And we're off, with installment 357 in our tour through American fear and horror on film: it's 1974's....IT'S ALIVE! Obviously, the title nods to Frankenstein, & the movie is about technology and aberrant fertility, of a sort: a monster mutant baby, who's deeply and utterly and homicidally violent, born this way, presumably, because of the, let's say, defective birth control pills taken by mom.

Okay, and we're off, with a brief installment 356 of our tour through American fear and horror on film....with 1974's HORROR HIGH! Here's the thing about HORROR HIGH: it's a useful entry in checking in on what teenage horror movies look like in the Seventies, in part because it's basically utterly conventional. It combines two classic genres - the revenge of the nerd with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde -

And we're off, with installment 355 of our tour through American horror and fear on film....this one is an Oscar-winner, people, the Best Documentary Oscar, for 1974's Vietnam documentary...HEARTS AND MINDS! Now, no one watching this documentary - which comes out before the US gets out of Vietnam, though certainly when the war is winding down - would take it as having a neutral position on the war. It doesn't pretend to one, either. It wears, you might say, its hearts on its sleeve..

And we're off, with installment 354 in our tour through American fear and horror on film: this one is definitely horrific...it's John Waters' 1974 FEMALE TROUBLE! As I say in my book that's coming out in under six months - which I'll be talking about quite a bit in those months to come - it's possible that for all the horror of the Seventies, the most taboo-shattering, groundbreaking material is coming out of Waters and Baltimore.

And we're off, with installment 353 in our tour through American fear and horror on film....it's another disaster movie of the early Seventies, and this time it's an....EARTHQUAKE! As you may have expected if you are familiar with disaster movies of the Seventies, this one stars Charlton Heston (and also the San Andreas Fault). You can pretty much paint this one by numbers; Heston gets to exercise his patriarchal authority by playing daddy/lover...

And we're off, with installment 352 in our tour through American horror and fear on film: a 1974 look at a very contemporary horror. It's Bob Clark's DEAD OF NIGHT, but many know it better as...DEATHDREAM! 1974 is a very good year for Clark. We've already talked about BLACK CHRISTMAS, and although that movie is more influential on the horror genre, this one is in some ways more fully of its moment, and even more disturbing. It's inspired by one of the all-time horror tales...

Okay, we're off with installment 351 of our tour through American fear on film; and as we've seen (although not for a while), the tour is very happy to leave the genre station every now and again for the movies that shape the American fearful mindset...and thus, 1974's CHINATOWN! Anyone who reads this thread is probably familiar with the movie, and if you're not, spoilers ahead, so be warned: but the movie, written by Robert Towne, directed by Roman Polanski, starring Nicholson and Dunaway, is famous for its evocation of an LA on the rise...

Okay, and we're off, with our *350th* installment in the history of American horror and fear on film! If you've liked these threads, then share! If you haven't read them, hop on! And buckle up, because we're starting a new chapter in our story....with 1974's BLACK CHRISTMAS! And first things first: yes, I know it's Canadian. But it's so important to our story, and it's only a little north of the border, that I'm including it...because it's really one of the first slasher films ever made.

And we're off with installment 349 of our tour through American fear and horror on film - and this one is playing a bit fast and loose with our definitions, because it's mostly Italian, but it's also....ANDY WARHOL'S DRACULA! Although the truth is that Warhol didn't have that much to do with it; but Warhol colleague Paul Morrissey did, having written and directed it. The movie, though, isn't just Warholian in the sense that it puts the latter's name on it to gain appeal and exposure....

Okay, and we're off again, with installment 348 of our tour through American fear and horror on film! Warming up with a brief thread about a 1974 film that's been forgotten...or has it? Welcome...to BAD RONALD! Ronald isn't bad, or, at least, isn't necessarily bad in the way we've seen in THE BAD SEED; what he's done is accidentally killed a young girl who was making fun of him. What makes things even worse than that, though, is that when his mother hears what he's done...

Here we go, installment 347, from 1974: it's Stacy Keach in another of our TV movies, this one a surprisingly interesting one called...ALL THE KIND STRANGERS! Since the odds are pretty good that you haven't seen this movie, I'll summarize, very briefly: Stacy Keach finds himself, through accidental circumstances, in a house with kids whose parents seem to be absent, although there is a woman there who is taking care of them...

