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movie, the best horror movie, can take you far beyond: it can take you to a place you’ve never been, a shadowy chamber of the mind outside of your worldly experience, with story twists and turns that will make you squirm until the lights come on and you emerge victoriously from your two hours in the dark. A great horror movie can be a revelatory experience.

A great way to take society’s pulse is through the arts and entertainment of the time. And the horror film makes a great thermometer. As I intend to examine in this study, a national or global health is particularly well represented by its fright films. At times of political upheaval, war, depression and recession, the horror cycle runs to a particular high. Adam Simon’s remarkable documentary, The American Nightmare, about the horror boom of the 1970s arising out of the international upheaval that surrounded the war in Vietnam. Is a terrific examination of how one relates to the other.

But as we close in on the end of the new millennium’s first decade, we find ourselves in another long-lasting terror boom in a post 9/11 world. Obviously, most of these films are not artistic reflections of social strife, or the primal screams of the mad artist who paints in blood. As they have, with everything else that makes money, the corporate kings have co-opted the popular cycle on their own terms. Where brilliant artists contribute excellent and exciting new ventures, the screens are also littered with the latest iterations of franchises nobody asks for, but are easy to market. In recent years, its been far easier for an industry that isn’t interested in or has any understanding of the horror genre to take familiar titles, and remake and sequelise them until the law of diminishing returns proves itself, and they move on to the next title.

There are great horror films being made today amidst the dross. But it’s not quality that’s being discussed here, though it obviously plays a part. It’s that there is a new and ravening audience for the spilling of blood. Again, there’s nothing new about this: filmgoers filled the cinemas during the Depression to see the Frankenstein monster toss an innocent little girl into the pond, to see Count Dracula sup on the blood of lovely blondes; during World War II, Frankenstein’s monster met everyone from the Wolf Man to Abbott and Costello, and Universal cranked out one monster fest after another, while a quiet, well-real producer named Val Lewton churned out intelligent, atmospheric shockers for RKO; in the 1950s, when the Cold War and Air Raid duck-and-cover drills were the order of the day, nuclear tests gave birth to the giant ants of Them, the humungous grasshoppers of The Beginning of the End, and the radioactivity-breathing Japanese dragon beast of Godzilla; the early sixties turned internal, with human monsters like Norman Bates infesting our souls and killing on behalf of the sexual battle within the newly blossoming psychological terror train; the Vietnamese apocalypses were brutal, fed as they were by nightly news imagery of burning bodies and human torture, in a toe-in-the-water test of loosening censorship that led to a free-for-all; the eighties were all about cheap: no stars, gore effects and creative kills being the entire raison d’être for a horror film’s existence; the本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。