It’s astounding how the stories interweave with one another, with something like Romero’s Night of the Living Dead influencing many of the directors who came after, and thus becoming a major part of the story.

Steven Spielberg and Jaws – and, although to a lesser extent, Duel – factor in, as do low-budget b-movie mavens George Romero, Roger Corman and Herschel Gordon Lewis.

Also, rather simply focus on the major players (who, for the record, are Wes Craven, John Carpenter, Brian De Palma, Dan O’Bannon, William Friedkin, Tobe Hooper, and Roman Polanski), Zinoman ties in quite a few players one might not expect. Only the pertinent details are communicated. The author effectively uses snapshot biographies, which allow the reader to get a glimpse of the director as a youth and in their early career, without delving too much into pointless back story. I feel he missed some chances to connect the past when mentioning the marketing of Wes Craven’s Last House On the Left using “It’s only a movie…” with the various tactics utilized by William Castle, whose acquisition of Rosemary’s Baby gets the book rolling. The repeated contrasting of the ’70s directors and their earlier counterparts – De Palma and Hitchcock, most notably – allows Zinoman to ably demonstrate just what kind of innovation was at hand. Throughout Shock Value, Zinoman continually makes the point that this is the transition from Old Horror to New Horror. In his new book, Shock Value: How a Few Eccentric Outsiders Gave Us Nightmares, Conquered Hollywood, and Invented Modern Horror, author Jason Zinoman does a stellar job of presenting the story of the ’70s horror directors who took the horror genre from its supernatural underpinings and clean, “good triumphs over evil” endings into the realm of modern-day psychological terror and equivocating conclusions.

Shock value by jason zinoman