The author does take a stab at conventional wisdom when he argues that 'the notion that Hitchcock is the inventor of the modern horror genre is overstated.' In a chapter titled The Problem with The Exorcist isn't a horror movie: 'It won 10 Academy Award nominations,' he tells Zinoman. Rosemary's Baby, while to this day, William Friedkin maintains his rather absurd claim that Last House on the Left) says, 'I didn't even know what horror film was' Roman Polanski was holding his nose throughout the creation of Targets) calls the genre 'dumb' Wes Craven (whose first film was Indeed, Zinoman makes it clear that many of the directors creating these genre-busting films had great disdain for horror. The Exorcist), or exploitation films that wallowed in the trashy excesses the genre allowed for, precisely because it was so often marginalized ( He also fully understands that the films of this period were either class acts with studio budgets that were attempting to yank the genre's reputation from the gutter ( This period, from the late 1960s to early '80s, is 'the greatest golden age of horror.' Fans of the genre will appreciate Zinoman's tone as much as his exhaustive research he has an intense, obvious admiration for horror that is both cerebral and visceral. Targets as some of the pivotal leaps forward, films that would greatly influence later landmarks of the seventies, including Zinoman reaches back to a key moment in American cultural history, and suggests that there were several films that pushed the genre from a stodgy, campy collection of silly clichés, taking them beyond the caricatures of Vincent Price and Boris Karloff and into the frontier of the New Horror.

Shock Value tells the intricate story of several landmark films, and indicates through an eminently readable blend of anecdote, interview and analysis how they changed the course of film history. Shock Value, the new book by Jason Zinoman, gets a ringing endorsement on its jacket from Mark Harris, author of

Shock value by jason zinoman