Most of us know this stuff like the backs of our own hands, but it's current and forum appropriate, so...
As "Nightmare" cleans up at the box office, we look at the bumpy history of the once-provocative genre.
By Glenn Kenny
In the beloved — OK, beloved by some — 1948 comedy-horror hybrid "Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein," the hapless lycanthrope Larry Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr., who did hapless better than he likely wanted to) tries to explain his condition to the skeptics played by the film's titular comic team. "I know you think I'm crazy," he bleats, "but in half an hour the moon will rise, and I'll turn into a wolf."
"You and 20 million other guys," says Lou Costello's Wilbur with a smirk.
That's the sort of thing that constituted — some might say "passed for" — knowing adult humor in popular entertainment those days. Less than a decade later, after Sinatra's bobby-soxers brought the notion of adolescent hormonal activity into the mainstream, a movie calling itself "I Was a Teenage Werewolf" was hardly a surprise. Since that fairly risible 1957 Michael Landon film, the teen-horror subgenre has gone through quite a few changes of its own, growing out of its awkward phase and yielding some of the most striking work in horror, period. But then something happened. Last weekend yet another remake of yet another teen-horror classic opened and became the number one movie at the box office: "A Nightmare on Elm Street," in which the iconic bogeyman Freddy Krueger (here played by Jackie Earle Haley, the go-to guy for creep-you-out roles nowadays) troubles the already anxiety-laden dreams of your average teens by actually slaughtering the kids from within those visions. As with recent rethinks of scare fare from "The Hills Have Eyes" to "Friday the 13th" and beyond, the filmmakers' concern here seems less about artistically revitalizing the genre than with making a few bucks off a familiar brand.
In his groundbreaking late '60s book "An Illustrated History of Horror and Science Fiction Films," scholar Carlos Clarens was (rightly) dismissive of "Teenage Werewolf" and its coeval, "I Was a Teenage Frankenstein." But Clarens was presciently specific concerning the origins of those films. He cites an "unsubtle try at eliciting passive audience participation" on the part of the then-29-year-old producer Herman Cohen: "Studying the result of a poll that earmarked the age group of a high percentage … of the movie-going public as lying between 12 and 25 years, Cohen decided to adapt the well-known formulas of the horror movie to juvenile terms." Ah, it's our old friend: the demographic. As students of certain Hollywood trends understand, sometimes art can be born of what begins as market pandering — but this first wave of teen horror produced few, if any, films worth taking terribly seriously.
A concatenation of cultural circumstances that included, but wasn't limited to, the flower children, the Vietnam War and the feminist movement gave filmmakers new perspectives on teendom and young adulthood. And it gave horror moviemakers new and more provocative victims. Leatherface's prey in the legendary original "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" (1974) is a group of callow, curdled stepchildren of the Age of Aquarius. The young lambs to the slaughter in Wes Craven's original, and still grimily effective, 1974 "Last House on the Left" are tragically naive would-be hippie chicks.
Still, "Last House," and many films that came in its wake, particularly Brian De Palma's 1976 "Carrie" and John Carpenter's seminal 1978 "Halloween," seemed to do their teen characters the favor of taking them, and their circumstances, somewhat seriously. And those turned out to be films that certain critics and scholars found worth taking seriously as well. For the great critic Robin Wood, the likes of "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and "Last House" were powerful parables of repression, while the academic Carol Clover cited pictures such as "Halloween" and "Carrie" for her "Final Girl" theory, which she developed in her book "Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film."
"Halloween" spawned oodles of imitations featuring virginal heroines who became practically automatic "final girls," and soon enough the teen-horror subgenre descended into a protracted cycle of pastiche profitably lampooned by Wes Craven's 1996 "Scream" (which of course spawned its own group of sequels). So it's a little surprising to look at "Halloween" now and note just how well developed and genuinely, well, interesting its lead character, Laurie Strode (portrayed by Jamie Lee Curtis, the first and arguably the greatest of the latter-day "scream queens"), is. Neither a prude (she has no problem sharing a joint with her best pal) nor a libertine, she's witty, engaging, responsible and resourceful. Although she is, yes, virginal, she insists her lack of a social life is merely the result of being constantly busy and the fact that "guys think I'm too smart." And the film spends a good deal of time getting to know her. (Another surprise, looking at the film today, is just how relatively leisurely its pacing is; director Carpenter frequently holds shots for lengths that might be considered unconscionable in contemporary horror pictures.)
As an individual entity, "Halloween" is hardly as reactionary as its imitations would make it seem. A subsequent ostensible teen-horror classic, Wes Craven's 1984 "Nightmare on Elm Street," which spawned a franchise that the new Michael Bay-produced remake no doubt aspires to revive, cannily anticipates John Hughes' "Breakfast Club" with its dissection, as it were, of high-school clique hierarchies, then makes both nerds and jocks equal under the blade-laden hand of Freddy Krueger. The notion of a nightmare figure who can literally kill you in your sleep is the most ingeniously realized thing in the original, the dialogue of which is as faux "with it" and on-the-nose ("What's goin' on here, an orgy or something?" "Maybe a funeral, dickhead!") as that of, well, Craven's "Last House on the Left," in which an adult female grouses to her teen daughter, "I thought you were supposed to be the love generation!"
