Fans' Notes: The Horror Film Fanzine

The man who insists on high and serious pleasures is depriving himself of pleasure; he continually restricts what he can enjoy; in the constant exercise of his good taste he will eventually price himself out of the market, so to speak. -Susan Sontag1 "film buff": that species who collect movies the way others collect stamps or butterflies, thereby depriving them of their contextual significance. -Robin Wood2 Slimetime, Grind, Trashola, The Gore Gazette. The titles reflect an unseemly juvenile fascination with unrespectable and illicit imagery, the domain of the horror film. For most adults horror films are the junk food of the imagination, trivially dispensable cultural artifacts undeserving of critical attention and devoid of artistic or intellectual sophistication. Even defenders of the genre, like Stephen King, admit that "good horror movies operate most powerfully on this 'wanna-look-at-my-chewed-up-food?' level," a primitively childish consciousness "sometimes also known as the Oh my God, was that gross!' factor."3 Sophisticated critics may speak of a typology of the monstrous or the genre's reflection of personal, social or mythic structures, but it is some undeniable, primitive, precritical instinct that compels successive generations willingly to pay good money to be made extremely uncomfortable and thereby answer "an invitation to indulge in deviant, antisocial behavior by proxy-to commit gratuitous acts of violence, indulge our puerile dreams of power, to give in to our most craven fears."4 Among the willing participants in this sometimes unsavory process are the editors of horror film and video fanzines: independent, non-commercial, amateur publications compulsively produced by individuals who have fallen prey to what Stephen King call "the siren song of crap." Either mimeographed or off-set printed, available only by mail and unpredictable in their publication, the fanzines are suffused with that juvenile fascination with grue and gore, most evident in their frequent inclusion of illustrations appealing to the lowest kind of prurient interest and guaranteed to offend: a policeman's severed head laid out on a kitchen table like some grisly hors d'oeuvre; ravenous zombies about to satisfy their appetites upon an unwilling victim. Connoisseurs of the badfilm, trash, and gore, the fanzine editors insist upon the pleasures to be found in the consumption of such raw, undiluted imagery. Their enthusiasm may seem to lack irony or finesse; however, at its source the fanzine perspective is "such a deadly serious undertaking that its seriousness can never be openly acknowledged. The gross-out afficionado savors his sense of complicity when the values of a smug social stratum, from which he feels himself excluded, are systematically trashed and ridiculed."5 What may seem to some a sophomoric interest in putatively indefensible outrage for outrage's sake is to the fanzine editor a healthy interest in forms of expression that call into question social and cultural norms. This perspective is best summarized by V. Vale and Andrea Juno in the introduction to their seminal publication Research #10: Incredibly Strange Films: This is a functional guide to territory largely neglected by the film-criticism establishment-encompassing tens of thousands of films. Most of the films discussed test the limits of contemporary [middle-class] cultural acceptability, mainly because they don't meet certain "standards" utilized in evaluating direction, cinematography, etc. Many of the films are overtly "lower-class" or "low-brow" in content and art direction. However, a high percentage of these works disdained by the would-be dictators of public opinion are sources of pure enjoyment and delight, despite improbable plots, "bad" acting, or ragged film technique. At issue is the notion of "good taste," which functions as a filter to block out entire areas of experience judged-and damned-as unworthy of investigation. …