Samhain Project 2: The American Nightmare

 There have been quite a few documentaries made about horror films, but I've noticed that they often focus on the franchises like Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th, and as long-winded as those series can be, their documentaries are both deserved and understandable.

The American Nightmare is one that focuses on an era.  Though it doesn't mention the 50's and early 60's, 1968 was when a corner was turned from Edgar Allan Poe and radioactive monster movies toward something more sinister and realistically tangible.  The slim 74 minute film works as a pretty good companion piece to Jason Zinoman's study Shock Value (highly recommended, read the damn thing) but dips a little further into history.  Vietnam, the fuel shortage-era, women's rights, and political corruption all pushed the filmmakers discussed here into a new arena of more distressing horror films.  Of course a line was crossed in the late 90's where many films were made that I cannot bring myself to view, but that's another story.  To each their own.

David Cronenberg and George Romero discuss violent and painful "revolution" with their films "Night of the Living Dead" and "Shivers".  Wes Craven talks about how with "Last House on the Left", he may have been angrier than he originally thought.  (Ya think, Wes?  Let's compare that little number to Shocker, Jesus).  John Carpenter just wants to scare you.  Maybe push that line forward. 

And John Landis makes astute and often comical observations about all of the films, despite his controversies in the modern day, he's a good source of alternate thought when looking at these films, as his knowledge of the Universal Monsters era tying into the "new horror" is pretty indispensable, particularly with his sense of humor. 

But be prepared to look away at times.  Particularly early in the film during very candid discussions with FX master Tom Savini. The Vietnam war and it's atrocities are examined, and often in stomach-churning ways, including non-simulated visuals. However, if you want to know what it was that was jabbing at these young men, pushing them to use film to "work it out", as Tobe Hooper puts it here, its kind of hard not to look at the bastardization of the American way of life, and not tie it to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  (For further reading Joseph Lanza's Texas Chainsaw Massacre:  the Film that terrified a nation is a book that showed how a movie and a country informed one another in an uncomfortable period of time).

These are the men that changed horror.  Yes, Brian DePalma is left out.  Yes, Dan Curtis is left out. Though Curtis may have been a bit too old to fit the puzzle being pieced together here, his work was no less shocking, particularly considering that he worked primarily in the television medium.

This is a pretty educational piece, and definitely works as a nice answer to the question that often comes up after the viewing of a horror film, particularly from the uninitiated, "What's going through their minds?"

Well.

Now You'll Know.