Horror Movies

By far the most acclaimed and talked about family horror movie of the 1970s and 1980s was William Friedkin's The Exorcist (1973). Winner of two Academy Awards and nominated for eight others, this film was the subject of intense media scrutiny from the time of its initial release.

Loosely based on a reported real life exorcism, the film chronicles the efforts of a disenchanted priest to save the life of a young girl who has been possessed by demonic forces. The display of Christian iconography in the presence of foul sexual language, nauseating special effects, and graphic exhibitions of self-mutilation outraged many religious groups. But stripped of its demonic-possession theme, The Exorcist provides a moving commentary on, among other things, the uselessness of modern medicine when confronted with unknown illnesses, the crises of guilt and responsibility faced by single mothers, and, in general, the difficulty parents have comprehending and responding to their often aggressive, hormonal children. Although inspired by The Exorcist, and highly successful in its own right, Richard Donner's own "satanic child" film, The Omen (1976) lacked its predecessor's underlying concern with domestic issues. Instead, it terrified viewers with threats of the apocalypse, and, what ultimately amounts to the same thing, the infiltration of evil agents into the political sphere.

Although the proportion of horror movies within the overall film population continued to increase well into the 1980s, by the end of the decade it was obvious that a staleness had set in. Halloween was up to its fourth sequel in 1989, Friday the 13th its seventh, and the overuse of narrative and technical conventions was (not surprisingly) accompanied by a decline in viewer interest. But with Jonathan Demme's Academy Award-winning The Silence of the Lambs (1991) selling the mystique of the serial killer to mainstream audiences, the horror-thriller-suspense hybrid received a massive boost in popularity. In the mid-1990s, glossy, big-budgeted, star-powered films such as Copycat (1995), Se7en (1995), and Kiss the Girls (1997) focused on the gruesome handiwork of charismatic, creative serial killers and reflected public fascination with those who commit mass murder on principle (or so they would have us believe), not merely because of some underlying psychosexual disorder.

Other, more conventional horror movies of this period sought to supernaturalize the serial killer. Inspired by Wes Craven's modern classic A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), in which a once-human child murderer takes revenge on those who lynched him by invading the dreams of their offspring, films such as Child's Play (1988), The Exorcist III (1990), The Frighteners (1996), and Fallen (1997) either give supernatural powers to a serial killer or else give serial killer characteristics to a supernatural being. Another Wes Craven movie, Scream, was a sleeper hit in 1996, and became the first in a slew of neo-stalkers. These highly self-reflexive works, which include Scream 2 (1997), Halloween H20 (1998), and Urban Legend (1998), contrive to satirize stalker film conventions while still providing genuine scares; they succeed in this task only insofar as they are able to avoid too heavy a reliance on the very conventions they are mocking. Despite the fact that almost all of the neo-stalkers to come out in the late 1990s have done quite well at the box office, many critics view the ever-increasing emphasis on parody, intertextuality, and pastiche as signs that the genre has exhausted itself, and that a dark age in horror cinema is imminent.

St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture, 2002 Gale Group.