C&C 58: Genre Jones

New histories of horror and cinematic science fiction

With Wicked joining the ranks of 2024’s highest-grossing movies, there’s finally a non-sequel in the year’s top 10 moneymakers. But as we’re talking about the adaptation of a stage musical based on a prequel novel to a series of books that spawned a timeless film, we remain deep in Hollywood’s IP weeds. Sequel culture has driven the movie industry for decades, although some now question whether this reliance on the tried and true means the business is eating its seed corn. (I will say, pace that Variety article, that I would absolutely pay to see Tom Cruise in Ridley Scott’s Legend II: It’s Hard Out Here for a Sprite.)

Chris Nashawaty pinpoints when this current state of affairs began in The Future Was Now: Madmen, Mavericks, and the Epic Sci-Fi Summer of 1982 (2024). As Nashawaty observes, five years is “the typical gestation period for studio executives to spot a trend, develop and green-light an imitator, push it into production, and usher it into theaters.” The stunning success of Star Wars in 1977 + 5 = 1982, the year when Hollywood studios released eight, count ‘em, eight mammoth SF or SF-adjacent movies in the span of two months. Those halcyon days were “a brief moment in time when new risks were taken and creativity was allowed to flourish.” But as Nashawaty writes, “You can make a case that Hollywood took all the wrong lessons from those eight weeks and ran them into the ground,” landing us squarely in “our age of preexisting intellectual property and endless spin-offs spoon-fed to audiences with little or no concern for originality.” 1982 was a peak moviegoing year for a Gen Xer like me, so I have my own take on this octet of extravaganzas.

Conan the Barbarian is the one I’ve seen the least—I was never a big fantasy fan—but I’m with cowriter Oliver Stone, who can’t fathom how the franchise didn’t become the next James Bond, with Arnold Schwarzenegger muscling out new Hyborian hijinks every eighteen months. E.T. was easily the runaway success of the roster and ranks among Steven Spielberg’s favorites of his films, yet I last revisited it decades ago. Nashawaty digs deep into the conjoined development of that film and another of the ’82 eight, Poltergeist—which is still underrated—both rising out of Night Skies, a script by John Sayles based on Spielberg’s original idea. E.T. kept the relationship between a boy and a friendly alien, while Poltergeist preserved the tone and the notion of a suburban family besieged by supernatural forces. Nashawaty also wades into the lingering question of whether Spielberg and not the credited Tobe Hooper (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre) actually directed the latter film, with reminders of how much the controversy played out publicly at the time and the note that Hooper’s “career would never fully recover from his ‘partnership’ with Steven Spielberg.”

I couldn’t count how many times I watched Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan on cable, and it’s fascinating to read about how Paramount treated it as a budget-conscious exercise in damage control after hustling Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) into production. Credit director (and uncredited cowriter) Nicholas Meyer, who handled the assignment with aplomb and would make two more Trek films. Plus, his addition of the Kobayashi Maru exercise is still top-notch screenwriting. Similarly, Walt Disney Studios had already been burned by their first foray into big-budget SF, 1979’s The Black Hole.¹ The stodgiest studio would take the biggest chance with Tron, a movie decades ahead of its time. Go ahead and throw your brickbats. I loved Tron in 1982 and still harbor affection for it, I’m a fan of Tron: Legacy (2010), and I’m happy that 2025 will bring a third movie in the Tron Cinematic Universe. A fun fact from Nashawaty’s book: a finalist to play Tron’s female lead was Debbie Harry. Had my first celebrity crush appeared in that movie, it would have broken my adolescent brain.

Admit it: Tron’s lightcycles are cool.

The Road Warrior is an outlier here, a sequel to a movie not widely seen in the US (in the rest of the world, the follow-up was simply called Mad Max 2), made in isolation in Australia. You have to love that director/physician George Miller told the driver of the rig in the movie’s climactic stunt not to eat for twelve hours beforehand, because that’s standard pre-surgery procedure and it never hurts to be prepared. My father took me to see the movie that summer and I wouldn’t shut up about it. With the release of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome in 1985, I started insisting that these movies are a better trilogy than the original Star Wars films, a view I maintain and no, I will not take questions.

