The revolution is being televised, commercialized, and synthesized.

At the beginning of the decade, America is killing its own children at Kent State and throwing them by the thousands into a lost war. Nixon turns out to be a crook after all and is driven from office.

Every icon of stability is trembling.

College-age baby boomers are turning counter culture into mainstream culture and, when the rubble of falling empire settles, the party begins. Disco plumbs new depths of mindlessness and punk rock turns anger into a manifesto. Everything is questionable.

The Exorcist proves that the devil is still alive and The Wicker Man does the same for bloodthirsty pagan gods. Jaws teaches us to fear the water.

Midnight movies are popular, ratings are looser. Films that would have never been released ten years earlier now find eager audiences. Wes Craven shatters the boundaries of good taste in Last House on the Left. Larry Cohen makes a new kind of edgy monster movie in It’s Alive! As the decade progresses, horror films take on new and surprising shapes, increasingly subversive of traditional values, joyfully exploring madness, alienation, and the unthinkable.

A new generation of directors, Cronenberg, Lynch, Craven, Hooper, Carpenter, DePalma, thrive in the midnight darkness, feeding an increasingly sophisticated and insatiable audience, melding surrealism and shock into nightmares. Overseas, Dario Argento picks up the grisly mantle of Mario Bava and redefines stylistic horror in Suspiria. Fear is becoming art.

This is truly the Renaissance of Horror. 

Angela's Pick - Alien (1979)

When it came to the seventies, I had a tough time picking a movie to review.  There were so many good ones in the decade, including Captain Kronos – Vampire Hunter, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Jaws (a movie I refused to watch until after my family had moved off our sailboat.  Good thing too…), Suspiria, Cronenberg’s Rabid and The Brood, Carrie, and Halloween.  But of all the films of the decade, the one that still makes me jump is Alien.

Later years have made me a huge Ridley Scott fan, but I didn’t know who he was when I first saw Alien.   While the core of the story centers on human contact with a hostile alien being, the undercurrents of greed, paranoia, loyalty and courage give this movie an energy that is unsurpassed in the decade.  Sigourney Weaver became a household name as Ripley – one of the Nostromo’s officers – who ends up battling the acid-dripping alien alone after the rest of the crew is wiped out.   In Ripley we see a character who values life over profit, friendship over company policy, who is willing to stand up against the establishment, and in the end who uses her own wits and courage to battle a creature with terrifying advantages, while taking time to save a cat. 

The alien itself is almost unseen, but when it flashes across the screen, the creature is truly alien and unspeakable.  Scott does such a good job of ratcheting up the tension that some of the most heart stopping scenes in the move have nothing to do with the alien.

A brilliant script, amazing direction, and incredible set designs based on the otherworldly art of H. R. Giger make Alien a movie worth keeping in your horror film library. 

Drake's Pick - Shivers (1975)

Choosing one horror film out of the 70s is a real challenge.

Shivers (American title, They Came from Within) is not my favorite horror movie from the 70s, but I think it represents its era perfectly, and it heralds so much of what will follow. The first feature directed by David Cronenberg, Shivers was made in part, astonishingly, with Canadian tax dollars. The film was both financially successful and very controversial. Small wonder.

Excessive in nearly every way, Shivers begins with the murder and evisceration of a young woman, followed by her killer pouring acid into her abdomen, a brutal emblem of the “horror of flesh” that is at the core of so much of Cronenberg’s work. The story, told with intelligence and suspense, involves a scientist (mad of course) who has developed a genetically engineered parasite that may help provide synthetic organs for human beings, but which has also been designed to “improve” human behavior by making its hosts more sensual in their appetites, more driven by their natural instincts. His creation gets loose in an upscale island condo development in Toronto, infecting the inhabitants and causing them to engage in mass orgies of sex and violence, like Romero zombies with engorged libidos. Full of skin and blood, and infused with the blackest of black humor, the film is a satire of modern urban culture and a sharp comment on mankind’s alienation from his own nature.

Besides introducing the fixations that will drive Cronenberg’s career, the visual excesses of Shivers are glistening examples of the 70s’ wave of horror films.  Its themes are fundamentally subversive, even transgressive, bringing the vision of experimental film to a drive-in movie story, pulp art cinema at its finest.

A true underground milestone, Shivers sadly is not available commercially on DVD in the US today, but all-region disks are sold on Ebay. Order one and join the party.

It’s a killer.