Page 198 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

got to high school I was in the States and at that time in the 1960s it was the time of the French New-
Wave and Europe was where all the great movies were coming from. I think this generation in Europe
has forgotten that. I don't think they realise that when they get defensive about movies in Europe,
there was a time when movies were way cooler because they were in Italian or French and American
movies couldn't be as interesting or as important because they were from the States.
I think this is something that during the 1970s and 1980s Europe forgot and thought 'va-
cant compete with American movies therefore we must have all these economic rules and defences
in place because we are really not good enough to compete'. I think they are ignoring history in
that case. I took a lot of influence from the New Wave, like most Americans of my generation.
I watched everything from L'Année Dernière à Marienbad, (Last Year at Marionbad, 1961) and
Fellini to Truffaut and Godard. I mean these movies were what were really important during that
period.
Going back to notions of the fantastic, what is so interesting about European cinema is that it transcends
the art and commercial divide. You mentioned obvious art movie directors but there's also Spanish directors,
Italian directors who were doing stuff that was experimental as well as genre-based.
Well I think we certainly have to include directors such as Dario Argento, whose work is both
fantastical and pretty arty. I also like the work of the Italian horror director Mario Bava. When I look
at it, I didn't realise that when I was going crazy for the Roger Corman/Poe movies, I'd never seen
movies like Maschera del Demonio (Mask of Satan, 1960) or La Casa Dell Esorcismo (House of Exorcism
aka Lisa and the Devil, 1973). Well, I felt a little embarrassed after I saw Bava's films and I realised
that Corman was remaking European genre movies in American syntax and that's what I loved. There
was a whole period during the 1950s and 1960s when all you had to do was go and look at European
movies and come back and make one, because Americans would never go and see them!
A n d of course if we include Britain in Europe, which normally in America we don't, then I would
certainly have to say that the company that recreated the Frankenstein myth and the vampire myth,
and Dracula myth, was Hammer. Hammer took the dead Universal series of monsters and they
gave it colour, sex and blood - and this was the scariest stuff out in the 1950s. Is that an influence?
Is it European? I don't know what you call it. Sometimes I have a hard time putting nationality to
a lot of movie influences because sometimes I think they really transcend it. I think in Europe the
audiences are more accepting of genre films being movies than in America. In America, this is a
cliché, but everything is reduced to money, everything is reduced to a value, quantifiable in dollars.
And that's not the case in Europe. That's maybe the most significant cultural difference between the
continents.
It seems to me that the key feature of horror is almost disrespectability. As soon as you make it big budget
you make it safe — would you agree?
Yes. It's a little like comedy. A comedy works better with less production, because there's
something about comedy that depends upon timing and indefinable elements, almost improvised
elements. With horror it tends to be the same way that sometimes an over-produced horror movie
ceases to work.
What horror does successfully, and your films do in particular, is to draw up certain repressed material,
things that society would prefer to ignore. Would you agree?

184