![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Early nickelodeons showed quick nudie films down the boardwalk from silent-era classics in the early ’60s, drive-ins and downtrodden art-houses played Herschel Gordon Lewis’ hardcore bloodbaths. Of course, cheap, hidden thrills have been part of the film industry since the technology was invented. “ Psycho was kind of restrained, I always thought,” Wes Craven says early on in Jason Zinoman’s Shock Value, a new history of modern horror films that aims to do for the blood-and-guts set what Biskind did for the New Hollywood generation. No one gave a damn about Frankenstein or Dracula, and in an era of dead soldiers and political assassinations on television, Hitchcock just wasn’t scary anymore. While the directors chronicled in Peter Biskin’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls tore down the old conventions of the movie screen, another cinematic upheaval was brewing at the grindhouse down the block. Picking over the bones of a collapsed Hollywood, a new wave of filmmakers took post-Watergate, post-Vietnam weltschmerz and spun it all into a sexy, druggy, kinetic library of modern classics, and along the way became the new studio system.īut that’s another book. The throes of the feel-bad 1970s were a great time for American movies. Whoops! There was an error and we couldn't process your subscription. ![]()
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