The History of Horror: 1940s WWII and the Cold War; 1950s and 1960s: Repression and Revolution

1940s: World War II and the Cold War

During World War II, real life horror was playing across the silver screen in newsreels delivering word back to Americans from the home front. The holocaust, whose extent of true horror was not revealed until after the war ended, made cinematic versions pale in comparison. Yet during this period, Hollywood continued to churn out horror films to audiences' delight. Two such filmmakers who created some of the classic horror films of this period were Jacques Tourneur and Val Lewton. Russian born RKO producer Lewton teamed up with French director Tourneur to create such suspenseful films as The Cat People (1943), I Walked with A Zombie (1943), and The Leopard Man (1943). Though Lewton and Tourneur's films tended to be more suspenseful psychological dramas rather than straight horror, the chills they created had far more impact on the cinematic imagination. In the classic The Cat People, for instance, horror is conveyed through what is implied and not what is shown. The film is about a young woman who is transformed into a black panther whenever she is overwhelmed by sexual desires and jealousy, leading her to stalk the young heroine who has fallen in love with her husband. One of the film's most frightening sequences occurs when the heroine is stalked by a panther while swimming in a local pool. We don't see the panther crawling in the darkened pool room, but only its shadow and its growling. Other films such as The Uninvited (1944) starring Ray Milland and the gentle ghost love story Portrait of Jennie (1948), starring Joseph Cotton, were films that were also depended on atmospherics to deliver their chills.

The 1950s and 1960s: Repression and Revolution

The changes occurring in 1950s and 1960s America found its way to the movie screen, particularly in many of the horror films created during this golden age of cinematic filmmaking. Capitalizing on the advent of the atomic age, 1950s horror revealed the frightening reality of the Cold War Era. Films such as The Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954), Godzilla (1954), and Them (1954), about mutant ants, revealed what could happen to the natural order of things when atomic energy unleashed its massive fury. Other films such as The Thing (From Another Planet) (1951), War of the Worlds (1953) and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) played on Cold War fears of Soviet invasion as well as the previous decades' fears of the Nazi blitzkreig. During this period, rock and roll became the dominant soundtrack for a younger generation, prompting Hollywood to take advantage of the teen buying dollars by creating horror films marketed directly to this new demographic. I Was A Teenage Werewolf (1957) and The Blob (1958), starring the young Michael Landon and Steve McQueen respectively, were two such representatives of this new subset of horror films. The decade also saw a rise in B-movie horror films produced by such sclockmeisters as William B. Castle (1959's The Tingler and The House on Haunted Hill). When theater ownership monopolies were struck down by the courts during the late 1940s, independently owned theaters and drive-in theaters opened up a field of independent filmmakers who could now get their films into theaters without dealing with the studios. Filmmakers, such as the director and producer Edward D. Wood (1959's Plan 9 From Outer Space), despite their lack of filmmaking skills, could raise budgets and shoot films that found their way into movie theaters. While these films lacked cinematic style, they more than made it up in cheesy frights that delighted teenage audiences looking for cheap thrills. During the 1950s, television had dealt a serious blow to the competitive edge films had over the attention of American audiences by delivering entertainment right into their living rooms. The studios competed with this new medium by shooting films in wide-screen (Cinemascope and Vistavision, for instance), while producers like Castle used gimmicks, such as films shot in 3-D, to offer audiences something extra for their cinematic viewing pleasures. Ironically, many nascent local broadcast affiliates broadcasted old horror movies to fill out viewing hours, often in the guise of horror hosted programs such as L.A.'s KABC-TV's Vampira (Maila Nurmi), which delivered classic 1930s horror pictures to a new generation of fans. It was during this period that a rise in classic horror memorabilia depicting such characters as Karloff's Frankenstein and Lugosi's Dracula became a moneymaking enterprise for both collectors and buyers.

