The Horror: It just won't die...

The Horror: It just won't die...
Friday October 29 - Sunday November 7, ACMI Cinemas
Including meet-the-filmmaker Q & A sessions with special guests Adam Simon (USA), Director, American Nightmare and Martin Murphy (Aus) Director, Lost Things

As the limp remakes of 'Dawn of the Dead' and 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre' hit number one at the US box office, the highly derivative 'House of 1000 Corpses' and '28 Days Later' enjoy huge success and the soon-to-be released zombie spoof Shaun of the Dead settles in for a long run at multiplexes everywhere, ACMI invites you to revisit the times and the films that inspired a thousand sequels, rip-offs and remakes - the 1970s American indie horror boom.

1970s USA was a fertile breeding ground for some of the most bone-chilling nightmarish visions ever committed to screen. It was a time when a group of young maverick directors including Wes Craven, David Cronenberg, Tobe Hooper, George Romero and John Carpenter, produced a series of films that were unparalleled in their uncompromising shock value, grunge aesthetics and daring experiments in style.

Their films are now among the most copied and referenced films ever.

But while these films continue to inspire later generations of filmmakers, the imitators often surface diluted or devoid of the potent cultural references that inspired the originals.

Mainly low budget, independent productions made outside of the Hollywood system, films like 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre', John Carpenter's 'Halloween', 'Last House on the Left' and 'Dawn of the Dead' reflected the American populace's mood of unease and increasing distrust of their fellow man. It was a time of increasing disenchantment of the government in the wake of Watergate and the Vietnam War produced some of the most horrific images ever seen in the mass media.

"In the 1970s, horror films were at their peak because America was itself a horror show," says Bradley P. Guillory in his essay, Stained Lens: Style as a Cultural Signifier in Seventies Horror Films.

"The Vietnam War was in full force; police were shooting Kent State students for exercising their constitutional rights; technology was replacing factory workers, but gasoline was still running low. The American hero of World War II had vanished, and the horror directors of the seventies were compelled to comment on this disappearance. In 'Last House on the Left' (1972), Wes Craven uses a family of criminals symbolically and juxtaposes them with a straight-laced family that tries to escape the new, post-Vietnam America, but the straight-laced family finds that the stain of war and atrocity affects their lives as well. Tobe Hooper created a family of economic degenerates who have resorted to cannibalism in order to survive the technological encroachment into their rural homeland of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Just when Americans thought they were safe from the seventies, John Carpenter's 'Halloween' (1978) appeared with a physical form of evil that reminds us that light cannot exist without darkness."

Coinciding with Halloween, 'The Horror' will give audiences a rare opportunity to experience the original, unforgettable and highly influential horror movies from this period on the big screen in ACMI's state-of-the-art cinemas.

Films to be screened in the program include the original (and the best) 'Texas Chainsaw Massacre' (1974); George Romero's 'The Crazies' (1973) and his later work 'Dawn of the Dead' (1978), a seminal film which merges zombies with a commentary on the darker side of consumerism; 'The Hills Have Eyes' (1977) and 'Last House on the Lef't (1972), two visions of a decaying rural America from horror master Wes Craven; 'It's Alive' (1974) and 'God Told Me To' (1976) by B movie maestro Larry Cohen;


Bob Clark's 'Dead of Night' (1974) and John Carpenter's 'Halloween' (1978), the precursor to the modern 'slasher' genre and one of the most profitable independent films ever made.

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