The title of Adam Simon's documentary -- "The American Nightmare" -- refers both to the social upheavals of the '60s (race riots, assassinations, Vietnam) and the new style of horror film that began to appear around the same time. It is the filmmaker's contention that "The Last House on the Left," "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and others, ostensibly gross-out movies, were in fact the work of artists -- auteurs, if you will -- responding to the growing chaos around them. The horror, the
"The American Nightmare"
horror, where’d
it come from?
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Wes Craven, the metteur-en-scene behind the "Scream" series puts it this way: "As Alan Ginsburg said in 'Howl,' all that bad karma has to go somewhere."
Several film professors from leading universities weigh in on this issue, all concluding that bad karma led not only to good films, but some of the best films America has ever produced.
Speaking of "Night of the Living Dead," for instance, a professor at Berkeley calls the flick "one of the great American films." This is where Simon's documentary begins to get into trouble. No one disputes that these are cult classics, but this is a far cry from installing them in the Pantheon. For that to happen, the films would have to offer a more focused critique of the culture of violence from which they arose. Uttering words like "My Lai" and "montage" in the same sentence doesn't mean the two can be equated.
Nevertheless, if the last time you saw "Night of the Living Dead," say, was at a midnight screening in some altered state of consciousness, you might be surprised to find how much the film was a comment on the racial climate of the day. Ever wonder why the protagonist was a black man, and what his massacre at the hands of some aw-shucks white sheriffs might mean? And what about the montage over the end credit sequence, when they carry him with meat hooks to a funeral pyre?
Its overreaching tendencies aside, "American Nightmare" contains revealing interviews with some of the masters of schlock horror -- George Romero, John Carpenter, David Cronenberg and others -- and intersperses them with extensive clips some of the best sequences of cannibalism and dismemberment ever filmed.
By Scott Vogel
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