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We Are the Mutants: The Battle for Hollywood from Rosemary's Baby to Lethal Weapon
An offbeat odyssey through the most daring and disruptive phase of American cinema since the advent of sound — during the most transformative and tumultuous period of American history since the Civil War.
We Are the Mutants is a critical reassessment of what is arguably the most discussed and beloved stretch of movies in Hollywood history. Documenting the period between the arrival of US combat troops in Vietnam and the end of President Ronald Reagan’s second term, the book forgoes the usual and restrictive exemplars of “auteur cinema,” and instead focuses on an eclectic selection of films and genres — horror, documentary, disaster, vigilante action, neo-noir, post-apocalyptic sci-fi — to track this period's tumultuous transformation in American life, culture, and politics.
By exploring cult classics like 'The Texas Chain Saw Massacre' and 'Escape from New York', as well as studio blockbusters like 'The Exorcist' and 'Fatal Attraction', We Are the Mutants rewrites the history of modern American cinema and, in doing so, the history of America itself.
We Are the Mutants is a critical reassessment of what is arguably the most discussed and beloved stretch of movies in Hollywood history. Documenting the period between the arrival of US combat troops in Vietnam and the end of President Ronald Reagan’s second term, the book forgoes the usual and restrictive exemplars of “auteur cinema,” and instead focuses on an eclectic selection of films and genres — horror, documentary, disaster, vigilante action, neo-noir, post-apocalyptic sci-fi — to track this period's tumultuous transformation in American life, culture, and politics.
By exploring cult classics like 'The Texas Chain Saw Massacre' and 'Escape from New York', as well as studio blockbusters like 'The Exorcist' and 'Fatal Attraction', We Are the Mutants rewrites the history of modern American cinema and, in doing so, the history of America itself.
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330 pages, Paperback
Published October 11, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
September 30, 2025
"We've focused on feature films [released between 1968 and 1988] that, intentionally or not, fairly or unfairly, best capture the beliefs, hopes, and anxieties of those audiences that paid to see them, as well as the realties and preoccupations of the day . . . [American audiences] went for the new stories and old stories, for innovation and tradition, for engagement and escape. They went, and continue to go, because movies are how Americans choose to see the world." -- from the preface, on page 1
A triumvirate of authors - Grasso, McKenna, and Roberts - trade off examining two dozen U.S. films debuting between 1968 and 1988 with their peculiarly-titled We Are the Mutants. The 'hook' of the book in this instance is that two films - which sometimes may have similarities, but more often don't - are compared and/or contrasted throughout the twelve chapters. As other GR reviewers have noted, the standout is likely the essay 'The Cost of Electricity,' regarding some parallels between the crude, low-budget 1974 horror film Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the stark award-winning 1976 coal miners' strike documentary Harlan County, U.S.A.. Among the other films discussed are Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist, Alien, Poltergeist, and Fatal Attraction - don't we Americans just seem to love our unsettling horror/suspense flicks? 😉 - among a number of some less-remembered movies that have since attained cult status. Another good discourse involved the 1974 vigilante action/drama Death Wish and director John Carpenter's 1981 sci-fi adventure Escape From New York, which both seemed to sprout from the actual crime, fiscal, and other crises suffered by 'the Big Apple' throughout the 1970's. While the authors occasionally pour on their political viewpoints and ideologies a little too obviously at times, this was otherwise an often intelligent dishing about a prolific era for U.S. movies.
A triumvirate of authors - Grasso, McKenna, and Roberts - trade off examining two dozen U.S. films debuting between 1968 and 1988 with their peculiarly-titled We Are the Mutants. The 'hook' of the book in this instance is that two films - which sometimes may have similarities, but more often don't - are compared and/or contrasted throughout the twelve chapters. As other GR reviewers have noted, the standout is likely the essay 'The Cost of Electricity,' regarding some parallels between the crude, low-budget 1974 horror film Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the stark award-winning 1976 coal miners' strike documentary Harlan County, U.S.A.. Among the other films discussed are Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist, Alien, Poltergeist, and Fatal Attraction - don't we Americans just seem to love our unsettling horror/suspense flicks? 😉 - among a number of some less-remembered movies that have since attained cult status. Another good discourse involved the 1974 vigilante action/drama Death Wish and director John Carpenter's 1981 sci-fi adventure Escape From New York, which both seemed to sprout from the actual crime, fiscal, and other crises suffered by 'the Big Apple' throughout the 1970's. While the authors occasionally pour on their political viewpoints and ideologies a little too obviously at times, this was otherwise an often intelligent dishing about a prolific era for U.S. movies.
