The American Nightmare

• Director: Adam Simon
• AMG Rating:
• Genre: History
• Movie Type: Media Studies, Film & Television History
• Themes: Filmmaking, Political Unrest
• Main Cast: George A. Romero, John Carpenter, Tom Savini, David Cronenberg, Wes Craven
• Release Year: 2000
• Country: US
• Run Time: 73 minutes

Plot

In the late '60s, the tone of American horror films began to shift in the wake of the startling success of George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead -- horror films became gorier, bleaker, and began to subtly reflect the political and social upheaval gripping the country. Through the '70s and '80s, films like Last House on the Left, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Halloween held a distorted mirror up to American culture, reflecting its fear and chaos in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate. The American Nightmare is a documentary that looks at the transgressive horror films of the '60s and '70s and the people who made them. Directors Wes Craven, Tobe Hooper, and David Cronenberg, special effects man Tom Savini, and film critics Tom Gunning and Adam Lowenstein are among those interviewed by director Adam Simon. The American Nightmare was produced for the premium cable outlet The Independent Film Channel. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Review

Unlike 1984's Terror in the Aisles, which merely strung together the money shots from a wide variety of horror films, the documentary The American Nightmare takes a specific subset of this enduring genre and convincingly argues a case about its historical context and sociological significance. Director Adam Simon's method of interspersing clips from the transgressive North American horror films of the '60s and '70s with footage of Vietnam, the Ku Klux Klan, political assassinations, and other world events may grow wearying over the course of 75 minutes, but the stylistic overlap between the powerful images, both real and imagined, brings Simon's arguments vividly to life. Candid interviews with scholars and the maverick directors whose personal visions fuelled these films seem to support Simon's horror-flick-as-social-commentary thesis; perhaps a little more give and take with the "it's just a movie" school would have provided balance. The tendency of 1950s horror movies to reflect anxieties about the Cold War and the nuclear bomb is similarly neglected, perhaps to make the director's argument about the uniqueness of the later films seem more forceful. Such quibbles aside, however, The American Nightmare offers an appealing mixture of meticulous research, historical anecdote, and twisted humor. ~ Brian J. Dillard, All Movie Guide

Cast

• George A. Romero
• John Carpenter
• Tom Savini
• David Cronenberg
• Wes Craven

Tobe Hooper; John Landis

Credit

Eliza Mellor - Associate Producer, Adam Simon - Director, Paul Carlin - Editor, Caroline Kaplan - Executive Producer, Colin MacCabe - Producer, Paula Jalfon - Producer, Jonathan Sehring - Producer, John Quinn - Sound/Sound Designer, Adam Simon - Screenwriter

Similar Movies

Schlock! The Secret History of American Movies; Masters of Horror; Dario Argento's World of Horror; John Carpenter: Fear is Just the Beginning... The Man and His Movies; Horror Business