Dark Directions: Romero, Craven, Carpenter, and the Modern Horror Film

Conclusion

169 169 Conclusion The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 represented a sea change in American politics and culture. Reagan’s “new morning in America” was a time of renewed optimism and a return to “traditional” American values. It was a cultural movement that fostered—and in ways enforced—belief in America’s moral and military superiority and an exaggerated confidence in the free market to allow wealth to “trickle down” throughout society. With a seemingly renewed faith in American values and optimism for the future, there appeared to be little room for the kinds of transgressive and cynical films that had dominated the period starting in 1968. Perhaps this is why the era also saw John Carpenter’s bleak 1982 masterpiece The Thing eclipsed by Steven Spielberg’s optimistic alien story E.T. These cultural shifts brought an end to the second golden age of horror, as did the reconsolidation of Hollywood and the decline of the independent directors. As Robert Kolker observes, during the 1980s, “the filmmaking business itself was undergoing transformation, with more and more of the once independent studios becoming part of multinational corporations.”1 The impact of these shifts was substantial, especially on the horror auteurs whose work helped define the second golden age. George Romero’s 1985 Day of the Dead, as noted, was constrained by low budgets and pressure to keep the violence within the strictures of an R rating. For Carpenter, the few films he produced with major studio backing—films like Memoirs of an Invisible Man—faced substantial interference and were generally box office failures.2 Of the three directors considered in the preceding chapters, only Wes Craven has been able to consistently find box office success with films like the Scream series and the more recent Red Eye. Conclusion 170 Whatever the fates of their more recent efforts, all three directors remain remarkably influential. The most obvious manifestation of this influence can be seen in the flood of remakes emerging from the back catalog of these directors. There is, of course, always something lacking in remakes—a sense of treading over ground that has already been visited and often in more intriguing ways—but the sheer volume is striking. The spate of remakes began with Zak Snyder’s 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead, and in many ways this film is typical of the trend. In his version, Snyder follows the same general plot outline—the sudden appearance of zombies leads a small band of survivors to take refuge in a local shopping mall—but accelerates the zombies, amplifies the action, and eliminates the politics. Amid the manic running zombies and continuous bursts of automatic gun fire, there is little time to consider the nature of either the shambling bodies of the dead or the panicked bodies of the survivors; in this way, the insightful reflection of Romero’s original is one of the primary elements excised from Snyder’s version. Overall, the quality of these remakes is varied, ranging from the generally interesting version of The Hills Have Eyes (2006), directed by Alexander Aja, to the perplexing re-imagining of Halloween (2007) by Rob Zombie, to the brutal but vapid remake of The Last House on the Left (2009) by Dennis Iliadis. While the rise of the remake as the dominant form of horror film in the current era likely says more about studio marketing decisions than about the underlying cultural atmosphere of our era, what is notable is that even in the early twenty-first century, our vision of horror continues to be founded on the films that emerged during the second golden age and overwhelmingly on the films crafted by the three architects of that era, Romero, Craven, and Carpenter. Indeed, in a wider sense, their influence remains prominent even among films that have no direct relationship. Danny Boyle’s remarkable zombie film 28 Days Later (2002) manages to be both frightening and insightful, and the film is clearly an homage to the first three films in Romero’s Living Dead series. As well, Eli Roth’s savagely provocative 2005 Hostel manifests both the sadism and the political acumen of the early 1970s in a film that exaggerates and distorts America’s post-9/11 xenophobia and sense of moral superiority. Indeed, a wide variety of contemporary horror films can be seen as tracing along the broad aesthetic lines established by the films of Romero, Craven, and Carpenter: the recent popularity of zombie films like Zombieland...