How did the 1960s youth movement influence horror films?

Answer 1

Hitch-hiking and drugs were extremely popular in the 60's, and many 60's Horror flicks were meant to either scare the youth out of doing either, or to warn them of possible outcomes of either. Around the 60's, a few years after the Baby Boom, everyone was also casually sleeping around, and movies like The Omen and Rosemary's Baby helped to scare people into considering that as well.

Answer 2

A growing interest in horror among young people—what horror film historian David J. Skal calls “monster culture”—arose in the 1960s for a variety of reasons. One of the most important was the release to television of the classic horror films of the 1930s and 1940s, often hosted by campy ghouls like Vampira and Zacherle. This trend began in the late 1950s and continued throughout the next two decades (at least until the development of cable TV and VCRs started to change the way that fans accessed horror films). “Monster culture” also included publications like Famous Monsters of Filmland and The Monster Times, Aurora monster model kits, top-ten hits like “The Monster MASH,” and a deluge of toys, games, trading cards, etc., many of them themed around Universal’s classic monsters, including Dracula, the Wolf Man, and Frankenstein’s monster.

In a way, this familiarization with and re-appropriation of the classic monsters made room for new monsters like Norman Bates (Psycho [1960]), flesh-eating Zombies (Night of the Living Dead [1968]), and people possessed by demons (The Exorcist). These new monsters were far more gory and realistic than those of the classical era, and thus historians often speak of American horror in terms of its classical phase (roughly the 1930s-1960), and its more realist or postmodern phase (the 1960s and onward). One film that exemplifies this shift brilliantly is Peter Bogdanovich Targets (1968), in which Boris Karloff plays an aging horror movie star (not unlike himself) whose type of horror is slowly being replaced by more modern forms, in this case a random serial killer with a shotgun.