By: Matt Jackson

Huntsville —     In the mid 1960s, horror films started changing. The creature features and camp classics of the past three decades were fading, and in their place were arising new and brutal visions of uncompromising vision. Wes Craven (known best now for his work on the Scream franchise) made his debut with the unflinching and bloody The Last House on the Left, George A. Romero produced his indie classic Night of the Living Dead and Roman Polanski lent cinematic and artistic credibility to the genre with the satanic tale Rosemary’s Baby. Together, this unlikely trio helped give birth to something Jason Zinoman calls “The New Horror.”
    Shock Value is Zinoman’s attempt to produce a cohesive, analytical history of The New Horror, from its roots in the early films of Craven and Romero, to its peak in films like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Halloween and its eventual decline as films like Friday the 13th became carbon copies and spoofs of an age of originality and primal creative energy. 
    Shock Value  would be entertaining enough as a simple chronology of The New Horror age, charting its rise and fall through the films that made it great and the filmmakers who made it them. It would be interesting enough to hear how Tobe Hooper made The Texas Chain Saw Massacre with very little money in the midst of stifling Southern heat, or how Roman Polanski defied the odds and produced both a commercially and critically successful horror film with Rosemary’s Baby, or how John Carpenter defined a genre with Halloween. But Zinoman isn’t satisfied with stopping there.
    Shock Value is a thoroughly detailed and well-written history of a fascinating segment of modern horror cinema, but it’s also a revelatory analysis of a genre that’s often taken for granted. Zinoman isn’t just interested in the popularity of these films, but in why they were popular, what they did right, and what was so scary about them. From the often overlooked Black Christmas to the perennial “scariest movie of all time” The Exorcist, Zinoman digs deep to find the details about the films, and the filmmakers, that matter most both to their initial success and their eventual status as classics.
    The conclusions he reaches aren’t always original, but the way they’re presented is both unique and surprisingly insightful. Shock Value presents an understanding of the nature of evil and the masochistic pleasure that millions of viewers take from seeing it portrayed on film. But Zinoman is eloquent in pointing out that there’s more than masochism at stake. There’s a kind of psychological freedom at work in these films, and Shock Value is as much about the shock of that freedom as it is about the value of it.
    Even if the depth of horror cinema isn’t something you’re interested in, Shock Value is an entertaining, highly accessible piece of commentary. Few writers could say so much in so brief a span, and few books could leave the reader having so much fun.