This is further developed when Alfred Hitchcock, who was both a predecessor and contemporary of the new horror crowd, is brought in.
Chronicling how Castle played a major role in the early development of the film version of Rosemary’s Baby, and then losing the director role (and his chance at finally achieving some level of respectability) to Roman Polanski sets the tone of that connection – the new guys, given more leeway for violence and ambiguity, were outright replacing the gothic thrillers and schlocky good times of their antecedents. Earlier, figures like Vincent Price (tasked with “defending” horror films against Frederic Wertham) and William Castle appear as the veterans of fifties and sixties horror cinema, presented as a kind of light fantasy fare (contrasted with the darker, more intense tone of the late sixties and seventies) – Castle and Boris Karloff (who appears in Peter Bogdanovich’s film Targets) then bridge that era, key figures in some of the core movies Zinoman focuses on. Some of the most interesting historical material in Shock Value are the stories about the new horror directors and their relationship with their direct predecessors, the direct and indirect responses and rivalries that were in the background of many of the movies.
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