While the days of horror films creating household names had ended by the 1940s, the 1950s saw one such actor whose name would forever be attached to horror: Vincent Price. During his early screen career, Price was a supporting actor often appearing in dramatic films such as 1940s noir thrillers Laura and Leave Her To Heaven (both starring screen actress Gene Tierney). Price's first horror film was in the 1948 Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, where he was uncredited as the voice of the Invisible Man. But his first starring role in a horror film was in the 1953 Andre de Toth classic House of Wax, where he plays Prof. Harold Jerrod, a sculptor who uses real life victims for his wax models. Price would later star in other 1950s classic horror films such as The Fly (1958), as well as four films released in 1959 alone––House on Haunted Hill, The Tingler, Return of the Fly, and The Bat.

Price continued his career in horror movies throughout the sixties, starring in a series of Edgar Allan Poe-based films such as House of Usher (1960), The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), the horror anthology Tales of Terror (1962), The Raven (1963), The Masque of the Red Death (1964) and The Tomb of Ligeia (1964), all directed by Roger Corman, a film producer and director whose output during the 1950s and 1960s created an arena for low-budget horror and exploitation films. Corman's films during the 1950s, such as It Conquered the World (1956) and Attack of the Crab Monster (1957) were hardly film classics in the traditional sense, and were often ridiculed on the 1990s Comedy Central show Mystery Science Theater 3000. But Corman set the stage for offering work to some of the most inventive directors, such as Francis Ford Coppola (Dementia 13) and Martin Scorsese (Boxcar Bertha) of the 1970s auteur movement. In Britain, the Hammer Studios released an outlet of horror films during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s that have become classics within the genre, including such films as The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and the Brides of Dracula (1960), starring such Hammer horror mainstays as Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. Other horror films released during the early 1960s include Herk Hervey's Carnival of Souls (1962), Whatever Happened to Baby Jane (1962), and Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte (1965).

Though not necessarily a horror film director, British born Alfred Hitchcock directed two films during the early sixties that changed how horror films would be interpreted by modern audiences. In his 1960 thriller Psycho, Hitchcock proved that the most horrific models of evil were not vampires or werewolves but other human beings, in this case, Norman Bates, an outwardly normal if troubled young man who turns out to be a serial killer masking as his late mother. In 1963, Hitchcock released The Birds, using another normal and everyday creature as the villain in this piece. In The Birds, Hitchcock dispenses with exposition which explains the random and frightening bird attacks in the small California seaside community of Bodega Bay, making the horror seem arbitrary in the way true horror often visits upon everyday reality.

The films of this period––particularly Hitchcock's The Birds; Hervey's Carnival of Souls; the 1961 Deborah Kerr film The Innocents, based on Henry James's The Turn of the Screw; and Robert Wise's 1963 classic The Haunting (starring Julie Harris) based on Shirley Jackson's novel The Haunting of Hill House––revealed the repressive nature of 1950s Cold War on the American mindset, often focusing on sexual hysteria and repression among its female leads. As the baby boom generation began to dictate popular culture during this period, the youthful rejection of the moral codes of previous generations was met with virulent opposition until the early 1960s, when even rock and roll was tamed for older audiences. But as the underground ideas and movements of the Beat generation slowly influenced artists as broad as Bob Dylan and The Beatles, younger audiences were slowly rejecting older values, giving way to a popular culture that represented this growing freedom of ideas about politics, spirituality, and sexuality.

During this decade, the Production Code, which controlled many of the films previously released, were relaxing, allowing filmmakers to push the envelope in what they could show in horror films. Challenging old Hollywood standards were a new wave of filmmakers, graduates of the nascent film school movement and the stepchildren of the European-based French Nouvelle and Italian neo-realism movements of the 1940s, '50s, and early '60s, emerged with a new style of storytelling for the horror genre.

Source: IMDB.com and www.filmsite.org/horrorfilms.html

Black Power Mix Tapes 1967-1975: A Review

Between the late 1960s and the 1970s, Black America had undergone huge transformations. This was due largely to the Civil Rights Movement, but the Black Power Movement not only heightened the social and political consciousness of black people in America, but also set trends in the look and attitude of young black people across the country. Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), former leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), broke ranks with civil rights leader Dr. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. in terms of their philosophical attitudes regarding social and political movements, and pursued a more aggressive stance toward black liberation. Coining the phrase, “Black Power,” Carmichael embraced the philosophy of self-defense, inspired by the teachings of Malcolm X and the Black Panthers, which was formed in the mid-60s by Bobby Seale and Huey Newton to resist political and economic oppression. By the late sixties, black folks were chanting “Black Power” and rejecting the non-violence philosophy of the Civil Rights Movement.