And we're off, with a very brief installment 346 of our tour through American fear and horror on film, this one another of our sequels. Even though it's 1974, it's time for....AIRPORT 1975! If AIRPORT was more of an infusion of crisis sensibility into a how does it work type vehicle - showing a country many of whose citizens hadn't flown very much just how the whole thing goes, and sometimes how it doesn't - AIRPORT '75 savors much more of the disaster.

It's 1974, people! Which means it's time for installment 345 of our tour through American fear and horror on film, with a little-known movie capitalizing both on the boom in Black horror films and the massive success of THE EXORCIST....it's ABBY! ABBY is probably most famous (to the extent that it's remembered at all) for circumstances surrounding it, rather than the movie itself: it was yanked from theaters - where it was doing quite well - because it was sued by Warner for ripping off THE EXORCIST. This reminds me...

A brief installment 344 on a movie which has a lot of merits, but was less central (even in its marginality) to the project of American fear and horror on film than I'd thought, even though I enjoyed my rewatch...it's 1973's SERPICO! The reason I watched the movie - which, as most film fans know, but given that it's a half-century old, might not be obvious - is that I thought that its look at the crumblings of authority via the corruption of the NYPD illuminated by Pacino's Serpico - who gets shot in the face

And here we ago, with a second thread of the day (first time I've done this in a long time), with a fun one: this is installment 343 of our tour through American fear and horror on film. Welcome to 1973's....WESTWORLD! Because of the much more recent HBO show version, most people know the premise: amusement world populated by extremely lifelike robots. (There are other worlds; a medieval one, a Roman one, but the movie focuses almost entirely on Western world.) As a high-paying client -

And here we go, with a deservedly brief thread on installment 342 of our tour through American fear and horror on film, which is....1973's THE WEREWOLF OF WASHINGTON, starring Dean Stockwell! So, a few thoughts on this movie, which I'm sure everyone has seen: it's pretty much what you'd expect from the title. It's about a guy who works for the President, and he's having an affair with the man's daughter, and he gets bitten by a werewolf, and then things get awkward.

Okay, it's been a minute, but back to our tour through American fear and horror on film: we were up to 1973, and installment 341, and it's a very interesting one to jump back in with....a few thoughts on GANJA AND HESS! The thing about GANJA AND HESS is that watching it it's clear that you're in the presence of Art, or, at least, the avant-garde; maybe not since that Twenties House of Usher (or, maybe, the Kenneth Anger film we watched), are we watching something so self-consciously experimental

Time for another horror read, and another thank you to @SadieHartmann, for introducing me to @_SarahGailey's novel JUST LIKE HOME. As Gailey suggests in their acknowledgments, this is a novel about monstrous, terrible, terrifying love, and the strange contours & channels it takes - Gailey has a lot of different elements to juggle in determining precisely what it is that makes this house, and its inhabitants, haunted, and in the hands of a lesser talent those elements would spin out of control; but Gailey has a very sure hand.

And we're off, with the first of a few brief installments in our tour through American horror and fear on film. This one, installment 340, is probably the most notable for being Curtis Hanson's film debut. Before there was LA Confidential, there was 1973's....SWEET KILL! SWEET KILL was partially financed by Roger Corman, who, apparently, told Hanson that his cut needed more bare breasts in it; and it was also titled, at different stages, THE AROUSERS, which gives you a kind of sense of what the movie is supposed to do; but what it's most explicit

And we're off, with installment 339 of our tour through American fear and horror on film, this one a classic full of people....it's 1973's SOYLENT GREEN! SOYLENT GREEN, a SF horror classic set in that far-off future year of 2022, strikes in a fairly timely fashion today, because it's a signal entrant in the then new-ish genre of eco-horror: the idea, in the wake of earth day and such, that we're ruining the planet... (how crazy!)

Okay, and we're off with a brief thread 338 in our tour through American horror and fear on film, this one a much less well known film by George Romero where the only thing zombified is matrimony...it's 1973's SEASON OF THE WITCH! The movie - following on the great novel CONJURE WIFE by Fritz Leiber and its various cinematic adaptations - is dedicated, largely, to the premise that women, particularly in domestic settings, are witches: but in contrast to Leiber's Fifties novel, where the witches are