The American Nightmare
Like Going to Pieces, this is a wonderfully focussed documentary on the horror genre – in fact, if anything, it’s even more focussed, dedicating around 10 minutes each just to Romero’s Dead trilogy (well, the first two parts, and Tom Savini’s make-up work thereon), Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left, John Carpenter’s Halloween, Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chain Saw, and David Cronenberg’s Shivers. There’s some brilliant intercutting from the movies concerned to actual reality footage of the time, truly putting the movies in question in context.
Will you learn anything new if you’re already as much a fan of the genre and the time as I am? Probably not – but it’s still a good watch and as good an intro to the whole thing as you’ll get if you happen to be starting a film studies course of any kind. My favourite quote in the movie comes from Tobe Hooper, brutally honest about the whole phenomenon, who says, “We shot a whole bunch of footage. And then 20 years later, we find out what it meant.” When you look at Dawn of the Dead and realise it was made at a time when, really, the world wasn’t so bad afterall, it really makes you (well, me) wonder, where’s the classic horror movie of our time?