Post-Manson Cinema: Horror, Transgression, and Susan Sontag's America in the 1970s

In the early 1970s, with the utopian ambitions of the previous decade burnt to cinders, a giddy lust for chaos and annihilation seized American cinema and spawned a shocking cycle of bloody, nihilistic films that encompassed avant-garde experiments, documentaries, and low-budget horror alike. This phenomenon found an astute commentator and unlikely aficionado in Susan Sontag, the literary firebrand whose attunement to the dark, apocalyptic energies of the era position her as the ideal critic for helping us to understand the bloodlust, criminality, and evil that saturate these films. Traversing a vast constellation of cultural references and thinkers, from the My Lai massacre to Simone de Beauvoir, Post-Manson Cinema engages Sontag’s writing and thinking to better understand some of the most shocking and transgressive movies ever made.