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Economic Anxiety is Everywhere (Horror Through The Decades, 1970's Part 1)
8 Plays4 months ago
We’re returning to our trip through the history of horror, and now we have landed in the 1970’s. For part 1, we are going to focus on the impact of the economic crisis on horror films. Many horror films at the time tackled different elements of the economic fears of the United States in different ways, and we're going to talk about a few examples.
Movies Discussed: Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), The Hills Have Eyes (1977), The Amityville Horror (1979), Dawn of the Dead (1978)
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Intro Music: Body in the trunk by Victor_Natas -- https://freesound.org/s/717975/ -- License: Attribution 4.0
Outro Music: drum loop x5 by theoctopus559 -- https://freesound.org/s/622897/ -- License: Attribution 4.0
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Transcript
Podcast Introduction
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to What Haunts You, a podcast about the stories that haunt our dreams. Find us on Instagram at whathauntsyoupod and find all of our episodes on YouTube or Spotify. I'm your host Carly and I'm here this episode to take you back to the nineteen seventy s
00:00:40
Speaker
There was a lot going on in the 1970s, and there were a lot of horror movies being made at the time. This script just kept getting longer and longer, and it was getting kind of ridiculous. So We're actually going to take this one in two parts.
00:00:55
Speaker
In the next episode, we're going to talk about the fears around the American family. So the fears of the decline of the American family and also the fear of the dangers that people thought the American family was facing.
1970s Economic and Government Challenges
00:01:10
Speaker
But in this episode, we're going to focus more on the general distrust towards the government and the intense economic distress that was brewing in the United States. In the first half of the 1970s, the U.S. government was fighting in a war that a lot of people thought they had no business fighting.
00:01:28
Speaker
People were protesting the Vietnam War, but people were also witnessing it in a way that no previous war had really been witnessed. On top of distrust around the war, the Watergate scandal obviously didn't help improve how people were feeling about the government.
00:01:45
Speaker
people were a lot more suspicious of the government than they had been in previous decades, especially closer to World War II, where Americans were still kind of feeling like heroes. And through all of this, like, suspicion and scandal and violence, inflation rates and unemployment rates were incredibly high, so things were looking pretty grim for a lot of people.
00:02:08
Speaker
There was a steel crisis in the 1970s, which was partially caused by industrialization spreading more globally, so more places were producing steel, but it was also partially caused by like a general failure to upgrade to more efficient equipment in the States.
00:02:27
Speaker
During the peak of the steel industry in the U.S., there were about 650,000 people employed within the industry, but by 1980, this number dropped drastically to 399,000
00:02:41
Speaker
and like only continued to drop into the 80s. There were actually two oil crises in the 1970s. So in 1973, after the Yom Kippur War, embargoes were placed on countries that had supported Israel during the war.
00:02:56
Speaker
And in 1979, oil production decreased in the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution. This fuel crisis contributed heavily to the economic crisis in the United States,
00:03:08
Speaker
So there was this intense economic anxiety that was mixing with that suspicion of the government. These two things together really sort of create a sense of precariousness for people.
00:03:20
Speaker
Because if you're uncertain about your economic stability and you don't necessarily believe that your government has your best interests at heart, it is pretty hard not to be anxious. And people were anxious.
00:03:33
Speaker
And horror movies had never been more popular.
Horror Films as Societal Mirrors
00:03:36
Speaker
It was the 1970s that Jaws became the first real blockbuster movie. Jaws and The Exorcist were each the highest grossing films released in 73 and 75 respectively.
00:03:49
Speaker
1974's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is one movie where the writer and director has spoken really directly and about the social and political concerns that influenced him in the making of the film.
00:04:02
Speaker
And it's largely because of these influences that Texas Chainsaw Massacre became such an important movie that it's now actually in the Museum of Modern Art, where I think it deserves to be.
00:04:14
Speaker
We do have a whole episode about this movie, so I'm not going to break down the plot in too much detail. But the movie opens with a statement on screen. The film you are about to see is true.
00:04:27
Speaker
Toby Hooper said in an interview that starting with this misrepresentation was intended to be a reflection of being lied to by the government in the wake of Watergate, the recession, and the Vietnam War.
00:04:39
Speaker
Tobe Hooper said that the media portrayed news of death or violence with a, quote, lack of sentimentality and brutality. The Vietnam War was the first time many people at home had really seen war with their own eyes.
00:04:53
Speaker
And exposure to that kind of violence changes people, right? It changes society. So we're going to take a quick sidetrack here about trauma. When we think of trauma, we think of how humans react to things that they have directly experienced.
00:05:09
Speaker
Like, we understand that the soldiers who were coming back from the Vietnam War often had intense post-traumatic stress disorder, even though we weren't necessarily calling it that at the time.
00:05:20
Speaker
But we don't often think about the idea of the trauma of witnessing or the trauma of exposure to violence. Witnessing extreme violence, even if you don't experience any physical harm, can affect people in a whole spectrum of ways, ranging from being stressful to being fully traumatizing.
00:05:40
Speaker
I think for some people, the distance that's created by watching something on screen is enough distance for this to not happen. But I also think that with the presence of social media and generally so much violence on the news,
00:05:54
Speaker
We really take exposure to violence as a given in this day and age, but this was not always true. And I would imagine that there were a lot of people who were traumatized by exposure to the footage of the Vietnam War, in addition to the intense trauma of the people who were there witnessing it firsthand.
