The American Nightmare

How do filmmakers address a modern world in which gore and inhuman violence are the stuff of the nightly news? Adam Simon's documentary argues that for a generation of filmmakers, horror films were the logical extension of Vietnam, the political assassinations of the 1960s, and modernity run amuck. Beginning with George Romero's Night of the Living Dead and stretching through The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Shivers, and Halloween, among other films, The American Nightmare offers an auteurist perspective on some of the finest horror films ever crafted. Interviews with Romero, Tobe Hooper, Tom Savini, and particularly Wes Craven and David Cronenberg (who is, in fact, a Canadian director), offer ample evidence that the architects of these bloody, sexually deviant, and often subversive films are some of the smartest filmmakers working in Hollywood. Backed by film scholars including Tom Gunning and Carol Clover, the documentary is especially effective in validating Romero's zombie films and Hooper's low budget Leatherface flick, dedicating more than half of its 73-minute running time to two of the Living Dead films and Massacre. In doing so, the survey inevitably comes up short in other areas of analysis, particularly in explaining the shifts in the horror genre as the 1980s began, when horror became synonymous with slasher films of decreasing value. Still, there is much food for thought (as well as for cannibals) here. Recommended. (D. Fienberg)