A Quick Guide to Hippiesploitation Horror
‘Hippiesploitation’ refers to a slew of movies (not all horror) made in the late-’60s and early ’70s which capitalized on the ‘counterculture’ that was sweeping America at the time. The post-war generation of baby boomers had hit their twenties and had grown up to reject the American Dream, protesting agasint materialism, conformity, nuclear armament, racial inequality and the Vietnam war, while embracing a ‘back to the earth’ mentality accompanied by heavy doses of free sex and drugs.
As well as plenty of documentaries which chronicled the ‘hippie’ scene in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district during 1967’s Summer of Love, the movie industry was keen to exploit audiences’ fascination and titilation with the hedonistic and sexually liberated hippies. Movies like The Trip (1967), The Love-Ins (1967) and Psych-Out (1968) focused on the sex, drugs and psychedelia, while the low-budget indie movie, Easy Rider (1969) revolutionized Hollywood and made the big studios rethink their business plan. Other hippie-based movies, such as Riot on Sunset Strip (1967) and The Young Runaways (1968), explored the seedy and dangerous side of America’s youth gone wild and acted more like PSAs that warned against drugs and falling in with the wrong crowd. In fact, much of the hippie lifestyle evoked horror as much as amusement in middle America and the tone was about to take a drastically dark turn.
In August of 1969, a group of desert-dwelling dropouts and followers of cult leader Charles Manson broke into a Los Angeles home and brutally murdered five people including actress Sharon Tate who was 8 months pregnant. More murders were committed the following night, striking terror across the city until the group were finally rounded up and arrested. Together with the disastrous Altamont concert that year in which several people were killed against a bleak backdrop of bad drugs and overzealous biker security guards, the Manson murders brought the 1960s to a gloomy and frightening close.
Bhaskar Roy Chowdhury plays the Manson-esque guru in 1971’s I Drink Your Blood. Whether or not Manson’s followers were actually hippies (and they themselves rejected the term) is irrelevant. The public saw them as such and suddenly attitudes towards longhaired peaceniks changed. Hippies were no longer seen as an untidy nuisance. Now, they might break into your house and kill you. The movie industry was quick to capitalize on this new fear. The Other Side of Madness (1971) was rushed into production while the Manson trial was still unfolding and intercut documentary footage with dramatized scenes of the murders. Other horror movies presented thinly disguised portrayals of Manson and his followers. I Drink your Blood (1971), The Night God Screamed, The Love-Thrill Murders and The Cult all came out in 1971 and portrayed small town America and its straight denizens under attack from longhaired freaks led by charismatic gurus who preached biblical doom.
Hippiesploitation also toyed with the supernatural. Even the old stock movie monsters were given a counterculture makeover in movies like Deathmaster (1972) which has Count Yorga himself (Robert Quarry) play a vampire cult leader who recruits a band of Topanga Canyon dropouts as his bloodsucking horde. The same year, British horror studio Hammer tried to revamp (ha!) their Christopher Lee-starring Dracula franchise with Dracula A.D. 1972 in which the undead count is resurrected at the tail end of swinging London by a bunch of hip young things to a psychedelic soundtrack. In the promisingly titled Werewolves on Wheels (1971), a biker gang is cursed by a cult of desert dwelling satanic monks and gradually turn into werewolves.
A biker gang earns the wrath of an evil cult in Werewolves on Wheels (1971).While there may be a world of difference between the hippie scene and the biker scene, the average square saw both camps as dirty, undisciplined longhairs who might invade their community and cause havoc. Ever since Easy Rider, movies often presented characters who had a foot in both camps. While their politics may differ, both hippies and bikers voluntarily live outside society. The Manson Family, after all, were in cahoots with a Venice Beach biker gang called the Straight Satans. A boom in biker gang movies began after Roger Corman’s The Wild Angels in 1966, featuring boozed-up, leather-clad thugs terrorizing small communities and pursuing innocent people like ravening wolves.
As the ’60s approached their end, there with ever-increasing counterculture leanings in the biker genre. The aforementioned Werewolves on Wheels had a gang member called Tarot who is teased by his fellow bikers for his mystical bullshit and the leader of the titular gang in 1969’s Satan’s Sadists (which was shot in the vicinity of Spahn Ranch while members of the Manson family were still living there) defends hippies as his comrades (albeit overly forgiving ones) in his fight against ‘the man’.
Russ Tamblyn as biker gang leader ‘Anchor’ bridges the gap between bikers and hippies in Satan’s Sadists (1969).As the 1970s wore on, the hippie dream faded and the movie industry lost interest, turning their attention to other avenues of horror. But movies set in the American wilderness about cannibalistic hillbillies and mutants who prey on unsuspecting travelers like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and The Hills Have Eyes (1977), demonstrated the continued unease felt about communes of people with different belief systems living beyond the borders of society. Folk horror experienced a surge in the ’70s, and it’s not hard to see it as a reaction to the return-to-nature hippie ideals and experimentations with cults and mysticism of the previous decade.
So, if hippiesploitation horror seems like it’s your bag, then give my novel Death Trip a read! It’s a 1968-set post-apocalyptic tale of hippies and bikers trying to survive in zombie-haunted Southern California. Available from Godless or other vendors (including Amazon) here.