00:06:13
Speaker
Toby Hooper really felt this impact and channeled those concerns into the making of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It was a mixture of fears about what was happening in the world.
00:06:24
Speaker
It was fear of the violence that he was witnessing, but it was also fear about the way that humans were learning to relate to that violence. And I think ultimately that is an issue we are still sorting through today.
00:06:37
Speaker
At that time, journalists weren't quite saying if it bleeds, it leads yet, but you can see that they were setting off on that trajectory with the way that violence would be shown on screen.
00:06:48
Speaker
And this violence wasn't just on screen in a movie at a movie theater, right? This violence was now literally inside people's homes through the television. I feel like there is no way that that didn't change something about us as people and something about our society.
00:07:06
Speaker
This movie also explores another theme that was really emerging around this time, the battle between the interests of the urban and the rural. The group of city kids in Texas Chainsaw Massacre trespass onto rural territory, and they ultimately pay the price for doing so.
00:07:23
Speaker
Carol J. Clover writes in Men, Women, and Chainsaw's Gender in the Modern Horror Film, quote, One of the obvious things at stake in the city-country split of horror films, in short, is social class, the confrontation between the haves and the have-nots, or even more directly between exploiters and their victims.
00:07:42
Speaker
She talks about movies like this as a, quote, universal archetype. Going from city to country in horror film is very much like going from village to deep dark forest in traditional fairy tales.
00:07:55
Speaker
We as humans are always scared of something that feels more remote than what we are used to. So that has levels to it, but that is something that seems to be true all the time. And ultimately, what is the Sawyer family of Texas Chainsaw Massacre if not, you know, a family that is luring young people into their house to
Impact of Industrialization and Poverty
00:08:15
Speaker
eat them? that's That's a wicked witch story, you know? It's dressed up differently, but it amounts to the same.
00:08:22
Speaker
But in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the deranged cannibal family was not always a deranged cannibal family. Historically, the Sawyer family had been working in the meat industry at a slaughterhouse.
00:08:34
Speaker
As the slaughterhouse became more and more industrialized, leaving them out of work, they began to hate the technology and the machinery that essentially replaced them and took their jobs.
00:08:45
Speaker
So there were no jobs, and therefore there was no money, and therefore there were no resources. Somewhere down the line, they started kidnapping people who came too near their house and slaughtered them to eat but also to sell as barbecue in their family-owned gas station.
00:09:02
Speaker
This fed them, kept them with some money coming in, and allowed them to go on in a way that in their minds was close enough to the way things were before industrial slaughter. These movies, i think starting with Texas Chainsaw Massacre, tend to have one like front of house person.
00:09:20
Speaker
It starts with the eldest son of the Sawyer family who runs the barbecue shop, but we see it repeated in The Hills Have Eyes, which I'll get into more later. And that trope has lasted much farther than that.
00:09:32
Speaker
Like you might think of Captain Spaulding from House of a Thousand Corpses and his fried chicken shop and murder ride. There is usually someone who is presentable and sociable enough to be around the general public.
00:09:45
Speaker
They usually run a roadside stand or a gas station, something fairly innocuous and not so out of place on a mostly deserted road. In Texas Chainsaw, it's the We Slaughter Barbecue.
00:09:57
Speaker
But even with the barbecue, the Sawyer family is just barely getting by. So the city people coming into their territory are faced with depravity that has resulted from serious desperation and a serious lack of resources.
00:10:12
Speaker
As Clover puts it to be in the country then is notably to confront the poverty that one may have colluded in creating and maintaining. It is to confront poverty without the protection of the judicial system and its coercive apparatus to face the victims of one's class comfort without recourse to the police.
00:10:34
Speaker
1997's The Hills Have Eyes explores this dynamic between city and country by pitting a traditional urban family with a retired cop for a father directly against a deranged and cannibalistic rural family.
00:10:49
Speaker
Clover writes, quote, the cleveland family of the hills have eyes that get stuck in this desert wilderness are folks with all the usual signs of affluent nice car large trailer house ohio state t-shirt and the like whereas the Farrell family is literally starving and in fact attacks the city people in the first sequence to get food.
00:11:12
Speaker
She goes on to say that in these movies, quote, country people live beyond the reaches of social law. They do not observe the civilized rules of hygiene or personal habit.
00:11:23
Speaker
If city men are either clean shaven or wear stylish beards or mustaches, country men sport stubble. Likewise, teeth. The country is a world beyond dentistry.
00:11:34
Speaker
The typical country rapist is a toothless or rotten-toothed single man with a four-day growth. As with hygiene, so with manners. Country people snort when they breathe, snore when they sleep, talk with mouths full, and drool when they eat.
00:11:50
Speaker
The hill people of the hills have eyes, do not even know how to use knives and forks. I just want to reiterate that none of this is about people in real life, right? This is how this is how country people are being portrayed in these horror movies.
00:12:05
Speaker
And that's a really important distinction, so I just want to really drill that in. But anyway, in an early interaction between the Cleveland family and the shopkeeper, they ask him if he has a dumpster for them to leave some trash.
