1970s: Sexual Hangups and Schlock

With the demise of the Production Code of America in 1964, and the financial successes of the low-budget gore films churned out in the ensuing years, plus an increasing public fascination with the occult, the genre was able to be reshaped by a series of intense, often gory horror movies with sexual overtones, made as "A-movies" (as opposed to "B-movies").

Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby (1968) was a critical and popular success, and a precursor to the 1970s occult explosion, which included The Exorcist (1973) (directed by William Friedkin and written by William Peter Blatty, who also wrote the novel), and scores of other horror films in which the Devil became the supernatural evil, often by impregnating women or possessing children.

Evil children and reincarnation became popular subjects (such as Robert Wise's 1977 United Artists film Audrey Rose, which dealt with a man who claims his daughter is the reincarnation of another dead person). Being by doctrine invincible to solely human intervention, Satan-villained films also cemented the relationship between horror film genre, postmodern style and a dystopian worldview.

The "new age" ideas of the 1960s hippies began to influence horror films, as the youth previously involved in the counterculture began exploring the medium of film. Wes Craven's The Last House on the Left (1972) and Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) both pushed comfortable liberal boundaries to the edge; George Romero examined the rise of the new consumer society in his 1978 zombie sequel, Dawn of the Dead; Canadian director David Cronenberg updated the "mad scientist" movie subgenre by exploring contemporary fears about technology and society, and reinventing the "body horror" genre, starting with Shivers (1975).

Also in the 1970s, horror author Stephen King, a child of the 1960s, first came on the film scene. Adaptations of many of his books came to be filmed for the screen, beginning with Brian DePalma's adaptation of King's first published novel, Carrie (1976), which went on to be nominated for Academy Awards, although it has often been noted that its appeal was more for its psychological exploration as for its capacity to scare.

And John Carpenter, who had previously directed stoner comedy Dark Star (1973), created the hit Halloween (1978), introducing the teens-threatened-by-superhuman-evil theme, and kick-starting the "slasher film" genre. This genre would be mined in dozens of increasingly violent movies throughout the 1980s.

1979's Alien combined the naturalistic acting and graphic violence of the 1970s with the monster movie plots of earlier decades, and re-acquainted the horror film with the science fiction genre. It spawned a long-lasting franchise, and countless imitators, overs the next 30 years.

At the same time, there was an explosion of horror films in Europe, particularly from the hands of Italian filmmakers like Mario Bava, Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci, and Spanish filmmakers like Jacinto Molina (aka Paul Naschy) and Jesus Franco, which were dubbed into English and filled drive-in theaters that could not necessarily afford the expensive rental contracts of the major American producers.

These films generally featured more traditional horror subjects - e.g. vampires, werewolves, psycho-killers, demons, zombies - but treated with a distinctive European style that included copious gore and sexuality (of which mainstream American producers overall were still a little skittish). Notable national outputs were the "giallo" genre from Italy, the Jean Rollin romantic/erotic films from France, and the anthology films of Amicus from the UK.

The sexual revolution and the first broadcast images from Vietnam saw audiences raise their tolerance for gore and sex in the horror of the '60s (most notably in the then-shocking "Psycho" and the blood-drenched, bust-heaving works coming out of Hammer Films). But the genre's next great heyday came in the '70s. Recession, a gas crisis, the threat of terrorism and images from a protracted conflict abroad (sound familiar?) gave moviegoers a taste for gritty, unflinching indie scares.

 "When you talk about all the filmmakers who made all of the classic stuff in the '70s, like Tobe Hooper, Wes Craven, John Carpenter, they always reference all the horrible images that you saw for the first time on TV from Vietnam. That had a big impact on those films, because those films were so real," Zombie said.

 'Last House on the Left' was very much ... if not a protest against Vietnam, certainly a reflection of the anguish, and the shock at the horror of it," Craven said of his 1972 horror debut.

 "I think in the '70s there were a bunch of us who were angry, who grew up in the '60s and were pissed off we couldn't change the world," Romero recalled. "I think that the anger in some of us came out of that."

The only true fantasy film in the 1970s was The Seven Faces of Dr. Lao. With Raiders of the Lost Ark, a fantasy explosion began which continues into the Twenty-first Century.