November 3, 2022
Chapters on Texas Chainsaw/Harlan County and Sorcerer/Alien are all-timers.
October 28, 2022
Is there anything new left to say about the period of American film production from the late 1960s to the early 1980s?
This is the period that began with the so-called ‘New Hollywood’ and continued with its collapse under the weight of its own cinematic hubris and excess, bumped along considerably by the 1977 release of Star Wars, after which the blockbuster franchise, with its lucrative pre-sold merchandising deals, evolved into the majority of what now passes for the American film industry. Of course, this is just one facet of the story. Influencing this trajectory was Vietnam, the rise and fall of the counterculture, the election of Ronald Reagan and the rise of neoliberalism.
To say something different about all of this is a tough task. But it is is precisely the aim of We are the Mutants: The Battle for Hollywood from Rosemary’s Baby to Lethal Weapon. That the book largely succeeds in its mission is due to a quality I initially found hard to define until I hit on a way to do so by way of a comparison. The book reminds me of the work of British documentary maker Adam Curtis, particularly his most recent effort, I Can’t Get You Out of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World. Constructed purely from BBC archival footage, with the addition of only his narration and a soundtrack, I Can’t Get You Out of My Head mined a huge amount of unknown, forgotten and subcultural history, events and people, to illuminate the hidden history of how we got from the hope of the 1960s to the hi tech, mass surveillance, atomised, market saturated world of today. An historical period in which we have never had more control over our individual identities but seemingly have never been less free and more unhappy.
Kelly Roberts, Michael Grasso and Richard MacKenna take a similar approach. They search for, excavate and weave together the overt and deeply subcultural links, influences, events and coincidences, along with a wealth of political history and popular (and unpopular) culture into a coherent narrative that casts this thirty year period of American film in a somewhat different light. I would add that this is largely the tone of the material on the website We Are the Mutants that all three edit. This describes itself as ‘focusing on the history and analysis of Cold War-era popular and outsider culture, with a strong emphasis on speculative (sci-fi, fantasy, horror), genre, pulp, cult, occult, subculture, and anti-establishment media.’ The website, which is a must read (full disclosure – I have also contributed to it), has largely been in abeyance while they have been pulling together this book, and I fervently hope this it resumes normal transmission now that it is out.
We are the Mutants: The Battle for Hollywood from Rosemary’s Baby to Lethal Weapon comprises a series of chapters, written by the various authors, that pair two key but, on the surface at least, completely unrelated films. Each then goes on to examine them individually but also their linkages and influences, intentional and not (and as all good structuralists we known it doesn’t matter which). Hence Rosemary’s Baby (1968) is paired with Roger Corman’s Bloody Mama (1970). Polanski’s film is discussed in terms of being a text around the assassination of presidential hopeful Robert F Kennedy and the divisions that would eventually cleave America due to the rise of counterculture, and its various occult and spiritual manifestations. Bloody Mama is mined for what it says about what surely must be America’s public fascination number one of the late 1960s, Charles Manson. Both are also analysed in the context of the Vietnam War, which no surprisingly casts a long shadow over the entire book.
Grasso cleverly examines the 1968 dystopian comedy Wild in the Streets alongside Peter Watkins’s Punishment Park (1971) for insights into the debates over strategy between different factions of the late 1960s/early 1970s US left. In what was one of the stand-out chapters for me, Roberts discusses Harlan County U.S.A., a 1976 documentary about a bloody thirteen month strike by Kentucky coal miners in 1973, with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), to illuminate contemporaneous debates about poverty, labour relations, company town life, energy policy and the unravelling of counterculture. Sorcerer (1977) the release of which was obliterated by Star Wars, is discussed alongside Alien (1979) for what it can tell us about the rise of neoliberalism, the penetration of the market into every sphere of life (even space) and the rise of Reaganism.
You get the general drift.
