“I
remember reading Easy Riders, Raging Bulls and
really enjoying it, but with only a few exceptions like Carrie and The Exorcist, it didn’t involve any
of the movies I grew up loving. So I covered some of the same bases.” With this opening remark during our recent interview, author Jason Zinoman quickly established that he and I are very much on the same page, as it were, about horror cinema’s last golden age. Okay, but first things first. If you’re interested in film
of any kind and haven’t read Peter Biskind’s Easy Rid- ers, Raging Bulls (1998, Simon and Schuster), you re- ally need to. The auteur period in American cinema – roughly spanning the 1960s and early ’70s – has been chronicled and critiqued exhaustively, but never with such insight or in such sordid detail as in Biskind’s book, which tracks the career trajectories and turbulent personal lives of Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, William Friedkin, Peter Bogdanovich, Robert Altman and many more revered filmmakers, as well as the Hollywood power brokers who alternately championed and de- stroyed them. When I first read it years ago, a
thought struck me: wouldn’t it be cool if someone wrote basically the same book about horror filmmakers who broke out during the same über-pivotal period? More to the point, wouldn’t it be cool if I wrote that book? Well, I never did get around to that, but the good news is, Zi- noman has. Shock Value (Penguin Press) hit stores in July and may well prove to be the most indispensable overview of modern horror film for years to come. Still just in his mid-30s, Zinoman already had an impressive resumé as a theatre and film critic for Vanity Fair, Time Out, The Guardian, The Economist and The New York Times before embarking on his first book. Not sur- prisingly, it had its beginnings as a Vanity Fair article, which he subsequently decided to expand. “It’s hard to get the same kind of gossip [Biskind] gets,” notes Zinoman, “but I think that most of the
RM48
horror directors are less flamboyant, crazy characters than the more mainstream ones. Those stories are much wilder than any about Romero or Craven. I was most shocked by Brian De Palma, in terms of what an extreme character he was in his personal life, the way his obsessive voyeurism wasn’t just some abstract thing he got from Hitchcock films. It goes back to when he caught his dad cheating on his mom and filmed it. De Palma, Polanski and Friedkin all have much more outsize person- alities.” Regardless, there’s no shortage of
industry intrigue detailed in these pages. Although we tend to think of horror filmmakers as a competitive but generally supportive fraternity, the genre has had its share of feuds that began as alliances, and few are as bitter as the falling out between
icons John Carpenter and Dan O’Bannon (O’Bannon pictured above, left, with John Carpenter on the set of Dark Star). Zinoman managed to get both sides of the story with considerable candour before O’Ban- non’s death several years ago, but it wasn’t easy. “I didn’t always get what I wanted [initially],” he
says. “Especially the more sensitive stuff; I would have to hear it first from somebody else, then come to them and say, ‘Here’s what I heard – is this right?’
and then maybe they’d talk about it. Carpenter, the first time I interviewed him, was certainly very careful, while O’Bannon was less so. But then I probably talked to O’Bannon more than anyone else for this book.” Non-genre influences as diverse as Edward Albee,
Ingmar Bergman and Harold Pinter are cited and de- bated throughout Shock Value, but the reach of one cinema titan proves less pervasive than most fans would think. “I always just assumed that Hitchcock was the most
influential figure,” Zinoman says, “and he probably was. But one director after another – after paying due respect and saying how much they loved Hitchcock – had criticisms, and some came up over and over again. Some primary ideas of ‘new horror’ are based on the idea that the scariest thing is the unknown, and that was in part a reaction to the last scene in Psycho. Polanski, Friedkin and Carpenter believe in not explain- ing every motivation. That resonates with me because I was in New York on September 11, and the scariest moment was after the planes hit because you had no idea what was going on. Then information began to dribble out. It was still horrifying, but once you could sort of put it in a box and identify the enemy, you could at least manage that fear.” In case you hadn’t guessed by now, Shock Value
comes with my unreserved recommendation, so get the hell out of my basement and go buy a copy of the book I wish I’d written.
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72