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

by Jason Zinoman
(New York: Penguin Press, 2011)
Kindle eBook, 272 Pages, 1309 KB, Nonfiction
ASBN: B004IYJEN8, US$12.99

ABCD Rating: CHECK OUT

From the Cover: Much has been written about the storied New Hollywood of the 1970s, but at the same time as Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and Francis Ford Coppola were making their first classic movies, a parallel universe of directors gave birth to the modern horror film-aggressive, raw, and utterly original. Based on unprecedented access to the genre’s major players, The New York Times’s critic Jason Zinoman’s Shock Value delivers the first definitive account of horror’s golden age. By the late 1960s, horror was stuck in the past, confined mostly to drive-in theaters and exploitation houses, and shunned by critics. Shock Value tells the unlikely story of how the much-disparaged horror film became an ambitious art form while also conquering the multiplex. Directors such as Wes Craven, Roman Polanski, John Carpenter, and Brian De Palma—counterculture types operating largely outside the confines of Hollywood—revolutionized the genre, exploding taboos and bringing a gritty aesthetic, confrontational style, and political edge to horror. Zinoman recounts how these directors produced such classics as Rosemary’s Baby, Carrie, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and Halloween, creating a template for horror that has been imitated relentlessly but whose originality has rarely been matched. This new kind of film dispensed with the old vampires and werewolves and instead assaulted audiences with portraits of serial killers, the dark side of suburbia, and a brand of nihilistic violence that had never been seen before. Shock Value tells the improbable stories behind the making of these movies, which were often directed by obsessive and insecure young men working on shoestring budgets, were funded by sketchy investors, and starred porn stars. But once The Exorcist became the highest grossing film in America, Hollywood took notice. The classic horror films of the 1970s have now spawned a billion-dollar industry, but they have also penetrated deep into the American consciousness. Quite literally, Zinoman reveals, these movies have taught us what to be afraid of. Drawing on interviews with hundreds of the most important artists in horror, Shock Value is an enthralling and personality-driven account of an overlooked but hugely influential golden age in American film.

My Review: Okay, this book isn’t for everyone. I’ll start this review right off by saying that. Not everyone is going to find this as fascinating as I do, and even then, this book is not as shocking as I might have hoped. While there is some good insight here, most of what Zinoman has here is old hat for the horror genre … at least for those of us that are involved with the genre on a scholarly or academic level. Sure, there are some new stories here, and some interesting background material on the films in question and their creators and directors, but most of the conclusions that Zinoman has drawn are ones that I have read in articles and books that I have read as I write papers on the genre.

That said, what Zinoman has done is present this heavily academic material in a way which is easily accessible to the average reader. What I mean by that is that in order to learn some of the same things that Zinoman talks about regarding films like Halloween, Night of the Living Dead, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and The Last House on the Left one would have to wade through a number of dense academic articles in obscure journals. For that reasons, Zinoman’s book is very handy. It is even handier (is that a word?) in Kindle form since it is searchable on the eReader and makes doing research that much easier.

In the end, though, reading Shock Value is really only for three audiences: (1) scholars and academics who are interested in the horror genre, (2) diehard fans of the genre of the kind who watch every DVD special feature and read all the articles and magazines (and often Groups 1 and 2 are one-and-the-same), and (3) Hollywood types who can’t understand why their remake of Halloween or A Nightmare on Elm Street or their Paranormal Activity knock-off have failed at the box office. Zinoman lays that out quite explicitly and Hollywood would do well to learn that lesson.

I enjoyed Shock Value, but will you? I honestly don’t know.

Zinoman wrote a four-part piece for Slate titled “How to Fix Horror” which can be found HERE and there is a Q&A with the author about his book HERE at MoreIntelligentLife.