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Chapter 4: New Blood
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Chapter 4 New Blood 1970–1990 And so the floodgates opened. The horror films released from the 1970s onward had little in common with their predecessors , save for one central aspect: they genuinely horrified viewers. It is hard to imagine audience members fainting dead away at the sight of Boris Karloff in Frankenstein, but it is so; Edward Van Sloan’s “friendly warning” at the beginning of the film had been necessitated by Karloff’s shocking countenance and, of course, by the subject matter. Living beings constructed from the corpses of the dead, hunchbacks, mad scientists , the drowning of a young girl—it was all too much for audiences to bear. Forty years later, Frankenstein was a venerable antique, a blueprint that had outlived its usefulness—unless, of course, one increased the level of violence and mayhem, with copious amounts of gore as window dressing. This period also witnessed the decline and total collapse of the Hollywood studio system, allowing independent filmmakers with minuscule resources access to the marketplace. This trend, of course, would last for only a short time—perhaps ten years, fifteen at the most— before the conglomerates would once again hold unquestioned power over the new, anonymous multiplexes that sprang up in the late 1970s through the present era. But for a time, if you had $100,000 or so and enough talent, guts, and imagination to offer something that the majors were afraid to touch, you had a shot at breaking through to the mainstream audience. This strategy, of course, is how independent filmmakers have always competed against the majors, by offering the public a fresh, often outlaw vision that the bigger studios were either unwilling or unable to duplicate. One couldn’t compete on budgets; the majors 123 would beat you every time. But you could, as AIP did, offer films that appealed directly to a younger, edgier audience and lure away a significant group of viewers. In time, these “breakaway audiences” would become dominant, and the cycle would start all over again, with some new auteur on the block presenting a spectacle that, once again, pushed the outer edges of the envelope. And horror films, as we’ve seen, by definition operate on the cinematic margins, continually redefining what it is that truly horrifies us, frightens us, even repulses us—otherwise, they cease to be truly horri fic. The splatter pioneer Herschell Gordon Lewis, whose Blood Feast (1963), shot in Miami on a budget of roughly $25,000, sensed this when he created the first truly ultra-violent film with copious amounts of gore and sadism, and was universally reviled for it. Yet nearly half a century later, the brutality and senseless slaughter of Blood Feast have been replicated by so many contemporary horror films that we can see, whether we like it or not, where the horror film was headed. Lewis, known as the “Wizard of Gore,” went on to create a series of these ultra-low-budget, nearly plotless films with amateurish acting, inept direction, and seemingly endless scenes of graphic violence, each film more repellent than the last. Two Thousand Maniacs (1964), which boasted a somewhat larger budget, features one scene in which a woman is ritually dismembered; in another sequence, a man is pushed down a hill inside a barrel with spikes driven through it, until all that remains is a bloodied corpse. Lewis correctly assessed that the film was “repulsive psychologically” and knew that he was appealing to the lowest common denominator in his audiences , but he simply didn’t care. For Lewis, it was all about box-office receipts. As he put it, “If you cannot titillate [your audiences] with production value, you [must] titillate them with some type of edge.” Indeed, Lewis’s imagination in this regard was limited solely by meager budgets; for years, he wanted to blow someone up on the screen with a swallowed stick of dynamite, but gave up because he couldn’t figure out how to do it for a reasonable amount of money. And despite Lewis’s renegade status, or perhaps because of it, French critics in L’Observateur, Cahiers du cinéma, and Image et son compared Lewis’s audaciously violent films with Polanski’s Repulsion and Hitchcock’s Psycho. But, as Lewis knew, “That isn’t the way you keep score. You keep score A H i s t o r y o f H o r r o r 124 [18.232...