Shock Value: How a Few Eccentric Outsiders Gave Us Nightmares, Conquered Hollywood, and Invented Modern Horror

by Jason Zinoman
791.43617 Zino

New Horror came out during the same period as Lucas, Spielberg, and Scorsese were creating a New Hollywood, so from the late sixties to 1980. The author explores the landmark films that helped re-distinguish a dieing genre and launch some of the most prolific careers of the last several decades.

Horror films were a very big obsession of mine dating back to the summer after my 8th grade when I saw Scream at the movie theatres. It was the first genre of film that I whole heartily embraced. I would go to my local video store and rent 10 VHS tapes on their buy one get one free Wednesdays and watch them throughout the week. I started by seeing all the greats and every picture mentioned by the characters of Scream and then delved deeper from there. I had seen most of the films mentioned here in this book and all of the titles each chapter focuses on such as Rosemary's Baby, Carrie, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Halloween many times.

I found it interesting of how horror was looked at during the time period before these directors made their mark. Were most horror movies were for drive-in double features and Saturday matinees that focused more on cheesy monster movies and Gothic vampires and werewolves. Even with movies like Hitchcock's Psycho and The Birds, their was little respect for the genre until Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist came and Hollywood took notice of these huge hits. Though the directors of those movies would never admit to them being horror movies which further illustrates how they were thought of. When I went in to see Scream in the Summer of 1997, horror movies were thought of as well in little regard as an endless number of sequels killed off most enthusiasm the fame New Horror directors had created.

As a horror fan the stories told in the book are nice. There is no deep and long engaged dissection of each film but the stories of each film from early production to its legacy that has lived on from its fans to its remakes are deeper than the trivia page you would find on IMDB or Wikipedia.