Jed Mayer
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Raised in Fear: Obsolete Technology, Retro-Futurism, Ultra-Violence, and Stanley Kubrick
I have always been drawn to visions of the future, but little did I know what brutal images were held on the Beta videocassette of Stanley Kubrick’s "A Clockwork Orange" I rented at the tender age of ten.
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Screaming Hides the Sound: John Carpenter’s Death Disco
The year after John Carpenter’s "Halloween" left its indelible mark on future developments in film and music, a stadium full of baseball fans would vent their misdirected hatred on a pile of disco records. If this was 1979’s version of 1969’s Altamont, clearly Marx was right when he said that histo...
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RAISED IN FEAR: Frankenstein, Dracula, and Other Supernannies
Most responsible parents will tell you that using the television as a surrogate nanny is bad for kids, but my own experience as a child would argue against this. My parents were wise enough to know that there were some places in the child mind that parents shouldn't go, and the only reliable guides...
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SCREAMING HIDES THE SOUND, PART 2: THE WICKER MAN, The Pagan-Horror-Folk-Rock Musical
Many seemingly healthy people are terrified of folk music, which makes it not surprising that one of the most innovative and hauntingly effective soundtracks in the history of horror films is essentially a collection of folk songs.
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SCREAMING HIDES THE SOUND, Part 1: The Resurrection of Fabio Frizzi
If you had your windows open on the sultry evening of August 7, you may have heard a series of distant screams.
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RAISED IN FEAR: Midnight Movie Revivals and DAWN OF THE DEAD
It's midnight. A horde of glassy-eyed teenagers descends upon the brightly lit multiplex. They look almost like normal film-goers but their gait is shuffling, awkward. “What are they doing? Why do they come here?” “Some kind of instinct. Memory . . . of what they’ve seen before and crave again.”
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Raised in Fear: Coping with Excess in Larry Cohen’s IT'S ALIVE
It started with a poster.
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Raised in Fear: Phantasm and the Uses of Enchantment
For many filmgoers, seeing their first horror movie is a rite of passage: mine came at the tender age of six, on our first family visit to the drive-in to see "The Satanic Rites of Dracula" (1973).
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