Horror Cinema, Trauma, and the US in Crisis in the 1970s

Horror is a reaction; it’s not a genre.

John Carpenter

Crises abounded in the U.S. in the 1970s. From the energy crisis of 1973 to stagflation to the nation's rising crime rates, the decade was in many ways a dark chapter in America's recent past. It was an age of conspiracies come true and loss of faith in government and social institutions. Overall, the 1970s were marked by societal uncertainty and anxiety.

At the same time, the decade saw a notable shift in popular culture: the increasing popularity of horror films. A horror movie was the top grossing movie of 1973 with The Exorcist, and again in 1975 with Jaws. Indeed, the significance of the first ever blockbuster being a horror film should not be overlooked.

The art of a society reflects its condition and concerns, and horror films of the 1970s were no different, reflecting widespread societal feelings of anxiety and fear for the future. The uniquely dismal social conditions and outlook in the decade created a new rash of horror films and a new fervor for them among largely young audiences. Horror cinema was so popular, especially among youth, because it dealt with the issues in people's lives, representing not only the problems plaguing the U.S. but their lasting effects on Americans. Horror films effectively put a face to the fears that young people in America were growing up surrounded by. They did so both by creating antagonists that arose from the ills plaguing society and viscerally representing the lasting trauma in their surviving victims, mirroring the trauma felt by the U.S. in the period.

The reverberations of the Vietnam War in the American psyche were absolutely crucial to the overarching changes in horror cinema in the 1970s. Americans who reached their adolescence in the period had seen real life horror and bloodshed aired on daytime television throughout much of their childhood in the 1960s. This set the stage of a nation witnessing the real horrors that people could inflict upon one another.

The effects of the news coverage of the Vietnam War were reflected in many overarching developments in 1970s horror films. For instance, compared to horror films of the previous decades, movies from the era were generally more violent, bloody, and depraved. They also had a greater focus on real-life horrors rather than the supernatural, some even purporting to be based on true events. In turn, these attributes contribute to films' focus on representing the survivors' trauma, something largely absent from horror films of the 1960s.

Accompanying the various crises that rocked life throughout the decade was a feeling that they would never improve. People literally thought the world was ending--apocalyptic predictions of the end times became increasingly common, with Hal Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth being the best selling non-fiction book of the entire decade (Lundberg, 102). In addition, trust in American institutions was damaged. The advent of military failure in Vietnam, with U.S. involvement officially ending in 1973, followed immediately by Nixon's resignation amidst the Watergate scandal in 1974 (Wiest, xi) gave rise to the mistrust in government that would shape much of the rest of the decade.

Americans felt that they could no longer trust even their own president, and the social and economic crises that seemed never-ending further shook their faith in institutions. As such, there was a very real sense that the various ills of society would never get better, a shared trauma shared among Americans due to the dismal conditions which affected their lives every day. As Wes Craven said, "I think the nation was just repeatedly traumatized by the events of that time" (Craven, quoted in Blake, 71). This sense of trauma was captured in the horror films of the decade that dealt with the issues that plagued Americans. Two of the most pressing issues throughout the decade that I will focus on were the perceived loss of religion and breakdown of the family in America and the economic crisis.

Concerns over the breakdown of the traditional family and societal loss of religion were ever-present in the 1970s. The fear of the destruction of the family continued from the 1960s, where counterculture developments such as the sexual revolution and the phenomenon of teenagers running away from home to join "hippie" communities threatened the middle-class family unit (Kaufman, Allen, and West, 717-18). Despite the end of the hippie movement, these concerns over the integrity of the nuclear family persisted in the 1970s. They were exacerbated by the decade's changes, such as rising divorce rates and women increasingly entering the workforce. By 1973, the divorce rate was approaching 50 percent; by 1976, over half of mothers with school age children were in the labor force. As the phenomenon of the non-traditional matriarchal household became more visible throughout the decade, it became a source of anxiety (Zaretsky, 10-12).

