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medium-paced
While some of this information was new to me and really interesting, Zinoman's angle and framing in the last chapter really brought my enjoyment of this entire experience down.
really fun and i learned a lot! love you horror love you stomach exploding alien love you random man (men?) in masks lmao
This was a well reasearched love letter to horror movies. (If you're not a fan of horror movies, I wouldn't recommend reading this - it won't change your mind about them.) If you are a fan of horror movies, a lot of this information may already be known to you. What won't be is the content of the interviews that Zinoman conducted, and that's what makes this book shine - he manages to take historical timelines and tie them into the personal struggles of directors that many horror fans know and love. We all know that many horror films of the 70s and 80s have a lot to do with current events of the day, but seing them tie into directors' lives and personal backgrounds was a really interesting factoid.
This is a super niche book, but if you're a fan of said niche, pick it up.
This is a super niche book, but if you're a fan of said niche, pick it up.
As someone who grew up watching horror and has seen nearly every film featured in this book (somehow, I've never gotten up the nerve or stomach to watch Last House on the Left), I ate this up. Zinoman, a genuine theater critic and horror super-fan, takes the serious approach and tells the story of how horror films went from Christopher Lee and Vincent Price in the early 60's to foul-mouthed demons and chainsaws a decade later. There's a wealth of back story on major horror film figures like Wes Craven, Dan O'Bannon, John Carpenter and William Friedkin, to name a few. It's a riveting, serious cultural exploration of a certain type of cinema. With blood and vomit.
I found something interesting on nearly every page. Roman Polanski and his cinematographer experimented with all kinds of visual effects for Rosemary's Baby, like prefogging the film for the trippy rape sequence. George Romero only made a horror film his first feature because it was cheap-and despite what you may have heard, the original Living Dead was NOT intended as social commentary. Dan O'Bannon, the co-writer of Alien, was inspired to write the chest-bursting scene by his lifelong struggle with Crohn's Disease. William Peter Blatty (the author of novel The Exorcist) is kind of utterly insane:
(Why, I now demand to know, were we never treated to The Exorcist: The College Years? It couldn't possibly have been worse than the sequel they made with Richard Burton.)
I love cinema. I love horror films. I love good writing. If you love any combination of the above, this book is pretty much a win.
I found something interesting on nearly every page. Roman Polanski and his cinematographer experimented with all kinds of visual effects for Rosemary's Baby, like prefogging the film for the trippy rape sequence. George Romero only made a horror film his first feature because it was cheap-and despite what you may have heard, the original Living Dead was NOT intended as social commentary. Dan O'Bannon, the co-writer of Alien, was inspired to write the chest-bursting scene by his lifelong struggle with Crohn's Disease. William Peter Blatty (the author of novel The Exorcist) is kind of utterly insane:
Georgetown University...."I thought it was a Catholic institution. There are demons running all over that campus."
(Why, I now demand to know, were we never treated to The Exorcist: The College Years? It couldn't possibly have been worse than the sequel they made with Richard Burton.)
I love cinema. I love horror films. I love good writing. If you love any combination of the above, this book is pretty much a win.
While only slightly more elucidating than perusing IMDb's trivia section, I did enjoy certain parts of Shock Value. The author clearly loves horror and his detailed accounts of behind the scenes negotiations and creative spats are entertaining. However Zinoman is wildly irregular in his approach. He melds history with theory but gravely does a disservice to the latter. For instance, he dismisses gendered readings of slasher films as "sex-obsessed" but occasionally points to Freud as an explanation for why certain things make us spook. Okay, dude. If you want to read a truly great book on horror check out Carol J. Clover's excellent Men, Women, and Chainsaws. The nicest thing I can say about Shock Value is that it made me want to reread Clover.
informative
fast-paced
This book was full of interesting anecdotes and behind-the-scenes information, but lacked a unifying thesis beyond, "Man, weren't the 70s the best?"
2.5 stars.
2.5 stars.
More of a 3.5 / 5 here. It's readable, but not compulsively so.
This book is really for horror fans, especially those with a fondness for the grindhouse breakouts of the late 60s and the 70s. I enjoyed learning new tidbits about the directors and screenwriters behind the classics of horror's second wave, and while many of these movies (The Last House on the Left, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) are not necessarily my favorites, they're certainly landmarks that have influenced the genre.
Jason Zinoman does a great job of letting us know the hows and whys behind the vision and influence of a wide variety of landmark films he dubs the New Horror, and it's inherently interesting to see how many of these movies were compromised by collaborations and the Hollywood studio system. While a lot of these films have been ascribed political messages, they were often incidental rather than intentional. The final shot of Night of the Living Dead? Never meant to be a comment on racism, but it certainly benefited from the racial tensions of the time, especially since it debuted after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. And it seemed like John Carpenter had been trying to remake The Thing from Another Planet like 50 different times until he had the clout and the special effects to pull it off wholesale.
