Who’s the real monster?

‘The first monster that an audience has to be scared of is the film-maker. They have to feel in the presence of someone not confined by the normal rules of decency.’

Thus decreed Wes Craven, that maestro of horror who gave us, among other gems, The Last House on the Left (1972), in which a girl is forced to urinate on herself by a gang of rapists.

And on some level, he is obviously right. But as Jason Zinoman points out in his deft study of the rise of New Horror — that is, horror movies of the late 1960s and 1970s, which were more realistic, and so a hell of a lot scarier, than the Hammer-style schlock that had gone before — the pioneers of the style actually tended to be mild-mannered, geeky types, at least to outward view. Peaceniks. Film buffs. Soft-spoken oddballs. Or even conservative-looking figures such as Alfred Hitchcock, who physically resembled an overgrown baby. Yet this same man created, in 1960, the masterpiece that arguably spawned the whole New Horror movement.

In killing off its biggest star, Janet Leigh, at a relatively early stage, Psycho contravened a basic law of cinema. Which only made it scarier. Here, it was clear, was a director ‘not confined by the normal rules’. The film became the domineering mother of slasher flicks, revered by its filmic offspring, who liked to wear its clothes. Brian de Palma, in particular, was obsessed by the Master of Suspense, although the Master didn’t always feel flattered. After expressing dismay at De Palma’s Dressed to Kill (1980), which, like Psycho, featured a cross-dressing killer, he was assured that it was an hommage. ‘You mean fromage,’ the great man replied gloomily.

Yet Hitchcock himself wasn’t without faults.