Back in the 1970s, before the advent of consumer video and the Internet, the drive-in was the place to go in my hometown — a sleepy Southern college burg that had only recently christened its first two-screen multiplex. The double features covered every facet of trash cinema: sexploitation, blaxploitation, redneck-sploitation (anything with Burt Reynolds), bad sci-fi, and horror. Raw, shrieking horror.

The radio would crackle with lurid 30-second spots promoting the latest aberration, delivered by an announcer in an oily, Mephistophelean baritone that seeped through the airwaves like sweat. If memory serves, it was the year I started high school when I first heard the promo that would haunt my dreams for years, even as it secretly thrilled me. The commercial, which reveled in the on-screen torments visited upon a pair of teenage girls by a homicidal gang of depraved felons, was less an invitation than a red alert. If the film’s title – “The Last House on the Left” — wasn’t forbidding enough, the tagline was sheer goose bumps: “Keep repeating,” Satan’s apprentice instructed, “it’s only a movie … it’s only a movie.”

The power of Wes Craven’s 1972 shocker, a no-budget remake of Ingmar Bergman’s “Virgin Spring” for the grindhouse set, was such that you didn’t even have to see it to experience it. Just the idea was so threatening, especially to a 14-year-old imagination, that it could suck the air out of your lungs. That was the particular genius of 1970s horror, which will be revisited in a 32-film series opening Saturday at the Museum of the Moving Image.

Taking that now-classic pitch as its title, MMI’s sprawling program aims to contrast the graphic transgressions of Mr. Craven, Tobe Hooper (“The Texas Chainsaw Massacre”), Larry Cohen (“It’s Alive”), David Cronenberg (“Rabid”), John Carpenter (“Halloween”), and George A. Romero (“Martin”), among more obscure selections, with the work of their latter-day counterparts. Dubbed the “Splat Pack,” a new generation of plasma vendors has been making a ruckus with ever-more twisted psychological themes and scenes of explicit violence and torture — made more realistic, oddly enough, with advancements in special effects that minimize the beloved “cheese factor” inherent in those ’70s gorefests.

The question, though, is whether hotshot neo-horror auteurs such as Eli Roth (“Hostel”), Alexandre Aja (“High Tension”), Rob Zombie (“The Devil’s Rejects”), and the makers of the various “Saw” and “Final Destination” sequels are really advancing the creep-out quotient that made the earlier films as emotionally satisfying as they were shocking. Or are they mostly minting a new form of pornography — “gorno,” as Mr. Roth has described it. When directors like Messrs. Romero and Cronenberg began shooting their early films, with cannibalistic, virus-ridden themes about societal meltdown, they were like the reform school orphans of the New Hollywood. They worked outside the system, and were most likely to share Times Square marquees with disreputable adult fare. Grindhouse nirvana, indeed.

Thirty years later, a blistering talent like Mr. Aja can, in the course of one movie, go from inspiration to hackdom. His French-language “High Tension” (2003) is ferociously gut-twisting, a tricky play on slasher flick mechanics that revels in mind games, gender reversals, and geysering arteries. The work’s psychological dimension, as well as the intimate connection to its would-be heroine, serves a brilliant setup. Audiences will debate the payoff, but there’s no doubt the film delivers a breathless rush of adrenaline to go with its subversive plot twists. Likewise, Neil Marshall’s complex 2005 subterranean thriller, “The Descent,” which tracks the deepening peril and madness of a group of eight women who go exploring in the wrong cave, a misadventure underscored by strongly feminine themes of maternal loss and the uterine labyrinth of the underground passages that claim the divers one by one.

Mr. Marshall is working on an apocalyptic drama about a viral contagion that breaks lose in a quarantined London after three decades — hmmm, “28 Days Later,” anyone? We’ll see. But after Hollywood rushed to sign up Mr. Aja to do a remake of Mr. Craven’s 1977 “The Hills Have Eyes,” all the director produced was a more exaggerated kill-fest, augmented by goon-faced villains who spent a few extra hours in makeup. Mr. Craven’s original, in which a suburban family stranded in the New Mexico desert is besieged by a clan of mutants, had a deeper context, as did the films of his peers: The directors all were working in the wake of the Vietnam War, and to varying degrees offering analogies to a nation that had eaten itself alive.

Splat Packers such as Mr. Roth, whose “Hostel 2” arrived last week amid a seasonal flurry of new horror films, argues that there is a context: the queasy experience of living

in a post-9/11 world, and the need to exorcise its very real terrors amid a selective parade of images: the Abu Ghraib torture photos, Al-Jazeera videos of hostage beheadings, the cell phone documentation of Saddam Hussein’s hanging.

“My pop is a psychologist at Harvard and we’ve talked about a great deal of that,” Mr. Roth said. “Vietnam was the last media war. It’s sickening we’ve not been allowed to see images of the bodies coming back. I get letters from American soldiers in Iraq and messages on MySpace saying how much they love ‘Hostel.’ They say when they see these images, that they can finally respond emotionally.” After the stress and genuine horror of war, Mr. Roth said, the casual event of watching a splattery analogy on DVD is cathartic. “They can know they’re not crazy for feeling these things.”

French critics perceived “Hostel” differently. Le Monde commented that it was about American-driven globalism run amok. “Europeans see it in a much more political way,” Mr. Roth said. Such lines of thought can lend legitimacy to what, in a colder eye, looks like new-jack exploitation.

Still, to shock and disturb an audience in 2007 — one that is steadily exposed to carnage through video games and the unfiltered frontiers of the Internet — takes as much ingenuity as slaughterhouse chutzpah. Mr. Roth, who decided to become a filmmaker after seeing “Alien” at the age of 8, knows this — even if, as his critics insist, his defense of the “Hostel” films as social statements is disingenuous. “People don’t want the most violent image,” he said. “They want a great story. It’s the actor, and the character, and how you feel about them.”

As the nausea-inducing finale of “Hostel 2” — which reprises the similar revenge-by-castration closer of “The Last House on the Left” — suggests, there’s one key rule to an effective horror film: You’ve got to grab the audience by the cojones. When that visceral grip is strong enough, it’s impossible to say it’s only a movie.

Through July 22 (35th Avenue at 36th Street, Astoria, Queens, 718-784-0077).