A History of Horror: Cards From a Haunted Tarot Deck
The first great American horror story of the new century was, as many noted at the time, a scene from a horror film, but not of a horror film: two planes flying into two buildings, collapsing into smoke and ash. And, to bring the horror from widescreen to individual, that terrible, impossible photograph by Richard Drew of the man caught in midair, falling from a tower’s height, which was printed in many newspapers the following day then “rarely printed again, becoming paradoxically both iconic and impermissible.” That sense—of horror and fear everywhere, and the necessity and impossibility of expressing it, of getting one’s arms around it—would come to characterize the age that followed. Rather than having come to an end, history had returned, with a bloody vengeance: and sometimes it seems that all that has followed in the two-plus decades since—war, pandemic, political upheaval and polarization at levels unseen for generations—has led, at times, to a feeling of too much history, of times that are too eventful to place into the calming, cathartic stream of clear narrative.
While history always feels far more settled from a distance, it’s certainly the case we don’t yet have the benefit of hindsight to tell the story of current American fear as clearly as that of previous eras. What’s more, in this fear-saturated century, not only has the appetite for thinking through those fears fictionally risen substantially—the market share of horror movies in wide release more than doubled between 1995 and 2005, and between 2005 and 2015, twenty-five new horror series premiered on television—the number of possible means of recording, reflecting, and refracting these horrors has exploded exponentially, alongside the channels for disseminating them. While in previous chapters of our story we could focus largely on the written word and the movie and television screen, the sheer number of new institutions and technologies—streaming, mobile, gaming, social media—each with their own firehose of contributions to our narrative, tend to beggar the imagination, inundate the reader and viewer, and provide the historian with nightmares of their own.
And so our story, which has been something of a river, branches out: into different trends, narratives, that try to capture something about American fear now, where it has recently been, and where it might be heading. But every one of them, varied as they are, draw powerfully from our portrait of where the country has been: could one expect any less, from a story full of ghosts?
America has always been a country obsessed with murder, the more grotesque and lurid the better: from the Levi Weeks case to the Benders to H. H. Holmes to Ed Gein to Jeffrey Dahmer, and a thousand fictional counterparts. But the twenty-first century has taken it to a new extreme. “Oh, wonderful, very moody,” says an officer, coming in to see one of the bodies in Se7en, and that late nineties classic helped to usher in murder as mood, as vibe, as part of the DNA of the new century’s cultural landscape.
That landscape had been shaped by books and movies featuring Hannibal Lecter and his ilk; but its tectonic plates shifted, and settled, on the broadcast networks, particularly CBS, which dined out on murder several times a week. The incredibly popular CSI franchise required a murder to get each episode going, and, given their ongoing success, required writers to come up with, and expose viewers to, the violent ending of life in literally thousands of different ways. And the drama required, for variety’s sake, increasingly baroque and even Rube Goldberg–esque iterations and imaginations of death. Although the majority of the killers, unlike Lecter and Dahmer, weren’t of a serial nature, the resulting proliferation of one-off murderers made for even worse implications, hearkening back to the noir period in convincing us that America is a place of impossible and constant threat and fear of violence. Fictitious programs like Criminal Minds and reality crime shows like America’s Most Wanted all did their best to convince Americans that strangers lay in constant wait to abduct our children or do us harm. In fact, statistics suggest that it is much more likely that such violence will be done not by the cosmic force of an indifferent madman, but by a gun kept at home or an abuser already in our lives.
But that sense of randomness resonated. In 2007, Michael Haneke remade his own German-language film Funny Games for an American audience in an American setting; in both versions, an idyllic family is tortured and killed by two young men. The following year, The Strangers tread the same territory, continuing to spread the fear of the sadistic, pathological violation of the sanctity of the home we saw in Death Wish a generation earlier. But while Death Wish offered the (questionable) solace of a cause—urban decay—and a solution—vigilantism—there was far less on offer here. The duo in Funny Games seemingly commit their crimes, as the title implies, just for the giggles; when the imprisoned pair in The Strangers ask their captors why they targeted them, the answer, famously, is: “Because you were home.”
