[screams]

Brian: Recognize that? Just in time for Halloween. The shower scene that changed everything in American horror cinema, Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 movie Psycho, was one of the first horror films to introduce American audiences to the deranged serial killer, and to ask the question, "Could a murderer be lurking in us all?" Coming on the heels of a post-war atomic age, where many horror movies had to do with out of control science experiments, think Godzilla, think Frankenstein, Psycho as my next guest puts it, ushered in in an an era where the monsters had nothing to do with supernatural elements or technological disasters, but spraying instead from some internal corruption.

Aja Romano is an internet culture reporter for Vox. In this week leading up to Halloween, her new piece is called The Horror Century, the scariest movies have always been a dark mirror on American's deepest fears and anxieties. Aja, thank you so much for joining us for this.

Aja Romano: Thanks for having me.

Brian: Listeners, we will play a couple of other classic movie clips as we go here. The basic relationship we have to horror movies is something maybe we could start with, because some people turn to horror movies for comfort when they're stressed with actual life. Other people like me, think that's weird and just get more disturbed by them. Did you watch a lot of horror during the pandemic, and if so, what did you find yourself drawn to?

Aja Romano: Absolutely, I did. I think this idea that there's something validating about horror, that you can see all of your anxieties and all of your subconscious worries and things that you're repressing play out on screen. I think that the idea that can be cathartic to many people is true and I think that's probably why I think horror in the pandemic has been really popular. Of course, we've been having this golden era of horror in general, but I have especially been drawn to quiet horror recently.

There's a film from New Zealand that I really enjoy called Housebound, where this girl is on house arrest and she is basically stuck with her mom and she's having all these issues, just normal family issues while she's on house arrest, and she's this irascible 20-something who doesn't know what she wants in life, but then she realizes that there's somebody in the house with them. She can't leave because she's on house arrest. I think that movie, it's so witty and dry. It just encapsulates this feeling of being trapped, stuck in this one location, like we've been in quarantine for many of us during pandemic.

I think that there are moments like that when a film can really resonate with you on both a literal and an allegorical level.

Brian: Listeners, you can be part of this too. Did you find yourself turning to horror during the pandemic and what was your favorite horror film, that you watched in the last year and a half or so, and why? 212-433, WNYC horror movie fans, this Halloween week, 212-433-9692, have horror films been a comfort for you of any kind during the pandemic era in particular? If so, what movies? 212-433-9692, for Aja Romano, internet culture reporter for Vox.

The premise of your piece before we play a few more clips, is that horror movies and what makes them scary, the monster, the threat, is often linked to the cultural anxieties and fears of that very moment in society, a dark mirror as you call it. You write, "The first horror movie is widely accepted to be 1921s, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, that's 100 years ago, 1921." Happy birthday horror. What were some themes that dominated that movie, and then in those first few decades of the genre?

Aja Romano: I think that movie is really unique. It's well-known for being an expression of expressionism and for having almost this surrealist quality in the set design and getting at the the psychosis of dreams, and really plumbing the depths of the psyche and looking internally for the source of the monstrous within us. That's a theme that we see playing out throughout that era. You have these the universal monster movies of the '30s and '40s, things like The Mummy and The Wolfman and Dracula. I think that whole era really was grappling with this undercurrent of Andes following World War I and preceding World War II, where you had this idea that the old world was collapsing and giving rise to the new world, but there was all this clash of modernity and tradition and individualism with commonality and all of these things that culminated in this exploration that I think we see playing out in horror films of the period. That's asking, "Who is the other in the situation? What if I am the monster? What if I am the person who's not able to fit in properly into this new society?"

I think we see various kinds of extrapolations and layers upon layers of those ideas in horror over the next decade or so.

Brian: Let's play a clip from 1954's Creature from the Black Lagoon, a movie you say dealt directly with post-war anxiety. A group of scientists has just discovered a large amphibious hand while on an expedition in the Amazon. Listen.

Speaker 3: Could it possibly belong to a plasticine man?

Speaker 4: The chances are much greater than that hand belonged to an amphibian, Mark. One that's spent a great deal of time in the water.

Female Speaker 5: Well, then how do you account for the structure of the fingers, obviously, for land use.

Speaker 3: We can be sure of one thing, whatever it was, it was very powerful.

Brian: Whatever it was, was very powerful in 1954's Creature from the Black Lagoon. How do you place this movie in your piece, Aja?

