eah, that’s about right.

Of course, a part of this problem is the very existence of the “cult movie buff” and the “horror fan.” As laudable as Ackerman and his offspring are, the existence of the parallel world of horror film criticism and the parallel world of horror film marketing means that we’ve managed to seperate the universe of the “horror film buff” from the world of the regular movie buff, which is at the heart of the problem you’re writing about. “Horror movie fans” want different kinds of kicks than your run of the mill “movie buff.” We do have several contemporary Forry Ackerman....Chas Balum or “Deep Red,” that Bougie guy of “Cinema Sewer,” Bill Landis and Michele Clifford, Jo Bobb Briggs are a few of the most prominent examples. They are doing the same work Ackerman did. “Famous Monsters” chronicled exploitation cinema from twenty to thirty years before it’s time, as do these guys. Only instead of a trash culture made of monster movies and poverty row shockers, we get gore flicks, zombie movies, violent pornography, and other assorted sleaze. (Bear in mind these are descriptive labels, not pajoritive ones....I like this crap!) DVD companies that specialize in reissuing old horror and exploitation movies movies are similarly minded. Synapse Pictures anyone? Blue Underground?

The fact that most film audiences are aesthtically illiterate and historically ignorant isn’t odd or alarming....not eveybody is a movie buff.... but the fact that horror movie geeks...people who devote lots of movie, time, and energy into the genre, and who therefore are the target audience of horror filmakers, and who therefore have a lot of say in what gets made....seem to have memories that go no further than “Dawn of the Dead.”

The fact is that horror fans generally become horror fans when they are teenagers with teenaged concerns. I, like a bunch of other horror geeks my age, remember seeing the icky, sexy, perverse video boxes in my local video store, and wanting to get my hands on those little slices of the forbidden. Out of this fascination grew a much larger interest in the history of the genre, but my aesthetic values really were founded by looking at those video boxes. For ME horror the central texts in horror cinema are Lucio Fulci’s Zombie flicks and “A Nighmare on Elm Street.” Why is this? Because those movies shocked me and turned me on when I was 13.

Loving this jolt of the trasgressive, or rather, loving this jolt of what seemed trangressive, is what roped me into being a horror geek. Certainly my tastes have expanded since then, but in my head, horror movies are always reacting against or living up to those flicks that formed my interest.

Since being a horror movie geek is driven by different impulses that the impulses that make somebody a run of the mill movie buff (I’m one of those too, but to a much lesser extent), those two groups of folks have pretty diffent attitudes about the past. If you claim to be a movie buff but haven’t seen at least three or four Akira Kurasawa flicks, or if you don’t know anything about Italian neo-realism or Charlie Chaplin, then you are a poser. If you claim to be a horror buff and you don’t know who James Whale is.....well, so what? Defining oneself as a horror film buff means that you love trash culture, that you want to see art that adopts the pose of being transgressive, that you like to be shocked. These are adolescent concerns, and while horror films certainly aren’t necessarily stupid or adolescent, one usually must be able to see through adolescent eyes to really “get” a horror film. The stuff that was “cool” when you WERE an adolescent will always be central to you.  “Dawn of the Dead” is a brilliant satire of patricarchal authority and mindless consumerism, but it’s also a movie where you can see a zombie get the top of its head wached off with a helicopter blade in a mist of orange blood. Bad freakin’ ass.

I would certainly like it if horror geeks made more of an effort to incorporate the “classical music fan” mentality you’re talking about into their viewing habits, and I certainly would like it if more of my fellow horror fans had broader tastes. Why isn’t Warner Herzog’s “Nosferatu” remake held with the same esteem by horror fans as the awesome, but vastly inferior “The Seven Doors of Death”? Because one hits those adolescent buttons and one doesn’t.