00:12:18
Speaker
He responds, oh hell, just use the whole damn desert for all I care. He's totally exasperated with city people, and he's in a really desperate situation in this dying town.
00:12:30
Speaker
They have a conversation about the rundown state of things in town. There's an old mine nearby that is out of silver and so inactive, and the Air Force is using part of their area now for weapons testing.
00:12:42
Speaker
The town has essentially been dying slowly for a long time and is now dying much faster due to the presence of the military. The Cleveland family, as horror families do, ignored the shopkeeper's warning to stay on the main road, and naturally they get lost.
00:12:58
Speaker
And they don't know it, but there are spikes laid out on the road and they run over them and they blow a tire. Bob, the family patriarch, is walking back to the shop to get help.
00:13:10
Speaker
Their dog runs off. And by the way, their dogs are named Beauty and the Beast, you guys. It's so perfect. ah And while he's looking for Beauty, the younger son, Bobby, finds Beauty's body and hears a man talking and runs away.
00:13:25
Speaker
Kind of surprisingly, Bob does make it back to the gas station immediately after which the shopkeeper hangs himself in the closet. But Bob gets him down immediately and they talk.
00:13:36
Speaker
We get our basic exposition scene here, and the shopkeeper explains the backstory of these cannibals in the desert hills. Clover sums it up well, too, writing, quote, The Hills Have Eyes films play out their horror in a desert area once alive with silver mines, but now the silver gone, given over to nuclear testing.
00:13:57
Speaker
If in fact the Feral family of that set of films came into being as a result of radiation, as the first film suggests, it's then we have yet another way that country folk are the direct victims of urban interests, in this case, the military-industrial complex.
00:14:16
Speaker
The shopkeeper talks about the time before the decline of this mining town, when he and his wife were living there with their young daughter and they had a son on the way. When the son was born, he, quote, weighed 20 pounds and was hairy as a monkey.
00:14:31
Speaker
When he was 10 and the size of a grown man, the shopkeeper started finding dead animals around. It seems that eventually this son burnt down their house with their daughter inside, killing her.
00:14:44
Speaker
The shopkeeper hit him with a tire iron and took him out to the desert to leave him there to die. Hearing this story, Bob accuses the shopkeeper of being scared that his son's ghost is haunting him.
00:14:57
Speaker
The condescension is palpable in the way he says it, but it's not a ghost, it's really him. And he has kidnapped a sex worker and had multiple children with her, three sons and a daughter.
00:15:09
Speaker
Bob says it's been a long time since then. And the shopkeeper tells him, quote, long enough for a devil kid to grow up to be a devil man. As they're talking, the shopkeeper is dragged out and killed.
00:15:22
Speaker
Meanwhile, further into the desert, the cannibals start breaking into the family trailer, stealing food, and the fight between these two families really picks up. When they get into the trailer, one of the cannibals sexually assaults Brenda, the daughter of the family, and they steal the baby of the family with plans to eat it.
00:15:41
Speaker
Sexual assault is fairly common in films that explore the dynamic of city versus country, where a city girl will be assaulted by one or more country men.
00:15:52
Speaker
In some ways, the assault of the country man on the city woman is used as a sort of twisted revenge that country is taking on city. As Clover puts it, quote, the construction of city as a metaphoric rapist of the country is an increasingly common one in horror.
00:16:10
Speaker
So the way that shows up is that the city rapes the country for its resources and its vastness, and in turn, the country rapes the city. Ultimately, in these films, even after these assaults take place, the city usually still ends up on top.
00:16:26
Speaker
Films like this might serve as some sort of comfort to city dwellers who are wondering if they've lost their grit, their survival instincts, if they could really hack it without the wide array of resources at their disposal.
Social Dynamics in Horror Narratives
00:16:39
Speaker
Despite the assaults, despite any resources vanishing, these movies posit the fact that the country is being ravaged by urbanization and industrialization, but still prioritizes the city folks as the good guys, as the victors that we are supposed to root for.
00:16:57
Speaker
Clover writes, quote, like other city revenge films, The Hills Have Eyes both asks and answers the question of hyper-civilization. Yes, city people are up to the challenge.
00:17:09
Speaker
Despite air conditioning and insurance, despite their concentration on mental activities rather than physical ones, and despite reliance on quote-unquote authorities, they still can kill.
00:17:22
Speaker
The fight between these families continues into the next day, and eventually the Citi family wins. Four of them survive, including the baby, thankfully, and they take Ruby, the maybe young adult, maybe teenage daughter of the cannibal family, with them.
00:17:38
Speaker
Clover says, quote, the scenario to which city-country horror obsessively returns is one in which the haves, the civilized urbanites, are separated from the system of supports that silently keep their privilege intact.
00:17:52
Speaker
What would happen if, and this is always the underlying question, if the haves had to face the have-nots in a struggle for survival just muscle on muscle, wit on wit, without recourse to the law or to verbal argument or to money payoffs or to sophisticated weaponry or whatever?
00:18:10
Speaker
Could we, the film's we, city people, do what is to be done under such conditions? Eat raw meat, sleep on the bare ground, betray our comrades, kill someone.
00:18:22
Speaker
or have city people refined themselves out of the Darwinian game? She goes on to say, quote, "...against the outlaw family, beyond the reaches of legal responsibility, is a city family whose father is significantly a retired policeman.