The concern over the breakdown of the family was deeply tied to perceptions of loss of religion in America, specifically Christianity. As conservative Christians believed in the utmost importance of the heterosexual nuclear family in which parents could pass on their Christian values to children, particularly as forming a foundation for the nation to fight anti-religious Communism, its perceived destruction was a serious concern. They saw the rise of feminism and the youth movements of the 1960s and 1970s as destroying the nation's family values-based morality (Sutton 14).

The idea that Christianity was under attack was exacerbated by other interrelated factors as well, such as the Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion and the gay liberation movement following the Stonewall Rebellion of 1969. With Christians seeing abortion and homosexuality as sins, their emerging acceptance into mainstream culture in the early 1970s contributed to the perception of a waning morality in America brought on by the abandonment of the family unit and religion. These were far from fringe opinions. By the late 1970s, the religious right experienced a reawakening, influenced by the sense that American was losing its religion in the early 1970s. In 1979, thousands of supporters came to religious leader Jerry Falwell's taping of a broadcast in which he rallied "against pornography, abortion, homosexuality, sex education, the lack of prayer in public schools, and the waning influence of Christian morality in American life" (Rosenfeld).

Horror films throughout the decade would represent both the breakdown of family and the loss of religion. Movies would frequently feature groups of teenagers with no parents in sight doing decidedly un-Christian things--drinking, doing drugs, having sex--and dying for it. This is particularly true with the advent of the slasher subgenre, with 1974's Black Christmas typically being credited as the first slasher film (Koven, 11). Importantly, Halloween (1978), the film that started the slasher movie craze of the late 1970s and early 1980s, was released after the rise of the religious right in the mid- to late-1970s. These later slasher films simultaneously echoed societal fears about dissolving families and lack of Christian morals and placed themselves into youth culture by marketing to a teenage demographic through young casts and stories revolving around teenagers. Slasher films thus perhaps reflected youth’s fears about being punished for the sinful behavior depicted in these films, an anxiety potentially brought on by the rise of the religious right. With 50 million Americans identifying as Evangelicals by 1976 (Chandler), this anxiety very likely could have stemmed from the viewers' own homes.

Other films from the era dealt with the family unit and Christianity directly. For example, 1976's The Omen is about the coming of the Antichrist in the form of a young boy. In many ways the film can be considered pro-Christian, with a priest even telling the protagonist that he must accept Christ in order to defeat the Antichrist. That same year, the "overtly anti-Catholic" (Everman, 12) Alice, Sweet Alice took on the topic of punishing sinners, with a religious woman taking divine justice into her own hands by punishing sinful members of her church via murder. While these films have oppositional messages about Christianity, they both respond to the same anxieties in American culture surrounding loss of faith, albeit from different perspectives. In addition, it is significant that both films feature non-traditional families, with The Omen featuring a secretly adopted child and Alice, Sweet Alice a family with a single mother. Both families enable evil, whether that evil is directly depicted, as in the former, or only implied, as in the latter when the titular Alice walks away with the antagonist's knife. Both movies therefore react to societal perceptions of the dissolving family and depict it allowing for moral bankruptcy in youth, indicating the widespread nature of this concern.

We now turn to a film that mostly predated the rise of the religious right in America: The Exorcist (1973). Written by William Peter Blatty, adapting it from his own novel, and directed by William Friedkin (Kermode, 20-21), The Exorcist was incredibly popular, earning the title of highest-grossing film of 1973. With its release, horror films definitively stepped into mainstream American popular culture. In many ways, it exemplifies how horror films of the 1970s mirrored societal anxiety over family and religion, and, as such, how the newfound popularity of the genre stemmed from its representation of societal fears and the trauma that arose from them.

