Original subtitles

In 1910, the New York Film Studio of Thomas Edison created an adaptation of Mary Shelley's

Gothic novel Frankenstein.

The film was a commercial failure.

It would be 20 years before the rise of the American horror film.

Between 2003 and 2008, 135 horror titles gross nearly $3 billion at the box office.

Hundreds more were produced for home video.

The film is still still has plenty of life blood.

And prompting Sunday wonder why American viewers are so obsessed with violence.

How did we get here?

If a horror film is cutting off people's thumbs and gouging your eyes out, I guess that's

a certain kind of horror film, but it's certainly not the kind of horror film that interests

me.

The appeal of horror movies has always been about confronting death.

And in their various ways, these movies help us cope with that.

And that's why the reasons that this has been such a long live genre from literary

times on.

Fear is probably the most powerful emotion we all feel.

We're all afraid of death and lost in love for one.

Lost about identity.

All the things that you see in the movie, we're all afraid of.

In my mind, what makes it going to more and more, is something that stays with you after

the credits going during the car.

And you're driving home in that next morning when you wake up.

If you meet all the people who make horror films, you discover they are very non-violent,

they're politically active and knowledgeable and anti-war.

They have opened themselves up to all of these possibilities.

And it's the people who repress them who are the ones you have to look out for.

I always had this affinity towards the great universal monsters.

Not sure where that came from other than probably being a boy who felt like he was not

particularly good looking and felt like a free one.

I love the monsters.

I mean, that comes back to those days at the Arcade O'Kass all the other.

When even though Frankie was bothering me a little bit there, I still sympathized with him.

And I've always sympathized with the monsters.

At the dawn of the 20th century, most Americans knew by heart how misgephas and stirring words

from the Declaration of Independence.

We hold these truths to be self-evident.

That all men are created equal, that they're endowed by their creator,

with certain unalienable rights, and among these are life, liberty, and a pursuit of happiness.

From the beginning Hollywood filmmakers were skeptical.

Hard truths quickly found their way into the National Cinema.

The Great War in Europe reinforced the nation's identity as a crusader for freedom.

While the old world suffered, America thrived.

But the new world had its own monsters, waiting in the shadows.

Going all the way back to the 20s, the horror movies of the Sylon era with La Unchini,

there was a lot of kind of twisted people.

The monster was just a mutilated person.

When people came back from World War I, they came back without limbs.

They came back in somewhat living pieces.

The Volstidac gets enacted in 1919. They can't drink. They've lost arms, legs, eyes,

other body parts. And so there is just both attraction and a revolve of polishing that they

experienced in America. La Unchini was America's first horror movie star.

The Monsters Epertrayed were ordinary men, turned outwardly monstrous by cruel fate.

And turned inwardly monstrous by the cruelty of men.

He's unaxapted by the general public. He's on the fringe, and yet he's the hero,

you're ruining the form. And not how evil he is.

I love that moment in front of the opera where the crowd has got him cornered by the river.

And he turns into the many raises hands like he's got something in his hand to throw at them.

And they recoil him and the openoses hand and he's got nothing in his hand.

And then they jump on him and beat him to death. But I just love that moment when he opens his hand.

And then only does the openoses hand that the look of his face like,

aha, yeah, I fooled you, you know.

Cheney's outsider represented the dark side of American life.

Fear's realized on October 24th, 1929.

In the midst of the great depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt promised to

save the American dream saying the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

The horror films that influenced me the most were not the classic American horror films.

They were the German silent expressionist films of the 1920s. I think back specifically to the

cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Nassfarato, which I thought were true classics.

Many of Hollywood's earliest filmmakers were immigrants from Europe.

They brought mythic monsters from the whole world to new shores.

Dr. Caligari initially was sold at first as a love story and as a horror film.

I believe one of the original advertising taglines was the strangest love story ever told.

And so they don't mention what strange is that the main lover is a Nassfarato one dead.

You are too late. I'm glad now flows through her veins. Here we live.

Do the same choice to come. As I have lived. It was the one that really established the idea I think of horror films.

Universal followed up with a new version of Frankenstein.

It really is and still is to this day. The Gothic thing that I always find myself drawn to.

The period somehow seemed simpler and classier. The way people dressed, the way people spoke.

Like heaven being with you again. Heaven wasn't so far away all the time.

And yet there was the jack one hide story. There's this other side underneath that you wanted to get to.

And that was particularly for a boy far more interesting that you could get this beautiful lady.

And somehow you'd screw it up because you were really a monster inside.

We had a fight. Suddenly I realized the power I held, the power to rule.

To make the world a Robert at my feet.

Essentially there are two kinds of horror movies.

One is it's all about where evil is. The location of it. So we can imagine ourselves around the campfire.

And the wise man whoever is talking to us about the location of evil. And he says the evil is out there in the dark.

It's beyond the woods. It's the other tribe. It's the people that they'll look like us.

They don't speak like us. And that's the externally evil. That's the other.

The people aren't like us. But the other location of evil. The same setting.

The campfire and the shame in the wise man says, Ashley evil is writing here.

It's at her own human hearts. That particular story is a hard one to tell.

It's easier to talk about the other. It's harder to say.

I have met the enemy and he is us. We are the enemy.

This story is fun. God made some endpoints. Some he made kings. Some bigots.

Me! He made a huntup. During the 1930s there was all the turmoil in Europe. The rise of Nazi

is and there was various problems at different countries where obviously having an established

okay who's going to be in charge what kind of forces are they going to unleash?

Ladies and gentlemen, look at calm. We ate wonder of the world.

Legend has it to add off Hitler's favorite film. Was King Kong.

We have to watch out for these people who are trying to consolidate and manipulate power,

manipulate us.

In 1934 the Hollywood production code administration decreed that all movie monsters must be destroyed

by the end of every film. Regardless of their motives. The monster in Frankenstein had a sympathetic

note. He was just as frightening and just as terrible as the other monsters. But there was a scene

where he's at a little pond with a little girl and you expect him to kill a little girl.

Why are you? I'm Maria. When you play with me?

Instead he is very friendly and affectionate to the little girl and I remember when I first saw that.

I was really surprised and I would assume the audience was surprised too.

The Frankenstein story in and of itself was fascinating but bright a Frankenstein.

You know what James Whale did. The empathy that you had for the monster in that and the fact that he wanted

you know to love Elsa Langester at the end. As a very very young kid that had a really strong impression on me.

You know trying to find that other freak that doesn't want you either. You know and then we all die.

We belong again.

Even then the most terrifying movie monsters were human beings.

