Monster mania sweeps America.

The baby boom is growing up with sharp teeth and a taste forhorror.

In Hollywood.American International Pictures rides the youthquake tsunami, with hot rods,surf movies, and monsters. Roger Corman turns Poe stories into full-colorepics, hitting a peak with Masque of the Red Death in 1964. Toho Studios in Japancontinue to feed American drive-ins a steady diet of monsters, and Hammer ofEngland exports double feature vampires, zombies, and mummies.

Uptown, Hitchcock’s Psycho and The Birds redefine hiscareer, Robert Wise makes The Haunting into a masterpiece of spookystorytelling, and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, with Betty Davis and JoanCrawford, spawns a mini-genre of horror-suspense films aimed at adults. Downtown,Herschell Lewis invents the gore film, testing the widening tolerance of a moreliberal marketplace. Across America,regional producers create a rich diversity of films, many of them awful, butimbued with raw vitality.

The decade bleeds with assassinations and war, race riotsand demonstrations. There is a sense of sweeping change, even revolution. Drugsfuel kid culture, music and movies, and the midnightmovie becomes a staple of popular entertainment, spawning benign cults.

In literature, Rosemary’s Baby makes the devil mainstreamand Roman Polanski films it.

By the end of the 60s, the world is hardly recognizable.

And neither are horror films.

Angela's Pick: The Haunting (1963)

If someone were to strip me bare, dip me in honey, then holdme over a fire ant hill (damn, I was hoping it would end differently too!), andforce me to chose one – only one – favorite horror film of all time, this wouldbe it.

Hill House, a spooky old New Englandmansion, is the setting for Shirley Jackson’s story that revolves around ananthropologist’s efforts to prove the existence of supernatural powers.  In his efforts to prove his case, he enliststhe aid of Eleanor, an introverted, timid woman with a past experience withghosts and boatload of guilt and other psychological hang ups, and Theodora, agifted clairvoyant, who quickly befriends Eleanor at Hill House.  Along for the ride is Luke, the heir of HillHouse, and eventually the party is joined by the anthropologist’s wife.  Almost immediately the guests are subjectedto slams, bangs, thunderous pounding and screeching, and as the unexplainedmanifestations continue, tension and terror ratchet up, and Eleanor’s tenuousgrip on sanity begins to slip…

Or does it?

Never have I seen a movie that does so much with solittle.  Director Robert Wise creates amasterpiece through the use of sound, shadows and light, and no other filmbuilds the suspense like this one does as we wait to see what’s behind theclosed doors. Wise, like Drake’s favorite, Jacque Tourneur, is another alumniof the Val Lewton films of the 40s, having cut his teeth on Curse of the CatPeople and The Body Snatcher. He is, of course, better known for award winnerslike West Side Story and The Sound of Music – a truly versatile master of adirector.

Filmed in 1963, this movie stands the test of time, andwithout a doubt The Haunting is one of the most atmospheric and chilling moviesever made.  To date, I have not found itsequal for tight, suspenseful horror.  Amust see at Halloween!

Drake's Pick: Night of the Living Dead (1968)

There are films now and then that change everything, thatreset the rules, redefine the medium and nothing that is made after themescapes their influence.

Film historians will usually list The Great Train Robbery,Birth of a Nation, Citizen Kane, maybe Mean Streets or The Godfather as suchlandmark films.

The Citizen Kaneof horror films, the movie that changed scary movies forever, is Night of the Living Dead – a low budgetmasterpiece made for a little over $100,000 in Pittsburgh,by a 28-year old commercial director named George Romero. Night’s significancewas realized slowly, though early notoriety spawned by a Roger Ebertreview/essay reprinted in Reader’s Digest helped stir awareness of  just how different from rank and filedrive-in fare it was.

The forerunner of an entire sub-genre of movies, Night ofthe Living Dead was brilliantly told in flickering newscasts and melodramaticvignettes, utilizing unknown actors, adding a little gore, and wrapping it up witha shockingly bleak ending.  It has beenimitated, remade, colorized, and shown so many times that much of its originalmagic has been diluted, but few films in its wake are even half as scary.

The premise is simple. The newly buried dead are returningto life and eating the living, a 20^th century take on the MedievalDance of Death, that Romero still returns to and expands on, a multi-layeredmetaphor for mortality and the choices life makes when confronted by it,Romero’s “deadworld” opened an entire new wing in the mansion of dark imagination.

In the process, he changed horror films forever. Immediatelyafter Night, Romero proved that his success, while raw, was not unintended andhe continues to be a risk-taking filmmaker with a unique artistic vision tothis day. Dario Argento, Tobe Hooper, Wes Craven, and John Carpenter all thrivedin the chilly frontier Romero scouted.

The dead he unearthed are still hungry, 40 years on.