Without dwelling too long on summary, various elements of the film uphold the notion that America was losing its faith and familial foundations. The story centers around a young girl on the edge of adolescence, Regan, with a working single mother and an absent father. Already from a "broken" family, the girl is rendered open to possession by the un-Christian activity of playing with a Ouija board. Significantly, her working mother does not know that she has done so until after she has already made contact with a demon. Here the viewer is presented with the modern, matriarchal family that was becoming increasingly common in the 1970s.

The characters from the church, too, reflect family disunity and dying faith. Father Karras left his dying mother in poverty-stricken conditions to become a priest in another city. He has even begun to doubt his faith and wants to leave the church. The film thus represented the profound nature of the crisis of faith in the 1970s--even a priest is losing his religion. Through her possession, Regan symbolically becomes the immoral teenager that adults feared. She begins to swear, rebels against authority, and metaphorically loses her virginity in the infamous crucifix scene. Regan's savior comes in the form of religion with her exorcism. In addition, Karras's sacrifice shows his regaining of faith. The film therefore echoes concerns about American youth growing up without strong family ties and religious faith and ultimately posits that a return to Christianity is necessary for their salvation. While perhaps thus intended more for adult audiences, and indeed the writer and director were in their 40s, teenagers still consumed the film in high numbers. The pro-Christian message of the film is highlighted by a 1974 piece in The L.A. Times featuring priests praising the film for having the potential to "[push] someone back into a relationship with God" (Thomas J. Dove, quoted in Kilday, 1).

While The Exorcist's ending is relatively optimistic compared to many of the horror films that would follow it, with the demon exorcised and Regan seemingly returning to normal, it still shows the lasting trauma caused by the events of the story. Father Karras is dead, and there are clear indications that Father Dyer, who administered Karras’s last rites, will suffer from the trauma of witnessing his friend’s death. The shot of Dyer looking at the stairs on which Karras died, with the boarded-up window from which he fell framed directly behind him, imply that Karras's death will not leave Dyer soon. The very last shot of the film, with the window juxtaposed with Dyer walking away from the house as the theme music plays, tells the viewer that the demon is still out there, and the events of the film are implied to be able to happen again.

This ending shows that salvation is only temporary, and in the end the families are still broken. As The Exorcist was released before the religious right became as prominent as it was in the late 1970s, this ending can be seen as representing the futility of religion in a society that is losing its faith. It thus echoes the societal trauma of a nation feeling that Christian morals were slipping away, replaced by the hedonism of the modern, atheistic age. Even when one person was saved, there was still a whole nation of faithless people vulnerable to the demon of disbelief.

Another facet of life in the U.S. in the 1970s that was ever-present was economic distress. In about 1974-5, the country experienced the worst economic contraction since the Great Depression, and its effects were felt throughout the rest of the decade. The dismal economic conditions in the era, marked by stagflation and compounded by factors such as the 1973 oil crisis and rampant unemployment, caused widespread feelings of helplessness and "mental strain" (Tausig and Fenwick, 2-12). By the mid-1970s, headlines referred to the economic conditions as a "crisis," and there were frequent stories of layoffs.

The effects of the economic distress faced by Americans in the 1970s is best captured by what is called the "misery index," explained in the graph below. The peaks throughout the 1970s demonstrate how miserable the decade was, so to speak, especially as compared to the relatively prosperous 1960s.

Unlike Christianity, economic decay was rarely directly addressed in the horror films of the 1970s. Rather, like the breakdown of the family, economic anxiety was more metaphorically depicted. For instance, class tensions were highlighted in the conflict between the educated scientist Hooper and the working-class shark hunter Quint in Jaws (1975). The The Hills Have Eyes (1977) can be read as an allegory for increasing class divide, with the Carter family representing affluent Americans and the cannibal family those living in poverty. While haunted house films were less common in the era, 1979's house-centric The Amityville Horror symbolizes the financial difficulties of homeownership and the fear of a bad real estate investment. One 1970 Chicago Tribune article even aptly described home buyers and sellers as feeling, like the Lutz family in their haunted house, "like trapped prey" (Sneed, 1).