The radicalization of Black America has been chronicled in many works, including Henry Hampton’s award-winning documentary series “Eyes on the Prize.” But, until recently, very few focused solely on the Black Power Movement. Last year, IFC Entertainment released The Black Power Mix Tapes 1967-1975, a documentary film based on archival footage shot by Swedish journalists. Written and directed by filmmaker Goran Hugo Olsson, the film offers a more balanced look at that period in Black American history.

The archival footage that was shot during this period are edited in chronological order in the film and broken down into 9 chapters, beginning with 1967 and ending in 1975. The film not only covers Carmichael’s rejection of Dr. King’s philosophy, but the Black Panthers, Angela Davis, and Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam in the mid-1970s. The Vietnam War and the assassinations of Dr. King and Robert F. Kennedy in the late 60s, as well as the FBI’s COINTELPRO, which destroyed the Black Panthers and other militant groups and the break down of the black community due to poverty and drugs in the ‘70s act as backdrops against the movement, offering as explanation its militancy and eventual tragedies.

The footage is strong and offers sides of the power players in the movement that weren’t available on American TV. In fact, the film brings up the notion of journalistic propaganda when an editor of TV Guide criticizes the anti-American negativity in much of the reporting in Sweden. While the editor concedes during an interview taken by the Swedish film crew that much of the news coming out of the States is negative, he goes on to state that Americans have a far more complex view of what was happening in the country at the time than the Swedes. This is hardly a winning argument, but it does reveal how propaganda against black radicals was filtered through even fluff publications like TV Guide. The footage the Swedish journalist shot is relevant because, unlike many American journalism, it offers a different, more balanced perspective of black radical politics.

Undercutting the footage are voice interviews of figures as diverse as Angela Davis, commenting much on her own experiences during that time; Harry Belafonte, Questlove of the Roots, singers Erykah Badu and John Forte, poets Sonia Sanchez and Abiodun Oyewole of the Last Poets and other philosophical and historical luminaries. Their reflections of that period offer a context that bridges the past with the present, drawing connections between the advances of the Black Power Movement and its failures.

While the film is informative and valuable, there are a few drawbacks. As the filmmakers Olssen contends, the Black Power Mix Tapes doesn’t cover everything that happened during that period. Nor should it have to. Yet the latter half of the film falters because of those omissions. During the 1974-1975 chapters, the documentary focuses on Harlem and how the drug war caused a terrible and irrevocable shift in the black community. The West coast, which had gotten some coverage due to the Black Panthers movement, is ignored, which is a shame since so much was happening here in the 1970s, from the rise of the Bloods and the Crips in the Los Angeles region due to the fractionalization of many Black Power groups to the disintegration of the Black Panthers and its leaders, including Huey Newton. Despite that one flaw, the documentary is a powerful chronicle of a movement that is largely warped in the American imagination and offers a primer to those who want to know more about this significant period in political history.

What You See in the Dark by Manuel Muñoz: A Review

What You See in the Dark, the debut novel by Manuel Muñoz (Faith Healer of Olive Street), takes an unlikely subject, the making of an iconic Hollywood film classic, and wraps it around a story of murder, love, and obsession.

It's 1959, Bakersfield, California. A murder has taken place. A young woman, Teresa, is brutally beaten in the stairway outside her apartment. The perpetrator is her boyfriend, Dan. These particulars set the story in motion. While What You See in the Dark takes its cues from film noir, it is much more than that. It is a mediation on death. It is also about film, and the hold it has on our collective imagination to portray on the silver screen our deepest desires and fears.

What You See in the Dark is told through four voices: Teresa, a shoe sales clerk with ambitions of becoming a singer; Arlene Watson, Dan's mother, who is also a waitress and motel-owner biding her time in Bakersfield following her husband's abandonment; the Actress who comes to Bakersfield to shoot principal photography on the movie that will become Psycho, a movie that will not only launch itself into the nightmares of countless film goers, but also change everything we know about film; and one of Theresa's co-workers at the shoe store, who tries to bring some perspective into her senseless death.

