It’s a hot summer morning, and Jason Zinoman is standing on sacred ground for horror films. The D.C. native is in Georgetown, perched on the very spot where the genre moved from the tawdry backwaters of pop culture into the mainstream of American life.
Of course, the author of “Shock Value,” a new book about how fright films made this transition, is standing at the top of the “The Exorcist” steps.
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The steep stairwell at Prospect and 36th streets NW, dropping down sharply to M Street and Canal Road, with the Potomac River and the Key Bridge in the near distance, has become a touchstone for movie fans since the 1973 film in which Father Karras (Jason Miller) hurls himself out of a window and down, down the steps, apparently freeing a possessed child of a demon at the cost of his own life.
“People forget, but the ‘The Exorcist’ was the highest-grossing blockbuster of all time,” Zinoman, 35, is saying in his rapid-fire, enthusiastic delivery. “It was on the cover of magazines. If you wanted to be an intellectual, you had to have a position on ‘The Exorcist.’ You couldn’t just have seen it. You had to have thought about it.”
Zinoman, 35, lives in New York City and freelances theater reviews and articles for the New York Times and Slate. He grew up in the District (his mom, Joy, founded Studio Theatre), and he fell in love with horror films as a kid at Georgetown Day School.
At a friend’s house after school one day, a group of guys watched a tape of “Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer,” a flick whose widest release was just eight theaters. Zinoman was about 12, and he never quite got over it.
“I went home disturbed,” he laughs.
Mom and Dad were not aware their son was watching such fare, Joy Zinoman says now, with a loud “Yech!” at hearing the title.
“When I was pregnant with him, I directed a play called ‘Marat/Sade,’ which takes place in lunatic asylum,” she says, perhaps by way of explanation. “But I never saw a horror film until his book came out.”
Today, horror is a staple genre, a vast moneymaking machine for Hollywood. Films spawn franchises. Killers become pop-culture references. There are Freddy Krueger, Jason and Chucky, and the ubiquitous “Scream” mask. If politics wasn’t scary enough, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s “It’s 3 a.m.” campaign ad seemed to have clear roots in “Halloween.”
The genre is so entrenched in pop culture that the Web site Box Office Mojo, which tracks ticket sales, separates horror into eight different subcategories (slasher, supernatural, torture, comedy, etc.) and counts more than a dozen films that have grossed more than $100 million. From “Night of the Living Dead” in 1968 forward, the movies have often been made on shoestring budgets. “The Blair Witch Project,” set in Maryland and shot for about $60,000 in 1999, has earned about $248 million, according to the site.
Zinoman’s book, subtitled “How a Few Eccentric Outsiders Gave Us Nightmares, Conquered Hollywood, and Invented Modern Horror,” is about how this came to be.
“The Exorcist” — the biggest of all supernatural movies remains one of the top 10 highest-grossing films of all time — was the brainchild of Georgetown graduate William Peter Blatty. He took his novel to Hollywood, sniffed out a $400,000 offer for the film rights as a bad deal, broke into a producer’s filing cabinet to make a copy of an incriminating document and wound up with as much clout on a film as any writer ever had.
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