Neil Young's Film Lounge

Neil Young’s Film Lounge – The American Nightmare

THE AMERICAN NIGHTMARE

5/10

UK 2000
dir Adam Simon (documentary)
edited by Paul Carlin
73 minutes

Fair enough as far as it goes, The American Nightmare analyses of some of the key horror movies from from 1969 to 1979, starting with Night of the Living Dead, and taking in Last House on the Left, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Dawn of the Dead, Shivers, and Halloween, placing them in the social political context of their time.

The made-for-TV documentary starts strongly, intercutting movie clips with vivid newsreel footage from Vietnam and talking-head interviews with directors and academics, but the episodic approach soon becomes repetitive and some of the arguments seem forced, especially the closing moments which try to categorise the whole 70s horror boom as a psychological aftershock from 50s A-bomb fears.

It’s hard to know what the very Canadian, very idiosyncratic David Cronenberg is doing in a film called The American Nightmare, while, on the other hand, the more explicitly commercial John Carpenter receives very short shrift. It’s also odd that zero mention is made either of 70s horror pictures either from the US mainstream (Exorcist, Jaws, Omen, Rosemary’s Baby) or from Europe, or any attempt made to draw parallels with the current state of US independent cinema.

While essentially a bit of a missed opportunity, The American Nightmare is always watchable, and should prove a useful introduction to the subject, its crisp editing enhanced by Godspeed You Black Emperor!’s moody instrumental soundtrack – though it’s typical of the movie as a whole that the band are as emphatically Canadian as Cronenberg.

by Neil Young

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