In the 1970s, when horror movies started to get more and more extreme, it wasn’t just the blood and the savagery that increased. So did the sensation that you were seeing something “real” — not mere “horror-movie violence” but violence as it really was, in all its existential terror. It was Hitchcock’s “Psycho,” in 1960, that sounded the original slasher chord of that era, but the event that truly ignited the reality-horror revolution was the Manson murders. They set off such a gruesome shock wave in the culture that they turned into a kind of movie of the mind, a psychotic nightmare made flesh. The slasher films of the
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