If Italian cinema went high-brow with fine style, so too did it go low with head-first zest and no less rigor. If an argument is to be made for the 1960s as a golden age of European cinema, the undernourished portion of the claim is genre cinema. Not that genre cinema was at a low during the ’60s. Why in France alone we had Clouzot doing an all-time Hitchcock impersonation even as he ushered action cinema to the next level, Franju giving us grisly, poetically classy horror, Melville abstracting crime thrillers to their icy, cosmic cores, and even Godard and Truffaut dipping their toes in the water with their playful noir pastiches Bande a Part and Shoot the Piano Player, respectively.
But the crown jewel of ’60s European genre cinema cannot but be Italian cinema. The elephant in the room is Sergio Leone, elevating the Western by drawing out its cartoon core and emphasizing tactile feel over all else. Deeper still, however, we have a treasure trove of that most unholy of film genres: horror. Giallo would come in full force with the arrival of the glistening crimson reds and sickly yellows of the ’70s, but the ’60s saw no shortage of pristine, pitch-black Italian horrors, most of them admittedly directed by the master of the form: Mario Bava. Most famous for his color-first lurid later cinema that re-propositioned horror as a ballet of human motion and painted-on color, Bava got his start much earlier than we usually assume. In fact, his first film, and arguably his greatest, is a chiaroscuro masterwork fresh from the grave, a Hammer Horror pastiche that beat Hammer at its own game. I speak of course of the fiery death-drive of Bava’s Black Sunday.
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Sometimes it’s the simple things that pay off most readily, you know? A few non-actors. A cabin Woods. Two dozen buckets of cinematic fury and might. A story that can be summed up as “those non-actors in that cabin face off against those two dozen buckets of cinematic fury and might and have their asses handed to them”. Thus is Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead II, such a simple and elegant horror film it doesn’t need to explicate a damn thing. There’s a book. It unlocks some demons. And it’s in a cabin. Why does the book do this, and what are its limits? Who cares. All that matters is that it is the most direct and unworried clothesline upon which Sam Raimi can absolutely tear not one but two genres a new one, and tear down the whole idea of genre as a construct in doing so.
Updated June 2016
It is not a new or interesting point that slasher, and by proxy horror, filmmaking was in a rut in the mid 1980s. The slasher genre had reinvigorated American horror briefly (extremely briefly, like maybe for a year or two) in the late ’70s and early ’80s by incorporating Italian giallo bloodletting into the mix, but the well went dry before anyone could say “blood geyser coming out of a bed and onto the ceiling”. Luckily, long-lost grubby horror maestro Wes Craven (what a last name for a horror film director) – who had shepherded cinema’s most distraught, devilish Bergman remake ever (Last House on the Left) and the latter grotesque haunt The Hills Have Eyes – was looking to have a little fun with the genre, and the stars had finally aligned after years of wallowing in semi-obscurity.
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I apologize for the temporary absence of the weekly Midnight Screening from this blog for the better part of the month of November. I was too busy elsewhere and found myself too distracted with other reviews. I justified it to myself by reminding myself I had published three full length reviews instead of the usual one for the final week of October, but, seeing as I didn’t tell you all playing at home about this, that’s not an excuse. I’ll try to be better about staying consistent and giving a heads-up when things are to change. On the positive side, I can’t think of a better film to re-start the series with than this week’s entry. Consider it an apology. Enjoy.
Carrie
Science fiction was in vogue in the late ’70s, largely due to the success of George Lucas’ Star Wars, which kick-started perhaps the greatest popular revolution in American film history and drove the medium to new commercial heights. Of course, it saw mixed results for the art-form: a rebirth of genre filmmaking married to the deadening and eventual end of the New Hollywood drama which had married classical themes to European New Wave modes of storytelling to brilliant effect and which, in fact, made American film interesting after a long drop-off in the ’60s. After Star Wars, many studios grew less interested in drama and shifted toward pop commercialism, aiming for big, big, and bigger at the expense of nuance.
The Long Take 