For Hollywood’s Golden Age, 1939 is often cited as the pinnacle, a year that yielded an almost silly number of classics.  Forty years ago horror had its 1939 with a year that produced startling successes on multiple levels and created an unparalleled watershed for the genre.

Michael Reeves’ brilliant Witchfinder General, largely vilified at first for its brutality, spurred similarly-themed imitators on the Continent for the next five years.  Though made at Tigon, it still represents the apex of Hammer-style British productions—a literate period piece that nonetheless refuses to skimp on the horror.  The film also boasts a fine performance by Vincent Price and represents a kind of culmination of the many period films he had done with Roger Corman.  At the same time, as if to prove the ultimate inability of period horror and aging icons to keep pace with the real world, came Peter Bogdanovich’s stunning debut, Targets.  Not simply the first self-reflective horror movie—a trend that seems to have become its own subgenre—Targets also helped bring horror out of the escapist-only mode and deal with true events head-on.  In unintentional contrast to these social statements, one of the world’s foremost directors went inward to create one of the most unsettling films ever made.  Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf was a critical hit, but its real legacy was to artists such as David Lynch, who saw new possibilities for using film’s unique strengths to replicate internal states experientially for the audience.  Anytime you see a film explore madness in a way that undermines reality itself, you might want to thank Bergman.

Horror movies had never exactly been nice, but now the genre was becoming subversive in ways it rarely had previously, at least not with such popular success.

Undermining the status quo was certainly what the two undisputed landmark films of 1968 were all about.  Rosemary's Baby was released on June 12, exactly one week after RFK was shot by Sirhan Sirhan, and four days after James Earl Ray was arrested.  These were more than violent times; they were times of upheaval.  Just the previous month saw the Paris strikes that led many to believe that a full-scale revolution was imminent.  It was in this context, which of course included several major offensives in the Vietnam War, that Polanski’s film soon became a box office and critical hit.  Night of the Living Dead was released in October, barely a month after the rioting at the Democratic National Convention and on the eve of Mexico City’s notorious Tlatelolco Massacre of students and workers (ten days before the Olympics!).  While those familiar with the film’s storied history know that ultimately the film grossed tens of millions of dollars on a budget of just over $100K, it was not a real commercial success until the 1969 re-release that followed its acclaim in Europe.  And although actually shot in 1967, Night of the Living Dead is very much a 1968 film in spirit.  Indeed, Romero and Russell (“Johnny”) Streiner drove the finished print to New York to find a distributor on April 4, 1968, the same evening on which Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated.

Although these two films have radically different pedigrees and approaches to filmmaking, they share an unsparing nihilistic vision.  Neither provided upbeat closure for audiences, and their box office success forever altered the horror landscape.  While other horror films had been downbeat, usually in the classically “tragic” mode, few were so radically pessimistic.  Could one get away with that kind of monstrously bleak outlook and still make money?  For both major studios and minor independents the answer was a resounding “yes.”  And of course filmmakers themselves couldn’t help but notice the chances these films took—and how such risks paid off.

In short, the American horror film went big-budget and low-budget—and both with such staggering results that producers and distributors could use them as object lessons for years to come.  Rosemary’s Baby showed Hollywood that money was to be made in A-level adaptations of best-selling novels on contemporary themes, a formula later repeated with The Exorcist and Jaws.  Night of the Living Dead, on the other hand, continues to inspire filmmakers working outside Hollywood, and its mythic-vision-on-a-shoestring sensibility represents an important precursor to Halloween a decade later.

So what was it about each of these films that so reflected—and strikingly amplified—the tumultuous times in which they bowed?

Rosemary's Baby, while not as overtly iconoclastic as Night of the Living Dead, is just as devastating and unapologetic.  Made for just over $3 million and returning close to five times that much, it was an unqualified blockbuster.  And while novelist Ira Levin can no doubt be credited with the pseudo-Gaslight narrative structure that pits a female protagonist against both her husband and accusations of paranoia, those who made the film created a studio horror title unlike any other that had come before.  The closest in terms of sheer thematic audacity was probably Psycho (1960), but even there the monster was captured in the end.

A clue that we’re turning a page in horror history is provided by the first name that appears on screen:  William Castle.  Although denied the chance to direct Rosemary’s Baby, as a producer Castle put together an inspired assemblage of talent.  While the picture bears no resemblance to the earlier gimmick-driven films of Castle’s career, it does make nods to classic Hollywood in clever ways.  The casting of Ralph Bellamy, always the placid butt of Cary Grant’s jokes, allowed him to play both with and, eventually, against type.  And you know immediately just how desperate Guy Woodhouse is to join the upper middle class when the very first scene has him trying to impress Elisha Cook, Jr.—when had that ever happened in movie history?

Like Romero, Polanski was a Hollywood outsider, a European who had no sentimentality about deconstructing American movies or mores.  Marriage, authority, the promise of upward mobility—all of these became targets.  In generic terms what’s most striking is Polanski’s transposition of an “old dark house” flick into a modern urban environment (something J-Horror would do to great effect 30 years later).  With many of the most chilling scenes in bright daylight, Polanski visually reinforces that no matter how well Mia Farrow repaints the apartment or redoes her hair, there’s no hope of repressing the corruption and sickness that lie under the surface.

