Ghouls, Gimmicks, and Gold: Horror Films and the American Movie Business, 1953-1968

by Kevin Heffernan
Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2004
336 pp. Trade $22.95
ISBN: 0-8223-3215-9.

Review by John F. Barber
Schools of Arts and Humanities, The University of Texas at Dallas
jfbarber@eaze.net

For the interested student of cinema, there are many books focusing on horror films. Some provide biographical accounts. Others analyze and critique the films and/or their production techniques. Still others document their aesthetic and cultural contributions.

Ghouls, Gimmicks, and Gold, a new book by Kevin Heffernan, is the first, however, to analyze and explain the numerous economic factors that changed how horror films were produced and distributed from 1953-1968, from the end of studio era to the conglomeration of New Hollywood.

Heffernan argues that major cultural and economic shifts in production and reception of horror films began in 1953 with technological innovations designed to attract more viewers and ended in 1968 with the codification of a rating system for films previously intended for a youth audience and the development of the adult horror film, epitomized by Rosemary's Baby. The efforts of movie producers to attract the attention, and money, of audiences, Heffernan argues, were largely responsible for the evolution of the horror film genre during this time period.

For example, the brief boom in 3-D films from 1952-1954, rather than foregrounding bizarre and shocking three-dimensional movie visual and narrative effects, was designed to increase studio profits through the sale of new projection equipment to exhibitors.

The use of color and gore, first seen in The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), was similarly designed to increase profits through exaggerated and stylized responses to conventions completely familiar to hard-boiled movie audiences. As Heffernan notes, audiences found their worlds becoming and tougher and tougher, and it was important for any film to be even tougher in order to elicit the desired reaction.

New audiences were developing, however. The 1950s produced the first ever market of teenagers with discretionary income. This growing youth market was identified and wooed and efforts by film producers to sell their products to this market often directly affected the nature of the product itself. For example, the advertising campaigns developed to attract the attention of these young viewers, Heffernan says, sought more and more to exploit sensational, violent, or horrific content and titles, even before scripts for the films were written or film exposed. In this sense, the carnival-barker style of such campaigns actually drove the production of the films in ways thought best to match the created audience’s desire. The result was exploitation films notable for their wild hype and low production qualities, the "B" movies prominently featured in local theater double-features.

International co-production was extremely important for the evolution of horror films during the 1960s, especially as an attempt to realize increased economies from the production and distribution of downscale genre films that could be easily upscaled through the conspicuous utilization of new technology or other production techniques. It meant increased opportunities for the television syndication arms of US movie studios, especially since there was an insatiable desire for content to fill the gaping maw of television. The switch to color, in response to the needs of television, forced further aesthetic changes on horror films, increasing their potential to be more specific, more realistic.

Finally, the growing use of more graphic violence, explicit sexuality, bleak social commentary, and downbeat endings, exhibited in films like The Night of the Living Dead and Rosemary's Baby, both released in 1968, marked a turning point for the low-budget horror film when producers realized that such films could be exploited in both matinee and evening slots, and thus sold to completely different audiences, youth as well as adult.

The result is that changes in the horror movie industry from 1953-1968 continue to form a model for exploitation of the movie marketplace. For example, saturation booking patterns for genre horror films then are associated with today's blockbuster releases. The upscaling of low-budget horror films through association with big stars and best-selling novels is another current-day technique developed during this period. So, too, is the concern with the international box office, the focus on making films for the youth market, the increasing importance of special effects, the continuing escalation of gore and violence, and "unprecedented interest in movies by the intelligentsia" (224).

In the end, Heffernan concludes that much of the evolution of horror films stems from "the cultivation of the young as a consumer group in the postwar period" (228). Originally conceived for and offered to a young audience, the horror films of the 1950s and 1960s continue to attract the interest of present-day baby boomers who parlay their zeal for the genre into concerns with canonicity and restoration, with recuperation of popular culture that seems to far outstrip any thought that horror films represent texts and artifacts of misbegotten youth.