RE: Satanic Panic: How Rosemary’s Baby Launched the A-List Horror Movie
It's amazing to see what triggers a wave of "me too" imitators, isn't it?
Horror historians link the explosion of the paperback horror market to the success of three novels: Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist, and The Other, and it's exactly those three movies that drove a stake into the old Hammer and Universal horror pictures.
I didn't seriously enjoy Hammer until I was into my early thirties, and while my library is grossly incomplete, what I have seen has, for the most part, blown me away. Hammer was "going there" years before the other studios were, whether it was with blood or nudity or special effects that are dated but still manage to work. They have their weak entries, as does any producer/distributor from the period, but damn if Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Vincent Price, and Ingrid Pitt aren't mesmerizing when they're on the screen no matter the film.
I didn't really have an appreciation for Vincent Price until I watched his old Roger Corman films for my recent article at Horrornews.net. (The Bergmanesque Masque of the Red Death, brilliantly shot by Nicolas Roeg, blew me away.) I'm now working on another list for horrornews of Chris Lee's greatest hits.
With regard to the Satanic Panic film craze, I think it all went back to the youth revolt of the 60s and early 70s. It's significant that the Satanic Big Three -- The Omen, The Exorcist, and Rosemary's Baby -- all feature Satantic children or babies. It was a catharsis for people who felt they were losing control of their own children. In another era, those films may not have been as significant as they were in the late 60s/70s.