Opening Salvo

Opening Salvo

Matthew Hamilton

Horror cinema prior to the 60’s and 70’s was all about the gimmick. William Castle perfected this,

having audience members sign releases in case they had a heart attack or, in the case of the famous TINGLER, having the seats in the theater vibrate when the monster slid by on the screen. They were films dominated by only a few actors, most notably Vincent Price. There was something of a boyish glee to the films he starred in and filmmakers such as Roger Corman were producing these pictures one after the other on an assembly line of cheap thrills and shoddy chills. That is not to say that these films are bad, it was just the norm back then. Even though they were also attacked by parents and religious groups, they were mostly harmless fun.

America was changing, however. Younger generations were coming up and wondering if everything they had been told all their lives was right. The violence of the Vietnam war was seen daily on the news, with the unimaginable number of American dead shown nightly on the news in giant white numbers on the TV screen. Horrors that were all too real permeated everybody’s homes. The counterculture was born and, with it, new films would grace the silver screen.

A change could be noticed in the 1960’s when people flocked to midnight showings of a cheap little black and white movie about flesh eating ghouls tormenting people hold up in an abandoned farmhouse. George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, with its documentary style and cameras that zoomed in on the action rather than pull away, as so many had done before, was changing everything. It was hardly the first film to challenge the status quo or to try and say something about the times. However, it was one of the first in a new breed of film by a new breed of filmmakers who had something to say, and they were going to get you to listen even if they had to blast you with the most violent things you had ever seen.

But to hear Romero tell it, it was just an accident, something that happened while he was trying to make a cheap little movie with his friends. They weren’t thinking about making a political statement with their undead zombies or about challenging anything. It just sort of happened and that seems to be running theme in all of these movies that I would like to discuss. They were made by filmmakers who were just reacting to the times in which they lived, to the images that they were bombarded with everyday and, more often than not, to childhoods that molded them into what they had become.

In no particular order, all of these films said something about the times, about the directors and writers and about the audiences who were suddenly willing to gobble them up one after the other.