SHOCK VALUE (Penguin Press) is New York Times theater critic Jason Zinoman’s debut book, a project that weaves critical analysis, objective reporting, rare perspectives and the fascination of a life-long fan of horror into one distinctive account of those genre landmarks of the 1970s. Fango spoke with the writer on his approach to covering the previously unheard sides of renowned cinema classics. See Part One of that exclusive chat below, in which Zinoman discusses the genesis of the book (out this week), the field work and discoveries it entailed and the ins and outs of SHOCK VALUE’s operating theories.

FANGORIA: So, SHOCK VALUE started as an article in Vanity Fair…

JASON ZINOMAN: That’s right.

FANG: How did that come to fruition?

ZINOMAN: The real origin of it was, I had read Peter Biskind’s EASY RIDERS, RAGING BULLS, which tells the story of the creation of the new Hollywood in the late ’60s and ’70s, and the sort of backstory of guys like Scorsese and Coppola. And it was a really illuminating, fun book. But at the end of it I thought it was funny to me that so few of the movies that I grew up loving he covered in the book, that were made at the exact same time that he’s writing about, and that I think had arguably as great an impact on culture as these movies made by Peter Bogdanovich and Coppola, those guys.

And I thought that, just like with people like that, I would love a story which tells the same story about the horror genre. I’ve certainly read a lot of reviews, and I’d been thinking about wanting to write a book for a while that’s rooted in reporting. I’d never written a book before, so I kind of didn’t know where to start. And because I’m a journalist, it was written in a lot shorter form. I thought maybe what I need to do to figure out if there’s really a story here that’s big enough to justify a whole book, is to start with an article, and try to place it somewhere which would let me over-report the story. It took a while. It was not gonna happen, then it did happen, and I went to LA and just wildly over-reported it.

I stayed there for a month or so and just talked to everybody. What I learned is, not only is there a huge story, and not only does it justify a book, but that there were stories that hadn’t been told, and there were these incredibly fascinating characters who still hadn’t gotten the respect they deserved, in a publication like Vanity Fair. They had gotten respect in publications like FANGORIA and the alternative horror press. But what I also wanted to do was connect and tell the story through reporting. I wanted to really make it rooted in these peoples’ accounts, and not just these directors, but also their producers, all different parts. Partially because, these guys are getting old. Some are dying, and even the ones who aren’t dying, their memories are fading, or they’re telling the same stories over and over again that there’s a limited window to write this book.

FANG: There are aspects of particular anecdotes that take a lot of candid quotes from each person involved. Yet, the way that it’s written isn’t linked, cut and dry from “A” and “B”; those quotes are dropped in throughout the context of their stories. Are they verbatim?

ZINOMAN: I would say 75 or 80 percent. I tried to keep a pretty close accounting in the source notes in the back of the book. Of course I read everything there is to read. Generally I found the most useful interviews were ones that were from the period. The ones that I wanted to concentrate on. I wanted to capture what these people who were making these movies were thinking at the time. So the two most important sources to me were interviews from the time, but more importantly, direct interviews with these people, and that would require long interviews, going back to them again and again. When it comes to the famous directors, they’ve been telling these stories for so often. The most useful things I found were when I talked to people around them, and I would already have the story–and then I would come to them and say, you know, “Is this true?” It required years of reporting, because so many people have done such great work covering a lot of these movies. So I tried to cast a wider net talking to peoples’ families, obscure people connected to these movies. ROSEMARY’S BABY was one of the harder ones, because probably the only person who I didn’t get to was Roman Polanski; he was in jail for a long time [laughs]. But the chapters on Brian De Palma, Wes Craven, John Carpenter and Dan O’Bannon–all the crucial meat of those chapters are first person interviews with these guys and the people around them.

FANG: You talk about Carpenter’s father’s encouraging of questioning the world around him, about Craven’s mother’s religious practices, how De Palma developed his voyeuristic tendencies at an early, impressionable age. The book’s operating theory seems to be the notion that these directors’ guiding impulses were embedded in them in childhood.

ZINOMAN: Yes.

FANG: Is it a matter of nurture over nature in the case of these filmmakers? Do you think these impulses were just there from the beginning, or that they couldn’t have happened without their upbringing, the experiences they had?

ZINOMAN: Well, you’re putting your finger on the key question that the book raises. I guess I would say this… What I believe coming away from doing all this reporting is that the greatest horror movies are much more personal and much more reflections of the idiosyncratic worldview of the people who’ve made them than [they’re] given credit for. Often horror’s seen as this genre that’s rooted in clichés and rules, conventions, homage. For these movies in this period, the closer you look at these peoples’ lives, I think it is a lot of nurture. There are some things that they had in common, certainly their backgrounds.