Although I do want to add what for me was another major highlight, McKenna’s chapter on Silent Running (1972) and Saul Bass’s little seen Phase IV, (1974), for its discussion of both in the context of ecological science fiction, the rise of environmentalism and the prevalence of dome architecture in the 1960s and 1970s. Not every chapter hits the spot for me, but that is more about individual taste as anything else. Taken as a whole, We are the Mutants: The Battle for Hollywood from Rosemary’s Baby to Lethal Weapon is a fascinating piece of work that breathes new life into the period of cinema, a discursive journey that takes in everything from Tiki culture to Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods?, to the CIA’s little known links to Manson and Dungeons and Dragons.
We are the Mutants: The Battle for Hollywood from Rosemary’s Baby to Lethal Weapon is out through Repeater Books.
This is the period that began with the so-called ‘New Hollywood’ and continued with its collapse under the weight of its own cinematic hubris and excess, bumped along considerably by the 1977 release of Star Wars, after which the blockbuster franchise, with its lucrative pre-sold merchandising deals, evolved into the majority of what now passes for the American film industry. Of course, this is just one facet of the story. Influencing this trajectory was Vietnam, the rise and fall of the counterculture, the election of Ronald Reagan and the rise of neoliberalism.
To say something different about all of this is a tough task. But it is is precisely the aim of We are the Mutants: The Battle for Hollywood from Rosemary’s Baby to Lethal Weapon. That the book largely succeeds in its mission is due to a quality I initially found hard to define until I hit on a way to do so by way of a comparison. The book reminds me of the work of British documentary maker Adam Curtis, particularly his most recent effort, I Can’t Get You Out of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World. Constructed purely from BBC archival footage, with the addition of only his narration and a soundtrack, I Can’t Get You Out of My Head mined a huge amount of unknown, forgotten and subcultural history, events and people, to illuminate the hidden history of how we got from the hope of the 1960s to the hi tech, mass surveillance, atomised, market saturated world of today. An historical period in which we have never had more control over our individual identities but seemingly have never been less free and more unhappy.
Kelly Roberts, Michael Grasso and Richard MacKenna take a similar approach. They search for, excavate and weave together the overt and deeply subcultural links, influences, events and coincidences, along with a wealth of political history and popular (and unpopular) culture into a coherent narrative that casts this thirty year period of American film in a somewhat different light. I would add that this is largely the tone of the material on the website We Are the Mutants that all three edit. This describes itself as ‘focusing on the history and analysis of Cold War-era popular and outsider culture, with a strong emphasis on speculative (sci-fi, fantasy, horror), genre, pulp, cult, occult, subculture, and anti-establishment media.’ The website, which is a must read (full disclosure – I have also contributed to it), has largely been in abeyance while they have been pulling together this book, and I fervently hope this it resumes normal transmission now that it is out.
We are the Mutants: The Battle for Hollywood from Rosemary’s Baby to Lethal Weapon comprises a series of chapters, written by the various authors, that pair two key but, on the surface at least, completely unrelated films. Each then goes on to examine them individually but also their linkages and influences, intentional and not (and as all good structuralists we known it doesn’t matter which). Hence Rosemary’s Baby (1968) is paired with Roger Corman’s Bloody Mama (1970). Polanski’s film is discussed in terms of being a text around the assassination of presidential hopeful Robert F Kennedy and the divisions that would eventually cleave America due to the rise of counterculture, and its various occult and spiritual manifestations. Bloody Mama is mined for what it says about what surely must be America’s public fascination number one of the late 1960s, Charles Manson. Both are also analysed in the context of the Vietnam War, which no surprisingly casts a long shadow over the entire book.
Grasso cleverly examines the 1968 dystopian comedy Wild in the Streets alongside Peter Watkins’s Punishment Park (1971) for insights into the debates over strategy between different factions of the late 1960s/early 1970s US left. In what was one of the stand-out chapters for me, Roberts discusses Harlan County U.S.A., a 1976 documentary about a bloody thirteen month strike by Kentucky coal miners in 1973, with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), to illuminate contemporaneous debates about poverty, labour relations, company town life, energy policy and the unravelling of counterculture. Sorcerer (1977) the release of which was obliterated by Star Wars, is discussed alongside Alien (1979) for what it can tell us about the rise of neoliberalism, the penetration of the market into every sphere of life (even space) and the rise of Reaganism.
You get the general drift.