00:18:38
Speaker
Aging but tall, tough, and familiar with guns and violence, he ought to be a match for his rural assailants, but he is not. He is quickly killed by them and his family left to their own devices." The family couldn't just try to walk away.
00:18:55
Speaker
They knew that the only guarantee of safety was making damn sure that that other family was dead. They couldn't rely on the systems that they would have relied on elsewhere. And their internal representative of those systems, their former police officer father, was dead.
00:19:11
Speaker
And that was the end of any belief that they might be able to rely on those systems for safety or justice. They could only rely on their ability to physically defend themselves and and to execute their attackers rather than just subdue them.
00:19:26
Speaker
The traditional all-American family are forced into violence and therefore stripped of all of their normalcy. They go from seeing themselves as civilized to plotting to kill an entire family.
00:19:37
Speaker
Like Toby Hooper discussed in interviews about the making of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the 70s were a time of decreasing trust in the government, raising people's fears about what it would be like to not be able to rely on governmental systems for their safety or for their well-being.
00:19:54
Speaker
As Clover puts it, quote, the collision between city and country is also a collision between a state mentality in which citizens can submit their grievances to the executive function and statelessness in which citizens rely on vigilantism.
00:20:10
Speaker
Much of the ambient horror of these films resides in the fact that statelessness, our collective past, is not dead and buried, but is just a car ride away. What the city limits mark in horror is the boundary between state and no state.
00:20:26
Speaker
I think many people sort of vacillate between a sense that their living in a state is a fixed reality and the fear of knowing that things could really crumble at any moment.
00:20:37
Speaker
In a time like the 1970s, where more people than ever were seeing the cracks in the facade and seeing the unreliability of their own government, that fear about things crumbling was probably more present than it had been in American history in a very long time.
00:20:53
Speaker
Like I said earlier, these fears are all sort of connected with each other. The fear of collapse was only elevated by economic crisis and government scandals. During the economic crisis, the stock market crashed and unemployment soared.
00:21:08
Speaker
At the same time, the baby boomer generation was also aging into homeownership. The housing boom and high mortgage rates of the 1970s had people thinking about the risk of homeownership in the context of this larger economic anxiety.
00:21:23
Speaker
A home is a big investment, and making a big investment at a time where people had so little financial stability and financial security was not exactly an anxiety-free decision to make.
00:21:34
Speaker
These mingled fears of economic uncertainty and the vulnerability of homeownership are really the undercurrent for movies like 1979's The Amityville Horror. Based on a true story, sort of, the movie opens telling us of a murdered family, all killed in their beds by the only surviving member of the family.
00:21:54
Speaker
A year later, the house is purchased by the Lutzes. Their tour of this house is intercut with scenes of the grisly murders that took place really not very long ago.
00:22:05
Speaker
The Lutzes are a blended family made up of Kathy, a divorced mom to three kids, the kids, and their new stepdad, George. Some important context for this movie, though.
00:22:16
Speaker
At a time where divorce rates were rising, but divorce was still a fairly socially frowned upon thing, Kathy was in sort of a precarious position here. She was invested in a new man, a new house, a new town, and a new life.
00:22:31
Speaker
And honestly, none of them seemed to be particularly good investments. The house is haunted, George is allegedly violent and reckless, and their new life is tainted by the murders that took place in their new house.
00:22:45
Speaker
The house is selling for way less than it's worth because of the murders, but it's still outside of their price range. That doesn't stop them because George convinces Kathy that it will save them money in other ways.
00:22:57
Speaker
If he uses the extra space in the house as an in-home office and can keep his boat at their boathouse instead of renting a place for it, which why do you have a boat if you're so strapped for cash, George? Like that's one of my real questions here.
00:23:10
Speaker
But a priest shows up to bless the house and he is swarmed by flies and hears a mysterious voice tell him to get out and he flees the house. George becomes increasingly unhinged. He chops wood obsessively, kind of like the dad in The Witch, and he is more aggressive and more rude as time goes on.
00:23:28
Speaker
There are signs of the supernatural around the house, like with the toilets bubbling up with black slime. Kathy's aunt, who's a nun, comes to the house and immediately freaks out and leaves.
00:23:40
Speaker
The priest gets into a car accident trying to get back to the house in order to warn the family that they might be in danger. So anyone remotely spiritual is immediately put off by the house at best or made physically ill by. it The first thing that is truly suspicious to me that happens is before Kathy's brother's wedding. $1,500 is missing from his jacket to pay the caterer.
00:24:05
Speaker
George doesn't really help while Kathy and her brother are searching for it, but he eventually says to forget about it and he'll write a check for the caterer. But George cannot actually afford this.
00:24:17
Speaker
If you remember, they are currently drowning in this house that they bought. So you sort of have to wonder, did George steal the money and then maybe write a check that he knew would bounce to buy himself some time to figure out what to do?
00:24:33
Speaker
Would he have had the arrogance to think that that could work? Would he have had the arrogance to think that that would work out? Well, he had the arrogance to convince his new wife that he should purchase this house that they can't afford and that it would somehow work out for them.
00:24:49
Speaker
The caterer is pretty suspicious of the change from getting paid in cash to being paid with a check. Checks get canceled. Checks bounce, he says. While they're at the wedding, a babysitter gets locked in a room at their house.
