In
the last great renaissance of horror movies, roughly 1978 to 1888, we saw the
emergence of a new kind of monster: the masked maniac, and they were legion.
Inspired largely by the movies on this list, a horde of second, third, and
fourth tier quickie, no-budget films literally spewed out of Hollywood like a
Tom Savini neck wound, muddying the waters and diluting the quality, and
incidentally, setting the bar for horror for a generation of people.
Sympathetic monsters, like Frankenstein and poor Larry Talbot, were right out.
In its place was the mute, force of nature, hulking menace wielding gardening
implements straight out of the Sears and Roebuck catalog.
At
the time, there was an emerging body of scholarship devoted to these films, and
I readily tracked down whatever I could. Most of the popular opinion regarding
the newfound fascination with horror was divided between the appeal of the
Grand Guignol, or theater of blood, from Victorian France, and a resurgence of
the kind of morality play that was performed during the Reformation and
eventually transmogrified into fairie tales, proverbs, and in the 20th century,
urban myths. Essentially, the gist of the story was this: good girls are
spared, and bad girls get punished. The good are spared, and the wicked get
what’s coming to them. An eye for an eye, literally.
All
of this was gleefully, if not consciously, sublimated into films like The Driller Killer, Prowler, Maniac, Pieces, and one of the all-time cult
classics, Sleepaway Camp, a film that
almost made my top 5 list. It was the age of Fangoria, and these movies were meat and potatoes for the masses.
