The generation gap is one of those issues that obsessed the British in the 1960s and 70s; popular sitcoms from Till Death Us Do Part to Bless This House, reveal an unhealthy interest in what the young were up to and scenes of comic generational conflict.
Comedy and horror are never far apart - they both probe the cultural fault lines of the day - so it's not surprising that some of the British horror movies of the time reveal similar anxieties about 'the youth of today'.
Tony Tenser, head of Tigon Films, produced a pair of bona fide classics of British horror with Witchfinder General and Blood On Satan's Claw. Set in the 17th century, neither seem, on the surface, to be concerned with the generation gap, but interesting subtexts lurk beneath the period detail. It's not hard to see Witchfinder's young lovers as victims of a hypocritical sexual repression embodied in Vincent Price's Matthew Hopkins (often as keen to shag his victims as to burn them); or to read the rural village in Blood On Satan's Claw as a wasteland in which a youth subculture progresses from winding up the vicar to rape, murder and occultism. The idea that the wayward teens are growing a piece of the Devil's hairy skin is both a weirdly powerful way of imagining the agonies of adolescence and a way of suggesting that the randy kids are indeed 'possessed' by something outside of acceptable adult society.
In 1974 Tenser backed exploitation auteur Pete Walker's Frightmare, one of the most ferociously original horror films of the 70s. Walker's genuinely nasty cannibal holocaust suggests that the older generation are nothing more than demented parasites feeding off their unfortunate offspring.
The fantastic Sheila Keith - wielding a Black & Decker years before Abel Ferrera got in on the act - appears as a brain-eating mother-from-hell. Walker and screenwriter David McGillivray pulled off something unique with Frightmare; it's as if Ken Loach had enlisted the services of Tobe Hooper to remake Family Life as a horror film. Their two other collaborations, each an attack on moral hypocrisy and repressiveness, were less successful but still fascinating. House of Whipcord is an ugly, plodding movie, but its central idea - a bunch of Mary Whitehouse-like gorgons set up their own prison to punish the mini-skirted young tarts enjoying the fruits of the sexual revolution - is pure genius.
House of Mortal Sin featured a sexually frustrated old priest getting so hot under the dog collar about the laxity contemporary morals that he runs amok, taking his flock out with poisoned wafers and - my personal favourite - a well-aimed incense censer to the head. Walker was disappointed the film didn't create the kind of controversy he'd hoped for. Was the generation gap closing? It certainly seemed that as a theme for British exploitation movies it was finished. Of course, it soon reared its ugly head again, and it'd be nice to think that Walker and McGillivray enjoyed the arrival of punk
The Pete Walker Collection and The Tigon Collection are available now from Anchor Bay priced £29.99
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