It isn't only a movie

In Adam Simon’s The American Nightmare horror films from the 1960’s and 70’s are discussed in their relation to sociopolitical struggles of the time. Right from the start Simon does a brilliant job of cross cutting real life news media images and fictional clips from horror films. The shots are so similar you can barely tell what’s the news and what’s just a movie. The documentary includes interviews with classic terrifying directors George Romero, Wes Craven, David Cronenberg, John Carpenter, and other writers and scholars in the horror media field. If anyone wants an insight on the relationship between societal fears and fantastical horror films this documentary delivers.

The main theme addressed in Nightmare is society’s deep-rooted terrors unleashed on the big screen, which gives us both a sense of pain and joy. I think an interesting point they made was the fascination viewers have with wanting to go behind that door to see the monster. The monster intrigues us because it is a human just like us. So in this society do we become either victim or victor of the American dream? One professor interviewed states that we teeter on a thin line between pain and relief because pain is an inevitable part of the social experience. The connection between society and body is unbreakable allowing us to always find something relevant to our unconscious fears. Cronenberg believes that you can’t get body without society and society without body. He made an interesting point about society’s battle to repress our innate nature, and this is where we find our struggle with pain and relief, with society and psychosis.

An interesting topic a couple of the directors brought up was reintroducing our infantile fears. The idea of being eaten is a major fear that we actually become familiarized with when we are just babies. Adults coo over little babies nibbling at their toes saying, “oh you’re so cute I could just eat you up.” They also reference the scene in Texas Chainsaw Massacre where they tease her to the point of tears and then mock her cries. The directors pluck at the ingrained fears from our childhood that we then relate to our current and much more broad struggles in our contemporary life. It isn't only a movie when it shows reflections of our real life societal concerns, revealing something much deeper.