The black cat is a rather unique movie in the heart of history because it's really the only one

that has a sense of evil to it. Boris Carloth and Bella Lagosi

stars two European soldiers engaged in the deadly grudge match.

With a young American couple caught in the middle.

Hofstraen Americans would soon find themselves in a similar situation. The unquiet ghosts of

World War I were about to break loose. We should play a little game of readers. A game of death

if you like. But under any circumstances we should have to wait until these people of Gaul are

until we are allowed.

Truly unquestionably the biggest evil that I know about in recent memories that it was the Holocaust.

There's a documentary on Dead GI's and we've got over there and they were taking pictures of some of the survivors

and some of the dead bodies. Oh my god. And that was in an industry that was an industry that was set up to kill.

It was industrialized murder. That was a staggering, staggering to see.

Set against the reality of genocide. Cinematic monsters became less terrifying.

The Universal Pictures which are beloved by a certain generation do really fall into two categories.

The ones in the thirties which were relatively sincerely up in the first time and the ones in the

forties which were basically trading on what had been done earlier in the thirties and sort of

driving it up a little further wartime audience. In 1942 invisible man became invisible agent.

Second or out of minute. Plains are going to bomb New York. I can't stop them but I bet I can slow them down.

As the tone of monster movie is softened, the target audience changed.

Let me tell you what made me change my mind. A lot of I think the childhood attraction to harm

movie starts with Disney because the scares were always a huge part of what was appealing about Disney movies.

Hello, Kyo! Here at Beetle Talk. You think something was going to happen to us.

But then when you get to a picture like Pinocchio which has this great transformation sequence

I mean as good as any world will feel like you transformation ever was saying where you

turns into a donkey. That's a pretty hairy stuff for kids.

I think a lot of kids find that they like that kind of stuff and other kids find that they don't.

But the ones who really enjoy that step up to harm movies.

Why love the wolf man? Of course I mean what kid does limp the wolf man?

I mean he's a perpetual adolescent to get Terry and you know he can control himself.

I mean he's always popular the wolf man.

I know Kurt C. Og Mac. He had very strong feelings about the war he fled Germany

due to his Jewish background and he was the one that came up with the idea of the wolf man

along the lines of a great tragedy. Here is a person cursed by fate who then has to try to deal with it.

Well I'm sick of the whole thing I'm going to get out of here.

Oh yeah but it's beaten by a werewolf and leaves becomes a werewolf himself.

Lunch any junior he was such a pity a bull fellow. He looked so sad and tragic. There's

something about his whole persona. It just looked terribly unhappy.

I grew up in a period where being Jewish was unusual. I mean most people weren't.

And then he went through the whole war as a kid hearing that these people wanted to come over

in Kenya and he wanted to kill everybody that was Jewish. So you did feel like an outsider.

During and after the war American cinema took on a darker, more somber tone.

Lower budget horror films like the Arcale Productions of All-Luton adopted a minimalist style

for economic and artistic reasons. Luton believed that in darkness audiences would imagine their own

worst fears.

One thing I really liked about the original cat people was that it's all about repression.

You know it's about repress sexuality. It's about turning into an animal when you release

that sexual desire. And it's about the repression of fear. And those things I didn't know

consciously what I was watching at the time I just knew I was watching a scary movie.

One of the scary sequences of all time it's in the leopard man with a little girl is sent

on her own to go to the grocery store. Mama sends her off and we know that there is an escape

panther somewhere in the neighborhood and she's running and running and she goes home to mama

and knocks on the door to bans ability and

mama in. Mama feeling no sense of urgency not knowing about the panther

waste to let her in.

And then suddenly we see blood coming under the door. We know that that girl is being torn to shreds

on the other side of that door. That is an absolutely chilling moment and unforgettable bit of horror.

One of the things I think is really great about the valoutin films is that there is a psychological

component to them. The seventh victim is basically about a woman who is obsessed with death.

Meets a woman who hasn't lived but wants to live.

The dichotomy between the woman who has had enough of life and wants to die and the

one who has an experience life and wants to live. And that's a major theme in that movie

trying to put the pieces together and figure out what is my place. Do I have a place in the

world or should I just go into a room with a news and hang myself?

I've always wanted to die. Always. I'm afraid. I'm tired of being afraid of waiting.

Why wait? Human interaction is the source of horror and fear and tension.

You know, it's a natural part of it and just dealing with the world at large as a human being,

you know, taking on responsibility as a citizen of the world is a big deal.

Santa Rosa California.

In 1943, Alfred Hitchcock placed this existential fear in small town America in shadow of a doubt.

The town with a secret is kind of a staple of film noir and the idea that things aren't quite

what they seem is, it's a basic tenet of horror movies. I've always been fascinated by

what's behind the door, what's behind the picket fence, what's really going on.

Uncle Charlie appears to be the classic American success story.

The Horatio Alger myth of the self-made man.

But Uncle Charlie is not what he seems. Do you know if you ripped the

front-sulf houses you'd find swine? The world's a hell, what is it? What happens in it?

I remember walking home from school one day and some little girl said to me,

you know, the bomb could go off right now and we'd all be dead in a second.

That was kind of news to me. I never really thought of that way.

And I do think that the kids of my era did grow up under the atomic fear cloud.

The first horror film I directed although it'd be more likely classified as horror science fiction

was the day the world ended a ten-day black and white picture.

Rick, how much do you know about the mature bomb test?

Only some rumors that nobody could actually pin down.

This one of the first films says that tackled the idea of okay.

Almost everybody's wiped out. Some of the people that will have to have been turned into these

monster mutants. What's going to happen after the end of civilization?

The first film was released in the world.

Impossible, unbelievable, fantastic. But I tell you it could happen.

This is back in the Red Scare days, atomic bomb days. And a lot of very famous science fiction movies

had come out. By the cruel intruder from the world. Dealing with the effects of the bomb,

the beast from 20,000 phathoms, them. These were all creatures of the bomb created by radiation.

When I saw Serencio love my transfer was only playing on Wednesday and Thursday.

And so I had to get my father to take me because it was at night.

Even science was stunned. The new atomic miracle should have been mankind's greatest boom.

Instead, when such power to cause phenomenal growth, who dangerously unstable,

man was confronted with his most shocking hunger.

It was so scary. I was so freaked out that I went after the lobby and I just started a pace.

And I would look in occasionally the screen.

It was scary. Leaving my father alone in the theater, watching this giant spider movie by himself.

Which for which he never forget me, I don't think.

The one that I remember the most was them, because it was by giant ants.

And they made a noise that was not unlike the crickets in the back of my house.

I had nightmares for weeks.

Maybe what you see is to a little prophecy come true.

And thus the biggest destruction and darkness come up in creation.