Of course, the fact that the horror geek film has a well cultivated subculture where these alternative values rule is no surprise...mainstream values aren’t equipped to seriously deal with a film like “I Spit on Your Grave” or “The House by the Cemetary,” nor are mainstream critics inclinded to try. Had rottentomatoes existed back then, both of these films would have ranked as some of the all time “least fresh” films ever. But they are classics; important, influential films that have provoked more respectable filmmakers to make films that critics have taken very seriously, like “Irreversable,” just to name one obvious example.

What might be a big threat to the health of the horror film is the way that horror culture has gotten better at promoting and defining itself. I’m not against film festivals or horror conventions, but I do wonder if we are helping to limit what horror films are supposed to be. How much Romero-lite do we really need?

By the way....a book that adopts what I think is an ideal mix of historically minded criticism and geeked out fun is Jamie Russell’s “Book of the Dead.” In addition to providing a broad, throrough historical base and tying differet eras of film history together, it manages to make critical sense of the excess of the zombie movie genre without being spoilsportish.

This post is getting out of hand, so I’ll call it a day. Thanks for an interesting article.

Comment by jamie — May 13, 2008 @ 3:46 pm

Hi Jamie,

I am glad to know that you found interesting my most recent column. I agree with your insightful comments, and I would like to briefly comment on them.

Certainly Chas Balum and Joe Bob Briggs are exceptional writers that manage to disseminate the interest and love for the horror genre, or at least for those “trash flicks” from the 1980s (which I love). Personally, Balum’s many variants and editions of his horror score guides were fundamental during my teenager days. However, quite unfortunately, Balum and Briggs pretty much have disappeared from the map since 5 or 6 years ago. If there is a writer/publication that may compete with Ackerman’s Famous Monsters, within a cultural context, that would be Tim Lucas and his exceptional Video Watchdog.

Also, we must be of about the same age, I was in my early teens during the late 1970s and early 1980s, and those years I saw movies which to date I still adulate: Alien, The Shinning, Altered States, The Thing, Videodrome, Escape From NY, Zombie, The Beyond, Mad Max 2, Blade Runner, Conan The Barbarian… So, indeed, when, where, and with whom one watches a movie is very significant to the way one appreciates them. But then again, this is part of the cultural contextuality which I constantly refer in this and previous articles.

Similarly, I believe that most of the followers and admirers of these films I mention are people of about our age. So, when we fade away, so will be part of the interest for these specific movies. Today, most of the principal writers who keep alive the silent flicks, the Universal classics, and the Hammer films, are at least in their early 40s. And I am indeed afraid that when they pass away, these older films will progressively become less popular than what they are today.

Regarding conventions, I used to attend almost every single year the Midnight Marquee and Fangoria reunions. Unfortunately, the first one, with its strong emphasis on older movies, it has practically disappeared. And the second, with its emphasis on movies that have not even been released, it feels more like a promotional event and lacks a critical appreciation of the genre (and still, believe it or not, one of the happiest moments in my entire life was the very first Fangoria convention I attended, back in 1990). In any event, I do not think that these fan gatherings have too much of an influence on the horror industry, but they just reiterate what the box office numbers show.

Marco

Comment by Marco Lanzagorta from Norway — May 15, 2008 @ 7:24 am

Curiously, I’m a few years younger than you (28), but the video store shelves looked about the same when I was a young teenager. Those flicks and their goofier, zanier knockoffs (Barbarian Queen, Return of the Living Dead, etc.) were the ones I remember staring at on the shelf.

I’m not sure conventions don’t have a bigger influence than you acknowledge. For low budget horror, the trick seems to be to get the film onto a screen at a convention so that a DVD distributer will pick it up. That means that stuff than “plays” with audiences of horror geeks on vacation has a better shot at getting onto the shelves.

Of course, I don’t really know that much about the biz, so this perception might have more to do with the films that get written about in the horror press (and those usually do play at film festivals) than anything else. Oh well.

I guess Chas Balum hasn’t really turned out much lately. I saw him briefly in a doc about the making of “The Manson Family” a couple of years ago, but I don’t remember when that footage was actually shot.

Comment by Jamie — May 18, 2008 @ 3:02 am