Horror in the 1960s

The decade in context

Late in the decade the Hollywood production code was losing its grip, and horror stepped out of castles and into motels, farmhouses and suburbs. The threat was increasingly human, or looked human.

Two black-and-white films at either end of the decade, one from a major studio and one made independently, show how wide the genre's reach had become.

Two events in 1960 set the decade's direction, and they happened within weeks of each other. In London, Michael Powell's Peeping Tom premiered on April 7, 1960, a British film about a killer who films his victims. British critics were harsh, with one reviewer writing that she had not been so disgusted by a film in a long time, and the backlash is widely credited with ending Powell's career as a director in the United Kingdom. Two months later, on June 16, 1960, Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho opened in New York. Both films featured mild-mannered killers obsessed with a parent. One failed, and the other became a sensation. Both were later recognized as landmarks, and Martin Scorsese helped push Peeping Tom back into view in the late 1970s.

Psycho is a case study in how a major director reshaped the business. Paramount declined to provide Hitchcock's usual budget, so he financed the film through his own company, Shamley Productions, with the studio agreeing to distribute it. The budget was about $807,000. Hitchcock reportedly waived his customary fee in exchange for a majority stake in the negative. He drew much of his crew from his television series, shot in black and white partly to save money and partly to soften the shower sequence, and used a score by Bernard Herrmann for string orchestra only, with Saul Bass credited for the title design and a storyboard for the famous murder. He also insisted that no one be admitted after the film started, a policy theater owners resisted until they saw the lines.

The significance of the film lies in where it put the danger. Earlier horror often looked to castles, laboratories and foreign lands. Psycho put its threat in a roadside motel and a quiet house, and made the killer someone who seemed shy and harmless. That shift from the gothic to the ordinary is the main story of the decade. It also has a link to the slasher, a style that later filmmakers would build from a handful of its ideas, and to the character study of Norman Bates. Critics were divided at the time, and many British reviewers were hostile, but audiences did not wait for reassessment.

Behind the shift was the weakening of Hollywood's self-censorship. The Production Code, adopted in 1930 and strictly enforced from 1934, required that crime be punished and barred a long list of subjects. By the 1960s it was under pressure from foreign films, changing public attitudes and court decisions. Psycho itself tested it with an unmarried couple in bed and a toilet on screen. The system was replaced when the Motion Picture Association's rating system took effect on November 1, 1968. Ratings let studios release adult material with a label instead of cutting it, and that change shapes everything about the 1970s.

Britain meanwhile had its own cycle. Hammer Film Productions, which had begun its horror run with The Quatermass Xperiment in 1955, found its formula with The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and Dracula (1958), the latter released in the United States as Horror of Dracula. Starring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee and filmed in color, these pictures were gothic and lavish, and they made money. Hammer kept making Frankenstein, Dracula and Mummy sequels through the 1960s and into the 1970s. The studio's success shows that, even as horror moved into modern settings in the United States, the older gothic tradition remained popular with audiences.

A darker British strand appeared late in the decade. Witchfinder General, directed by Michael Reeves and released on May 19, 1968, starred Vincent Price as Matthew Hopkins, a self-appointed witch hunter in England during the Civil War. It was produced by Tigon with American International Pictures, who released it in the US as The Conqueror Worm. The British Board of Film Censors demanded cuts to its violence. Critics now treat it as one of the three films often grouped as the foundation of British folk horror, together with The Blood on Satan's Claw (1971) and The Wicker Man, a link that is described in the United Kingdom guide.

The most important independent film of the era came from Pittsburgh. Night of the Living Dead was made by a company called Image Ten, formed to produce this single film. Principal photography ran from July 1967 to January 1968, much of it in and near Evans City, Pennsylvania, with a farmhouse rented because the filmmakers could not afford to build a set. George A. Romero shot in black and white on 35 mm film. Reported budgets vary, from roughly $100,000 to about $125,000. The film opened in Pittsburgh on October 1, 1968, and nationally three days later, and because it came just before the rating system took effect, children could buy tickets, which fueled the controversy over its graphic violence.

Two facts about it deserve emphasis. First, Duane Jones was cast in the lead, a notable choice for an American film of the time with a mostly white cast, and the part had not been written with a Black actor in mind, though Romero did not rewrite it. Second, the film lost its copyright protection because the notice was accidentally left off when the distributor changed the title from Night of the Flesh Eaters, which allowed it to circulate freely. Both facts helped its life as a cult object. It also helped give rise to the modern zombie and the apocalyptic style of zombie horror. The Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry in 1999.

Another landmark followed in June 1968: Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby, a Paramount release adapted from Ira Levin's 1967 novel. Made on a budget of about $3.2 million, with exteriors shot at the Dakota apartment building in New York, it grossed more than $33 million and won an Oscar for Ruth Gordon as Best Supporting Actress. It is a reminder that the most frightening thing in a decade of change could be an apartment building full of friendly neighbors. Together with Psycho and Night of the Living Dead, it makes up a trio that shows the genre working in three registers: the studio thriller, the independent shocker and the prestige adaptation.

The decade was not only about Anglo-American cinema. In Japan, 1964 brought Kwaidan, Masaki Kobayashi's anthology of Lafcadio Hearn stories, which was among the most expensive Japanese films of its time and received the Special Jury Prize at Cannes in 1965 and an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film. The same year came Onibaba, another film rooted in older tales. These pictures drew on theater and folklore and relied on atmosphere, and they anticipate the ghost-story tradition discussed in the Japan guide.

Taken together, the 1960s mark horror's passage from a genre of distant monsters to one of everyday places, and from a regulated system to a more open one. When you watch films from this decade, look at what has changed in the setting, at who the villain is and at how the camera treats violence. Then compare with the 1970s, when the freedoms won in these years were put to use. To see what the library holds for the period, filter by decade in the Movie Explorer.

Films from the 1960s