And the beasts will reign over the earth.

Fantastic beyond comprehension.

Ripping beyond compare.

Stounding beyond belief. The ideas monster the most.

It's no good shooting deal. The bullets pass through. It's just like X-rays.

Probably the movie that scared me the most in my life was the creature that the atom brain.

That was about six years old. It's not a very good movie, but boy it sure scared me.

I promise to see you die and I will.

There's a lot of movies that have different valuations depending on how they actually affect it.

I think people love the movies they saw when they were young.

They just they'd love to eat them up.

In the age of the atomic bomb, filmmakers warn viewers to keep watching disguise.

It's wrong.

We finally got one. We found a flying saucer.

Come in.

Close the door.

But you supposed the Pentagon could send us a revolving door.

The thing was the first movie that really pushed my buttons.

Hi Pat.

If you watch that movie, if you watch it now and really analyze it,

there are always opening doors.

And it's a put that old loud radio sound effect.

Opening the door.

Hey, buddy around here wants coffee.

And then it just our opening door. It's opening doors.

My pattern.

Opening the door.

Come out of car bro.

This door is locked.

Attention everybody in camp. Stay where you are in butcher doors.

Close the door please.

When you find what you're looking for, go ahead.

Sooner or later of course, you know that the thing is going to be there and God damn.

They had had one of the all-time great.

Well, several great scare scenes, but one is when they said him on fire.

Thubborn.

That was great stuff.

It tells a lot about where this country was and where the world was in 1951.

More so than I think a lot of quote mainstream pictures.

The political situation of the time was such that there were very few

quote liberal science fiction movies.

Certainly, I would call it came from outer space would be a liberal science fiction movie because

the aliens they just want to get home and they're not really bad and they've been

promoted the individual, the smart scientific versus the

community that's a little bit behind the times.

It's not accepting of the aliens.

But that wasn't really very popular.

I mean, it was much easier and more spectacular to do aliens who really were out to get us.

In invaders from Mars, conservative forces knew just how to deal with

anyone that looked different.

By the second half of the decade, alien invaders had learned to be more subtle.

I remember going to see it the Colosseum theater on the first street.

Believe it or not, it was the second feature on a double bill

invasion of body snatches.

I don't know you've got to get all of you away.

I think I sat through that picture twice because it was so good.

What time is it?

745.

Yeah, I know.

It's too early to be so busy.

What are they doing here?

But it was interesting that people could authentically read it as a metaphor,

either for individuality here is the conformist of the 50s

who are trying to tell everybody what to think, what to feel how to act,

or a metaphor for communist takeover.

Erase solace, unfeeling people who want to have an ideal future by eliminating

what's really human about us, trying to take away our freedoms.

They were very real anxieties of the time.

They are the other side crazy and insane.

If they really have no emotions, what would stop them from

breaking a treaty, pushing the button, doing the unthinkable.

Filmmakers continue to target the fears of the rising generation.

Every one of you watching this screen look out because soon, very soon, the most horrifying

monster menace ever conceived will be whosing into this fear.

I am William Castle, the director of the motion picture you're about to see.

You'll be given a supernatural viewer like this,

which will enable you to penetrate for the first time into the spirit world.

I feel obligated to warn you that some of the sensations, some of the physical reactions,

which the actors on the screen will feel, will also be experienced for the first time in

motion picture history by certain members of this audience.

I have the booklet for the seat buzzers that the exhibitors were sent.

And they were war surplus motors that had to be inserted into the seats in the theater.

And it was quite a big deal.

And they were warning electric shock and a lot of complicated instructions about how these things

have to be worked and how the projectionists have to activate them.

And it was like most theater menace to fight.

I don't want to do this. I mean, this is crazy.

And it was pandemonium basically and it was a lot of fun.

And with them, it was designed for that.

The successive gimmicks, I think, started a Peter out after that. I mean, that was really a high point

that you couldn't really top.

Good afternoon.

Here we have a quite little motel.

Perfectly harmless, Druchin.

When in fact, it has now become known as the scene of the crime.

One of the first movie loves of my life was the movie Psycho.

I saw it at the Drive in in 1961 as a kid.

And in those days horror movies were thought of as kids movies even Psycho.

Psycho put audiences on notice that nothing would be off limits anymore.

And anyone can die at any time.

And the most sympathetic character in the movie can be the most diabolical.

Beginning of the modern horror film was Psycho, 1960.

That was the turning point.

Most horror films before they're not all the most were Gothic romances.

Take the hammer films in the 56, 57.

They were all in castles with Dracula and Frank and Stein and Behrans and the European aristocracy.

Psycho was a whole different breed of movie.

In a way, it prefigured what was going to happen in the culture.

She done to you.

In the following years, filmmakers tried to outdo Psycho in shock value.

Hitchcock continued to push the limits of on-screen violence in his next film The Birds.

To see just how much audiences were willing to watch.

The Birds were not allowed to watch.

Drive-in director, herhial Gordon Lewis went even further.

Blood feast.

It's barely above the level of a home movie, but when it played theaters in Chicago,

I mean, they closed them down and it was a big scandal because this is pornography.

You know, it's the cheap end trails and all that.

This is totally into the news and today.

But at the time, it was very transgressive.

People wanted to see movies like Mondo Cane, which was a documentary all about

death and grotesque rituals around the world because it's what you couldn't see on TV and

what you couldn't see in the theaters.

This man, the exult of the legislation of Christ.

So you wouldn't see those at the Warner Hollywood or the Pacific Paramount or anything like that.

You'd see them at the little cracker box theater downtown or, you know, on the wrong side of the tracks.

Some seasoned filmmakers competed not simply by increasing shock value,

but by increasing the production value of their films.

I was in almost continuous production at that time making films,

generally on 10-day schedules for AIP.

I convinced Sam Arca, who was hit of the Monday Department of AIP,

that the thing to do was to do one picture, 15 days, and in color,

and put together the two budgets and spend somewhere around $200,000.

They asked me what I wanted to do and I said, I want to do the fall of the house of usher.

Once this land was fertile, farms abounded, earth-yuted her riches at Harvestown,

there were trees in plant life, flowers, views of grain.

There was great beauty here.

This was long before my turn.

I identified with it emotionally because there was a tortured individual Vincent Price in the

center of it. He was going to torture you as a belt. He did have like some great love of his life

that left him or betrayed him. I'm going to make you suffer your faithlessness to me.

And there was always that fear that, you know, that was going to happen to you or even early

girl friends that, you know, you had a crush on that like somebody else and then you could

egg and eyes over that. So there was a identifying on that love.

I had a great affinity for the Vincent Price and wanted to be the one controlling the pendulum.