Continued...
http://www.salon.com/entertainment/m...n_horror_films
As "Nightmare" cleans up at the box office, we look at the bumpy history of the once-provocative genre.
By Glenn Kenny
In the beloved — OK, beloved by some — 1948 comedy-horror hybrid "Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein," the hapless lycanthrope Larry Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr., who did hapless better than he likely wanted to) tries to explain his condition to the skeptics played by the film's titular comic team. "I know you think I'm crazy," he bleats, "but in half an hour the moon will rise, and I'll turn into a wolf."
"You and 20 million other guys," says Lou Costello's Wilbur with a smirk.
That's the sort of thing that constituted — some might say "passed for" — knowing adult humor in popular entertainment those days. Less than a decade later, after Sinatra's bobby-soxers brought the notion of adolescent hormonal activity into the mainstream, a movie calling itself "I Was a Teenage Werewolf" was hardly a surprise. Since that fairly risible 1957 Michael Landon film, the teen-horror subgenre has gone through quite a few changes of its own, growing out of its awkward phase and yielding some of the most striking work in horror, period. But then something happened. Last weekend yet another remake of yet another teen-horror classic opened and became the number one movie at the box office: "A Nightmare on Elm Street," in which the iconic bogeyman Freddy Krueger (here played by Jackie Earle Haley, the go-to guy for creep-you-out roles nowadays) troubles the already anxiety-laden dreams of your average teens by actually slaughtering the kids from within those visions. As with recent rethinks of scare fare from "The Hills Have Eyes" to "Friday the 13th" and beyond, the filmmakers' concern here seems less about artistically revitalizing the genre than with making a few bucks off a familiar brand.
In his groundbreaking late '60s book "An Illustrated History of Horror and Science Fiction Films," scholar Carlos Clarens was (rightly) dismissive of "Teenage Werewolf" and its coeval, "I Was a Teenage Frankenstein." But Clarens was presciently specific concerning the origins of those films. He cites an "unsubtle try at eliciting passive audience participation" on the part of the then-29-year-old producer Herman Cohen: "Studying the result of a poll that earmarked the age group of a high percentage … of the movie-going public as lying between 12 and 25 years, Cohen decided to adapt the well-known formulas of the horror movie to juvenile terms." Ah, it's our old friend: the demographic. As students of certain Hollywood trends understand, sometimes art can be born of what begins as market pandering — but this first wave of teen horror produced few, if any, films worth taking terribly seriously.
A concatenation of cultural circumstances that included, but wasn't limited to, the flower children, the Vietnam War and the feminist movement gave filmmakers new perspectives on teendom and young adulthood. And it gave horror moviemakers new and more provocative victims. Leatherface's prey in the legendary original "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" (1974) is a group of callow, curdled stepchildren of the Age of Aquarius. The young lambs to the slaughter in Wes Craven's original, and still grimily effective, 1974 "Last House on the Left" are tragically naive would-be hippie chicks.
Still, "Last House," and many films that came in its wake, particularly Brian De Palma's 1976 "Carrie" and John Carpenter's seminal 1978 "Halloween," seemed to do their teen characters the favor of taking them, and their circumstances, somewhat seriously. And those turned out to be films that certain critics and scholars found worth taking seriously as well. For the great critic Robin Wood, the likes of "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and "Last House" were powerful parables of repression, while the academic Carol Clover cited pictures such as "Halloween" and "Carrie" for her "Final Girl" theory, which she developed in her book "Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film."
"Halloween" spawned oodles of imitations featuring virginal heroines who became practically automatic "final girls," and soon enough the teen-horror subgenre descended into a protracted cycle of pastiche profitably lampooned by Wes Craven's 1996 "Scream" (which of course spawned its own group of sequels). So it's a little surprising to look at "Halloween" now and note just how well developed and genuinely, well, interesting its lead character, Laurie Strode (portrayed by Jamie Lee Curtis, the first and arguably the greatest of the latter-day "scream queens"), is. Neither a prude (she has no problem sharing a joint with her best pal) nor a libertine, she's witty, engaging, responsible and resourceful. Although she is, yes, virginal, she insists her lack of a social life is merely the result of being constantly busy and the fact that "guys think I'm too smart." And the film spends a good deal of time getting to know her. (Another surprise, looking at the film today, is just how relatively leisurely its pacing is; director Carpenter frequently holds shots for lengths that might be considered unconscionable in contemporary horror pictures.)
As an individual entity, "Halloween" is hardly as reactionary as its imitations would make it seem. A subsequent ostensible teen-horror classic, Wes Craven's 1984 "Nightmare on Elm Street," which spawned a franchise that the new Michael Bay-produced remake no doubt aspires to revive, cannily anticipates John Hughes' "Breakfast Club" with its dissection, as it were, of high-school clique hierarchies, then makes both nerds and jocks equal under the blade-laden hand of Freddy Krueger. The notion of a nightmare figure who can literally kill you in your sleep is the most ingeniously realized thing in the original, the dialogue of which is as faux "with it" and on-the-nose ("What's goin' on here, an orgy or something?" "Maybe a funeral, dickhead!") as that of, well, Craven's "Last House on the Left," in which an adult female grouses to her teen daughter, "I thought you were supposed to be the love generation!"
Continued...
http://www.salon.com/entertainment/m...n_horror_films
