This article was originally published on the Disqus version of the Avocado in October 2017. The original version of the article, as well as its comments, can be found here.
As we move into fall, it’s time to break out our parents’ novelty Halloween records and watch black and white movies with monophonic sound. The season has reawakened a question in me: Where does modern horror cinema begin?
I should define what I think the distinction is. Old horror is monster-based. The silent era drew on 19th century literary traditions like Dracula and Frankenstein, and the horror always had a physical embodiment. That isn’t to say that physical embodiment couldn’t be highly metaphorical – vampirism and sexuality, resurrection and scientific hubris – but the horror was wrapped up in a thing, and that thing could be killed. Old horror evolved – by the 1960s, the thing was usually some kind of atomic monster, and the picture might be in color – but the principles remained the same. Kill the giant ants or the gorilla robot and everyone would be safe. Movies like this continue to be made today, often starring sexy teens.
New horror suggests the real danger is somehow latent in us, the human viewers. The horror might still have a physical form, but even if it can be killed, the thing isn’t the real danger anymore. We are flawed at the core; the external threat just stirs up things we’d like to keep hidden. The two types might look the same superficially, but they make completely different assumptions about the everyday people meant to be our stand-ins in horror.
I haven’t seen every classic horror movie, but with what I know, I can suggest three films as being emblematic of the transition from old to new horror. This isn’t to say that they did all the heavy lifting on their own; each one is as much a product of its era as it is an influence to the next. And I’d be remiss not to mention The Twilight Zone at least in passing. But here are three horror movies, each one asking the viewer to expect slightly less of their fellow humans than the one before it.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) might be the first modern horror film. One can only imagine what Eisenhower-era America made of it. Into the very heart of the Rubber Suits from Space period of horror film-making came a movie where the enemy looked just like us. Make no mistake, there are a couple great shots of inhuman things hatching from giant seed pods, but the finished product was a race of utterly ordinary people whose true nature was only visible in their swarm-like actions and utterly neutral voices.
The best scene, for my money, illustrates this completely wordlessly. Having made it through the night, the heroes look down on the town square at daybreak. They’re heartened to see a sea of ordinary people, milling about a row of produce trucks. When the trucks leave, though, the charade ends: The crowd moves as a unit, like ants, across the pavement. Maybe this isn’t the first time a movie showed inhuman intelligence in a human body, but if there’s an earlier film that shows humans reduced to a hive mind, I don’t know of it.
Body Snatchers ends on an implicitly hopeful note, albeit a dire one. As the credits roll, we’re assured the authorities have been notified, and are taking the threat seriously. The question is whether they can move fast enough.
The Last Man on Earth (1964) might be the first modern horror film. The opening is credibly dark: A man lives alone in what was once his family home, the windows boarded up, the floor space taken up with the machinery and supplies keeping him alive. Every day, he gets up at 6 and drives around the city in his station wagon, murdering vampires in their sleep. In a too-long-but-not-terrible flashback sequence, we see that he was once a scientist working on a cure for a vampiric plague sweeping the Earth, borne on the wind. His immunity is never fully explained, but by the time the movie starts, he’s the last human.
The man in question is played by Vincent Price, and it’s an open question as to whether he’s an antihero or whether we’re supposed to completely identify with a man who repeatedly assaults the first living woman he finds. Without spoilers, the ending heavily leans on imagery that suggests he’s in the right. But it’s a tough sell: He extinguishes any life he thinks might turn on him. The vampires themselves are a step down from pod people, they can still talk and sort of think, but they’re stupid, slow and feeble. The worst of the group that hounds Price’s house is one of his former lab coworkers, who knows his name and taunts him with it.
Still, he never gives up hope on a cure. And in the flashback sequences, even as gas-mask wearing army members carry the infected away, they try to reason with the bereaved family members in a way that seems shockingly naive. I was startled in particular by a scene where Price grabs a man stepping out of an army truck and demands answers. The soldier actually takes his gas mask off to answer him, instead of emptying an assault rifle into his gut. Last Man takes a step back from Body Snatchers: the authorities we trust are definitely not strong enough to save us. But they’re still trying.
Night of the Living Dead (1968) might be the first modern horror film. Director George Romero openly credited the influence of The Last Man on Earth, and he made a movie that fixed most of the problems with its inspiration. The disaster unfolds in real-time now, following a group of people holed up in a farmhouse from corpses that have risen from the dead. The creatures here are rudimentary human ugliness: incapable of speech or any tool use beyond bludgeoning. Their primary attack is a bite, and the bite spreads whatever is wrong with them, infecting and killing the bitten.
As the external threat steps down from the eloquent iciness of pod people to the simple mockery of vampires to the shambling, groaning zombies, so too do the human threats rise in kind. The authorities in Night of the Living Dead are hopelessly at odds with each other about what is happening or what’s causing it. The ground teams shown at the end of the film do more harm than good, to put it lightly. But the real threat is inside the farmhouse all along.
The survivor dynamics of Night of the Living Dead are not the most eloquent thing in cinema. The writing isn’t amazing, and the acting is often uncertain. But the tensions – between black and white, young and old, man and woman – are there. This is a group of people who fundamentally do not know if they can count on each other. Unlike Body Snatchers and Last Man, there’s never any ambiguity about who is or isn’t a zombie. And even that isn’t enough. Humans are the most dangerous thing to other humans.
I’ll share one of my favorite parts as a coda. Though he probably didn’t intend it to, Romero made a movie that – for the first few minutes – looks like the sort of campy stuff that had been everywhere in cinema for the last 30 years. You’ve got an expository radio bulletin, cut off. You’ve got two young people walking through a cemetery. You’ve even got a guy trying to spook his sister by doing a scary voice, as what turns out to be the first zombie walks up to them. They don’t really know it’s a zombie. It’s just an old guy moving funny. Except that it’s not.
And for my money, that’s where modern horror begins.