You're here.

Within a few years, the United States was engaged in its biggest military conflicts in World War II.

As the Vietnam War escalated, the counter-culture movement began to grow.

Can you look around this world and believe in the goodness of a God who rules it?

Famine, Estilence, War disease and death. They ruled this world.

There is also love and life and hope. Very little hope by us, showing.

The mask of the Red Death was one of the later pictures we were already into the 1960s,

the counter-culture was building and I did indeed incorporate particularly some of the

fantasy scenes, some of the style that I later developed or fully in my LSD picture, the trip.

250 micrograms of peace. I'm going to take.

The youth generation responded by turning on tuning in and dropping out, but they still couldn't

escape the collective nightmare.

Rogers always been left of center and his office just to have French revolutionary posters on the wall.

And as he was with Nikolay M. Diningy for making a picture of him. A lot of that, I think,

shows up in his work. The movies are subversive.

I've come to tell you what I see. I knew this would happen.

In 1968, a big budget studio horror film presented mainstream movie gores with a death of all certain

dudes. There seemed to be this confluence of events that made people think, well, maybe this

really is the last generation. Maybe judgment day is really coming. Maybe we really have gotten

too far away from God. No! Oh, back! God is dead! He's insane! The air is one! Mr. Boogieman, King of Blood, they used to call me.

In targets, Boris Carloff realizes that traditional monster movies can't compete with the

horrors of real life in 1960s America. I kind of horror is horror every more this year.

Look at that! Richard Nixon reassured voters that the violent few are not the majority of Americans

emerged. The great silent majority to stand up and become him.

I thought it was about revolution. We were 60's guys and thinking, in those terms,

pissed off that the 60's revolution didn't work. Peace and loved didn't solve anything in the end.

In fact, shit was looking worse. And I said, what would be a really earth-shattering thing that would

be revolutionary, and that people would refuse to ignore the dead, stop, stay dead. Oh, it is

one thing more. They like to eat living people. When night of the living dead came out,

it was shocking. It was horrific. And it really shocked me when I first saw it.

The fact that there was a black character in it was a big deal. Today it looks like nothing,

but if you realize that back then the only black people you saw in the movies would Sydney Poidey

in the release of the field or I spy. You realize that we didn't have black people in movies

much. And I have a black guy in the horror movie who ends up, you know, being the only survivor and

then senselessly getting killed. Good shot. I noted it as being kind of a countercultural movie for

that reason. Okay, let's go get him. That's another one for the fire. What bothers me the most about

a lot of traditional horror is that why do you do it to upset the apple cart? And always at the

end it sort of gets set back up again. We killed the monster, you know, we do whatever we need through.

And I didn't want to do that. In my mind most of the power that it has relates to the time that

it was me. And the anger at that time. And the disappointment of that time.

As the Vietnam War continued into the 70s, Phil Makobob clock offered his own form of protest in

Death dream. Do you know that they sent us a telegram tonight? I mean, they actually sent us a telegram

telling us that you were killed. They actually said that my son was dead. I was.

That was a scary time. There was a draft, an active draft. And it was scary to be up for that.

I remember in college when the first draft lottery came out. What they would do would draw a number

for every one of the 365 days of the year and choose an order. So if you were in the first,

if your birthday was January 15th, they would draw a number and if January 15th came up and it was

number 6, you were going to Vietnam. You were going into the service.

At the turn of the decade, the prevailing message of the American Independence Cinema was

we believe it. Audiences had to be psychologically prepared for the worst.

I remember taking a little journey down sunset strip when I first got to Los Angeles and

these guys along here were sort of selling acid on the street. And I went to the whiskey and saw

some rock and roll bands. It was a great time for music. Hadn't quite hit the hits, the skids as it did

in 1969 and the ultimate when that sort of turned dark. And Charles Manson.

As the culture changed from 60s into the 70s, everything got harder. There's more sex than

there's more violence. But there was a lot of excessive stuff going on.

Music.

Misavage Cinema is really about random violence, about unpredictability, about seeing the things you

couldn't imagine around the next corner. Whether that being a murderer's show up at your house one night

and going a killing spree, or that you go on a nice vacation into the desert and it turns out

that their cannibals living in that desert who want the luxuries you have and want to kill the family

have and rape your daughter and do all these absolutely horrible things.

It's crazy. What's crazy? All that blood and violence. I thought you was supposed to be the love generation.

Last house in the left was just like a strong cup of coffee in the morning. It opened you right up.

Wow.

My favorite moment in horror history is in the last house in the left. There's a guy named Krugin

and he had just got done raping a girl. He stands up and the girl's not dead.

And all these guys, he was three of them, stand up and they're kind of talking to each other

in his music's plane and they looked down at their hands and it's covered in blood and grass

and they're pulling the grass off their hands.

And then the lead character looks down at his hands and there's this look that comes over his face

overall their faces and it was basically what the hell do we just do?

And they feel disgusted for a moment they're disgusted. They're not just mad men and crazy killers.

They were humans and that one moment made me want to do horror films.

Those are films that actually discuss violence in a meaningful way. In our culture we have made

violence acceptable that when we're attacked we attack.

That violence can be okay under certain conditions.

This is the story of a man who decided to clean up the most violent town in the world.

The child's brought some death-lish films. They say,

okay you've attacked my family, you've murdered my family, you've raped my wife. Now I will kill you and it is justified.

What last house on the left says is that I have acted as violently as you have. My child is still dead and now what am I left with?

What these horror films do is they rip that decorum off killing.

They show you the naked ugliness of violence.

I don't think they were necessarily social statement movies consciously.

I think they couldn't help but express that era and the filmmakers and their counter-cultural bent

regardless because in those days making independent films didn't have to go through the meat grinder process that it does now.

In 1974 film maker Toby Hooper suggested there was something cosmicly wrong with life in America.

Hence when malefic planets are in retrograde and Saturn's malefic,

okay their malifus is increased.

Here's an era where people running out of gas so they're going to this town.

Slotterhouse have been closed down. People are out of work. It's reflecting a lot of the anxiety

of the 70s. Only in this family they're not just unemployed. They're absolutely crazy.

It has this level of insanity that feels very real and you wonder who made this fucking movie.

Odin says don't want something too horrible. Hello? It's none entertaining for us. They want to be entertained.

They want to have a good time. Hello! They know mine some of the characters in the screen getting bumped off.

Even in terrible ways but you can cross a line.

Any audience will turn against you. Anybody home?

And if you're a filmmaker you can sometimes use that to your benefit

by teasing the audience. The audience is in God. Are they going to show me something? I don't want to see.

