The year that brought us the classic Alien also gave us dozens of other horror movies – some great, others less so. We head back to 1979:
“The horror… the horror,” a shadowy Marlon Brando intoned in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, finally released in 1979 after an infamously protracted shoot. Brando’s Colonel Kurtz was referring to the haunting fallout from the Vietnam war in those final, whispered words, but he could just as well have been reading off a newspaper listing of the numerous genre movies released that year.
Among 1979’s biggest hits was, of course, Alien, Ridley Scott’s prowling space horror that elevated its monster-on-a-ship premise into something unforgettably visceral and disturbing. So disturbing that it launched a franchise that is still going 45 years later; as these words are being typed, Fede Alvarez’s sidequel Alien: Romulus is about to hatch in cinemas.
Alien was a huge hit for 20th Century Fox, but surprisingly, it wasn’t the biggest horror film of 1979 at the US box office. Instead, that prize went to The Amityville Horror, American International’s swiftly-made haunted house flick that made $86.4m – some $4m more than Alien. Its financial success made it the second highest-grossing film released in the United States and Canada that year, roughly $20m behind writer-director Robert Benton’s multi Oscar-winning divorce drama, Kramer Vs Kramer. It’s difficult to imagine a film with that subject matter doing quite so well in cinemas in the 21st century.
By the end of the 1970s, horror had long since gained a new level of respectability among filmmakers, with Roman Polanski helping redefine the genre with the contemporary stylings of Rosemary’s Baby in 1968. The Exorcist, released five years later, again proved that horror wasn’t the preserve of drive-ins and dingy grindhouses; it was the biggest film of 1973 at the US box office, and was so highly regarded that it was nominated for 10 Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director for the impish, tracksuit-clad William Friedkin.
Further emboldened by the success of Jaws in 1975, studios were increasingly willing to throw money at genre movies towards the end of the decade – hence the arrival of Alien, a bloodcurdling film that owes as much to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Exorcist and Jaws as it does to George Lucas’s Star Wars, which helped make sci-fi so bankable again.
All of which goes to explain why, Alien aside, 1979 was a year positively awash with horror of various sorts, from grounded murderer-on-the-rampage films like Abel Ferrara’s The Driller Killer to nature-strikes-back outings like Bog and Killer Fish. Most of the latter, including the Roger Corman-produced Up From The Depths, were cheaply-made cash-ins. But the siren call of horror was such that some respected directors also tried their hand at the subgenre that same year.
Arthur Hiller, the director who’d made one of the most profitable films of the 1970s with Love Story at the start of the decade (Oscar nominations: seven) decided to end it with Nightwing, a distinctly wobbly film about plague-ridden vampire bats in New Mexico. Although it’s regarded as a cult item today, it was critically derided at the time, and Hiller never attempted to make another horror film again.
Read more: Alien | The birth and curious death of HR Giger’s Space Jockey
One of the year’s more surprising disappointments, given the pedigree behind it, was Prophecy. Its director was John Frankenheimer, the filmmaker behind The Manchurian Candidate, Seconds, French Connection II and more besides. Then there was its writer, David Seltzer, screenwriter of The Omen – the biggest horror hit of 1976. Put it all together, and you had the makings of something quite exciting. Instead, what actually emerged was an ecologically-conscious monster flick whose central threat – a chemically-mutated bear named Katahdin – left audiences laughing rather than shuddering. In a recent review, Quentin Tarantino recalled seeing Prophecy at a cinema when it came out, and one movie-goer yelling, “It’s just a bear!” when the creature made its grand entrance. A mutant bear with a raw, hairless face, admittedly, but a bear nonetheless.
Although far from Frankenheimer’s finest hour (he didn’t make another monster movie until 1996’s ill-fated The Island Of Doctor Moreau), Prophecy still has a significant place in horror history – not least because it’s marked the film debut of an uncredited Kevin Peter Hall, who went on to play the Predator.
Perhaps the most iconic (and among the first) of all movie monsters also made no fewer than three appearances in 1979. The first was maverick writer-director Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu The Vampire, his own take on FW Murnau’s movie from 1922, itself an unauthorised Dracula adaptation that was almost destroyed by the Bram Stoker estate. Klaus Kinski, who later turned out to be a true monster in real life, played the titular vampire, and it’s arguably among the most beautiful-looking films Herzog ever made.
Nosferatu was followed into US cinemas a few weeks later by Love At First Bite, a comedy in which George Hamilton plays a fish-out-of-water Dracula who becomes a reluctant citizen of New York at the height of the disco era. The film was an unexpectedly huge hit, making more at the box office than director John Badham’s more expensive, official Dracula adaptation, starring Frank Langella as the Prince of Darkness.
While some of 1979’s big-budget horror films fell somewhat flat (costing some $13m to make, Dracula was a bigger production than Alien), independent filmmakers were turning out some of the best work of their careers. Italian director Lucio Fulci went from giallo to full-on horror with Zombie Flesh Eaters (aka Zombi 2), a cheerfully nasty low-budget shocker that was later banned by the BBFC during the whole video nasty flap in the 1980s. Falsely marketed as a sequel to George Romero’s Dawn Of The Dead (1978), it was among the first and arguably best knock-offs to emerge in the wake of Romero’s classic. You certainly won’t see a zombie wrestling a real, flesh-and-blood shark in another horror film any time soon.
Even more visually striking was writer-director Don Coscarelli’s spectacularly imaginative Phantasm. About a group of youngsters who begin poking their noses into the affairs of a gaunt, unblinking mortician dubbed the Tall Man, Coscarelli’s dreamlike story goes to places that are almost impossible to predict. Angus Scrimm immediately becomes one of the eeriest horror villains ever as the Tall Man, and the now legendary sequence involving a flying sphere is among the wildest death scenes ever conceived.
Incredibly, Phantasm wasn’t even the weirdest genre movie to emerge in 1979. That prize has to go to The Visitor, a bizarre slab of cosmic horror that takes in Franco Nero as an unblinking space Jesus figure and a Linda Blair-like possessed girl who happens to own a pet hawk, director Guilo Paradisi’s film almost defies description. It’s perhaps enough to say that The Visitor pilfers from just about every successful genre film of the 70s and sticks the stolen goods together with little regard for logic or taste. Most shocking of all is the cast: Mel Ferrer, John Huston, Shelley Winters and a fresh-faced Lance Henriksen star, and legendary director Sam Peckinpah even shows up as a doctor. Also named Sam.
In terms of inventive visuals and out-there storytelling, The Visitor is certainly a cut above the vaguely Halloween-like slasher movies that began appearing in cinemas in 1979 (Silent Scream, Bloodrage), though even some of the year’s more flawed offerings had something going for them: When A Stranger Calls and Tourist Trap are both memorably unsettling in places.
One of the year’s most disturbing horror films, meanwhile, has surprising echoes of 1979’s biggest box office success. David Cronenberg mined his own bitter experiences of divorce and child custody for The Brood, a film that acts as the blackest of mirrors to Kramer Vs Kramer – something the Canadian director has said himself in interviews.
While his movie came out before Kramer, Cronenberg still often described The Brood as his version of that Oscar-winner; “I was really trying to get to the reality, with a capital R, [of divorce],” Cronenberg once said, “which is why I have disdain for Kramer. I think it’s false, fake, candy.” It’s certainly fair to say that The Brood’s conclusion, in which Samantha Eggars’ performance as enraged mother Nola Carveth reaches its crescendo, is the opposite of candy.
Kramer Vs Kramer came out in US cinemas on the 19th December 1979 – a respectable capstone on a year in which America’s movie screens were regularly drenched in blood.