Although I do want to add what for me was another major highlight, McKenna’s chapter on Silent Running (1972) and Saul Bass’s little seen Phase IV, (1974), for its discussion of both in the context of ecological science fiction, the rise of environmentalism and the prevalence of dome architecture in the 1960s and 1970s. Not every chapter hits the spot for me, but that is more about individual taste as anything else. Taken as a whole, We are the Mutants: The Battle for Hollywood from Rosemary’s Baby to Lethal Weapon is a fascinating piece of work that breathes new life into the period of cinema, a discursive journey that takes in everything from Tiki culture to Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods?, to the CIA’s little known links to Manson and Dungeons and Dragons.
We are the Mutants: The Battle for Hollywood from Rosemary’s Baby to Lethal Weapon is out through Repeater Books.
October 22, 2022
In addition to being laser-fit into my personal wheelhouse, this book is smart, well-researched, beautifully written, and full of truly unique perspectives on movies, America, and the world in general. Structured as twelve film pairing, the authors weave a narrative about the subtle, and sometimes not-so-subtle mutation of Western culture across the second half of the twentieth century. They say so much, and yet you get the sense that they've only scratched the surface. I hope there are follow-ups to this.
November 17, 2023
I want to give a positive up top and that is the essay on Harlan County USA and Texas Chainsaw Massacre was an interesting read and made some thoughtful points. Unfortunately it was the only essay in this book I can say that about. The rest of the book was full of shallow “analysis” that mostly contained a beat for beat plot synopsis and when a reading of the film did happen it wasn’t given any supporting arguments it was simply stated and the next plot point covered. The thesis was poorly thought out and the arguments lacked substance. This is the worst film analysis I’ve read outside of a Reddit post. Not recommend.
May 20, 2024
An exhilaratingly fun and smart take on what is, after all, perhaps the most densely studied period of film, if it's not the classic 1936-39 studio heyday--the span from the decline of the New Hollywood through the Reagan era. What's new here is the range of movies being treated (more Corman/AIP movies than I've seen, and not the movies that have become at least para-canonical) and especially the juxtaposition of sometimes very different movies as signposts of moments of crisis--Alien and Sorcerer, the mostly-unseen Wages of Fear remake as discussions of work in global capitalism, Suburbia and Poltergeist as explorations of what the suburbs don't hide, and my favorites, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Harlan County, U.S.A. and corporate capitalism in its, I guess, earlier late stages, and Escape from New York, Death Wish, and what's wrong with the 1970s city. (Oh, and Dragonslayer and Manhunter, which introduced us to Hannibal Lecter [plus, I need to go back and watch that to see Brian Cox (!) in the role], as takes on authority and narrative and the nature of expertise. I mean, it made me want to rewatch a movie I probably thought was a kiddie film when it came out, which this makes the case was much more tough-minded than it seemed.) Though there are times where it feels like we're just seeing two separate takes stapled together, at its frequent best the book puts these films in dialogue and contextualizes them in original ways to show us something new about the ways popular artifacts opened up the country's psychic underbelly.
December 20, 2024
An approachable academic-ish dissection of the social, cultural, and political undercurrent that ran through Hollywood in the days between the end of the Vietnam War and the close of Reagan's second term.
It's a fun, though decidedly mixed bag, collection of essays, each of which pairs two seemingly unrelated films and draws out a common theme the authors find suggested by the zeitgeist that produced the works.
A great example of this is the chapter on Ridley Scott's Alien and William Friedkin's Sorcerer. What does the claustrophobic, sci-fi monster movie share in common the bleak, jungle-dwelling actioner? Both feature a set of blue-collar workers whose search for payday finds them sent by a faceless corporation into a world of horror only known to exist by those dangling the paycheck. These are workers who have been led to believe they understood the risks of trading time and energy to a capitalist interest only to discover too late, that they've actually traded their lives for the gain of a system that will pay them no dividends.
If reading that Alien and Sorcerer are linked by their lowkey interrogation of the exploitative and extractive forces that drive Western corporate neoliberalism to literally consume human bodies for profit ... this is your book.
There are 12 essays in total that pair 24 films in other more or less interesting ways.
For a full list of every movie mentioned in the book, see this list: https://boxd.it/vLYua
3.5 rounded up
It's a fun, though decidedly mixed bag, collection of essays, each of which pairs two seemingly unrelated films and draws out a common theme the authors find suggested by the zeitgeist that produced the works.
