Sin-A-Rama

These auspicious words swirl through the grey matter as I sit here today, typing this introduction. It’s these very words that my cousin uttered on one hot summer day in 1987 that are the demon seed of this work. That day amongst the dusty and darkly lit shelves of some long forgotten mom and pop video shop, there aside the battered portraits of Patrick Swayze, Tom Cruise and Richard Gere was the promise that a 90lb. weakling would be transformed into "The first Super-Hero... from New Jersey!".

It was after many years and hundreds of films that I began to understand the significance of that summer. Maybe it was the indelible image of my youngest brother and his collection of Toxic Crusader action figures or trick or treaters dressed to the hilt in Freddy Kruger and Jason Voorhees outfits, playfully slashing at each other’s jugulars with the reckless immortality of youth. It occurred to me that somewhere in the Reganomic-optimism and greed-tinted-lenses of the 1980’s that a group of kids who never saw the true tragedy of war and the harsh struggles for equal rights were missing out on the significance of the boundaries that genre cinema had pushed.

The modern horror film eschewed the traditional monster movie of the 30’s and 40’s and set to peel the onion off a quiet suburban teenage wasteland. Filled with the cultural defiance and rage of the Vietnam era, a group of filmmakers descended upon the theaters of the world like the four horsemen of the apocalypse. With them they brought the gritty realism of the French New Wave to the genre and the realization of the atrocities committed in name of freedom. No longer where the innocents preyed upon by the charming count and the savage beast or the misunderstood giant. The innocent would now perish at the hands of friends, relatives, and nameless, faceless, human monsters that echoed the rising of corporate America.

It's been a long journey from the heyday of the Splatter flick and the Slasher pic and over the years I’ve been thrilled, chilled, jaded and dismayed by the state of the horror industry, but one thing has always remained true and that is the perseverance of the thankless number of dedicated filmmakers who have endured, against all odds, to redefine the cultural landscape of the modern horror film. Along the way these individuals have made crucial social commentaries, captured the end of American innocence, materialized the boogeyman inside us all and brushed the canvas of world cinema with complex hues of blood red.