At the same time, this can be overstated. All of these guys had the same personal narratives about their childhood–that they were outsiders, who felt alienated, some of them had difficult relationships with their parents, and their escape was the movies and making horror. But the truth, once you look closer and closer at it, there’s something a little bit artificial about some of these stories. They’re stories they tell themselves. But sometimes the story that we tell ourselves is more important than the truth.

O’Bannon was one of my favorite people to talk to. He had this really strong relationship with his father, and a lot of his inspiration comes from feeling like the outsider growing up in this rural area. When he passed away, his wife showed me this document that his father kept of the first 10 years of Dan’s life–keeping meticulous track of his son’s development of his life as a kid. There’s something a little critical about how his father wrote about his son. On the other hand, as I read it, it was an incredible act of love to closely examine your son’s life. He was the first person to realize that his son had this unique gift and was incredibly creative. So, O’Bannon has this one perspective of his father, but that’s not the only one. His father has his own story. I think there’s something about the horror genre, especially in this period, that they all shared a certain sense of anti-authority, a sense that there was a shame in what they were doing. Really restrictive, religious upbringings would inform their work later on. But all great artists’ work is informed by their biography.

FANG: In the case of O’Bannon’s father, there’s that same generational disconnect. His writing was an expression of love, but could only come through in that way. He was hardened, he shut himself off…

ZINOMAN: No question. There’s a parallel between what you say there and what O’Bannon did. [He] had some reclusive tendencies, and articulated that through making movies. [His] father didn’t have that opportunity. He’s a beautiful writer, and he found his [expression] in this document, which is rooted in the close examination of his son. Then several generations later, I can get my hands on it and say, “Wow, I have this portrait of an artist as a young man.” That’s not to say that he didn’t have difficulties as a father. But even though he’s portrayed as not always being supportive of [Dan’s] work, he was also an incredible eccentric. He ran a curio shop, he liked optical illusions. He would do these practical jokes, where he’d create fake rings, call the cops and say aliens had come [laughs]. I mean, it doesn’t take an act of pop psychology to say that Dan O’Bannon may have inherited his creativity and curiosity about the world from his father.

FANG: What kind of environment best facilitates a fascination with horror? Would you say that a better film might come from someone who’s lived on the margins, as opposed to someone who has been supported, nurtured?

ZINOMAN: It’s something I’ve thought about a lot. Compare these guys who made these movies in the ’70s—which I tend to like better, although I do like the horror genre today—and the horror directors today, guys like Rob Zombie, Eli Roth, there’s a striking cultural difference between the way that these two groups talk. The generation of the guys who came out in the ’60s and ’70s, even guys like Wes Craven, are a little bit embarrassed about working in horror. At the time, it was really disreputable. If you talk to Eli Roth, the guy is the happiest, most proud… He has no shame in what he does. As far as he’s concerned, he’s working in a genre that has great works of art. He’s working in a tradition that includes masterpieces like TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. He’s very much an establishment guy, his father teaches at Harvard, has money. And there is a striking difference between that kind of insider establishment type who dominates Hollywood horror today, and these guys who were working on the margins before. Is there something about the conditions of working on the margins, low budget, not in Hollywood, that makes for better movies? I think, yeah, perhaps.

That doesn’t mean that you can’t make a great movie inside Hollywood, or you can’t make a great movie with support from your parents and a happy, well adjusted childhood. You can, for sure. But the evidence of these movies showed that limited resources forced a lot of these people to be incredibly creative in solving problems. It forced a lot of them to think more deeply about what is truly scary, as opposed to thinking deeply about special effects, how best to market it. And the really fascinating question—which I’m not totally sure of myself—is I think there’s an element of the kind of shame that some of these guys had, the fact that their parents disapproved of what they were doing. That Wes Craven’s mother would never go to see his horror movies. That William Friedkin refused to call THE EXORCIST a horror film. There’s an element of that seems to find its way into their movies, and it’s creepy and uncomfortable and makes them more intense. When you look at the movies today, so many of them are packed full of references and homage and technical skill, that they’re [something] different. I appreciate them and I admire them, but they don’t feel as personal.

Also, if you look at these guys, once they had success and went to Hollywood, they had less success. Not all of them, but it was a pretty common story. There was something about the machinery of Hollywood that was resistant to creativity, and resistant to horror in those days. It’s a different ballgame, because now horror is much more respected in the mainstream. So it’s a lot easier to have your own vision and have it green-lit in Hollywood by a studio executive without any interference. Although it’s still problematic, you have to make some sacrifices of course. Unless it’s a remake or something…

TO BE CONTINUED

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