Today we continue our chat with author Jason Zinoman, who discusses the writing of his Penguin Press hardcover book SHOCK VALUE, subtitled HOW A FEW ECCENTRIC OUTSIDERS GAVE US NIGHTMARES, CONQUERED HOLLYWOOD, AND INVENTED MODERN HORROR. See part one here. 

FANGORIA: Today we hear about rewrites and filmmakers’ ideas being prematurely disrupted along the way on projects. Studios see more reason to meddle now in these things, where they might not have in the period you address.

JASON ZINOMAN: Right. Another theme of the book in terms of the reporting of it, is the book believes in the auteur theory, that you need to look closely at these directors to understand the movies—but it also doesn’t believe the auteur theory is completely sufficient. These movies were collaborative efforts. Tobe Hooper had a lot of help on TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, William Friedkin on THE EXORCIST… What I tried to do with these movies with what I discovered is that behind every one of them is a conflict, an argument between two or more artists or traditions. People tend to think that great art is the result of one artist achieving their vision. What I discovered is that a lot of the great art in the horror genre came out of the clash of two competing visions, which resulted in compromises, and in some cases the compromised vision turned out to be better than the original version.

So there are things about the commercial aspect of making movies, which are terrible, but there are some things that make these movies better. The reason John Carpenter says he made the music for HALLOWEEN was because he [couldn’t] afford another person. If he’s being honest, I don’t know. But he ended up making an incredibly brilliant musical score that ended up influencing many movies. Tobe Hooper worked out the plot of his movie with Kim Henkel. Dan O’Bannon didn’t get much credit at all for ALIEN, but the key decisions of that movie that made it great were as much his doing, or more so than the director’s. So the auteur theory can help explain, but it can also obscure the truth of these movies.

FANG: You mentioned O’Bannon and his role in cultivating ALIEN; the concept of the creature itself and the anxieties it elicits are purely his doing.

ZINOMAN: That’s right.

FANG: You detail it at length, but could you talk a bit about what you dub “the monster problem,” as you understand it?

ZINOMAN: Yeah. This, to me, was the great challenge of all these movies. This is not a new idea, but that the scariest thing in the world is the unknown, which H.P. Lovecraft pointed out, among others. Then, the challenge of the horror movie is that the audience wants to see the monster, either literally or figuratively. The problem is, once you see the monster, an element of the unknown is lost. So the audience wants to see the monster, but often at the climax, when they do, they’re disappointed. That’s where I came to the term “the monster problem.” That was the central problem, and still one of the central problems in horror movies. In the period that I look at, every single one of these films provides a brilliant answer to that problem, with different answers. The pinnacle to why they’re great is the ingenious way that they solve the monster problem.

In the case of HALLOWEEN, John Carpenter built this killer who you see, he’s on the screen, in person. But he has absolutely no psychology. No motivation you can tell. He moves in this way that seems a little like a ghost, but he’s not a ghost. He’s somewhere between a ghost and not. And this is what Carpenter intended, that he is something of an absence of a character. So that, on screen you see him, but he preserves a sense of mystery and the unknown. And that to me is the great innovation of [the film], and that solved the monster problem.

ALIEN is interesting, in that it’s one of the few movies where the idea that seeing the monster is the anticlimax breaks down. The chestburster scene, I’ve seen it hundreds of times, and it’s one of the few monster appearances that’s still amazing and still powerful. There’s many reasons for it, but there are two kinds of fear that he’s working on. One is the sort of suspense, misdirection, the Hitchcockian thing. But what’s great about O’Bannon, he also appreciates the power of disgust and repulsion and gore, and that sort of stickier, more disgusting thing, and he tapped into it with this kind of childbirth-type thing in the context of a man. It’s also in between; it’s very mechanical and hi-tech, but also sexual and human. There’s the sense that it’s hard to put into a neat category, which makes it elusive and gets it around the monster problem.

FANG: There’s also the flipside. In the case of Romero, the solution to the monster problem was achieved inadvertently. People saw NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD as a political allegory, but he just thought he was making a monster movie…

ZINOMAN: Right, right [laughs]. That’s one of the great things about the genre. The fans really deserve a lot of the credit. The reason for every zombie movie he made since NIGHT is because of fans. And critics, but mainly fans. It was unusual to see this black protagonist as a survivor figure, and they read all this critical meaning to it, and it actually opened Romero’s eyes. So when he made DAWN OF THE DEAD, he thought…

FANG: Now I’m actually really gonna work in this stuff [laughs]…

ZINOMAN: Yeah, exactly! And he owes that debt to horror fans. There’s this dialogue between people who make horror and people who consume it that has produced great things. Too often there’s the [perception] that if you’re thinking about the audience too much, you’re pandering. But in the case of Romero, responding to what the audience saw in that movie made him more artistically ambitious. It is possible to adapt your movies to pander to your audience in a way that’s crappy and cynical, but in this case, keeping a dialogue not improved his career, but made him deep in his vision. Not only credit goes to the fans, but to the alternative horror press back in the day, for treating these movies seriously in a way the mainstream press did not.

FANG: What of modern and postmodern horror? Are the recent resurgence of remakes a sign of decline, or is there hope to be found in those for you?