In many ways, the crux of Nashawaty’s book is June 25, 1982, what he calls “arguably, the worst day in the history of film criticism.” On that date, astonishingly, both Blade Runner and The Thing hit theaters and “would end up on the business end of some of the most savage—and nearsighted—reviews of the decade.” Blade Runner’s status in the SF pantheon has long since been established, and it’s the film here that I’ve seen the most. But John Carpenter’s The Thing is the one I find myself most drawn to now, a brilliantly-executed work of paranoia with perhaps the worst timing in Hollywood history. 1982 was the summer of E.T., which meant audiences weren’t interested in a gory film—Carpenter dedicated a then-unprecedented tenth of his budget to visual effects—featuring an ending that “is dark and nihilistic and ambiguous and also magnificent.” The disappointing critical and commercial response altered the trajectory of Carpenter’s career², although Nashawaty reports he now takes pride in The Thing’s reappraisal. The most astonishing revelation about that long-ago summer of 1982 is how diverse the box-office returns were; every one of these films save E.T. was outgrossed by the likes of On Golden Pond, An Officer and a Gentleman, and, of course, Porky’s.

The Thing and Texas Chain Saw are rightly hailed as masterpieces in Jeremy Dauber’s American Scary: A History of Horror, from Salem to Stephen King and Beyond (2024). Dauber writes with a scholar’s rigor and a fan’s enthusiasm, and he takes the American part of his brief seriously, touching on religious hysteria, xenophobia, patriarchal oppression, and slavery. Some might dismiss that approach as “woke,” and as a rebuttal I’d like to invite anyone making that argument to fuck all the way off. If any form is going to look long at the darkest parts of our nation’s history, it’s horror. “Slavery was part of the American story from the beginning, and of course, it is a horror story,” Dauber writes, and quotes a man abducted by slave traders in West Africa who believed he had died and fallen into a world of evil spirits.

Others may carp that Dauber casts his net too wide, but I found his definition of horror to be thrillingly broad, allowing him to consider films as varied as Vertigo (“in this we see the oldest and most fundamental horror story of all time: of that terrifying thing called love, and of the damage, particularly to one’s very essence, that can be done, in its name”), The Diary of Anne Frank (“What becomes increasingly, unsettlingly clear in the play and especially in movie versions of The Diary is that the kind of horror movie we’re watching is a haunted-house movie, and the characters we are seeing are ghosts”), even Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (“certainly fits that bill of A Nightmare of Unreality usurping the real”), the diversions never feeling like detours.

But fear not—an admittedly odd suggestion when discussing a survey of horror—Dauber also rounds up the usual suspects. You get the promised Stephen King as well as the surprising reach of H. P. Lovecraft, the Universal monsters and the long shadows cast by the uniquely Midwestern mayhem of Ed Gein. Dauber is as adept at discussing the recent renaissance of horror films like It Follows (2014) and Get Out (2017) as he is contemporary fiction, praising Tananarive Due, Sara Gran’s Come Closer (2003), and Joe R. Lansdale, whose “Night They Missed the Picture Show” Dauber dubs “perhaps the most disturbing American short story ever written.”³ He covers an impressive amount of territory with verve in a book that’s frequently challenging but always engaging.

What I’m Drinking

Speaking of horror, I’ve rewatched The Shining (1980) twice in recent months and belatedly caught up with the sequel Doctor Sleep (2019) last week, so it’s little wonder I was drawn to the Hedge Maze. The minimalist cocktail is from Yanni Kehagiaras at the acclaimed new San Francisco bar Stoa, where the beverages have four ingredients or fewer and garnishes are rare. It’s as bracing as an autumn breeze and serves as an object lesson in what a scant quarter-ounce of green chartreuse can do.

Hedge Maze

• 1 ½ oz. gin (Stoa uses St. George Spirits Terroir Gin, I opted for Tanqueray)

• ½ oz. blanc vermouth (preferably Dolin)

• ¼ oz. green chartreuse

Stir. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass. No garnish.

Where I Am

Like many people, I’ve started posting at Bluesky more. Feel free to give me a follow if you’re in the neighborhood.

1. It’s a terrible movie, but it had a robot voiced by Roddy McDowall called Vital Information Necessary CENTralized, or V.I.N.CENT., so I have a soft spot for it. I even had a T-shirt with the dopey-looking droid on it.

2. In 1984, he would make Starman, explicitly to prove that he could play nicely in Spielberg’s sandbox. Naturally, I’ve seen it more than E.T., because Jeff Bridges is in it.

3. I read “Picture Show” in the 1988 anthology Silver Scream, edited by David J. Schow, and can attest that Dauber speaks the truth; the story did indeed, as Champion Joe his own self promised in the introduction, knock my dick in the dirt.