Shock Value

Friedkin refused to produce a remake, but in 2000, he agreed to rerelease the original movie with ten minutes of cuts restored that added the explanation of why the devil haunted that house. What was a story filled with ambiguity and mystery became what Blatty had always wanted: a religious morality tale.
Sitting in the backyard of his palatial Maryland home, Blatty smiles like a man who had lost the battle but won the war. He describes the rerelease as a major improvement. “It has a meaning more than a horror show,” he says. “Demons are real.”

In the wake of the success of Alien, O’Bannon became preoccupied with the idea that someone was trying to kidnap him. He stayed out of the public eye and kept photos of his face scarce. With the money he made, he bought a house in Santa Monica, but then spent an extra $75,000 on a security system. His gun collection grew. O’Bannon remained the alienated pessimist, certain of the evil outside his door. If anything, he became even more like the monster in Lovecraft’s “The Outsider,” cloistered in his tower, resentful to the point of rage.

Updating this political argument, he claims that the subtext of movies like Hostel is the anger about the Iraq War

The result was what critic David Edelstein called “torture porn,”

In the 1980s, there were a few serial killers whose motivation was shrouded in mystery in movies like The Stepfather and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. These movies remained cult hits in a time when horror was reaching a mass audience. Just as the killers seemed increasingly ordinary in mainstream horror, the victims in the most popular horror movies became completely interchangeable, forgettable blank slates. This shifted the audience identification radically. People rooted for the killers and saw their victims as irrelevant casualties.

Many people also love horror movies precisely because they want to see the same conventions over and over again. The ritual is what satisfies.

In “Trash, Art, and the Movies,” her most fully articulated statement of aesthetic principles, published only a few months after Night of the Living Dead opened, she argued that when you are young you can find something to enjoy in almost any movie. Once you have seen the same genre conventions many times, however, it becomes more difficult. Her argument builds to an optimistic conclusion as aging audiences then raise their sights to work of greater ambition. “Trash,” she announces in a twist of a final line, “has given us an appetite for art.”

Pauline Kael understood the answer better than any other critic in the era of New Horror, even though she was brutally tough on many of its best movies. She didn’t like Rosemary’s Baby or The Exorcist, referred to Alien as a “haunted-house with gorilla picture set in outer space,” and insulted Halloween as a movie “stripped of everything but dumb scariness.” She also described the camerawork of The Shining as “like watching a skater do figure eights all night.”
It’s a testament to her analytical acuity and masterful style that Kael was the greatest critic of her generation despite serious lapses in taste (she hated The Birds and loved The Exorcist II).

I remember Ron telling me about coffee enemas once, that it would clean out your system. You know: science-fiction writers!”

The story shared the outer space exploration plot with the fifties science-fiction drive-in hit It: The Terror from the Beyond, and also resembled Mario Bava’s Planet of the Vampires. “I don’t steal from anybody,” O’Bannon would often say. “I steal from everybody.” In any event, Alien