ZINOMAN: There’s a lot of hope, actually. The quantity, there’s so much more. It’s an exciting time for horror. There’s fewer truly inspired masterpieces. And to some extent, time will tell, but my view as a critic is that now there’s more good horror, less great horror. I’m trying to work on a story right now to sort of defend the remake a little bit. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the idea of remakes. Carpenter’s THE THING is a great movie. Cronenberg’s THE FLY is a great movie. But I think there’s a sense with a lot of the remakes today that they’re just trying to do the same movie with a higher budget, and glossier-there doesn’t seem to be a point of view behind it.

But what’s exciting today is that you have both big Hollywood horror, which is generally not in a golden age, but then you have this huge world outside of that, of low-budget horror, of horror on television, which is often quite good. And then you have in some ways the true inheritors of the legacy of the horror of the 1970s, in mainstream Hollywood art films. If you look at BLACK SWAN, the Coen brothers’ movie A SERIOUS MAN… It’s clear to me that those filmmakers grew up watching Brian De Palma, John Carpenter. NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, the killer in that is essentially the same as Michael Myers. The kind of ambiguity, the sort of mystery we’ve been talking about, the Coen brothers employ. Clearly BLACK SWAN is playing games with voyeurism and the blurring of the line between fantasy and reality that De Palma and Polanski pioneered. So it’s interesting when you see some of those ambitious horror movies, although not all would call them that. I didn’t love SUPER 8, but I liked it—most people talk about it being an homage to Spielberg, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, E.T. To me, it’s just as much an homage to Romero and Carpenter.

FANG: Well, that “Romero Plant” nod couldn’t be any more on-the-nose.

ZINOMAN: The guys who casted clearly spent a lot of time studying photos of the people making NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. The kid who plays the director is wearing a shirt that’s in pictures that Romero wore from the ’60s. There is that tension in tone between sort of E.T. and HALLOWEEN, to say the least. It’s a movie-lovers’ movie, and I’m watching it and noticing the different references and tones, but I’m watching it and wondering, “Do all these different elements fit well together?” I’m not quite sure I know.

FANG: You touch on this rift in discourse that’s been going on between Splat Pack and provocateur types, and the reactions of the generation of filmmakers you cover in the book; Craven found room to praise something like HOSTEL, while Romero knee-jerked it. Do you subscribe to critical terms like “torture porn”?

ZINOMAN: “Torture porn” was a term coined by David Edelstein, and like any term, it simplifies. It’s greater purpose is to simplify. I think we should give movies like HOSTEL the benefit of the doubt just like people gave NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD the benefit of the doubt. It doesn’t really matter to me that Romero didn’t intend to make a movie about civil rights, and it doesn’t really matter to me whether or not Eli Roth was making a movie about torture. But it’s echoed in the movie. A lot of these movies that are called torture porn I love. Horror needs to always be pushing the envelope a little bit. I don’t like it when horror gets too safe, gets too respectable. So these movies like HUMAN CENTIPEDE, SERBIAN FILM, it’s important to have these movies that still upset people and may or may not be unethical.

And it’s actually good for horror to have some of these elder statesmen kind of dismiss these movies. It shows that horror’s still vital and daring and willing to take risks. I wouldn’t want a horror genre where the older characters in the genre have too much respect for the younger characters. You’ve gotta kill your father at some point [laughs]. If anything, the problem I see with horror is that the younger filmmakers have too much respect for the older ones. In some ways they’ve become too meta, too much homage. But generally speaking, the phrase “torture porn,” it’s not a helpful term. Maybe 10 years ago it would describe things in a way that made sense.

But is HUMAN CENTIPEDE torture porn? I don’t know. What’s a slasher movie? How do you define porn? A lot of people use “torture porn” as a synonym for “bad” [laughs], and a way to dismiss it. If you’re going to use the term to dismiss something like SAW because you didn’t like it, then that’s not useful; SAW is a lot better than that. If you use it as a descriptive term, about what it “is,” and people can disagree about it, that is perfectly fine.

FANG: Any upcoming projects in the works?

ZINOMAN: I have a couple of ideas. I’m at the Times, so I’ll be doing that, and I have ideas for another book. But I’ll tell you, it’s exhausting. It’s a lot of work [laughs]. It takes a long time to write. The reason I was able to finish this book, is at the end of the day, I love horror movies, and I’m perfectly happy to spend years and years and years watching movies and talking to people about them. I have an idea that I was into, some big stories that I was reporting on Cirque de Soleis that I wanted to write. But at the end of the day, I can’t justify spending four years of my life on something I’m not as passionate about as I am in horror. So I think I’m gonna wait till I can’t find something else before I jump into another book that I’m really passionate about. Meanwhile, I’m still covering theater, which I enjoy, and film. I alsos may write a movie. After spending three or four years talking to all these great directors, it gives you some great ideas about what could make a good horror movie. So it’s something I could try to do, just write a low-budget horror movie. So that’s one idea I had when the book comes out and I sort of finish with that—to take time off. Maybe nothing comes of it, but I think it could be fun.

See our review of SHOCK VALUE in Fango #305, now on sale.

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