I'm getting nervous now. This is the director. I'm not a trust this director really. He may show me something that's going to really

disturb me. You can never find that little niche. It's great because the audience said provides

most of the action for you and their hands.

After the Vietnam War the culture war in America raged on between rich and poor.

Young and old us and them.

There are two kinds of horror fans. They're the horror fans who say,

you know I really grew on the monster. I like Dracula. I like the wear wall. I like the Frankenstein monster.

And they're picking up on something in those characteristics. The fact that those creatures tend to be

sort of despised outside. Why should we treat a no-fancy? She's a Frankenstein.

But this average cinema is something entirely different. It's sort of a realization of the fact

that life is random and that you don't control your life. You walk into horror with your eyes shut and then

have to cope.

What's it doing today? In the actresses, audiences watched helpless layers pure evil

attacked an innocent teenage girl. Linda Blair's Reagan was everything that was sugar and

spice and everything that was the perfect little girl and she was set up so beautifully in that

one little scene with her and her mother talking about her wanting a horse for her birthday.

Wink it a half. Will see Rick and tiny little details that made you feel you were very intimate

in something very human. And when that girl then turned on us, she was victimized by this thing.

One moment being thrashed around in the next moment she was totally in charge of it.

And he moved towards that door that we were going to go through it again.

Well, then let's introduce ourselves. I'm Damon Kairns.

And I did, Kevin. Now, kind of, I do these strikes.

One of the actors in my troupe had seen the movie on the opening night because he had read the

book and things and he was the greatest trailer one could ever get for the movie because

this son of a gun could not go home, you know, and was sleeping on some of these floor by their

bed because he just peep was so freaked out and to go into the theater and feel this sense of fear

that we're going to see something evil. I mean, this was going to be really an experience.

People came in with that sense already that anticipation that they were going to be traumatized

and sure is how they were. In the exercise, the evil was vanquished.

But the national crisis of confidence was far from over. In the open, the devil and car

Nate was adopted by the US president. The future never looked so grim.

Horror continued to infiltrate the most commonplace visions of domestic bliss

turning the American dream inside out.

In horror, you can do with ideas like with its life.

One of the things that made me do the pictures was there was so many people

alienated from their kids at that time. There's an interesting idea. What happens if you

get to be terrified of your own child? The thing that you loved is suddenly the enemy.

In 1975, horror went mainstream. Universal invested millions in jaws and audiences

flock to the theaters to see idyllic visions of middle-class American life.

Get shredded.

It does testify to the fact that horror films which were once the despised others were

becoming the A films of Hollywood that wears in years past a film about a killer shark

would very much have been a B film. They would have been a low budget B film instead

this big budget A film with top of the line special effects.

The recordless of their budgets, most horror films portrayed red-blooded Americans,

fighting for their own individual ideas of the American dream.

In the step for the wise, the dream was manufactured.

There'll be somebody with my name and she'll cook and clean like crazy, but she won't be me.

In David Cronenberg's shivers, sexual liberation was the order of the day for better or worse.

This was the age of the equal rights amendment which ultimately did not pass.

But also Carrie was post-rowed versus Wade, the idea put into law that a woman has the right to choose

what she wants to have been with her body.

And so there was certainly the opportunity there to play on some of those fears, the idea of

what if a woman is too powerful?

I got criticized for punishing sexually-provenous girls.

But I never understood my assignment was to these vulnerable teenage girls,

where babysitters and they were being stopped.

So the question came up, what are the teenage girls do?

Most of the time, well they talk about their boyfriends.

They're making out with their boyfriends.

One of them maybe is a little not quite as a father advanced in her social education.

So Jamie Lee Curtis is the one who's a little scared of life.

She's actually the one who ends up kicking butt pretty much.

She takes care of business.

Deborah Hill mentioned that she was surprised nobody commented that the one person who hasn't

had sex is the one who penetrates the shape, attacks him, is getting out her sexual frustrations

because she really has no other outlet.

Alien is totally a film about sexuality and I think that comes out of the idea that the alien life

form is supposed to be a perfect life form.

And I guess the idea is if your perfect life form has to have a perfect and adaptable life cycle.

So there's this strong undercurrent about the reproductive cycle in Alien,

particularly how the alien co-ops the human reproductive cycle.

By the end of the 1970s, the American way of life had mutated into something unrecognizable

to say nothing of the American way of death.

In dawn of the dead George Romero pondered the fate of the nation's silent majority.

What the hell are they?

They're us that's all.

Zombies to me could be any natural disaster.

They could be anything.

My stories are about the people that deal with it, don't deal with it, deal with it,

improperly deal with it, stupidly deal with it.

You know, the stories are about how people screw up.

Donner the dead is celebrated for the whole idea of making fun of the consumer cultures.

These guys go to a mall and have unlimited access to all the material goods they ever want.

And for a while they celebrate and go crazy, but that's limited.

The Amityville horror suggested that even the basic dream of home ownership was fraught with demons.

Well, I guess people have had to deal with the service and said,

I'm gonna need you to get kicked out of the garden.

One writer captured middle-class America's shadow dreams better than any other.

Oh, me old Jesus.

Stephen King is the horror version of Norman Rockwell.

His characters live in your neighborhood.

You know, they live next door to you.

They experience what you do.

And it's not the monster in the closet, but the people who own the house that the closet is in that the story is about.

He obviously saw the same twilight zones.

We all saw the same outer limits, the same corpsmen movies, all that same stuff loved that stuff.

But because of his writing talent and taking those basic ideas and stories and filling

these novels full of the thoughts of these characters.

Has it ever occurred to you that part of being a parent?

It's trying to kill your kids.

I love you, Danny.

I love you more than anything else.

We're all never do anything to hurt you.

Never.

In Stephen King's story that dead son, the struggle between good and evil came down to the struggle between

a man and his country.

I just deal with the universe of the makes of movies where I would write this script and I'd have

complete control and such, which was great.

And I wanted to do something about Reaganism and because it just pissed me off so much.

The politics of the 1980s called for return to traditional values.

But to some, the government policies seem like a manipulation of American freedoms.

The crowd was killed a comedy for Christ and let's get those comedies and kill them.

So I grew up laughing at that in Dr. Strangelove.

And here it was again, it returned and with this massive enthusiasm behind

and this unrestrained free enterprise.

It really boils down to our ability to accept.

We don't need pessimism. There are no limits.

It was a piece of to be something like this.

For the home video generation, the decade was defined by Slash of Movies.

The beginning with Friday the 13th.

What's interesting about the Friday the 13th series is that if you watch those films

down to a film, Jason is compared with nature.

It's going to storm.

In every one of the Friday the 13th films, there's a storm coming.

