Horror movies have long been a site onto which we can project our deepest fears and anxieties. Films such as
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1972) and
Last House on the Left (1972) looked and felt like visions of hell that we could vicariously experience at a safe remove.
Timed to coincide with Halloween, ACMI presents its first horror film focus - The Horror. The season will revisit and present a selection of films produced in the United States during the 1970s by directors who expanded the definition of the horror genre during that decade; filmmakers such as Tobe Hooper, Wes Craven and George Romero. The most significant of these films - explorations in horror visited as much upon the mind as the body - have remained cult favourites due to the force of their ideas and the visceral impact of their images. Their uncompromising shock value, grunge aesthetics and daring experiments in style continue to influence younger generations of filmmakers who may or may not choose to pay as close attention to these films' political and social contexts.
Whether they may - or may not - be motivated by fears and anxieties of a more contemporary nature, horror films seem to be going through a state of 'recycling'. Slick studio remakes of seminal 1970s films such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Dawn of the Dead (1978) are happily trading on the notoriety and shock value of their originals, but seem somewhat uncommitted or oblivious to what gave these films their potency and cultural relevance. The 1970s was a decade in the United States marked by collective unease and scepticism inspired by such defining events as the Vietnam War and the Nixon/Watergate scandal. Growing distrust and disenchantment in government, the seeming breakdown of established social orders and the uneasy shift of power in gender roles are filtered through the nightmare visions in such films as Dead of Night, It's Alive, Last House on the Left and The Crazies, all of which are included in this season. The Horror re-presents these and other films with the aim of inviting their cultural re-evaluation and also with a desire to recreate the experience of encountering these works, which play so directly upon the 'collective unconscious', in a cinema setting.
Included in the season will also be a sampler of newer nightmares. These recent films have gone their own way in tapping into the collective unconscious to explore some of the fears we may harbour in our own particular cultural moment.
Curated by Fiona O'Grady, Spiro Economopoulos and Roberta Ciabarra
