Kevin Bacon, Adrienne King, Ari Lehman, Robbi Morgan, Betsy Palmer, and Jeannine Taylor in Friday the 13th (1980)

Must watch - sometimes just to pass the time... Typically 1970s vintage!  

Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Mick Taylor, Bill Wyman, and The Rolling Stones in Gimme Shelter (1970)

A list of all the horror movies I have seen

The decade when directors seize the steering wheel, studios gamble on risk, and a scrappy shark named Jaws accidentally invents the modern blockbuster—just as Star Wars fires it into hyperspace.


* New Hollywood’s rebel parliament – Coppola’s The Godfather I & II (1972/74) turn crime sagas into family tragedies; Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) and Mean Streets (1973) stalk urban malaise; Altman free-forms with MASH* (1970) and Nashville (1975); Lumet dissects media rage in Network (1976) while Ashby channels counter-culture drift in Harold and Maude (1971) and Coming Home (1978).



* Blockbuster big-bang – Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) proves summer can belong to a single movie; Lucas answers with Star Wars (1977), welding myth and merch for good. Their widescreen aftershocks reshape studio economics overnight.



* Genre reinventions & midnight cults – Horror mutates from gothic to gut-level: Craven’s Last House on the Left (1972), Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973), Carpenter’s slasher blueprint Halloween (1978), Romero’s consumer-zombie satire Dawn of the Dead (1978). Kung-fu fever breaks out with Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon (1973); blaxploitation struts in Shaft (1971) and Super Fly (1972); camp explodes at midnight with The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) and Eraserhead (1977).



* Global auteur counterpoint – Germany’s New Cinema blooms: Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), Wenders’ Alice in the Cities (1974). Italy wrestles with power in Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970) and Pasolini’s Salò (1975). Japan’s post-studio wave roars through Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses (1976) and Kurosawa’s comeback Dersu Uzala (1975). In Iran, Kiarostami begins with The Traveller (1974); in Senegal, Sembène’s Xala (1975) anchors African cinema.



* Documentary & vérité grit – Maysles’ Gimme Shelter (1970) and Grey Gardens (1975) blur fly-on-the-wall intimacy; Hearts and Minds (1974) and Harlan County U.S.A. (1976) weaponize nonfiction against war and labor exploitation.



* Animation & fantasy evolve – Bakshi’s rotoscope rebels (Fritz the Cat, 1972; Wizards, 1977), while Rankin/Bass craft stop-motion epics and Miyazaki debuts with Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro (1979), hinting at Studio Ghibli magic to come.


By 1979, the silver screen straddles two poles: gritty, director-driven confessionals and hyperspace-sized popcorn dreams. The Seventies prove cinema can be both personal diary and global carnival—sometimes within the same double bill.

Screenprints on My Mind – The Auteur Seventies (1970-1979)

Klaus Kinski in And God Said to Cain... (1970)

Gordon Harker and Violet Loraine in Road House (1934)

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