Aja Romano: I see it as a transition from the universal era, where you had these very concrete monsters into the post-war era of the '50s and '60s, where you had larger themes popping up about what is humanity's responsibility to the environment, to these places like the Amazon, that they explore in Creature from the Black Lagoon, and to the creature to be found there.

Brian: The Creature from the Black Lagoon was really Chevron. Never mind, I'm just still thinking about our last segment. Go ahead.

Aja Romano: That's actually a really good way to process this because you're talking about this era where all of our anxieties were suddenly about human overreach in the wake of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. You had people really starting to ask, "What if we're going too far?" I think Creature from the Black Lagoon is one of those Touchstone films that really approaches this idea that maybe humans shouldn't be going into the forest and trying to do anthropology in these places where they're not meant to be. Of course, we then see these new monsters or variants of old monsters, like Godzilla, who I described as like a post nuclear dragon with all of the incumbent anxiety that he contains about world war and the atomic era, and an apocalypse.

Brian: We're going to play a clip from in 1968 horror film in just a second as we continue to go forward in history in the genre. Let's hear from some of our callers, our lines are absolutely packed with people wanting to say what horror films they've turned to themselves during the pandemic. We'll start with Debbie in Branchville, you're on WNYC. Hi Debbie.

Debbie: Hi Brian. That's one of my favorite genres, but I really, really love horror films with intelligent plots and dialogue. I just recently binge-watched the entire series of Midnight Mass, which stars Hamish Linkletter, and Henry Thomas who's all grown up since he played Elliot and E.T. It's a combination, it's almost as if a serious version of dogma meets Salem's lot, because it does deal with issues, there are something like a vampire in it, but it's really more about the existential crisis that people think about life. It deals specifically with Catholicism and the Muslim religion. There are some really powerful monologues by different characters talking about these. As horrific as it is, and it is very gruesome, but it's also inspirational, and it's one of the first horror films where I've heard them singing Nearer, My God, To Thee, like they did on the Titanic while it sank. It's really worth watching.

Brian: Debbie, thank you very much for that. Appreciate it. Aaron in the city around WNYC. Hi Aaron.

Aaron: Oh, is this me?

Brian: Yes.

Aaron: Hi, Brian. I'm actually calling, this is super relevant to me because at the very start of the pandemic, a group of friends who were all in different places and we were all very stressed, of course, so we decided to start a virtual movie night over Zoom. Every week, there were all horror movies, we would all vote on a movie, we'd have a little bit of a chat beforehand, then we'd mute ourselves, use the chat box and talk during the movie. We had one friend who is not a horror movie fan at all, and she's basically become an expert at this point and we're probably up to 50 movies at this point.

Brian: Wow. Give us the internal dialogue that you feel you're experiencing when you watched some of these 50 horror movies during the pandemic. What are you getting from it in a release your pandemic anxiety sense?

Aaron: In a lot of ways, it was almost cathartic because you would watch people and a lot of the time we would have a phrase, we'd be like, "Okay, it's bad decision time," because you would see someone, like a movie like Jaws, for instance, that was one we watched and we all found it was very relevant to what was happening when people were like, "Oh, don't go in the water." Then the beach official or whoever was saying, "Oh, no, it's totally fine. Go ahead in there," and we were just like, "Wow, this is very relevant to what's happening right now with downplaying the pandemic," and all that sort of thing." It actually became almost a way of a therapeutic kind of an activity.

Brian: Aaron, thank you so much for that. Good luck with movie 51. Lynn in Bloomfield. You're on WNYC. Hi, Lynn.

Lynn: Hello. Let me take you off speaker. Hi. When the pandemic first started, I said into my remote, "Zombie movies," and something came up, it's called Cell with Samuel L. Jackson and John Cusack. Who knew Samuel L. Jackson made a zombie movie?

Brian: Was it relevant to-- go ahead?

Lynn: It's a zombie movie, so it's horror. What was amazing about it is that within the first three minutes, the zombies start attacking, which usually there is more of a prologue. There's more of a sendup in that. The other one that everything is really cool for everybody to watch is Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

Brian: Lynn, thank you very much. Let's do one more. Mark in Ponce Puerto Rico. Hi, Mark. You're on WNYC.

Mark: Hi, Brian. Thanks for picking up.

Brian: What's you got?

