Foreword: “What Lies Beneath?”

Summary

In 1979, Richard Lippe and I organized and hosted a retrospective of the (primarily) American horror film at the Toronto International Film Festival, then known as the “Festival of Festivals.” We invited a number of filmmakers to give seminars, and Brian de Palma, George Romero, Wes Craven, and Stephanie Rothman all made public appearances and answered questions, Richard and I interviewing each on stage before turning the questioning over to the audience. As part of this event, we produced a small booklet, to which Andrew Britton and Tony Williams also contributed essays, entitled (like the retrospective) The American Nightmare. My sections were subsequently included in my book Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan, with an extension dealing with the genre's development – “degeneration” would be a more appropriate term – in the 1980s.

Looking back, it seems to me that our primary motivation was what Howard Hawks always claimed for making his movies – “having fun” – though I would add that, like Hawks, we wanted to make as good a professional job of it as possible and we took our work very seriously. Of course, we would never have done it had we not believed that we had something to say, at the root of which was our sense that this most despised and ridiculed of genres deserved serious attention. I don't think it occurred to us that what we were doing would come to assume the historic importance that seems to be the case.