The economic crisis was also sometimes used as a background to horror films rather than a direct narrative. Eraserhead (1977), for example, sets an inward-facing narrative against the backdrop of a decaying city based on David Lynch's time in Philadelphia (Bhattacharjee, 490). The economic crisis was deeply tied to the urban crises of the era, with major cities such as New York being abandoned both by residents through white flight and by the government. The famous headline "Ford to City: Drop Dead" when President Ford refused to provide New York with federal assistance in 1975 encapsulates how residents of cities felt they were being left behind in the era. As we will see, however, it was not just the residents of America's cities that were profoundly affected by the decade's economic crisis.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, written, directed, and produced by Tobe Hooper, was released one year after The Exorcist in 1974, when Hooper was 31. It was both incredibly popular ("Philly Fans Get Real Buzz From 'Chainsaw'") and highly influential, establishing a template of gritty, violent horror based in reality that would continue throughout the decade. While dealing with a variety of topics, the film's basis in economic distress underlies the horror and its causes.

The film almost immediately makes its representation of economic crisis clear with the introduction of the hitchhiker. He tells the group of teens about his family's history of working at the local slaughterhouse, an occupational identity destroyed by new technology that resulted in "people put out of jobs" (Hooper, Texas Chain Saw Massacre). This economic displacement is the cause of their cannibalism, as the Sawyer family "kill[s] to 'make a living'" (Merritt, 207). The general scenes of the desolate Texas countryside, too, show rural poverty as existing in the foreground and background of the film. Further demonstrating the narrative's basis in economic decline is the reason why the teens can't simply drive away--there is no gas at the gas station. While it is possible that this was written before the 1973 oil crisis, given the film's 1974 release it took on a particular significance.

The theme of economic ruin persists throughout the film, with the Sawyer family clearly living in poverty to the point that they must kill people in order to eat and even furnish their home. As such, while the teens are victims of the Sawyers, the Sawyers are in turn victims of waning industry and layoffs, their crimes arising from the economic distress in which they live. The family comes together in the dinner scene, which takes a mainstay of American life--the family dinner--and perverts it, turning it into something horrific. This is perhaps to reflect the very real horror of the working breadwinner at the idea of not being able to put food on their family’s table.

The ending of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre leaves behind any trace of optimism one might have found in The Exorcist. The final scene ends with Sally, the lone survivor, screaming and then laughing in the back of the pickup truck, Leatherface still swinging his chainsaw on the road. It is clear that the trauma of the events she has lived through is something from which Sally will never recover; the psychological effects already come through in her jarring laughter. Leatherface is still there for his next victim, as emphasized by the final shot of him swinging his chainsaw against the setting sun. The audience knows that the "true" events of the film can--and will--happen again.

Overall, the film depicts the devastating effects of the economic crisis with its creation of the antagonists, and how the victims of economic decay--both the Sawyer family and Sally--can never truly recover from its effects. As economic distress has irreversibly changed the lives of the Sawyers, its effects will also haunt Sally for the rest of her life. Sally's incessant screaming and laughter and the final shot of Leatherface on the highway, indicating the repetition of the events of the film, represent the endurance of the crisis, with no end of America's economic misery in sight.

Both the popularity of and themes within horror films from the 1970s reveal the profound effect of the social and economic crises of the decade, particularly among youth. Films such as The Exorcist and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre served as one avenue through which young people consuming (and, in some cases, creating) horror cinema identified and dealt with the issues they grew up bombarded by. Horror movies of the era were an attempt for filmmakers and audiences to express the hopelessness that they felt living and growing up in an era defined by distrust, grim conditions, and seeming hopelessness for the future. In turn, this explains the horror genre's newfound popularity, as young people turned to metaphors to make sense of their fears and the world around them.

With the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, horror films would take on a new face. But as they existed in the 1970s, they provide significant insight into what anxieties and fears Americans were facing at the time, and how young Americans in particular addressed the trauma that they grew up surrounded by.

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