When he's coming at the same time, so is Jason actually an avenging force of God.

You know, his mother nature is nature.

Angry is God angry at these teens for smoking weed or occasionally doing cocaine or

having pre-marital sex.

It's really interesting that the forces of the moral majority and the religious right had such an

objection to these films because they were essentially depicting an all-testam in world.

You behave badly and you will be killed.

Vice proceeds slice and dice.

Where are we headed?

We can't crystalite.

Oh yeah.

I don't know I'm smoking a little dope.

I'm having a little premarital sex and getting slaughtered.

It's just like a piece of metal and a piece of metal and a piece of metal and a piece of metal.

Hey, you want to fear?

Anyone who works hard to call?

Or have premarital sex.

We have love premarital sex.

The joke.

It's the joke.

With a new slasher movie being released every weekend, horror movies were big business.

The challenge for filmmakers was figuring out how to revitalize the classic monsters

for the new generation.

We're genre pieces basically deal with, okay, this is a myth.

We've established some things.

Now, given this as a premise where do we go with it?

Some of the city in this human jungle.

It begins.

When they released the howling, none of the ads showed that it was a werewolf movie because that would have

seemed old fashioned and dusty.

It seemed to me that the audience was going to find it all hat and kind of corny.

And so we did everything we could do to not make it seem like a werewolf picture.

Hello.

There's no crime in my mind.

You're kidding me.

We'll be right up. Just calm down.

Okay, bye-bye.

What is it?

They'll just go up in my wolf.

This bitten by a werewolf and leaves becomes a werewolf himself.

There's a lot of humor and there's a lot of references to other movies.

Because I think the first werewolf movie,

that presuppose that the audience already knew about werewolf movies.

So what they don't know is that werewolves are real.

Horror became spectacle again.

Back in the 50s, it was spectacle because it was space monsters and all those things.

And in the 60s, it drew down into the Norman Bates and Rosemary's baby into human drama.

It was a new time because suddenly it wasn't just the filmmaker,

but it was also the special effects guys.

The Rick Bakers of the World, the Robbo teams of the world,

spectacle returned in a big way.

Other films took the opposite approach.

Reliring on traditional Gothic atmospherics.

I went to the catacombs in Paris and went down, you know, six stories,

stairs and found myself wall to wall with skulls and bones from hundreds of cemeteries that had been dug up

and all the bones put down there.

It got agh-bogh-bic.

And that impression was, you know, was the thing that created one dark night.

It really embraced the old thing of, you know, set up, set up, and what's going to happen.

Then when it took off, they were jumping out of their seats,

screaming.

John Carpenter's the fog also drew on the Gothic tradition.

He based his old fashioned ghost story on a legend from America's past.

The 17 or 1800s they were bringing gold in a ship to Galita in Santa Barbara.

And the town essentially put out a fake fire to draw them to what the ship thought was,

the beach. They hit the rocks and the ship went down, so they went out and looted the gold.

And the true story. So I just took that idea of this town with a sort of the dark past.

There's something in the pond.

It speaks to what I think was John Carpenter's growing disenchanted with America in the 1980s.

The fog is about the hundredth anniversary of this town Antonio Bay.

And all the people in the town are preparing for a big festival.

Where in they will remember the six great people who sort of formed this town and made it such a wonderful place to live.

Well, the only problem is those six Americans were thieves.

In the suburban neighborhood in Poltergeis, the ghosts were equally restless.

How much room for poisons are?

We own all the land. We've already made arrangements for relocating the cemetery.

What this is saying essentially is that your past comes up to bite you on the ass.

If you do bad things and that there's no free ride in America and that if we do bad things,

there's going to be blowback.

In 1982, John Carpenter's remake of the thing offered a blink look into the future.

He's wonderful.

When do you think of that to it?

I don't know.

When any time, anywhere, if it did get to him.

Hey, look, child's come on.

It seemed to me that we had hit that wall where we weren't trusting any...

Forget our government's schools institutions, but a boom, but a boom.

We weren't trusting each other. We weren't trusting ourselves.

In Georgia, Maro's day of the dead, the whole of humanity has been reduced to a group of squabbling survivors.

In fact, is that we are the only ones left. There's nobody within range.

It might be only a little second world war signals.

You wear a uniform.

Whether it's a military uniform or a scientist's gown, it really doesn't matter.

You're just underneath it all. You're just sort of a human, you know, flawed, very flawed human.

Maybe if we tried working together, we could ease some of the tensions.

We're all pulling in different directions.

Well, that's a trouble with the world of serenity.

People got different ideas concerning what they wanted to write.

Return of the Living Dead was just as pessimistic, but far more humorous about the nation's dark side.

Let me ask you a question, kid.

Do you see that movie? Night of the Living Dead?

Yeah, yeah, that's the one where the court is threatening the people, right?

Did you know that movie was based on a true case? Come on, you're shit me, right?

I've never been more serious in my life.

One week, we interrupt this presentation with the following urgent message regarding this stuff.

The stuff was a commentary on what people were really doing to themselves,

with the kind of food they were eating and the cigarettes they were smoking,

and the vast conspiracy to addict the public.

By mid-decade, monster movies had become so popular that they were being produced

and marketed for the widest possible audience.

When I first got involved with it, it was a spectra that Chris Columbus had written,

hoping to make a name in Hollywood from Southland. It was being passed around.

And when Spielberg saw it, he said, well, this is perfect to make a low budget horror picture out of it.

As it developed, it became obvious that the picture was going to cost a little bit more money than they had

fired originally. And therefore maybe it should be quite as dark as it was because the

grommel was at the dog and cut the mother's head off and bounced it down stairs and it was really

grossing. What really made the 80s such a great time for at least independent horror movies,

genre movies, what I love was the video. People were clamoring to get stuff for their video machines.

There was all this money for independent movies and we see in the early 80s how many really

interesting movies were being made. I've got something I want to put for you.

Even the glorious films of the 1980s were defined by their unlikely sense of humor.

Thanks to a new batch of young filmmakers like Sam Ramey.

Sam Ramey, what he did was he threw everything at you including the kitchen.

And he literally pumbled the viewer. He would use these fast-moving shaky cam shots where you're

barreling and people. The most ingenious shots, you know, a one gallon of blood wasn't good enough.

He'd have 10 gallons of blood hitting somebody. It was just excess, excess, excess.

And again, if that speaks to something about the 80s too, was that that was the era of excess.

When we were making reanimator, I don't think we thought about it as being subversive.

I think that we were just having fun.

There was no intention of making it funny. But it sort of turned out that way because we kept

laughing all the time when we were doing stuff. For us, it was having a delight

in doing these horrific things.