Yet the film’s lasting achievement is perhaps its celebrated dream sequences—although that term barely does them justice.  With elliptical sound, multiple exposures, and surprising yet fluid camerawork, we’re invited into something more akin to a hypnagogic state—for both protagonist and audience.  Blurring the border between internal and external cues in Rosemary’s consciousness, Polanski mines a conceit that only cinema can present so effectively.  In short, it’s not scary dreams that are most dreadful, it’s not being able to identify them confidently as dreams.  These striking “mindscreen” sequences contain such eerie beauty and power that it’s safe to say that a commercial feature had never been so staggeringly subjective and terrifying at the same time.  Indeed, Rosemary’s cry of “This is no dream, this is really happening!” could serve as the mantra for the master practitioners of modern American horror that followed in ‘68’s wake, and its echoes can still be heard, throbbing dimly, beneath the genre.  So while it’s facile to note that without Rosemary’s Baby there wouldn’t have been The Omen (1976), I’m suggesting that there’d be no A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) either.

Finally, the most frightening thing about Rosemary’s Baby is not anything that you can point to on the screen; rather, it’s the gradual evaporation of all meaningful context, a prospect both existentially and morally apocalyptic.  Yes, Rosemary herself undergoes a physical and emotion transformation but what’s truly awful, as with Gregor Samsa, is what this change reveals about the social and values systems in which she’d felt so secure.  In the final scene Polanski’s mise-en-scène emphasizes that she’s accepting not just the child but the sinister world of which it is a creation.  Although the birth of the title character is what the movie is ostensibly about, the subtext goes straight for an inversion of Christ’s admonishment in John 3:1-8 to be born again.  The gestation period the movie details is actually Rosemary’s own, and it ends with her emerging into a realm of darkness deeper than that of the womb.

So much has been written about Night of the Living Dead that now it’s probably impossible to offer a fresh exegesis.  Instead, I’d like to note how rapidly it became so overdetermined in its symbolism, providing a blank field upon which one’s fears could be projected.  If you thought the zombies were U.S. troops, the “consuming” American public, hedonistic hippies—all right, then that’s what they were.  An overnight archetype, it’s no wonder that NOTLD’s march into the canon was as relentless as the film itself.  It did more than give legitimacy to the low-budget end of horror—it helped fuel critical studies of the genre for years to come.  Ultimately this trend would trigger an interest in critically reevaluating or “discovering” other drive-in gems such as Carnival of Souls (1962).  So as much as NOTLD pointed the way to the future, it also helped horror reaffirm its past.  Eventually it united high and low brows both within and outside the horror community and spoke to cineastes generally.  That is, when The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) became part of MOMA’s permanent collection, it’s Romero’s film that deserved a tip of the hat.

Like Rosemary’s Baby, NOTLD is about metaphysical and social upheaval—or, more precisely, where the two intersect.  Horror audiences already knew the dead could come back if revived by a scientist, a vampiric curse, or a voodoo spell.  But Romero’s zombies were different:  they were clearly us… a thematic breakthrough that forty years later still resonates powerfully in such films as Shaun of the Dead (2004) and Fido (2006).  In terms of horror’s central paradigm, NOTLD broke down the barrier that separated the audience from the Other.  There had always been a tacit exchange of identification and even sympathy across that membrane, and some filmmakers made it more permeable than others.  But in Romero’s film for the first time appears the heretical notion that there is no membrane.  Either in movies or in life.

It’s clear that the zeitgeist in the late ‘60s made it possible for audiences not only to tolerate such a bleak message, but also ultimately to embrace it.  It’s fascinating to go back and read the critical response to these films and see how reviewers warmed up to them, as if they were forced overnight to adapt to the public’s new diet in popular entertainment or be left behind.  In 1967, with its Summer of Love, such shifts would never have occurred, but a year later we had turned some kind of corner and done so irrevocably.  No doubt about it:  people were shocked by Night of the Living Dead’s lack of survivors and Rosemary’s inability to overcome the conspiracy against her as some ingénue in a standard suspense film might.  But they were more receptive to shocks of this magnitude than ever before; the real world had prepared them.  And today’s filmmakers and audiences take for granted the freedom to be nihilistically downbeat that these films unintentionally helped champion.

Thematically, Night of the Living Dead and Rosemary’s Baby shed light (or is it darkness?) on some of America’s core conflicts.  Do we entrench ourselves in the basement—secure and safe—or do we choose a world of possibilities that include freedom?  Must being a wife and a mother entail subservience to societal norms and pressure?  These questions continue to haunt us.

Between them, Romero and Polanksi conquered the twin poles of dread—monsters within and without, familiar as neighbors and as new as SF-spawned zombies.  Similarly, their two films are prototypical in terms of “quiet horror” and “splatter” and thus cover the genre’s full spectrum.  But most importantly, one film dealt with birth, the other death, and both seemed to smash the comforting things that Western civilization had been telling us about these topics for centuries.  We already knew we weren’t safe in the “in-between” zone called life, where wars and killers lurked, but now there was neither initial innocence nor final escape.  Instead, the entire plane of human existence was laid savagely bare… and it was into this territory, fresh and terrible, that the horror film rushed headlong—and never looked back.

[A slightly different version of this essay originally appeared in Shroud magazine. -PG]