WORTH WATCHING

Watch: Short Video Essay on the 'Scary Summer' Movies of 1979

by Alex Billington
August 5, 2014
Source: Press Play

"It showed a world drained of vitality and meaning." 1979 - the year of Ridley Scott's Alien, the original Star Trek: The Motion Picture, as well as the original The Muppet Movie, Escape from Alcatraz and of course James Bond's Moonraker. But aside from Alien, it was actually a great year for "scary" movies galore, from George Romero's Dawn of the Dead to the original The Amityville Horror with James Brolin, as well as David Cronenberg's creeper The Brood, John Frankenheimer's eco-horror Prophecy about a giant killer bear, Don Coscarelli's cult horror Phantasm, even Werner Herzog's Nosferatu the Vampyre was released in 1979. Nelson Carvajal presents a new video essay about all the dark horror that summer. Enjoy.

Here's the video essay Our Scary Summer: 1979 by Nelson Carvajal and Jed Mayer, from Press Play:

Our Scary Summer: 1979 was made by Nelson Carvajal and Jed Mayer. We've featured a few of Carvajal's video essays previously. The full transcript of the voiceover (by Jed Mayer) in this video can be found on Press Play. " 1979 was also the year when my family decided we needed solutions to our own paralysis and stagnation. We sought it through family therapy, proudly airing our co-dependencies and dysfunctions, along with many other American families caught up in the family therapy movement. Few films expose the limitations of therapy narratives more ruthlessly than David Cronenberg's The Brood." How many of these films are your favorites? Is Alien the unbeatable best of, or are there other underrated gems? Thoughts?

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