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I want first to offer a series of general propositions about the American horror film, then attempt to define the particular nature of its evolution in the Sixties and Seventies. The aim is to provide a context within which individual.filmscan profitably be discussed and, in particular, a context for an article in the next issue of FILM COMMENT on the work of Larry Cohen.
1. Popularity and disreputability. The horror film has consistently been one of the most popular and, at the same time, the most disreputable of Hollywood genres. The popularity itself has a peculiar characteristic that sets the horror film apart from other genres; it is restricted to aficionados and complemented by total rejection, people tending to either go to horror films obsessively or not at all. They are dismissed with contempt by the majority of reviewercritics, or simply ignored. (The situation has changed somewhat since Psycho, which conferred on the horror film something of the dignity that Stagecoach conferred on the Western, but the disdain still largely continues. I have read no serious or illuminating accounts of, for example, Raw Meat, It's Alive, or The Hills Have Eyes.) The popularity, however, also continues. Most horror films make money; the ones that don't are those with overt intellectual pretensions, obviously "difficult" works like God Told Me To (Demon) and Exorcist II. Another psychologically interesting aspect of this popularity is that many people who go regularly to horror films profess to ridicule them and go in order to laughwhich is not true, generally speaking, of the Western or the gangster movie.
2. Dreams and Nightmares. In discussing Blonde Venus in the March-April FILM COMMENT, I invoked the common analogy between films and dreams, and it is necessary to elaborate on it here. The comparison is usually concerned with the experience of the audience. The spectator sits in darkness, and the sort of involvement the entertainment film invites necessitates a certain switching-off of consciousness, a losing of oneself in a fantasy-experience. But the analogy is also useful from the point of view of the filmmakers. Dreams-the embodiment of repressed desires, tensions, fears that our conscious mind rejects-become possible when the "censor" that guards our subconscious relaxes in sleep, though even then the desires can only...