Movie 12 - Nightmares in Red, White & Blue

Back to the great unwatched of my DVD collection that is looming in the corner! Next up is a documentary from 2009 by Andrew Monument called Nightmares in Red, White and Blue: The Evolution of the American Horror Film. This film is an excellent decade-by-decade look at how American horror films were influenced by the world around us featuring a cast of some of the most important names behind the scenes.

This really smart documentary becomes a timeline of horror in America. The truly awesome cast of great American directors includes John Carpenter (Halloween, The Thing), Joe Dante (The Howling, Gremlins), George Romero (Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead), Roger Corman (Pit and the Pendulum, The Terror), Larry Cohen (It's Alive, The Stuff) and many more. And it is even narrated by Lance Henriksen of Aliens and Near Dark fame!

I really love that this documentary starts at the very beginning by talking about Edison's Frankenstein (1910) and then moves to the films of Lon Chaney in the 1920's and the backdrop of World War I and the Great Depression. The 30's are dominated by Universal's game-changing Dracula and Frankenstein which are the first true horror films and usher in the monster age ... and a host of imitators. This led to the 40's monster mash-ups like The House of Frankenstein starring Dracula, the Wolf man and the Monster, but by then the Nazi's were scarier than anything Hollywood could put up on the big screen. Then, of course, the 50's are full of sci-fi terrors that put our fears of the A-bomb front and center like Them and The Day The Earth Stood Still. On and on the movie analyzes how each generation has different fears based on the real world and how they translate to the fantasies we watch on the movie screen.

It's also interesting how over time films get more brutal as real life gets more violent and crazed around us. Obviously this happened during Vietnam with films like Night of the Living Dead and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. So many filmmakers in this documentary and others have noted how they didn't shy away from being gruesome since everything was silly make believe compared to the nightly news. It was interesting to see a doc new enough though to equate this same reaction with the post 9/11 world and the advent of so called "torture porn" like Hostel and Saw.

I definitely recommend Nightmares in Red, White and Blue to any fans of horror movies, film history, world history and even psychology. While I may not have picked exactly the same line up as the people we see here, it is a great group of filmmakers that represent the genre. I would have liked to hear from maybe some of the screenwriters and fx artists to round it out a bit more, but this does include some cool people we never get to hear from like Brian Yuzna who produced Re-Animator and From Beyond.

imdb listing