Horrors Best Directors

Hitchcock's 60s Masterpieces:
Another suspense/thriller director Alfred Hitchcock, whose early silent film The Lodger (1926) explored horror's themes, brought out his most horrific film over 30 years later at the start of the decade. His film changed the face of all horror films ever since. Pure archetypal horror was now to be found in the dark shadows of the human soul itself - in a psychopathic, cross-dressing Bates Motel operator and taxidermist (Anthony Perkins). The low-budget, television-influenced, B & W Psycho (1960) could be considered the 'Citizen Kane' of horror films, with its complex Oedipal themes and schizophrenia. Its most famous scene was the classic shower murder in which the heroine (Janet Leigh) was savagely stabbed, with Bernard Herrmann's violin-tinged memorable score. The scene still invokes sheer terror, and the film itself would come to influence all subsequent Hollywood horror films - especially the 'slasher' horror film subgenre.
Hitchcock's next horror masterpiece was Universal Studios' apocalyptic The Birds (1963) about the invasion of coastal town Bodega Bay by avian flocks. A spoiled heiress (Tippi Hedren), her potential boyfriend (Rod Taylor), his mother (Jessica Tandy), and a schoolteacher (Suzanne Pleshette) all suffered from the many bird attacks. The theme of Man vs. Nature running amok remained unresolved by the film's end.



George Romero's Horror Contributions: Zombie Films
George Romero, now known as the Master of the 'zombie film,' debuted as director with the low-budget, black-and-white, intensely-claustrophobic, unrelenting B&W cult classic Night of the Living Dead (1968), a milestone 'splatter' film about newly dead, stumbling corpses/zombies that returned to life with ravenous hunger for human flesh. The amateurish, allegorical film made in just one month showed rotten human corpses walking with outstretched arms and threatening a few trapped survivors who sought refuge in a Pennsylvania farm-shack. By film's end, the townsfolk discovered that zombies could be killed by shooting them in the head - although they mistakenly shoot Ben (Duane Jones) after his desperate fight for survival.
Romero's most notable horror films -- his calling card -- included his Dead trilogy (now totaling five) -- about flesh-eating zombies who walked slowly and stiffly (due to the effects of rigor mortis), in a 'cult of the dead':
• Night of the Living Dead (1968) - this naturalistic, documentary-style film inaugurated an entire horror subgenre (zombie films with flesh-stalking cannibals), shot in stark and grainy black and white
• Dawn of the Dead (1978) - the gore-filled sequel with survivors who sought refuge in a deserted shopping mall, with a further perverse critique of the mall culture and its mentality, and the classic statement by Peter (Ken Foree): "When there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the Earth"; remade as Dawn of the Dead (2004) by Zack Snyder (his feature film debut)
• Day of the Dead (1985) - about surviving scientists and military officers who performed experiments on zombies in a bunker to find a cure for the plague, until the zombies revolt
• Land of the Dead (2005) - a symbolic 'haves & have-nots' story, between the elites who live in walled-off, luxurious urban skyscrapers in an embattled city called Fiddler's Green (led by feudal overlord leader Kaufman played by Dennis Hopper) where they are protected by mercenaries who battle the flesh-eating zombies, and the lower class masses who live in squalor
• Diary of the Dead (2008) - a "film-within-a-film," supposedly a documentary (with long takes and hand-held camera shots) made by aspiring film student Jason Creed (Joshua Close).

B.Birch