00:25:02
Speaker
When they get home and discover this, their daughter tells them, Jodi doesn't like George. And Jodi is maybe being perceived as an imaginary friend.
The Amityville Horror's Themes
00:25:12
Speaker
ah But Jodi is actually a giant evil demon pig, by the way.
00:25:16
Speaker
but George yells at Kathy and tells her that her kids need more discipline. Now, an important thing in the book that doesn't really make it into the movie so much is that it appears that George was allegedly physically abusive toward the children during their time in the house, and maybe even after it.
00:25:35
Speaker
But even though the movie doesn't show this explicitly, it does feel like that is underlying so much of what's happening in the movie. George's business partner is saying that George hasn't signed any payroll checks. The IRS is calling them.
00:25:50
Speaker
The caterer has even been contacting his business partner about the check that George wrote for him that, surprise, surprise, did bounce. It's clear that the house is financially ruining him and he is just becoming totally incapable of running his business.
00:26:05
Speaker
All this time, more and more spooky, creepy things are happening in the house. Doors are violently blowing open. Gross black slime is coming up. People are reacting weirdly to the house still. It just goes on, kind of standard haunted house style.
00:26:19
Speaker
George keeps waking up at 3.15 a.m., which is precisely the time that the murders were committed. And we see way too many shots of George sharpening and using his axe.
00:26:31
Speaker
And also all this time, everyone keeps telling George that he looks a lot like the guy who murdered his family in their house a year before. And now I just want to pause in terms of plot to really put this story into perspective in a way that the movie only seems to spend a little bit of time on.
00:26:49
Speaker
This family moved into a murder house one year after the murders happened. One year. Not much changes in a neighborhood in one year most of the time.
00:27:03
Speaker
So that means their kids are going to go to school with the friends of those dead kids. Their neighbors are probably all going to be the same neighbors that this murdered family had.
00:27:14
Speaker
And Amityville is a small town. So they are just like inserted into this town, basically in the place of a slaughtered family. And I'm not saying that it's wrong for them to buy the house. Like, it makes sense that the house would be sold.
00:27:31
Speaker
and I don't even know that they were being particularly disrespectful about it. But just imagine how that must feel for everyone in the town around them who went through this tragedy of their neighbors being murdered.
00:27:44
Speaker
People probably treated them very weirdly, and people definitely would have treated their house really weirdly. This is the context that the whole story is taking place in, and the only real acknowledgement of how weird it is is that everyone keeps telling George Lutz how much he looks like that guy who killed his family.
00:28:05
Speaker
The whole situation is totally bizarre all around. And then on top of that, just a reminder, they are literally financially drowning in all of this. Like everything they have is sunk into this house that they are now just stuck with.
00:28:18
Speaker
Anyway, George steals a book about witchcraft and the devil. Kathy calls the priest again and the phone is acting up, which is obviously supposed to be scary. George finally meets up with his business partner again and his business partner is basically like, what the hell is going on? Our business is going down the drain. You need to get it together.
00:28:37
Speaker
He accuses George of taking on too much and says, quote, you marry a dame with three kids, you buy a house with mortgages up to your ass, you change your religion, and you forget about business. George punches him square in the face, and somehow he's just like, okay, now can we talk? Like asking him essentially if he's gotten his rage out of his system.
00:28:59
Speaker
And they go back to being buddies, and George starts to explain to him what has been going on in their house. Their daughter is still talking to Jodi, who the mom sees in the form of like two glowing eyes outside the window.
00:29:12
Speaker
George's friends come in and we get the classic Indian burial ground trope. This is actually like the origin story of that trope in the horror genre. They say the house is built on an Indian burial ground, so it is full of dark energy and spirits and whatever.
00:29:29
Speaker
And at one point, they're hacking at the walls of the house and find like a secret scary room. And the walls of the secret scary room are red, so obviously the room is evil.
00:29:41
Speaker
They start trying to bless the house as if George isn't literally the worst thing in it. And we get our first real display of Kathy seeming to maybe be afraid of George telling him to leave her alone.
00:29:53
Speaker
Back to the priest. Everyone at his church thinks that this priest is crazy for thinking that the house is haunted or possessed or whatever. He suddenly goes blind while praying at church, which I think we're supposed to blame on the house.
00:30:08
Speaker
George is up again at his usual time, 3.15 a.m., murder o'clock, and starts screaming at the house or whatever he thinks is in the house that this is his house now.
00:30:20
Speaker
While this is happening, Kathy has a dream that George has ax-murdered the children and is now ax-murdering her. George is having full breakdowns. He's sleepwalking and dreaming and screaming.
00:30:33
Speaker
Kathy is begging him to just pack up and get themselves and the kids out of there. And it's then for the first time that we see him hit Kathy. He slaps her hard enough to give her a bloody nose.
00:30:46
Speaker
Kathy does her own research about the situation and then returns home to try to get George and the kids out of the house. The house is shaking and bleeding like blood is oozing from the walls.
00:30:58
Speaker
Everything is super chaotic. The house tries to lock them in, but George gets Kathy and the kids out to escape to the car. George is still in the house and he falls through the floor into the scary red room and then through that floor and into like blood or black goop. I don't know, but it's gross.