Do West. Never get credit from my discovery. Who's going to believe a talking head get a job in a side show?

West Craven produced the most iconic character of the decade.

Yes. Here's God. A supernatural serial killer named Freddie Kruger.

You have to ask yourself who was the most towering charismatic figure of the 1980s.

And you could say Ronald Reagan or you could say Freddie Kruger. They both essentially pursued the same policy.

That they were going to through their actions, visit the sins of the father upon the children.

Daddy, help me! And what that was in terms of Freddie was that he was going after

and killing the children of the people who killed him.

And what Reagan did was put this country so badly into debt, so badly into deficit with the

buildup of the armtrace by lowering taxes for the extremely rich. By doing that, what he was doing was

he was building up all of this future debt for the children of America.

You are all right to run for now.

The good thing about that right now was it was kind of tongue-in-cheek.

I mean, there was scariest effort but then Friday would always say there's one lineers that the major lab.

And you had this serial killer that was funny and awesome. And I wanted to be him for

Halloween every year. And I saw pictures of me as like an 11-year-old 12-year-old wearing Freddie Kruger.

Like I say, I had prosthetics on my face.

Over the years having dealt with this and talked to kids and, you know, particularly the fans of the

the Fridays or the the Freddy's and stuff, you know, we all wanted to be unstoppable, you know,

in control of the situation, clever with the one-liners, you know, whether it's James Bond or Freddy.

My name is Poussicula.

You know, if you don't feel yours handsome as James Bond,

what a subface.

You know, your identification may be, you know, with one of the monsters.

In 1991, Freddie was succeeded by a more refined nightmare man.

Silence of the lambs resonated so strongly with critics and audiences.

That it captured Earth, more than major Academy Awards in 1991.

The question is, why was it so popular?

Serial killers have a human face, you know, that people we know, they're fellow human beings,

there are neighbors, they're the male man, they're the guy in a line in the supermarket in front of us,

we're at the gas station.

It's a pretty frightening idea when a serial killer could be in such close proximity.

And now I'm going to have to do it again.

My brother introduced me when I was maybe 10 or 11,

two of me, we called Henry Porter, the Material Killer.

And I think that was my very first experience in the horror genre.

Henry presented the serial killer as the inversion of the American Dreamer,

a nightmare visionary with his own twist of concept of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

What do you do?

I'll see you again.

In the old days I used to think, how do these people sleep at night?

And as I got older and did a lot of these movies about, killers, I realized very well, they sleep.

Very well.

A lot of the people I've spoken to on death row, you know, when I researched characters,

they seem to just have absolutely either no emotion.

Is Paul's never got about 85?

Even when he ate it time.

Or it was something that had to be done, or yeah, I kind of regret it now, but don't hear any regret.

I ate his liver with some father beans and a nice candy.

That's the end of itself, scary.

In Candy Man, the serial killer is a mythological figure,

who inspires as much fascination as fear.

I think there has always been an attraction to the monster or to evil in horror films.

For the two hours that you sit there in the dark and you watch those monsters,

who is that?

It's not that you want to be them.

It's not that you want to kill anybody,

but it's the idea of you are both attracted and repulsed.

You wouldn't want to run into him.

You don't want to leave the theater and skin somebody alive,

but you do leave the theater and think that was cool.

In seven, the serial killer became a self-regist judge.

He is a monster, but then he says, so are we.

We see a deadly sin on every street corner

in every home and we tolerate it.

Well, I'm not any more.

I'm sitting the example and what I've done is going to be puzzled over

and studied and followed forever.

Yeah, you haven't spacey.

I mean, there's the ultimate serial killer right there.

John Doe was this little kind of Torpey dude.

He wasn't bigger than life.

He was normal. He was set in reality.

And then that's more terrifying than a lot of movies because a lot of movies

you take huge leaps.

You know, with that, it might not be straight.

Oh, you're sleeping and it's guy can kill you and you're sleeping.

You're going to die in real life.

Jason Voor, he's in seven seven foot eight dude that, you know,

can never be killed.

Well, this is just a little Torpey dude.

He's making these people commit heinous acts.

Oh, fucking me.

And I think that in real life, if you watch the news,

some of the biggest acts of violence are normal looking people.

I think that's that's really scary.

Any God.

She's gone.

Trust me.

God, it's for the best.

With the final sequel to a nightmare on L.M. Street,

West Craven explored the idea that the monster has somehow outgrown the fictional world.

Saying Freddy, this is ancient thing.

Crank version.

And for 10 years, he's been held captive pretty much as Freddy in the night

burn out street series, but

now the films have ended.

The deans out of the bottle.

We've always had horror stories, whether you go back to Hansel and Greil or

Greak Myth or what have you.

And there's a direct line that connects those stories to the horror films West Craven is making.

Like these two little fairy tales.

Finish, please.

And those stories have been with mankind all along because they serve some

valuable purpose to us.

They're the only ones that are making us address our culture and the violence and our culture

and the hatred and our culture and the divisions and our culture.

The horror movies are the ones that are doing that.

So the monsters come from horror movies into our reality

because that's where the monsters really live.

This is...

I can't see you seem one too many.

Not said.

Don't you blame the movies.

Movies don't create cycles.

Movies make cycles for creating a lot.

American Psycho proposed that the most horrifying monster we've faced

is the corrupted American Dreamer dedicated to a warped concept of life,

liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

I think that when makes a good horror movie as you can't just have a villain be villainous.

If there's no sense of humanity to him, then he's a character.

He's not a character.

Tonight.

I...

A lot of people.

If you listen to an animal like your set it made sense.

And he just happened to eat people as well but what he said made sense.

And I think that the villain in any horror movie has to make some sort of sense.

This horror movie monster is the true American rebel.

And for that we grant him at least partial amnesty.

Given the chance you would deny me my life wouldn't you?

Not your life.

My freedom just that you take that from me.

A Hannibal Lecter killed certain people who deserve to die.

So the question is, you know, is Hannibal Lecter a monster or is Hannibal Lecter a hero?

I don't think that the villain becoming the hero was actually a very new thing.

Because I think that for earlier generations the Frankenstein monster in the sense became a hero.

You know in the 90s we saw Brad Pitt's vampire interview with the vampire being the hero.

He often off the bed vampire.

What's changed is how our culture has changed.

I think it seems like something new in the 90s because we were more uncertain about things in the 90s.

We were looking at a more morally relative culture.

In Blader is no question that the vampires the hero.

As viewers we like knowing that the monster is out there,

the fear keeps us sharp.

On the dawn of the new millennium horror movies continue to ask viewers to question their

reality.

Cole?

What?

In the face of death, what do we believe in?

