Cinema Verité. The death-throes of the studio system.
Docu-dramas and New Age Woo conflated with UFOs, Bigfoot, The Loch Ness
Monster, the Bermuda Triangle, the pyramids, the Moth-Man, and a variety of
urban myths into a muddled roux of pseudoscience and fictionalized academic
speculation.
It was a great time for monsters. Or rather, it should have
been. Unfortunately, while the horror movies had a wealth of history and
tradition to draw on, they instead relied on quick camera cuts, shaky,
hand-held footage, and confusing storytelling to hide the fact that the mutant
bear was, in fact, only a guy in a suit, and not a very good suit, either.
There was a lot going on in the 1970’s, both at home and
abroad. Television had finally become ubiquitous in American households, and
the networks wasted no time showing everyone the horrors of the Viet Nam war,
the Manson children trials, the tragedy of the 1972 Olympics, and of course,
the Watergate investigation. People were protesting on campuses, and four of
them were killed at Kent State. The economy was in a recession and we were in
the midst of an energy crisis. Is it any wonder we needed to escape to the
movies?
Horror movies in this decade were largely reactive, and
carried a verisimilitude of realism that wasn’t quite an imitation of reportage,
but had enough leading headlines cobbled together to make it seem like the
events could have happened. All pretense of decency was abandoned, and with it
came shockingly realistic depictions of violence like what was shown (or
implied) in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and The Exorcist
(1973). It’s not surprising that some of the most iconic and influential horror
movies of all time were from this decade.