00:31:17
Speaker
And the dog helps him get out. But the house itself has him locked in. Eventually, he does get out with the dog, thank goodness, and the family drives away. The ending title card informs us that the Lutzes never reclaimed the home and didn't return for their belongings.
00:31:34
Speaker
So long, House, that was totally out of their budget, putting them in a totally unmanageable situation. The real-life epilogue is that they went on to write a book, which went on to be made into this movie, which is another piece of context that informs the story.
00:31:50
Speaker
So is this a haunted house story? Sure, yes. Is this also maybe the story of a woman and her three children, divorced and remarried to a man who turned out to be not only financially reckless but allegedly abusive?
00:32:05
Speaker
i think that's laying right under the surface of this story. And a woman who maybe at a time where divorce was less normalized didn't really feel like she could afford to have a second one.
00:32:17
Speaker
And stuck in this house that they are sort of not even able to handle living in George is constantly complaining that the house is cold. And sure, yes, demons and ghosts and cold spots and all that.
00:32:30
Speaker
But also you're in a big old house on a lake. Of course you're cold in the winter. It's cold. This is why you have the fireplace that you're so obsessed with. There are drafts and noises and all the trappings of an old house.
00:32:44
Speaker
So what do you do when you're stuck in this situation? Well, you certainly could write a book about how all of the trauma everyone in the house went through, maybe at the hands of George allegedly, could just be attributed to ghosts or demons and that you didn't in fact fuck up by making a terrible financial decision After also making another terrible decision by marrying this allegedly horrible man, you just got ran out by ghosts.
00:33:13
Speaker
Seems like a really, really good way seems like a really good way to cope with the economic anxiety of the time, if you ask me.
Consumerism and Societal Critique
00:33:22
Speaker
The 1970s were also a time where people were thinking about consumerism, like thinking more about consumer rights and responsibilities.
00:33:31
Speaker
Television had recently become an arena for marketing, which basically changed advertisements forever, which kind of changed shopping too. At the same time, there was increased awareness of and therefore increased criticism of the environmental impacts of overconsumption and the quest for instant gratification that people still go on when they're shopping today.
00:33:52
Speaker
And with that, we are back with George Romero and his ghouls. If you didn't listen yet, in the episode covering horror movies of the 1960s, I talked about Romero's Night of the Living Dead.
00:34:04
Speaker
Today, we're going to talk about its first sequel, 1978's Dawn of the Dead, what some people would call the best zombie movie in existence. I found an uncut version of the movie that had a two and a half hour runtime.
00:34:19
Speaker
It had been a long time since I saw the movie, so I don't really remember what the differences were, but obviously I was going to watch the longest version I found because of who I am as a person.
00:34:31
Speaker
So Dawn of the Dead picks up in the middle of some action. It is the middle of a broadcast about the situation with the zombies outside. There's conflict in the station over the best way to report the news about this evolving situation with these zombies.
00:34:46
Speaker
Like, should they stay on the air? Should they not? The people running the station think that they should keep all of the rescue stations listed on the screen despite some of them having already closed down.
00:34:57
Speaker
And some of the team rightfully says that doing this will send people to their deaths. Like Toby Hooper of Texas Chainsaw fame, it seems like George Romero had some feelings about the priorities of media and the ethics of journalism.
00:35:12
Speaker
Fran, a producer, and her boyfriend Steven, the traffic reporter, are talking about the situation, and he gets the idea to steal the station's helicopter to get out of the city. On the other side of town, a SWAT team is posted outside a housing project where one of the cops spouts off like a bunch of racist slurs and his intention to shoot all the people inside.
00:35:33
Speaker
ah A gunfight ensues between the cops and the men inside. The cops make it in and they raid the housing project and it is ah massacre. One cop in particular, the same one who shouted all the slurs, is gleefully like screaming more slurs and shooting people left and right to the point that the other cops actually shoot him and kill him to stop his indiscriminate violence.
00:35:56
Speaker
The thing is, in a situation where all bodies are reanimating upon death, mass death in one place is really the last thing you want. So the bodies start coming back to life.
00:36:07
Speaker
There are zombies everywhere, and honestly, the cops really have no one but themselves to blame. And it's spreading. These zombies are going to town on the survivors inside, and one cop even shoots himself in the head to escape.
00:36:22
Speaker
Two officers, Roger and Peter, talk about running away from the situation. Roger is friends with Steven, our traffic reporter with the helicopter, and they want to find him and get a ride out of the city.
00:36:34
Speaker
They see the damage. They see all the reanimated dead in the building, some of them still wrapped up in sheets and body bags and, like, writhing around, unable to escape.
00:36:45
Speaker
The two of them shoot every single one in the head, and they decide to go ahead with their plan to get out of the city. Roger and Peter make it to Fran, Stephen, and most importantly, the helicopter.
00:36:56
Speaker
While fueling up the helicopter, they run into some looters. It's a tense moment, but they all sort of agree that it would be foolish of them to start shooting with the whole reanimating dead situation, so they kind of just part ways.
00:37:10
Speaker
The looters are taking a boat to get out of the city, hoping to get to an island that this situation hasn't affected yet. And our main characters take the helicopter. While they're flying to wherever they think they're flying to, they start to see the scale of things and how much the situation has really spread.