However, the prose is kind of clunky and there's not a clear narrative beyond the fact that the movies Zinoman's chosen to profile were responsible for creating the tropes of the modern horror film. He often interrupts his own points in tangential asides about other movies, and in trying to link everything together, he sometimes gets a little repetitive. Zinoman occasionally approaches the question of why people enjoy horror movies and provides little insight when he does. He also blows off the horror of the 80s and beyond, presenting Halloween and Alien as the end of the golden era of New Horror, and while he's certainly entitled to that opinion, he doesn't provide any real analysis into it. He namechecks a few important post-70s titles, but by and large dismisses contemporary horror as unscary self-parody. Some of that's true, especially of the 80s and 90s, but given that the kind of social unrest that was so influential in the 60s and 70s has boomeranged right back in the 00s, a new paradigm is starting to emerge in horror, one that is definitely NOT defined by No Country for Old Men and The Hurt Locker, films that he feels are the 00s redefinition of the 70s sensibilities. Those aren't even horror movies! Honestly, it wouldn't have bothered me if Zinoman just told us that the rules are beginning to change once again after the 80s/90s gave us the second coming of goofy, campy Hammer-esque horror, but he makes it sound like nothing has ever been scary since Alien. Simply not true, and kind of an insult to those of us who love our classics but enjoy the scares afforded by contemporary horror, too.
This book is really for horror fans, especially those with a fondness for the grindhouse breakouts of the late 60s and the 70s. I enjoyed learning new tidbits about the directors and screenwriters behind the classics of horror's second wave, and while many of these movies (The Last House on the Left, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) are not necessarily my favorites, they're certainly landmarks that have influenced the genre.
Jason Zinoman does a great job of letting us know the hows and whys behind the vision and influence of a wide variety of landmark films he dubs the New Horror, and it's inherently interesting to see how many of these movies were compromised by collaborations and the Hollywood studio system. While a lot of these films have been ascribed political messages, they were often incidental rather than intentional. The final shot of Night of the Living Dead? Never meant to be a comment on racism, but it certainly benefited from the racial tensions of the time, especially since it debuted after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. And it seemed like John Carpenter had been trying to remake The Thing from Another Planet like 50 different times until he had the clout and the special effects to pull it off wholesale.
However, the prose is kind of clunky and there's not a clear narrative beyond the fact that the movies Zinoman's chosen to profile were responsible for creating the tropes of the modern horror film. He often interrupts his own points in tangential asides about other movies, and in trying to link everything together, he sometimes gets a little repetitive. Zinoman occasionally approaches the question of why people enjoy horror movies and provides little insight when he does. He also blows off the horror of the 80s and beyond, presenting Halloween and Alien as the end of the golden era of New Horror, and while he's certainly entitled to that opinion, he doesn't provide any real analysis into it. He namechecks a few important post-70s titles, but by and large dismisses contemporary horror as unscary self-parody. Some of that's true, especially of the 80s and 90s, but given that the kind of social unrest that was so influential in the 60s and 70s has boomeranged right back in the 00s, a new paradigm is starting to emerge in horror, one that is definitely NOT defined by No Country for Old Men and The Hurt Locker, films that he feels are the 00s redefinition of the 70s sensibilities. Those aren't even horror movies! Honestly, it wouldn't have bothered me if Zinoman just told us that the rules are beginning to change once again after the 80s/90s gave us the second coming of goofy, campy Hammer-esque horror, but he makes it sound like nothing has ever been scary since Alien. Simply not true, and kind of an insult to those of us who love our classics but enjoy the scares afforded by contemporary horror, too.
dark
informative
medium-paced
Had no intention of reading this book, but only discovered it by casually browsing the film section of nonfiction books at my local library. I'm sure glad I picked it up.
As someone who loves horror cinema, this was such an enjoyable read. There is some expected common knowledge to people like me who already know a lot about the industry and the early horror icons, but there was so much I learned as well. A ton of information that I won't forget and will think about every time I watch some of the movies Zinoman discusses.
Definitely read this book if you're into horror movies, especially the Carpenter/Craven/O'Bannon classics from the 70s.
As someone who loves horror cinema, this was such an enjoyable read. There is some expected common knowledge to people like me who already know a lot about the industry and the early horror icons, but there was so much I learned as well. A ton of information that I won't forget and will think about every time I watch some of the movies Zinoman discusses.
Definitely read this book if you're into horror movies, especially the Carpenter/Craven/O'Bannon classics from the 70s.