Why the 1970s Was Horror's Greatest Decade

Wed, 24 Jan 2024 13:00:00 +0000

Pick a decade and try to match the run. Between 1970 and 1979 horror produced The Exorcist, The Wicker Man, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Don’t Look Now, Jaws, Carrie, The Omen, Suspiria, Halloween, Dawn of the Dead and Alien, with Night of the Living Dead sitting just over the line in 1968 as the opening shot. That is not a good decade for a genre. That is the genre’s high-water mark, the ten years against which everything before and since gets measured, and the concentration of masterpieces is dense enough to demand an explanation. It was not luck. A specific set of forces converged in the 1970s to make horror briefly the most serious and dangerous cinema in the world, and understanding those forces explains both why it happened and why it has proved so hard to repeat.

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Why the 1970s Was Horror's Greatest Decade