Interview By Steve Ramos

Texas Chainsaw Massacre

We look away from the screen. Frequently, we cover our eyes. And still, time and time again, we return to the cinema to be shocked and scared by the latest horror movie. Currently, the re-release of The Exorcist is grabbing most of the attention. Still, there are always new thrillers aiming to test the emotional stamina of movie audiences.

Now, there is a cinematic guide, writer/ director Adam Simon's absorbing documentary, The American Nightmare.

Far away from the brand of 1950s schlock horror movies like The Tingler and Martian-invader movies, the films of George Romero (Night of the Living Dead), Tobe Hooper (Texas Chainsaw Massacre), David Cronenberg (Shivers), Wes Craven (Last House on the Left) and John Carpenter (Halloween) offered horrors that were more closer to home.

In The American Nightmare's opinion, the late 1960s and early 1970s were the golden age of horror films. After watching Simon's thoughtful documentary, it's difficult to disagree.

"Listen, you get a better sense of both the contemporary and the history of race relations from Night of the Living Dead than you get from Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?," Simon says, speaking at his Los Angeles home. "Even by the time you got films that were supposedly dealing with these issues like Coming Home -- Craven's Last House on the Left was his Coming Home -- this was about a coming home of a new level of trauma and violence that the society was being exposed."

Simon, a director of low-budget horror movies himself -- 1990's Brain Dead and 1995's Carnosaur -- has a lot of respect for The American Nightmare's subject matter. The focus is not just on the scares unfolding on the big screen. The American Nightmare also steps back and forms a bigger picture about its subject. Films like Last House on the Left and Night of the Living Dead are taken out of their cinematic boxes and connected to the conflict surrounding America's involvement in the Vietnam War, the country's racial conflicts, the Kent State shooting and the Watts riots. For Simon, the everyday horrors of these films drew from the violence that existed outside the movie theaters.

"These films are totally grounded and, in fact, direct expressions of the reality of their times in ways that the realist films of that time were not," Simon says. "The irony is that the realist films of that time are fantasies, and these fantastical horror films of that time are reality.

"Listen, these are not my favorite horror movies. These are movies that told a very important story about an important period in our lives."

Recently, there has been ample academic discourse about contemporary horror films. Of course, The American Nightmare appropriates these writings wisely. The result is a series of smart and serious interviews with its key filmmakers. But the film's saving grace is the deft hand of Simon. He makes the absence of conventional movie monsters like Dracula or Frankenstein seem like a good thing. The American Nightmare argues convincingly that movie horror was meant to be closer to home. More importantly, he thinks horror is primed for a comeback.

"The kind of horror movies I talk about in American Nightmare are the precursors of the American independent film movement now," Simon says. "If you hadn't had Night of the Living Dead, you would not have today's independent films.

"Horror is the place where the fantastic and the surrealism in its purest form has survived, and I don't think the culture is very comfortable with that. Still, when something is successful people will imitate it. So I think we are about to experience a lot of Blair Witch imitators."

E-mail Steve Ramos

Couch Potato (October 12, 2000)
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