00:37:28
Speaker
Eventually, they fly over a mall and they decide to stop there. They have no real supplies other than a couple of guns, and the mall is a perfect place to stock up. When they get there, they find that the mall has quite a few zombies walking around.
00:37:43
Speaker
And when Fran asks why they would all be there, Peter says, quote, some kind of instinct, memory, what they used to do. This was an important place in their lives. They guess that whatever is left of the zombie brains has guided them back to the mall, acting out the routine of shopping.
00:38:01
Speaker
Malls were America's favorite third place for a long time, so it actually does make sense. And mindless zombies wandering through the mall is very on the nose, right? It points to the mind-numbing effects of overconsumption, our addiction, particularly in America, to shopping, to ease our stress and self-soothe, and the way we are so often and so easily convinced that if we just buy the right stuff, all of our problems will be solved.
00:38:32
Speaker
Mindless shopping, mindless spending, and complacency. It's sort of the American way. So they're in the mall. They think that they can get a handle on the situation there.
00:38:44
Speaker
The zombies that are shown in the mall are shown in a sort of comical way. They bump into each other. They trip over stuff. But they're still scary because of their numbers, and there are some pretty close calls.
00:38:56
Speaker
Roger and Peter make it into a department store and lock all of the zombies out. They run around laughing, saying it's time to go shopping. We see kind of haunting intermittent shots of mannequins that look somehow both more alive and more dead than the zombies do.
00:39:15
Speaker
They're trying to get safe. They're trying to get supplies together. They're dodging zombies. They're killing zombies left and right. And eventually they do get the situation pretty well under control.
00:39:26
Speaker
And they start talking about the possibility of staying put for a while. They have resources there. And ultimately, a mall feels like a familiar place for them just as much as it does for the zombies.
00:39:38
Speaker
And I would imagine that in such a time of turmoil, being somewhere sort of normal and familiar would have its appeal. Stephen, in this conversation, reveals that Fran is a few months pregnant.
00:39:52
Speaker
Peter basically says that he knows how to perform an abortion if that's something that they want to do. Fran and Stephen are talking about their options, both relating to the baby and just generally staying safe.
00:40:03
Speaker
At one point, Fran says to the guys, quote, you're hypnotized by this place, all of you. It's so bright and neatly wrapped and you don't see that it's a prison too. Sounds like capitalism to me.
00:40:15
Speaker
Fran knows that this is not as good or as safe of an option as these men think it is. We learn over the course of the movie that these zombies are just, quote, pure motorized instinct.
00:40:28
Speaker
They don't really think, but they have some sort of muscle memory, and they'll repeat old actions, and they have like a very basic, very primitive handle on using tools. Fran continues sticking up for herself against these three men.
00:40:42
Speaker
and confronts the infantilizing way they have been treating her and the way they have been leaving her out of discussions and planning. Everyone but Peter kind of rolls her eyes at her, but Peter basically says that that's fair.
00:40:55
Speaker
He takes her seriously and he tells her that she's not coming into dangerous situations until she learns to defend herself and learns to shoot, which seems like a reasonable compromise to me under the circumstances, and they do start practicing.
00:41:08
Speaker
Peter and Roger go outside to use trucks to block off the entrance to the mall as best they can. Roger is getting way too cocky, and he thinks that they have this situation totally under control, despite the, like, hordes of zombies still coming towards them.
00:41:24
Speaker
and he does get bitten by a zombie in the leg. The gang arms themselves to the teeth, and they're wheelbarrowing Roger around so that he can help them shoot zombies.
00:41:34
Speaker
They have big guns, tons of bullets, and torches to scare the zombies into keeping their distance. The goal is to clear out all of the zombies in the entire mall so that they can live there more comfortably and for a longer time.
00:41:49
Speaker
Roger gets attacked yet again, and his bite has not turned him into a zombie yet. They drive one of the show cars in the mall through the mall, shooting down zombies left and right and like also running them over. It's actually quite badass.
00:42:03
Speaker
Once they kill all the zombies, they start planning to fortify the area of the mall that they're staying in. Fran is taking care of Roger, who is definitely about to become a zombie.
00:42:14
Speaker
Steven and Peter venture into the main areas of the mall to get the rest of the supplies they need before walling themselves in and to move the bodies of the zombies into the industrial-sized freezers of the mall to avoid the bodies rotting.
00:42:28
Speaker
They take big stashes of cash from cash registers. Like Peter says, you never know. They take whatever they want. There's an extended montage that looks like a fantasy version of being locked in a mall.
00:42:41
Speaker
They take whatever they want. They take clothes, jewelry, tons of candy. They take games, literally whatever they want. Fran uses the mall's ice rink and gives Stephen a haircut in the barber shop.
00:42:53
Speaker
They play games in the arcade to kill time, and they're increasingly enjoying their situation despite zombies still clawing at the door. They're us, that's all. There's no more room in hell.
00:43:05
Speaker
Peter tells them that this is what his grandfather would say. His grandfather was a voodoo priest and used to tell him that when there was no more room in hell, the dead would walk the earth. Roger keeps getting worse, and he basically asks Peter not to let him come back if he dies from his bite wound.
00:43:22
Speaker
The scene is heartbreaking and devastating. He tells Peter over and over that he will try his best. He will try not to come back. The people on TV debate the idea of dropping nuclear bombs on areas that the zombies are gathering.
