Where “Shock Value” excels is in its primary research, the stories of how the seminal shockers of this era came to be, told in large part by the men (and here and there a woman) who made them. What’s missing is (you should pardon the expression) the connective tissue, particularly discussions of broader changes in the film industry, audience tastes and the culture as a whole. Zinoman, a frequent contributor to The New York Times, concentrates on a handful of films and filmmakers that brought the corpse back to life during the late 1960s and early ’70s, and he convincingly conveys what made movies like “Night of the Living Dead” and “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” different from anything that had come before: more unsettling, purer in their sense of dread. He gets the what and the who, but the why and the how elude him in a book that struggles to bring the larger picture into focus. Something clearly has happened here, and Jason Zinoman’s “Shock Value” aims to tell us the what, the who, the why and the how.

Serial-killer thrillers like “The Silence of the Lambs” and “No Country for Old Men” win Academy Awards while the torture-porn of movies like “The Human Centipede” and “Hostel” makes the old grind-house screamers look virginal. Zombies, vampires and wolf men have conquered the best-seller lists, movie screens and the prime-time schedule. Today, of course, popular culture bleeds from every pore. Time magazine’s cover story on “Jaws” ran 3,300 words, and not one of them was “horror.” By 1975 a scary movie was called by any other name. The collapse of the studio system, the aging of its stars, the decline of Grade-A monster movies like 1931’s “Frankenstein” into rubber-suit rip-offs aimed at the teenage trade - all were stakes driven into a once vibrant genre.

As a cultural commodity that got any respect, the horror movie was dead by the early 1970s.

Shock value by jason zinoman