The women have few interactions, if at all, but they are nonetheless affected by one another and the paths each take. Teresa Garza is a young, restless Mexican woman who begins a relationship with a migrant worker who teaches her to play guitar. Yet it is Dan Watson, one of Bakersfield's most desirable young men, who captures her heart. They begin a doomed relationship, both on the stage where he asks her to perform with him and in bed. After the murder, Dan runs away and the migrant worker is deported, but the affect that all three will have on Bakersfield stains the town, even long after the people who live there move on.

Arlene bears the burden of what her son has done. But she has carried a lot of bad memories through her life. She isn't thrilled about her son's relationship with Teresa or his crime, but she is as resigned to it as she is resigned to the fact that she is a waitress and the owner of a motel doomed by the construction of a new highway that will lead away what little customers she has left. She is mystified by the younger waitresses at the diner who are fascinated by the movie stars in Look and Life magazines, whose lives of glamor and excitement are only a stone's throw away in Los Angeles. But Arlene is as swept up by such excitement when the Actress arrives with her driver. Arlene recognizes her, but the Actress denies who she is, a fact which later upsets Arlene when the Actress and the Director show up at her motel. The exterior of that motel will become famously enshrined in their film.

While Teresa dreams of a better life and Arlene is resigned to the one she has, the Actress has the life that is the stuff of fantasy, and yet she is unsettled with insecurity and ambivalence. The Hollywood she has grown used to will soon fall by the wayside, a victim to the European style of auteur filmmaking that will push envelopes and liberate film from its rigid, censorious past. She is a part of that past, and knows that if her career is to survive she will have to change with the times. The Actress is like a lot of Americans during the 1960s, seeing the tides of change sweeping at its shores and aware that if she does not ride along its waves she will drown in the undertow.

Muñoz's story is both quiet and unsettling in the way it reveals how change comes to certain areas of the country---not like a flood but more like a trickle. It is the building of a new highway, creating opportunities even as it destroys others. It is how a movie whose graphic depiction of nudity and violence for its time becomes an unlikely trendsetter. It is the murder of a girl whose death signals the ending of one era and the start of another. Teresa's murder is never depicted. As the story moves forward, this absence intensifies the expectation. This is not a failing, but rather an indication of Muñoz's mastery of manipulation (not unlike the master of manipulation himself, Alfred Hitchcock). He allows the reader's imagination to take over, just as Hitchcock allows his audience's imagination to run wild when the second murder occurs in his lesser known film, Frenzy (Muñoz mentions this scene as a reference point in his novel). Muñoz makes the point, as Hitchcock might, that now that the curtains have been thrown back, and we are able to see death graphically on screen or on the pages, it is time to pull them back firmly in place. There is a time and place, but the imagination will ultimately hold sway, the way the eye will actually perceive the knife cutting flesh, even when we know it is all an illusion.

Muñoz ably juggles his numerous themes in an understated way. He creates a mood and tone that beautifully captures small town life in southern California. He also does a superb job of capturing the unique experience of watching a film, whether it is being shot or shown on a screen. This is his take on Alfred Hitchcock's infamous shower scene in Psycho:

A silhouette in women's clothes, and a big butcher knife. Any knife will do in real life---a pocket blade in a street corner mugging, a sharpened screwdriver in a jail cell. But this was the movies and it had to be a butcher knife.

The knife came at her like a tiger's paw reaching through a cage, not able to strike, but the illusion was the same.

The silhouette was (or wasn't) a Las Vegas breast.

From overhead, it was heartbreakingly easy to see how she had nowhere to go, trapped as she was on all sides.

More screaming. Keep your face in the water. It will force you to shut your eyes.

We go to the movies because movies are meant to be safe. They allow us to experience our deepest fantasies without ridicule; to explore our fears without harm; to express our thoughts without censor. Psycho opened a way for filmmakers to push the envelope and make cinema more daring. Yet, as Muñoz's novel reveals, the way toward those changes often involves a bit of violence. Tightly written and sharply observed, What You See in the Dark is an auspicious debut of a very talented writer.