening night for SAW XVII (2020) no matter how ridiculous the story is. Why? Because people love to be scared, that’s why.

Slasher films show us, along with other horror film genres, that there really could be evil people out there who will stop at nothing to kill people for unknown or nonexistent reasons. They show us that there are things like a “six year old child, with this blank, pale, emotionless face and the blackest eyes, the Devil's eyes”( Halloween, 1978). Some slasher films, most notably the FRIDAY THE 13TH series, follow certain rules. Many of the characters who get murdered have either had sex, done drugs, or consumed alcohol illegally at some point in the film. The reasoning behind this was because most of the teenagers during the seventies were doing exactly these things to rebel against the norms of society. It may make the viewer think about the extreme consequences that could lie ahead for them if they go against the will of society and their parents. This effect may not be as severe as it used to be because of the media’s exploitation of underage drinking and sex, but in the seventies it was a different story.

“Psychological horror is a subgenre of horror fiction that relies on character fears, guilt, beliefs, and emotional instability to build tension and further the plot.” (Wikipedia) These films are usually a lot better than slasher films, mainly because they require thinking and actually have a plot. Psychological horror films also scare people in a different way. They do it through knowledge and ideas rather than in-your-face blood and guts. Because of this, they are generally better respected. Roman Polanski had a strong interest in psychological terror during this period. His films ROSEMARY’S BABY (1968) and THE TENANT (1976) both dealt with residents in apartment complexes worrying about their neighbors trying to use or hurt them in some way. Most ghost films are also psychological films. Many times, in the end, a character will have been creating their own reality, oblivious to the real world because of some psychological condition or will be the ghost or culprit themselves without realizing it.

The main importance of the horror films from the seventies is that they brought the idea of the horror movie out of the strictly B-movie genre and into the mainstream media. The two films most thought of when discussing this are THE EXORCIST (1973) and HALLOWEEN (1978).
THE EXORCIST made people realize that it is actually possible for a disgustingly graphic horror movie to be Oscar-caliber material. The film was so intensely grotesque and disturbing that the controversy it caused crossed over into the new world and blanketed other, far more important stories. Cook states, “It also became a cultural phenomenon of large proportions, complete with a Newsweek cover story and complaints by serious journalists that controversy over the film had replaced Watergate in the news.” (p. 226) THE EXORCIST was also so popular because of the extremes the director went to for shocks. The things Regan did to herself and said to others never would have entered the mind of a mainstream director hoping to get his/her film to the theater in its entirety. This probably made people unable to wait for the next film that pushed the envelope even more, with more disturbing scenes and images. Although similar films following THE EXORCIST were better than the imitations following HALLOWEEN, there were still plenty to go around. When there is a financially successful horror film, or any type of film, studios will try to make as many of that certain type of film as they can within a short period of time.

Slasher films are probably the most well-known for having a large amount of knock-offs of there successful films. Almost always, the knock-offs are terrible and make the original that started the theme look even greater than it did before. It would be very easy to state that there are ten EXORCIST IIs for every one EXORCIST. The best of these knock-offs, and one of the best horror films, was THE OMEN (1976). It had a top-shelf actor (Gregory Peck), director (Richard Donner), and managed to scare the daylights out of people with a creepy little kid who said virtually nothing throughout the film. THE OMEN was a combination of THE EXORCIST and ROSEMARY’S BABY, but it still managed to have its own feel and scared viewers in a slightly different way. The idea of a child being the villain in a horror film was obviously more popular post-Exorcist as well.

While there are plenty of negative aspects of certain seventies horror films (star power, production values, and sheer content), there are many positives in those same categories. The seventies horror films proved that even if a film gets horrible reviews and has a really low budget, it can make money for a company. These films solidified the genre as a moneymaker that continues to this day. Some of the films, like George Romero’s DAWN OF THE DEAD (1978) look into social commentary through the American consumer, while some require nothing more than the audience member to be scared out of their mind by the end. There are so many different features of horror films, and they all offer something just a little bit different from the others. The seventies horror genre set standards that continue today and are proven through multiple sequels and remakes that will never be forgotten.