![]() ![]() He gets the what and the who, but the why and the how elude him in a book that struggles to bring the larger picture into focus. ![]() ![]() Something clearly has happened here, and Jason Zinoman’s “Shock Value” aims to tell us the what, the who, the why and the how. Serial-killer thrillers like “The Silence of the Lambs” and “No Country for Old Men” win Academy Awards while the torture-porn of movies like “The Human Centipede” and “Hostel” makes the old grind-house screamers look virginal. Zombies, vampires and wolf men have conquered the best-seller lists, movie screens and the prime-time schedule. Today, of course, popular culture bleeds from every pore. Time magazine’s cover story on “Jaws” ran 3,300 words, and not one of them was “horror.” By 1975 a scary movie was called by any other name. The collapse of the studio system, the aging of its stars, the decline of Grade-A monster movies like 1931’s “Frankenstein” into rubber-suit rip-offs aimed at the teenage trade - all were stakes driven into a once vibrant genre. As a cultural commodity that got any respect, the horror movie was dead by the early 1970s. ![]()
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