“My kind of horror is not horror anymore. No one’s afraid of a painted monster.”
– Boris Karloff in Targets (1968)

I have spent my life trying to avoid becoming the kind of person who laments that horror (or much of anything else) was better back in the “good old days.” I try to find the good qualities in every era of horror output, and avoid broad generalizations about, especially, what is being produced today. That being said, like anyone else, I obviously have my preferences.

Perhaps surprisingly, my favorite horror films are not those that I grew up with. When I was a kid, I watched the stuff that was being produced at the time and seldom delved very far into the past. I generally believed myself immune to the charms of older horror movies, and assumed that I would not like them.

There were glimpses, even then, into the kinds of films that would become my favorites, though I was unable to recognize them at the time. I have written before and at great length about my love affair with the Crestwood House monster books, how I would pore over their evocative black-and-white photographs of films I had never seen – and might have avoided, even had the opportunity presented itself.

Then there were old horror comic books or issues of things such as the Cracked Monster Party that I would pick up at flea markets and read to pieces, even making my own homemade versions. There was my obsession with Mezco’s line of Silent Screamers toys, even though I had never seen most of the movies they were adapting.

But it wasn’t until college that I actually began digging into the majority of the horror movies from before the 1980s – the eras which would become my greatest raison d’etre.

“Horror is like a serpent; always shedding its skin, always changing.”
– Dario Argento

If pressed to pick a favorite decade of horror cinema, the answer is almost certainly the 1960s. But really, anything from the ’60s or before is my preferred brand of poison. As I have belabored up above, however, this isn’t due to nostalgia on my part, as this era of films was long over by the time I was born, and I didn’t come to them in any meaningful sense until my formative years were already behind me.

So, what draws me to the creaky, old movies in preference to the new? I’m sure there are lots of answers, and I’ve addressed some of them in essays before. But the lion’s share of it is probably aesthetic as much as anything.

In the essay that I just linked, I quote from Jason Zinoman’s book Shock Value and Roy Olson’s Booklist review of same, where the argument is advanced that “between 1968 and 1976, all the films that redefined the horror movie were made.” This is Zinoman’s “New Horror,” a genre-centric equivalent to the auteur-focused “New Hollywood” that was being developed by filmmakers such as Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese in the 1970s.

There are a lot of elements that separate this “New Horror” from the “painted monsters” that came before – I address just one of them in that essay above – but aesthetics certainly play a part.

While it is, again, unproductive to make broad declarations as if they are rules without exception, it is more true than not that the films of this “New Horror” – and those that followed – largely eschewed the expressionism of the earlier horror films for at least a certain brand of aesthetic realism.

Naturally, you can find exceptions aplenty, from the candy-colored lighting of Argento’s Suspiria to the canted camera angles of Raimi’s Evil Dead, but for the most part, the “New Horror” brought horror home in more ways than one. The stories were more likely to take place in locations where regular people might be, they were more likely to be filmed with naturalistic lighting, and even sometimes adopted cinema verite shooting styles.

This is often described (probably accurately) as modern horror films looking more “real.” But there are other elements at play, as well, from changes between horror of interiority and externality to a relaxation of the rules about what could and could not be shown on screen, leading to greater and greater depictions of violence to the body.

Discussing these changes at any length would require much more time and space than I have available here. Indeed, it occupies a considerable portion of Zinoman’s aforementioned book. And it’s largely irrelevant, anyway.

I am well aware of the relative strengths and weaknesses of both approaches, and I absolutely understand why the “New Horror” of the ’70s led to a renaissance of the genre that is largely still going today.

Variety recently made a controversial list of the “100 Best Horror Movies of All Time” where they placed The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) in the number one spot – and I don’t necessarily disagree. It’s not that I dislike modern horror, or that I think either aesthetic approach is inherently better or worse. Like almost anything else, each one has its uses, and each one can be applied to great effect in the right hands.

It’s simply that, if I have to choose, my heart is with those “painted monsters” every time. The interior of my mind is a manufactured set filled with artificial fog, painted on shadows, and handmade trees. It’s a place where a painted moon hangs above a cemetery filled with foam headstones.

I try to make almost every kind of horror “my kind of horror,” but, like anyone, I’m only ever going to be so successful at that. I’m always going to have my preferences, and those preferences are always going to be the old, expressionist shadows and painted backdrops of movies made decades before I was born.

“Say it’s only a paper moon / sailing over a cardboard sea
But it wouldn’t be make-believe / if you believed in me”
– E. Y. Harburg & Billy Rose, “It’s Only a Paper Moon”