A great example of this is the chapter on Ridley Scott's Alien and William Friedkin's Sorcerer. What does the claustrophobic, sci-fi monster movie share in common the bleak, jungle-dwelling actioner? Both feature a set of blue-collar workers whose search for payday finds them sent by a faceless corporation into a world of horror only known to exist by those dangling the paycheck. These are workers who have been led to believe they understood the risks of trading time and energy to a capitalist interest only to discover too late, that they've actually traded their lives for the gain of a system that will pay them no dividends.
If reading that Alien and Sorcerer are linked by their lowkey interrogation of the exploitative and extractive forces that drive Western corporate neoliberalism to literally consume human bodies for profit ... this is your book.
There are 12 essays in total that pair 24 films in other more or less interesting ways.
For a full list of every movie mentioned in the book, see this list: https://boxd.it/vLYua
3.5 rounded up
Read
March 27, 2024a breezy read, maybe a bit too breezy? stylistically each essay interpolates two films, specific scenes and plot points, to render between them comparisons and evocations about ... the eras they were made in i guess? i do think the connection to historical moment was a bit brief, or left as a tonal-derivation for the reader. i am wondering if it's just an audience thing; i think the essays in this book assume a very firm grasp on the 60s-80s culture, politics, and counterculture already, with this book filling in the blank of specifically how genre/pulp film reflects it. so it sorta just points to things like watergate, jfk's assassination, the vietnam war, the mason murders, etc. but doesn't actually explicate them and their impact on culture and society.
that being said, if i squint i can almost glean something, i think? something about the optimism of the 60s paired with anti-rationalism and hippie-ism, the disillusionment with revolution in the 70s, the disillusionment with prosperity, the anxiety about the death of paternalism w divorces and also daddy nixon betraying us and daddy jfk getting murdered, and i guess generally vietnam gave us mad anxiety about the US being the good guys?
it was still a fun and almost like, emotionally enjoyable book? but i like movie plot summaries. i'd recommend it on that alone, it's just vibes.
that being said, if i squint i can almost glean something, i think? something about the optimism of the 60s paired with anti-rationalism and hippie-ism, the disillusionment with revolution in the 70s, the disillusionment with prosperity, the anxiety about the death of paternalism w divorces and also daddy nixon betraying us and daddy jfk getting murdered, and i guess generally vietnam gave us mad anxiety about the US being the good guys?
it was still a fun and almost like, emotionally enjoyable book? but i like movie plot summaries. i'd recommend it on that alone, it's just vibes.
June 10, 2023
The substance of the content contained within We Are the Mutants frequently ranges from good to great. Satisfying and thought-provoking regardless of one’s level of film literacy, even if the truncated conclusion fails to cohere a wider point to these various essays. When all of these writers are on, they produce some strong critical analysis which provides fresh perspectives on this thoroughly-mined period of film history. But a few bum essays and a general undisciplined delivery of the book overall hold it back from being a must-own.
Full Review: https://setthetape.com/2022/11/22/we-...
Full Review: https://setthetape.com/2022/11/22/we-...
March 9, 2025
This book charts the transformation of Hollywood from the impact of the countercultural movements in late 1960s until the complete triumph of Reagan's neoconservative counter-revolution in the late 1980s through a series of chapters that each use two (often unlikely) movie pairs to analyze the shifting tides of cultural politics. It takes a lot of political and historical context for granted, focusing instead on detailed readings of the films (most exciting when seen as being in dialogue with each other), but even if its end result is a bit thin in terms of history and politics, the discussion of these well-chosen movies is often astonishing and never less than fully engaging.
September 7, 2023
This was a quick and breezy read, running through a history of Hollywood in the '70s and '80s via essays that linked two, often seemingly disparate, films together. It did expose me to some new flicks I want to catch, but I felt a little letdown. It probably wasn't great to read this in the shadows of Biskind's far superior book about New Hollywood.
December 26, 2022
An essay collection on Cold War American films and their relationship to the overall production of the American psyche. Each essay is engaging, but I will say that they often lack a certain bite or punch that I would expect from a project like this.
January 8, 2023
Brilliant read.
January 14, 2023
piacevolissimo. con tanti spunti interessanti e con fiferimenti a film assolutamente da vedere
July 19, 2023
3.5 / 5 stars
March 31, 2024
Silent Running/Phase IV essay rips, Manhunter essay feels like such a misread that it gets knocked down a star.
September 24, 2024
A neat book of fascinating essays, with the chapter on Seconds and Watermelon being a real highlight
October 24, 2024
I’m all in support of the political standpoint but some of the essays were a chore to read
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews