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Obviously, mainstream audiences have once again turned to horror during a rather dark time. But even those who help to drive this cycle differ when trying to explain how and why it works.
"I've always felt like horror films were dealing with the fears that people bring into the theater, rather than the fears that are created in the theater," explained Wes Craven, the mind behind "The Last House on the Left," "The Hills Have Eyes" and "A Nightmare on Elm Street." "They're cultural nightmares. They're literally from the subconscious, from the undisclosed, un-discerned — but felt — part of a culture. They are the expression of that, as much as they can be."
"There might be something to the idea that when times are hard in the world, people look for harder times on screen," added George Romero, the visionary behind classics like "Night of the Living Dead" and the original "Dawn of the Dead." "I also think that there's a tendency to worry a little more about mortality, whether there's a soul in this animal."
Indeed, mortality (and our intensified awareness of it) may play into the cycle of horror. While conflict and unrest are always with us, it has traditionally been those times when Americans feel threatened in their own homes — the A-bomb anxious '50s, the economic upheaval of the '70s and today's terrorism-tormented times — that horror benefits most.
"In the '50s, there was a lot of paranoia about the bomb, atomic warfare, everybody going up in a mushroom cloud," Timpone said. "That gave birth to a whole plethora of horror and science fiction movies about monsters spawned by atomic radiation."
"I guess everyone thought, 'We will set off a nuclear explosion and be overrun with giant mantises and tarantulas, or crab monsters,' " Zombie quipped.
It's estimated that more than 500 horror features and shorts were produced between 1948 and 1962 during this golden age, most of them populated with giant irradiated beasts (lizards, sea creatures, flies, moths, blobs, and on and on) terrorizing middle America, putting a face — scaly though it might be — to the fears of the day. For audiences of the '50s, it was perhaps reassuring to know that if science somehow spawned the giant ants of "Them," the 10-story fire-breathing lizard of "Godzilla" or the colossal woman scorned of "Attack of the 50 Foot Woman," it might also just find a way to conquer it within 90 thrill-packed minutes.
The sexual revolution and the first broadcast images from Vietnam saw audiences raise their tolerance for gore and sex in the horror of the '60s (most notably in the then-shocking "Psycho" and the blood-drenched, bust-heaving works coming out of Hammer Films). But the genre's next great heyday came in the '70s. Recession, a gas crisis, the threat of terrorism and images from a protracted conflict abroad (sound familiar?) gave moviegoers a taste for gritty, unflinching indie scares.
"People were very uneasy at that time," Timpone recalled. "People wanted again to escape from the everyday horrors and see something that they could put a finger on."
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Photo: New Line
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