00:43:38
Speaker
One of the men argues that there's no reason for any division amongst living humans anymore. There are only the living humans and the zombies. As this broadcast is on, Roger dies and his body reanimates, and Peter shoots him in the head.
00:43:53
Speaker
They bury his body in the indoor garden of the mall, giving him distinction from the bodies that were placed unceremoniously in the freezer. Peter sets Fran and Stephen up with a candle at dinner, and then goes and pours one out for his friend.
00:44:07
Speaker
He's grieving the last person from his life before all of this started. Peter gives Fran a pair of wedding rings at their dinner, and she gives it back, saying, we can't, not now.
00:44:18
Speaker
It wouldn't be real. At the bookstore, they start to stock up on pregnancy books and baby books. They continue to, like, peruse the mall, trying on clothes like kids playing dress-up.
00:44:31
Speaker
And the passage of time in the film is indicated by the swelling of Fran's pregnant belly. And I have to say, interestingly, this movie is about an apocalyptic outbreak leaving a pregnant woman named Fran as one of the only survivors.
00:44:46
Speaker
And it came out the same year as Stephen King's The Stand, which is also about an apocalyptic outbreak leaving a pregnant woman named Fran as one of the only survivors.
00:44:58
Speaker
Just a coincidence that I had to point out. Very different stories, but couldn't help it. But for the most part, they're making it work at the mall. They have enough supplies to keep things sort of interesting, like they have art supplies and sports supplies.
00:45:13
Speaker
But soon enough, the TV broadcasts stop coming through. It appears it's really all over out there. A biker gang reaches out to them on the radio, but they don't answer.
00:45:23
Speaker
Peter thinks they sound sketchy, which they do. They're lying about how many people are in their group, and Peter insists that they not answer, and so the biker gang basically declares war and says that they're going to take over the mall from them.
00:45:38
Speaker
Peter had planned for this. They had walled off their areas of the mall for this reason. They knew that they had to defend against not just zombies, but also for people who might be just as violent or dangerous.
00:45:50
Speaker
And these people just suck. Like, they break down the barricades to the mall and let all the zombies that have been crowding around the outside, inside. They're taking stuff from the mall, which would sort of be fine if they weren't being so reckless and chaotic. Like, there is more than enough stuff there for everyone.
00:46:10
Speaker
Steven is pissed off that these people are intruding on their fortress and starts to shoot out with them instead of just waiting out the situation. One of the most important things about the breakdown of their situation is that the zombies do not really screw things up for them once they get situated.
00:46:27
Speaker
It's the other people who screw things up for them. And then their own egos lead them to escalate the situation instead of doing the exact thing they set themselves up to do, withstand zombies or people coming into the mall.
00:46:43
Speaker
Steven dies in this process and, of course, reanimates as a zombie. Unfortunately, like we talked about, the zombies sort of remember actions and locations, so he goes directly to the wall they'd built to hide themselves and leads all the other zombies to Peter and Fran.
00:46:59
Speaker
Peter shoots zombified Steven sends Fran up to the roof where the helicopter is. He stays there, barricaded in the room, and considers ending things right there. He even points his gun at his head.
00:47:13
Speaker
Really, at the very last moment, he changes his mind and escapes to the roof where Fran has the helicopter that she's been learning to fly ready to go. He asks her how much fuel they have.
00:47:25
Speaker
She tells him, not much, and they fly away. This movie has a lot going on. Between the fears for the future expressed by Fran's pregnancy and the themes of greed and overconsumption throughout the whole movie, I mean, we literally have mindless zombies in a mall in this movie.
00:47:44
Speaker
And that's so spot on, right? We are mindless shoppers. This was true back then in malls, and this is still true now, even though things have moved more toward online shopping.
00:47:55
Speaker
And the fact that the mall had more than enough supplies for both groups of people and even more than enough space for them to sort of just stay away from each other, and that still wasn't good enough?
00:48:08
Speaker
I mean, it's pure greed at that point. Resources were abundant probably for the first time in a while, and people still couldn't manage to see that there is enough to go around if we just let it go around.
00:48:22
Speaker
It's the same mentality that makes us think that spending more money will somehow fix our problems. Which is the same mentality that led to the Lutz family buying a home that was totally outside their price range.
00:48:35
Speaker
and the same mentality that led to the destruction of our environment. And these themes are present in the 70s, but closely resemble themes that were already present that we've explored in previous episodes.
00:48:49
Speaker
The way the themes are explored just evolves with the times. Radioactive monster movies are also just fear of how much we might be destroying the environment. And we still see horror movies today that center around environmental disaster and destruction.
00:49:06
Speaker
And we definitely still see horror movies about economic distress. So the issues that would pop up in horror movies by this time just continue to be cemented in as these decades go by.
00:49:18
Speaker
I expect we'll continue to explore pretty similar themes as we move into horror movies of the decades since then. But first, we'll explore some other themes that were also present in nineteen seventy s horror.
00:49:50
Speaker
Our next episode is the perfect episode to come between parts one and part two covering 70s horror. We're going to have my friend Kelly back on to talk about The Exorcist. So get yourself ready with some pea soup and some crucifixes, and we'll see you next time on What Haunts You, a podcast about the stories that haunt our dreams.