Author: AS Berman; Design: Pamela Norman. 2009, Bearmanor Media, $19.95.
Aaron Berman paid his dues writing and editing for USA Today, so a snappy style is a given, but what is unexpected - and delightful - about The New Horror Handbook is his deep love of horror films from the last 10 years, and a cogent defense of so-called torture porn movies like the Hostel and Saw series, as well as insights into several other R-Rated films. In short, you'll re-evaluate films and filmmakers you may have dismissed, and learn things you didn't know about films you love.
Berman's thesis is that there is a breed of new horror film that encompasses three tenets: "Aesthetic Appeal", no matter how shocking the images on display, they are shot with style and skill; "An Underlying Message", dig beneath the offal and interesting parallels can be found; and "Hidden Depths", repeat viewing uncovers further insights.
"Where do you go when planes are hitting new York skyscrapers and trains are blowing up in London? When street cleaners are bagging limbs and viscera in the capitals of the free world, Michael Myers is a cartoon and the living dead are quaint boogeymen for a quieter time." – "Horror: The Story So Far", page 6.
Expertly setting the post 9/11, PG-13 landscape that horror was occupying in 2001–02, Berman immediately grasps what is so intriguing about the arc the genre has taken in the last eight years – in late 2001, it seemed impossible that a plane would ever blow up, or that large scale destruction or violence against the human body would ever be depicted on screen again. And yet, mainly thanks to a group of US-based filmmakers raised on scratchy VHS copies of The Hills Have Eyes, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and Last House on the Left, a new breed of French horror auteurs (a long way from Franju and Rollin), and a guy from Australia, the genre turned on its collective heel and pushed the boundaries of taste and acceptability further than ever before.
Featuring in-depth interviews with Eli Roth (Cabin Fever, Hostel), Greg McClean (Wolf Creek), Steve Niles (writer of 30 Days of Night), as well as box-out reviews of their work (often brutally honest), and sidebars that expand on certain themes in the text, the opening section "Got Guts" looks at some of the more extreme examples, while section two "Got Something You Want to Say?", looks at filmmakers and publishers seeking to give depth to horror, including Vincenzo Natali (Cube) John Fawcett and Karen Walton (Ginger Snaps), Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury (Inside/À l'intérieur), Darren Lynn Bousman (Saw II–IV, Repo! The Genetic Opera), and the writers and editors of Rue Morgue magazine. Finally, in "Tomorrow's Terrors", Berman looks to the future, in interviews with Emily Hagins (who wrote and directed Pathogen at the age of 12), Sean Clark (who creates "Horror's Hallowed Grounds" for Horrorhound magazine), and blind director Joe Monks (The Bunker).
It's to the author's credit that he expands beyond the expected director and writer interviews, to cover more fertile ground, like the "artist collective" behind Rue Morgue, and Sean Clark's obsessive hunt to catalog movie locations. And if he sometimes wavers from the premise laid out on the introduction, the rewards are great enough to forgive that, and the limitations of Lightning Source's print-on-demand technology, which occasionally do a disservice to Pamela Normans's gorgeous design.
What we're left with at the end of the book, is a genuine feeling of community behind this movement, a fact I was reminded of while following Twitter feeds from today's opening of Fantastic Fest in Austin TX. My own first taste of horror came at the age of 14, reading Denis Gifford's A Pictorial History of the Horror Film – a book that changed my life – and what Berman has done here is to capture that same sense of involvement and intrigue for the reader, – The New Horror Handbook is destined to inspire the next generation of fans to shudder, dream, and create. Buy it here.
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