The American Nightmare

Airdate: October 13, 2000 (exclusive television premiere)

When the term independent film is uttered, what are the first words that usually come to your mind? Art house. Subtitles. Near-zero box office return. Maybe Eric Stoltz. But, what about the horror movie, which is by far the most popular and profitable genre of the indie market? The Independent Film Channel didn't want us to overlook this fact, so they commissioned filmmaker, Adam Simon (Brain Dead, Carnosaur) to make a feature-length documentary about the "Golden Age" of American independent horror films.

George Romero

Inspired by an enormously successful horror retrospective at the 1979 Toronto International Film Festival by the same name, The American Nightmare draws mostly from one-on-one interviews and film clips. It covers the breakthrough films of five horror genre masters -- George Romero (Night of the Living Dead), John Carpenter (Halloween), Tobe Hooper (Texas Chainsaw Massacre), Wes Craven (Last House on the Left) and David Cronenberg (Shivers). In addition to these guys, make-up wizard/stuntman, Tom Savanti, various film scholars, and inexplicably, John Landis (Kentucky Fried Movie!), all provide theories on why we watch these sordid films from behind our hands or pillows and suffer sleepless nights, yet always return back for more.

The goal of this documentary is to figure out where these very carnal and shockingly violent films suddenly came from. The American Nightmare gives us a chronologically structured history lesson: the discrimination of blacks and the civil rights movement, the death of young innocents in the Vietnam War, the fear of nuclear war, and even the sexually-charged days of disco. All of these films are a reflection or interpretation of these turbulent times. The links are there and the filmmakers admit it themselves. Tom Savanti shares some unsettling experiences as an infantryman in Vietnam, where he would study mutilated dead bodies and use them to hone his gore effect skills. Craven acknowledges that the execution style gunshot to the head of the poor girl in Last House on the Left was taken straight from images he saw of the My Lai incident on the 6 o'clock evening news. Myself, I was particularly freaked out by an unrelated, bizarre sequence which juxtaposes the zombie shoppers of Dawn Of the Dead with shots of unsuspecting shoppers from a present-day mall.

Last House on the Left

Unfortunately, this film has some great ideas that are only vaguely touched upon. John Carpenter is tacked on at the end and short-changed with interview time, as was one of the film scholars, Carol Clover, who wrote the popular book, Men, Women and Chainsaws. In this book (which I highly recommend), she challenges many of the simplistic assumptions about the relationship between gender and culture in horror; that slasher films are narratives of women empowering themselves over male antagonists; that horror movies are actually very subversive and ahead of the times. Unfortunately, these don't really have a place in the story that Simon is telling, nor is there enough time to really get into it anyway, so Clover's input seem out of place. The final results of the points that Simon is trying to make end up a bit shapeless and therefore, confusing. I believe that he is certainly onto something, but I wish that he pushed it just a little further rather than cutting back to his comic relief in John Landis (though he does give some great sound bites.).

For me, The American Nightmare makes for disturbing viewing, not so much by showing how our society is really fucked up (Hell, I already knew that!), but for reasons which I'm sure are unintended. Perhaps I feel a bit removed from the issues because I'm not American, I don't know. But at the end of the day, you have to look to the individual. Wes Craven still wrote that sickening rape-torture-revenge film, Last House On the Left (something I just cannot watch, even in brief film excerpts) because, in his own words, he "had a lot of rage in [him] at the time". I don't mean to single out Mr. Craven here, but really, I think that says more about him as a person than how certain world events have shaped him. In real life, some of these filmmakers actually come across as creepy, scary men.

As our editor-in-chief, Sarah, has amusingly pointed out in the past, most genre directors are not particularly attractive. In fact, I'd venture to say that George Romero and John Carpenter are just downright ugly. Now, I realize that you're not looking to watch a documentary on horror movies to feast your eyes on some stud muffin, but... this film is about 75% talking head interviews with severe, unflattering close-ups of their faces. You can literally count Romero's nose hairs. I'd watch cannibalistic zombies over that any day, thank you very much.

All of this is not to say that The American Nightmare isn't worth watching. I think it works better as a good retrospective for film buffs (like an AFI special) rather than an intellectually or emotionally stimulating documentary. In other words, I'd watch it for those John Landis jokes, or to see how Tobe Hooper came up with the idea for Texas Chainsaw Massacre in a Montgomery Ward store; but to watch David Cronenberg analyze his anxieties over venereal disease? Ehhh, no.

In case you haven't already seen them or you want to see them again, IFC will be showing the landmark horror films featured in the documentary (and several more) for the entire month of October, completely uncut and commercial free. Visit the official American Nightmare movie website for their film schedule.

-- Julie Ng

The American Nightmare will air five times during the month of October on IFC: Friday, October 13 at 10:00PM/ET, Thursday, October 19 at 11:30PM/ET, Saturday, October 28 at 10:00PM/ET and Tuesday, October 31 at 10:00PM.

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