Table Of Content

Robin Wood on the Horror Film Robin Wood onstage during a postscreening Q&A as part of his American Nightmare program for the Festival of Festivals (now Toronto International Film Festival) in 1979. Edited by Barry Keith Grant With a preface by Richard Lippe Wayne State University Press Detroit © 2018 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission. Manufactured in the United States of America. Library of Congress Control Number: 2018943988 ISBN 978- 0- 8143- 4523- 8 (paperback) ISBN 978- 0- 8143- 4525- 2 (hardcover) ISBN 978- 0- 8143- 4524- 5 (ebook) Wayne State University Press Leonard N. Simons Building 4809 Woodward Avenue Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309 Visit us online at wsupress .wayne. edu C ontents Foreword by Barry Keith Grant vii Preface by Richard Lippe: The Journey from Psycho to The American Nightmare; or, Why Should We Take the Horror Film Seriously? xi Psychoanalysis of Psycho 3 In Memoriam: Michael Reeves 11 The Shadow Worlds of Jacques Tourneur 25 Disreputable Genre 41 The Creeping Flesh 43 Blood Brides 45 You’ll Like My Mother 47 Death Line (Raw Meat) 49 The Most Horrible Horror Film Ever? 53 Return of the Repressed 57 Yet Another Terrible Child 63 Race with the Devil 67 An Introduction to the American Horror Film 73 Der Erlkönig: The Ambiguities of Horror 111 The Dark Mirror: Murnau’s Nosferatu 119 Sisters 133 World of Gods and Monsters: The Films of Larry Cohen 141 Apocalypse Now: Notes on the Living Dead 161 The American Family Comedy: From Meet Me in St. Louis to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 171 Neglected Nightmares 181 “Art” and Alligators 201 Burying the Undead: The Use and Obsolescence of Count Dracula 205 Returning the Look: Eyes of a Stranger 221 Cronenberg: A Dissenting View 231 King Meets Cronenberg 253 John Carpenter 259 Dead End 261 Cat and Dog: Lewis Teague’s Stephen King Movies 265 Notes for a Reading of I Walked with a Zombie 281 The Woman’s Nightmare: Masculinity in Day of the Dead 319 Larry Cohen Interview (Robin Wood and Richard Lippe) 331 Nosferatu 361 The Silence of the Lambs 365 Brian De Palma 369 George Romero 373 Fresh Meat: Diary of the Dead 377 Revenge Is Sweet: The Bitterness of Audition 385 What Lies Beneath? 399 Notes 407 Acknowledgments 415 Index 421 vi - Contents F oreword In September 1979 Robin Wood and Richard Lippe programmed a series of sixty horror films for the Festival of Festivals (now known as the Toronto International Film Festival). To accompany the screenings, Wood and Lippe invited several of the filmmakers whose works were included— George Romero, David Cronenberg, Wes Craven, and Stephanie Rothman among them— for introductory discussions and postscreening Q&As. They also assembled a small book of essays on the horror film entitled The American Nightmare: Essays on the Horror Film. Sold at the screenings, this slim volume of twelve essays of varying length included two by coeditor Lippe, three by Andrew Britton (all reprinted in Britton on Film: The Collected Film Criticism of Andrew Britton, also published by Wayne State University Press), and an important piece on John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 by Tony Williams. The other half, including the longest and most influential essay, “An Introduc- tion to the American Horror Film,” were by Robin Wood. The American Nightmare was the first serious collection of critical writing on the horror genre (it preceded my own Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film by five years), and it has inspired numerous volumes since. This little book (it was fewer than one hundred pages), now a collector’s item, went on to become extraordinarily influential, fueling the wave of academic and popular writing on the horror film that followed. Its confluence of Marxist and Freudian theory provided critics with an exceedingly useful and flexible concept that opened the way to explain so much about the horror genre. Within Hollywood cinema, beginning in the late 1960s during the period known as the New Hollywood, all the popular genres were revisited by a gen- eration of younger filmmakers, many of whom had studied film history. These “movie brats,” including Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, George Lucas, and Francis Coppola, among others, brought fresh stylistic approaches and ideological self- awareness to their genre movies, as did Robert Altman. The Western’s ideology was deconstructed, and since then it has never recovered its once- undisputed place as the dominant genre of the studio system (although the genre is not “dead” as some have claimed). And even though horror films have continued to be churned out with consistency, that genre, like the Western, experienced a great but temporary rethinking at the time, with the work of