In a world where there's a thin line between news and entertainment.

Fact in fiction.

Hello?

It's all around us.

How do we know what's real?

And what's not?

Role, Pamera?

In a country raised on Hollywood magic, how do we recognize really?

Oh, my God.

One year into the new millennium, America changed forever.

But for some, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

I had started to write land of the dead.

It was going to be my 90s zombie think.

I had finished it and sent it around.

I mean literally like, you know, a week and a half before 9-11 have.

I came back to it again when that hysteria went down.

And I sort of tailored it for this new normal.

Romero shows us a land where the leaders have taken advantage of a culture of fear.

To gain money and power at the expense of ordinary human lives.

Kind of a lizard is business issue.

Nothing changes it, man.

What does it take?

What does it take to kick people in the ass hard enough to get them, you know, wake up?

There was an odd line in a movie I made come, starman, where Jeff Bridges' character is dying,

and he comes to a realization that humans are best when things are at their worst.

It's not true. I wish it was true.

What happens when people get afraid is real ugly.

They get fear for it.

That's what happened after 9-11 and it took over.

So where it would go, we come back to fear again, which is the universal human emotion

where all born afraid.

People do really crazy and awful things when they're fear for awful things.

When the tribe gets threatened, you sit around that campfire that we talked about.

And now, the easiest story to tell, and the easiest story that people will buy and the tribe is the

people's out there beyond the dark, beyond the woods, it's the other.

That's what we all bought. That's what everybody bought.

In 2003, the year the United States went to Moana Rock, Hollywood producers,

sensed a new generation of horror fans, and rushed to recreate the financial heyday of horror movies.

A lot of businesses are doing it, obviously, for the business, because they

movey business, and what's going to make money. Well, if it's a built-in fan base for

four Texas chainsaw massacre, what are like, okay, well, if we remake it, we can revitalize

a franchise and bring that fan base with it.

In new versions of the Texas chainsaw massacre, dawn of the dead and the hills have eyes.

The monsters became faster and messier and more sadistic than ever before.

Well, we turn on our TV sets, and we see what's going on in Iraq.

Let's even more horrific than a lot of the movies we're seeing.

So, because of TV and real life, it's sort of up the anti-on, the kind of horrific

images that filmmakers can show us. They have to come up with scenes that can shock us.

When you go to the movies, it has to be something we have at sea before it has to be something

even more shocking than what's going on in real life.

It's difficult to shock people today.

It's this saturation of horror movie images into politics and to pop culture. I mean, look at

Osama bin Laden. I mean, the ultimate bogey man of America. And then look at how in recent

films like the remake of the Texas chainsaw massacre, leather face strides.

And then disappears not to be seen again.

It's the Osama bin Laden factory. You know, he was here with he attacks now he's gone.

When is he going to come back? That's a perfect setup for a horror movie sequel, isn't it?

The killer came and attacked us. We never got him. He's still out there.

The independent features saw kicked off the most successful horror franchise of the decade.

Dr. Gordon, this is your wake-up coach. Your aim in this game is to kill out.

You have until six on the clock to do it.

The Jigsaw killer acts as a moral judge. But unlike other cinematic serial killers,

he gives his victims a choice.

Kill or die. Hello Amanda.

Get on that, baby. But I know you.

I want to play the game. If you listen to what he says in the saw, maybe there's a more realistic

thing to him, which you're like, wow, I kind of see what he's coming from on that.

And I think if you would have removed that more realistic thing, Jigsaw would have been nothing.

He would have just been a guy named Jigsaw that killed people. But by adding that more

realistic thing to him, you understood. Those people are so unbreakable to be alive.

But not you. Not anymore. Jigsaw was in saw one, maybe at three minutes of screen time.

He had maybe five minutes of off-screen like,

he wasn't a big character. So we really had to think of Jigsaw as a completely new entity in saw too.

We haven't been properly introduced.

When he's gone. I like to be called Jigsaw.

Jigsaw piece I cut from my subjects was only ever meant to be a symbol that that subject was missing

something. A vital piece of the human puzzle. The survival instinct.

It seems that horror comes back with every social discomfort.

And even the horror movies and horror novels that aren't as political today, as they were in the

60s, 70s, even the 80s, maybe they will look that way in retrospect.

Pasta'll surely represents political and social aspects of today.

That maybe we won't recognize until later. But it's a xenophobic film. It's about xenophobia.

It's about other countries being the other guy and they're laughable. You know, it's

you don't take them seriously. They can't possibly be as sophisticated as the young American man who

find themselves in Eastern Europe.

It's from all the.

I go home.

What does that express? Other than let's stay here in America and be Americans.

You know, it really does reflect some social and political attitudes of the day.

In the face of a trend toward hyperviolence, some viewers have increasingly turned to foreign films.

Obviously Guillermo del Toro is one of the most brilliant filmmakers out there now.

And what is scarier than the devil's backbone?

Which is a story about wartime and filled with all kinds of symbolism beyond the ghost story.

Pan's labyrinth, another story about war and monsters and other dimensions.

And just filled with gruesome political parable.

The Harlem movies are now kind of searching for where to go.

I think when you get to something like Pan's labyrinth, you see that there's an avenue that

the hasn't been taken. That's pretty interesting.

There's just so many elements of horror for the fans to appreciate.

The Zia tie in style, the Spanish style, the German style. It's so much to explore. That's a great

thing about being a horror fan is there's just so many different routes you could take to these

dark pleasures. As for those who argue that the American horror movie has run out of ideas.

Perhaps it has less to do with Hollywood's lack of creativity and with contemporary American culture.

The current generation is in a way, reliving the nightmares of previous generations.

Onscreen and off.

I remember it and we got an arm everybody saying, oh you can't pull out of the arm because

the dominant theory, all of Southeast Asia, will fall to communism if we leave.

So we stayed in Vietnam and what happened? Nothing. Nothing happened.

So what wasn't all about? What we should be doing is getting out of there and protecting our borders

and protecting ourselves against what is almost inevitable attack.

I'm afraid in my lifetime and my current life time I'm going to have to see American cities

attack but not the irrepecence.

When we look at crazy things happening in the world we think in terms of horror moves,

what is happening in the world is what's reflected in our nightmares.

You find the world has changed. You look at sunset Boulevard, normal desmin, the character in that

blade by Gloria Swanson is afraid to leave her house because she's going to see how much the world

has changed since she was a baby movie star and she lives in her own little world.

That's your brilliant performance. Well, you just have to embrace that the world has changed.

That is right it.

In these evolving cinematic creations we continue to see our past and our future.

The circumstances that made us who we are and the fears that determine where we go from here.