![]() Note that I've included a selection of alternate titles, as all of these films went under different names in different territories or for repeat releases. Predates the other two I'm going for the Fulcis first. Reviewed here are two from Lucio Fulci and one from Spaniard Jorge (or Jordi, it seems) Grau. Although few made it to our shores intact, enough Exorcist imitations kept the line going. In Italy, the 60s gothics were superceded by kinkier and sexier slasher films. In Spain (repressive Franco Spain, go figure) a mini-renaissance of adult horror began, and not all of itĮxploitative in nature. The strength of that film can be judged by the fact that three unrelated and not particularly similar Euro-horror films were retitled early in the 70s for a triple-bill, all with 'Living Dead' in the title: Fangs of the. The three films reviewed here are Zombie movies, all traceable to George Romero's Zombie original, Night of the Living Dead. Dario Argento picked up the thread begun by Mario Bava in a series of gialli: Murder mysteries where the mystery was far less important than the visual sheen of highly fetishized killings. While low-budget American horror still for the most part tried to appeal to very young audiences and therefore made attempts to avoid grue, imports from Spain and Italy started pouring in, of movies that were clearly artistic in intention but (in their original versions) completely unrestrained in violence and bloodletting. Psycho was given a PG when reissued, as time had made its once-shocking shower killing almost a quaint relic, a model of restraint. After such a shattering scene what movie could keep on going?Īs films like The Exorcist ratcheted up the explicit violence quotient, what the audience was expected to take become rougher. The ending carnage of Bonnie & Clyde was so powerful when new that it had to happen right at the end. When it is portrayed in movies nothing can compete - the story stops and our suspension of disbelief vanishes. ![]() Orson Welles once pontificated that real Sex didn't work in movies because the sex act is so arresting. Why watch ridiculous unconvincing atrocities when westerns like The Wild Bunch were around? Even films like Catch-22 had their moments of gore - the waist-gunner with his guts coming out the man on the raft reduced to a pair of legs spraying blood into the Curiously, in the experimental atmosphere of the early 70s the already marginalized 'gore' film genre pioneered by Herschel Gordon Lewis withered into oblivion. A quality shocker with style and power, it moved the masses the way the high-class horror film Rosemary's Baby never could. ![]() Nothing on the above-ground circuit could touch it. Coming from way out of nowhere, it was released just about everywhere in the next three years. The Night of the Living Dead punched a hole in the ozone of the Horror film in 1968.
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