Review: Nightmares in Red, White and Blue: The Evolution of the American Horror Film

The only thing I enjoy more than a good horror movie is a good documentary about horror movies. As a kid, I remember seeing a television series entitled Stephen King's World of Horror that featured interviews with the likes of John carpenter and Clive Barker, as well as King himself, all waxing rhapsodic about the nature of horror filmmaking and horror itself, and my love affair with talking about horror was born. Since then, it seems like horror docs come out with surprising frequency, some specific to subgenres like the entertaining Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film, while others approach the subject more expansively. Nightmares in Red, White Blue: The Evolution of the American Horror Film is an example of the latter, tracing the course of the American horror movie in broad terms.

With interviews from Darren Lynn Bousman (Saw II), John Carpenter (The Thing, Halloween), George Romero (Papa Bear), and many others, the film takes a chronological approach to its subject matter, beginning with the earliest movie ghouls to grace the sepia-toned screen. As the silent era gave way to talkies, Nightmares spends some quality time with the Universal monsters that have become synonymous with classic horror -Frankenstein's monster, the wolf man, Dracula - and it's always fun to hear modern filmmakers discuss their love affair with the first films that frightened them.

As the documentary gives way to the post-World War 2 era, some of the more entertaining moments come in the discussion of the giant bug movies that cropped up in response to our national fear that the Big One could drop at any moment, that we had released the radioactive genie from the bottle and there was no putting him back in. It is here that the film first begins its discussion of how our national psyche is directly responsible for the horror films we make popular, and the anxiety of the 1950s and '60s is little different from that of the 1980s, when the Cold War escalation produced films like The Day After or Threads.

As the film moves forward into modern times, by which I mean the 1970s and forward, Nightmares continues the evaluation of the relationship between societal change and the horror films of the time. A mention of David Cronenberg's Shivers as a response to the sexual revolution is all too brief, but the point is well made that we are given to worry as things evolve culturally, and those worries must have an outlet. One of the more interesting points made in the film occurs early on, as horror filmmakers discuss how nice the average horror auteur is, often more soft-spoken and friendly than the material they produce would suggest. This may be, the film proposes, because such filmmakers take their anxieties and worries and put them on the screen, rather than allow themselves to internalize them, letting them grow and fester like a cancer.

The benefit of documentaries like this one is that they bring a seriousness to the oft-maligned genre, discussing them in a manner beyond the usual fan discussions. A defense of The Silence of the Lambs as a true horror film, despite the producers categorizing it as a thriller, is welcome, and for anyone who has had that discussion, Nightmares provides a fairly succinct argument for horror here. More importantly, the documentary is recent, so it manages to address the current wave of remakes and adaptations of foreign horror, which must now be part of our discussion of the genre.

The only real downside to this doc is that it doesn't do a whole lot different. if you've seen Carpenter and Romero discussing horror before, you get some of the same stuff here (an exception being Carpenter's discussion of a line he wrote for Starman that is a wonderful moment of honesty), so Nightmares doesn't pack a lot of surprises for a devourer of horror like myself. On the other hand, if you aren't so devout and want to explore the subject of the American horror film, Nightmares in Red, White and Blue is a great primer for exploring the films of our past, while providing some much needed contextual analysis for them. If you are new to the genre, or have never turned back the cinematic clock to see where horror films began, this is a fine documentary and worthy of your time. For the well-initiated, it's still entertaining, if disappointingly familiar.