Mark: Last night I was watching CNN and I looked over to TCM, saw that THEM! was playing, all caps T-H-E-M-! with an exclamation point and I just had to rewatch it. I've watched it a million and I was just impressed with how much people trusted scientists and law enforcement, given the context we're in now.

Brian: THEM! was better than watching the horror of the news on Wolf Blitzer?

Mark: Definitely than watching the Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer. That's one of the most overproduced shows that is truly horrifying.

Brian: Mark, thank you very much. What are you thinking listening to those callers, Aja?

Aja Romano: I think they're getting it exactly what is so gratifying about horror in the pandemic age or in any age because I think they're calling out these themes that speak to them on an allegorical level, but also a very literal level. This idea that THEM! was produced in a time where we really valued science as being the ultimate guiding authority to really help us through times of chaos and these apocalyptic post-nuclear meltdowns, that were happening all over horror and sci-fi films. When you look back now, you see both how relevant that is to today and also how maybe naive we were back then. The idea that the plot of Jaws is basically the shark, versus this town's entire economy and the things that they will do to preserve their sense of stability in the face of this unpredictable maneater that has come to their town, really, really, really does mirror in many ways, the reaction to the pandemic. I think people seeing themselves in this situation, in those films are exactly what horror is about.

Brian: The virus is the monster and then how do human beings react to it? We've been living that trauma for a year and a half plus. We have a few more minutes with Aja Romano, culture critic for Vox, who has a great piece about how horror movies over time have expressed the anxieties of the time and reflected them. Let's take one more example from more than 50 years ago, 1968 in a section that you called Cultural Meltdown: Psychosexuality and The Occult and listeners, let's see if you can place this movie's ending scene.

Female Speaker 10: What have you done, damn, you maniac?

Speaker 11: Satan is his father not guy. He came up from hell and begot a son, a mortal woman.

Speaker 12: Hail Satan.

Speaker 13: Hail Satan.

Brian: Wow. Yes, that was Rosemary’s Baby in 1968. On the one hand, it's a complete and total metaphor for the way that women were not in control of their bodies and then in the last five seconds, it loses the metaphor and becomes goofy and actually about Satan. If you want this movie to be about the patriarchy, it's about the patriarchy, if you want it to be about Satan rituals and sacrifice, it's also about that. Would you say those two themes were circulating widely in 1968?

Aja Romano: I definitely think they were in the water. Obviously, there was an entire feminist movement in the '60s and '70s and even if you look back at Rosemary’s Baby itself, Mia Farrow's haircut was this iconic symbol of women's liberation. I think all those themes are obviously there in Rosemary's Baby, but you also have this burgeoning resentment over the counter culture. You have things like the Manson family gaining traction in the cultural subconscious and really preparing us for the '70s and the ultimate Satanic panic of the '80s.

I think films like this, obviously, they're so good and they're so powerful, but they also, in a very literal way, films like Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist gave people permission to believe in Satan and the devil and all sorts of occult panic and hysteria.

Brian: One more from 2017. Listeners, a lot of you will get this one from the context.

Rod: They're probably abducting Black people, brainwashing them, and make them slaves or sex slaves, not just regular slaves. See, I don't know if it's the hypnosis that's making them slaves or whatnot, but all I know is they already got two brothers we know, and it could be a whole bunch of brothers they got already.

Brian: That's the character Rod, for those of you who didn't see Get Out, which made this idea, we're talking about very explicit like at the Stepford Wives before it in the '70s, dealing with women's liberation. It took cultural anxieties about race and turned them up to 11, Jordan Peele calls Get Out social horror. Just give me 30 seconds on this and we're out of time.

Aja Romano: It's such a brilliant meta exploration of not only the situation that Black people are in in contemporary America, but horror itself and what horror is supposed to do because the whole plot runs on this conceit that normally in a horror film, the protagonist of a horror film is safe when they go into upper class, New England in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by rich white people in their rich white people houses. But in this case, the protagonist is a Black man and that completely upends everything you know about horror and everything you know about horror tropes, and it allows Peele to conduct this brilliant exploration of the audience's expectations for horror.

Brian: There we leave it as we return to music from Psycho, where we began on this Halloween week with Aja Romano, internet cultural reporter for Vox. Great article. Thanks for sharing it with us.

Aja Romano: Thanks for having me.

Copyright © 2021 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.