Nightmares In Red, White And Blue

How often do you see a "Based On The Book By" credit in a documentary? That just amuses me.
It was indeed, though, based on a book of the same name. This is a documentary about the history of American horror films. And it is delicious.
Pretty much every interviewee in the movie is someone I respect and admire and, honestly, I just eat this stuff up. I love studying the horror genre almost more than I enjoy the horror genre itself. It's one of the few subjects that can hold my attention for an indefinite amount of time.
And I've always been really interested to hear scholarly interpretations of horror films. I've never been good at reading subtext, even overt subtext (I don't think I caught the consumerism commentary in Dawn Of The Dead the first time I saw it) so part of what really fascinates me about books and documentaries about the genre is the insight into deeper meanings I missed, or to hear other people's interpretations on various horror works (I disagree with a lot of people about American Psycho; if what I've read is true, I even think Bret Easton Ellis doesn't get it).
What was really cool about this movie is it not only made me want to see some movies I had no interest in before, but it made me want to rewatch some movies I wasn't terribly fond of the first time around. Maybe they'd be better the second time. It's a powerful documentary that makes me think "I should rewatch Se7en." (Yes, it's true, I wasn't really a fan of Se7en. Judge me all you want, it didn't make the impact on me that it apparently made on everybody else.)
What frustrated me were two or three montages in the movie, quick cuts of all of the good (read: gory) bits of movies, but there was no way to tell what movies the clips were from (unless, of course, I recognized the clip because I'd already seen the movie). If there was a split second of something I found intrigueing (there were several) I don't know how I'm supposed to figure out what movie that split second was from in order to track it down. Grrrr.
Oh well, minor complaint.
A less minor complaint: they kinda glossed over the nineties. The early years of cinema were given a good chunk of time, the 1950s and '60s were given a decent amount of focus, the 1970s and 1980s each were looked at rather in depthly. "Oh, yeah, and the '90s happened." And then the movie ends with quite a few minutes about horror movies in the 2000s and a brief discussion on foreign horror (which ordinarily I'd have no problem with, but this is a movie specificially about American horror films, so that kinda bugged me).
If it were up to me, someone would make a PBS weeklong style horror film documentary miniseries, with at least two hours dedicated to each decade, encompassing all subgenres and foreign markets of horror. Yeah. I would watch the hell out of that. Who do I talk to about making that happen?
On the whole, Nightmares In Red, White And Blue was an interesting and entertaining documentary for those of us who like watching this sort of thing.

End of line.
-Sally