such filmmakers as George Romero, John Carpenter, Wes Craven, Tobe Hooper, and Brian De Palma. Responding to this remarkable resurgence of the horror film was The American Nightmare. In “An Introduction to the American Horror Film” Wood offered his ideas of the monster as represent- ing a “return of the repressed” and the tripartite structure of the horror film (normality, monster, and the relation between them). These ideas have since become basic tenets of our critical understanding of horror. Anyone writing about the horror film since then has been obliged to take Wood’s model into account, whether to demonstrate it, critique it, or break with it. In the 1960s and ’70s, when film studies was emerging as a legitimate field of scholarship and criticism and coalescing as an academic discipline within universities, genre studies were few and far between in the academic and schol- arly literature. The general attitude was that European art cinema and exper- imental film were appropriate areas for serious discussion, but for the most part, genre films were popular cinema, too lowbrow to take seriously as film art. Genre films might be of some sociological interest but did not constitute “Cinema.” In fact, the presence of conventions, a crucial component of genre films, worked against them. They were the opposite of art cinema wherein, as David Bordwell and others have pointed out, authorial flourishes and ambigu- ity were accepted and expected. Popular films clearly provided pleasure, which was regarded with suspicion as a manipulative tool of dominant ideology. It was fine to comment on lowbrow films, as Jean- Luc Godard did in Breath- less (1959)—t he film was dedicated to Monogram Pictures, a “Poverty Row” studio known for its B Westerns and mysteries— but not actually to devote oneself to the study of those films. They were, in the words of the magazine Film Comment, “guilty pleasures,” and that journal dutifully provided a regular forum for filmmakers and critics to confess their sins. (It is no coincidence that Wood would excoriate the very concept of “guilty pleasures,” as he does in the essay “What Lies Beneath?”) Today, of course, the situation has changed, viii - Foreword and the opposite is true. Books on film genres and genre films proliferate, with more devoted to horror and science fiction than any other, and most authors do not feel obliged to justify the seriousness of examining these genres. In the late 1970s a few scholars were taking the study of genre seriously—S tuart Kaminsky, Will Wright, and Steve Neale most notably—b ut more than any other critic, Robin Wood contributed to this turnaround regarding horror. Despite the enormous influence of “An Introduction to the American Horror Film” on subsequent critical thinking about the genre, it might seem that Wood’s interest in horror was peripheral to his larger work— his more well- known series of early auteur studies in the 1960s on Alfred Hitchcock, Ingmar Bergman, and others, and then his later projects involving ideological critique of Hollywood cinema and Western culture more generally. But, in fact, and as this collection shows, Wood, one of our foremost critics of the cinema, had a sustained critical interest in horror that spanned his entire career and brought together his parallel interests in (to borrow the title of another of his well- known essays) ideology, genre, and auteurism. No matter how one views the consistencies (or contrasts) of interest and emphasis in Wood’s early and later writing, he never wavered from taking the horror genre seriously. Given its scattered publication in widely diverse publications, this important body of work demanded to be collected in one volume. The present collection contains all of Wood’s writings from The American Nightmare and most everything else he wrote over the years on horror, gathered together for the first time. It begins with the first essay Wood published in a film journal, “Psychoanalysis of Psycho,” which appeared in Cahiers du cinéma (after it was rejected by Sight and Sound) in 1960, before that series of remarkable mono- graphs on directors mentioned above. In this early essay one already sees ideas that would be worked through with greater depth in the landmark Hitchcock’s Films a few years later. And the collection ends, fittingly, with one of Wood’s last essays, “What Lies Beneath?,” written almost a half century later, in which he reflects on the state of the horror film and horror film criticism since the genre’s renaissance in the 1970s. In between are all the remaining essays, reviews, and interviews that Wood wrote on horror over a span of half a century. Wayne State University Press was working with Wood to revise and reissue his classic early books on important film directors. Before his death in 2009, Foreword - ix