Writer Adam Simon stated he wrote the film for audiences who enjoyed The Blair Witch Project to put independent horror films of the 1960s and 1970s into context.[2] Simon described the film as a "way to sneak a history lesson in to young people who love horror movies. In that sense, I hope it will inspire a younger generation to get busy again, both as filmmakers and as citizens. For me, in some ways, the most distressing part of the movie was being forced to recognize how much more radical the press was, the media was, and film was than it is now. That was kind of depressing."[2] Legal rights problems prevented inclusion of some titles, including those in the “Friday the 13th” series.[1]
"GM" of Time Out described the film as a "thorough, intelligent and stylish study of the superior brand of horror movies that emerged from America in the late '60s and '70s." and that the film was "Good solid stuff, though given some of the academic work done on how the films relate to concepts of family, ritual, sexual politics and so on, you sometimes feel the makers might have probed a little deeper."[4] Brian J. Dillard of AllMovie compared the film to Terror in the Aisles noting that while that film "merely strung together the money shots from a wide variety of horror films" that American Nightmare "takes a specific subset of this enduring genre and convincingly argues a case about its historical context and sociological significance."[5] The review concluded that the documentary "offers an appealing mixture of meticulous research, historical anecdote, and twisted humor."[5]
Eddie Cockrell of Variety found that "Simon infuses pic with the same nervous enthusiasm displayed by the genre’s fans" as well as that "the sheer ambition of docu’s structure is also its downfall. Arbitrary and too-cute title cards (“Home Is Where the Hearts Are,” “Staying Alive”) butt up against inconsistent year markers, with pic losing much of its head after about an hour."[1]
