When director Tobe Hooper got together with some friends and fledgling actors to film 1974’s “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” few on hand would have guessed they were making a masterpiece. But 30 years later it is revered as a horror classic, popular enough to warrant a slick remake that opened No. 1 at the box office last weekend, making just under $30 million — about $29.8 million more than the budget of the original.
Many filmmakers have been vocal recently about returning horror to the “no holds barred” standards set by ’70s antecedents, a trend resulting in films such as “Cabin Fever,” “House of 1000 Corpses” and “Wrong Turn.” And with the success of the “Chainsaw” remake and the planned 2004 release of a remade “Dawn of the Dead,” it appears the resurgence is upon us.
Films such as “Chainsaw,” George Romero’s zombie films, Wes Craven’s 1972 “The Last House on the Left” and 1977’s “The Hills Have Eyes” have come to epitomize gritty ’70s horror, movies so notorious for their intensity that at the time audience members reportedly fainted regularly at screenings. “The Last House on the Left” even boasted the infamous tagline “To avoid fainting, keep repeating ‘It’s only a movie . . . It’s only a movie . . .’.”
“I wanted to make a movie that was just a straightforward horror film,” says “Wrong Turn” director Rob Schmidt on the new DVD of the hit film. “You meet people, you get to know them a little, and then they start to die.”
That’s pretty straightforward. That’s also very similar to the scant scenarios driving “Chainsaw” and “The Hills Have Eyes”: Unsuspecting travelers break down in the middle of nowhere and are beset by cannibalistic, backwoods adversaries. And we eat it up. What gives?
Craven, a one-time college professor whose soft-spoken politeness belies his reputation as the depraved horror maven responsible for both the “Nightmare on Elm Street” and “Scream” series, maintains that the graphic, relentless films that he and his horror peers made in the ’70s were reactions to the steady stream of bloody images being broadcast from Vietnam. And in that sense Craven hypothesizes that the self-appointed ’70s-styled horror films of today may be similarly motivated.
“I think films like these often happen during times of war, when very primal situations are going on,” Craven says. “A bunch of teenagers in a van stumbling into some family that’s totally different from them in the middle of nowhere isn’t all that different from a bunch of American kids being thrust into the middle of Baghdad. The parable is quite germane during these times.”
Indeed, the lurking evils of “Cabin Fever” and Danny Boyle’s “28 Days Later” are not slashers and monsters, but killer bacteria and viruses, truly horrifying and timely antagonists in the age of weapons of mass destruction.
“At the time we were setting up the film, Britain was in the grip of a couple of biological diseases, like foot and mouth and mad cow,” Boyle says. “There was a paranoia about what was safe to eat, and the countryside was covered with burning corpses, piles of animals. Then when we were shooting the film, obviously other things happened, and everything got ratcheted up. Our paranoia in the West — our vulnerability, our safety — became much more an issue in people’s minds.”
Rob Zombie, who directed “House of 1000 Corpses” — also about a vanload of friends terrorized by bloodthirsty maniacs in the middle of nowhere — wasn’t trying to make a political statement with his film. Rather, he wanted to instill in others the same thrills he felt when he first saw those formative movies by the likes of Craven and Romero. “I remember the first time I saw ‘Dawn of the Dead’ in a theater,” he says. “It was so over-the-top, and the crowd was going berserk.”
If anything, suggests Zombie, reverence for these classic ’70s horror films makes them tough to top in terms of scares and surprises. “I think audiences today are a lot more film savvy than they used to be,” he says. “Every kid has his own mini film library at home. When I was a kid, before VCRs, you saw ‘Night of the Living Dead’ once at some midnight screening, and then you prayed to see it again. It wasn’t like you owned it and watched it 9,000 times.”
Zombie, whose Grand Guignol “1000 Corpses” bobbled from scared studio to scared studio like a blood-soaked hot potato, also thinks the movie business has become more conservative, making it difficult to distribute movies like he used to watch growing up. “I remember seeing ‘Dawn of the Dead’ at the local multiplex, unrated. There was also a drive-in everywhere. But most theaters today will not show unrated films, and no one’s going to spend millions of dollars to make a movie that only plays in two theaters. Now you’re making horror movies that are going to sit next to ‘The Lizzie McGuire’ movie and ‘Bringing Down the House’.”
Tom Gunning, a humanities professor at the University of Chicago who serves on the school’s Committee on Cinema & Media Studies (and who taught “Wrong Turn” director Schmidt), sees this return to ’70s-styled horror films not just as political or a reaction to complacency, but as a necessary means to refresh the genre.
“With genre films, particularly when the genre hasn’t disappeared, most of the things that determine the shape of the genre are actually inside the genre themselves,” says Gunning. “Certainly social and historical contexts are always a factor. In the ’70s you can point to Vietnam, and that’s definitely a strong subtext. But in this period of the horror film, the main thing that drives it is trying to look new, which often means trying to look not like the last one did, but the last one before the last one.”
“To some extent, the self-referential stuff of ‘Scream’ was an indication that the genre had become so imprinted that it was beginning to take itself as its own theme, which happens after a long run of a genre,” he continues. “But then what happens is it begins to fall apart and disappear, so people have to look back for other models.”
About bloody time.
VETERANS OF VIOLENCE
They took the horror genre and made it what it is today, directing such films as “Nightmare on Elm Street” and “The Exorcist.” Where are they now?
George A. Romero
Still best known for his zombie trilogy — “Night of the Living Dead,” “Dawn of the Dead” and “Day of the Dead” — Romero is reportedly searching for financing on the fourth film in the series while he begins production on the virus thriller “The Ill.”
Wes Craven
After his B-movie hits “The Last House on the Left” and “The Hills Have Eyes,” Craven went on to create the “Nightmare on Elm Street” and “Scream” series. Craven has since moved on from both lucrative franchises and is working to finish his modern werewolf tale, “Cursed.”
Tobe Hooper
Hooper never matched the success of “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” but he’s found plenty of work on TV, including directing the pilot episode of Steven Spielberg’s recent sci-fi mini-series, “Taken.”
John Carpenter
Carpenter more or less invented the modern slasher genre with “Halloween,” then moved on to make a number of classic genre films. He has yet to announce his next project, but his inventive “Escape from New York” will arrive this winter on DVD in a restored director’s cut.
William Friedkin
The director of “The Exorcist,” Friedkin rarely tried his hand at horror again. Another sequel to “The Exorcist” — a prequel, actually — is reportedly on its way, though, with fellow ’70s veteran Paul Schrader at the helm.
— Joshua Klein
