Other films that turned American unrest into a catalyst for considerable horrors included Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left and, later, The Hills Have Eyes. Though zombies are busting down doors and chewing the flesh off of young couples outside, the protagonists who’ve barricaded themselves inside a farmhouse are more concerned with who among their cultural cross-section (a black man, an angry WASP man, a catatonic blond pinup) gets to wear the political crown in their small kingdom. While not the first film to break the gore barrier (give Herschell Gordon Lewis’s mid-‘60s work credit for that), it was the most successful at transplanting a genuine social dread into a metaphorical house of mirrors. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, which evoked a country coming apart at the seams even as it portrayed a more threatening apocalypse. The first big success story of this wave was George A. These films exposed and subverted everything America held true-open spaces, machinery, industry, and country-gravy hospitality-and amplified the nation’s capacity for superior terror. #The texas chain saw massacre 1974 cast seriesNo, it took a series of social uprisings, the gradual unraveling of a deceptive image that American soldiers were swaggering like pimps in Vietnam, and a seemingly endless cycle of political assassinations to fuel a new breed of scare-mongering films. Typically, Hitchcock’s Psycho is referred to as the film that sliced horror history in half along socio-political lines, but for all its subversions of the rules of horror, the film still faithfully presents mainstream American society (as represented by Vera Miles) as the norm. The Vietnam War seemed to be the cataclysm that ended the idea that America was the world’s “control group,” at least for a while. Whereas the horror films of yore would invariably depict true red-white-and-blue protagonists dealing xenophobically with foreign evil (vampires and cat people often represented all of Eastern Europe), a new wave of horror film presented terror in America as a messy, brutally honest implosion from within. All American horror films that really matter can be separated into two time periods: before and after Vietnam, an event that epitomized an era and transmogrified the nation’s concept of “horror” forever.
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