That sense of indifference, of an almost abstract sort, was tied to the aesthetic of two horror movie franchises of the last two decades, each dedicated, in very different ways, to the art and craft of murder: it is their raison d’être. The first, the Final Destination series, whose initial installment appeared in 2000, was dedicated to the concept that the arc of the universe bent toward death: the protagonists, so the story went, had survived when they shouldn’t have, and so the universe was going to set things right, in frequently as technically convoluted and thus visually stimulating a manner as possible—especially as the series continued. “In death, there are no accidents, no coincidences, no mishaps, and no escapes. . . . we’re all just a mouse that a cat has by the tail,” one character says in the original installment. In the process of ensuring the victims met their predestined faith, everything, from street signs to shower cords, became marshalled into the service of horror, and did so in a way that—with its moral and theological questions abstracted away—at its best left audiences shaking their heads in admiration for the filmmakers’ ingenuity in the roller-coaster-ride construction of the kills.
Compare this to the second great twenty-first-century movie franchise dedicated to horrific murder: the Saw franchise, which seems small-scale by comparison. (It had a budget about a twentieth of Final Destination, and yet the two grossed about the same.) Saw, which premiered in 2004, featured a taunting psychopath, a set of individual victims in extremis, and sadistic puzzles and punishments treated as games. Like in Final Destination, there is some gesturing at motives for choosing the victims, but this is much less important than the actual pain, torture, and murder. This approach, in Saw and other similar films, is sometimes referred to as “torture porn”; but for all of Saw’s blunt violence and industrial-ruin setting, it insists, rightfully, on its sophistication as a work of fiction, its format featuring nonlinear storytelling and a twist ending that tips its hat to works like Pulp Fiction and The Usual Suspects.
That sensibility, the idea of dressing up murder, of complicating it, fictionally, and infusing it into the stories we tell about our lives—there is a psychological backstory in Saw, one that reflects the killer’s own traumas and, as the series goes on, those he visits on surviving victims—also applied to the rise of other kinds of work that featured curlicues upon curlicues, that included hefty doses of the camp, the kitsch, and the neo-Gothic. A chief influence here, in the last decade, has been the work of Ryan Murphy, one of the current generation’s major auteurs of the small screen. Murphy’s products have been vast and variegated, and not all narrowly fear-based—unless you count the “Rocky Horror” episode of Glee—but many of them have been. One of Murphy’s first TV series, 2003’s Nip/Tuck, about a pair of Miami plastic surgeons, often descended into outright body horror, rarely if ever shying away from the violent damage—of the physical, but also the psychological sort—inflicted on patients, often for the wrong reasons. The show’s most famous line, a plastic surgeon’s come-on—“Tell me what you don’t like about yourself”—is, itself, an opening to express fear, alongside an insidious invitation to internalize cultural prejudices about the body.
But in 2011 Murphy would turn, more directly, to horror and murder with his anthology series American Horror Story. Each of the seasons (twelve as of this writing) has varied in locale and setting among the classic venues for horror, from a murder house to the sideshow to the Southern Gothic to the insane asylum, and Murphy’s dedication to the field allowed for the bodies that hit the floor to do so in a staggeringly varied set of ways. In almost every case, the series’ commitment to casting, and to camp, has made it a worthy heir to the psycho-biddy tradition of those sixties films, using actresses like Jessica Lange, Frances Conroy, Angela Bassett, and Kathy Bates, who find new career moments in performances dedicated to the monstrous.
Perhaps the greatest body count in recent American history comes in the pages of a comic book. Garth Ennis and Jacen Burrows’s 2008 comic book series Crossed describes a world in which a viral, extremely transmissible plague turns its victims into homicidal psychopaths whose sole purpose is to kill, maim, rape, cannibalize. At its worst, the series is a catalog of the violent acts that people can perpetrate on bodies, played out both in visually stunning and viscerally repulsive tableaux; and since, unlike most zombies, these creatures still have human intelligence at their disposal, comics’ sequential nature allows those scenes to be transformed into the most intimate and psychologically grueling sequences. At its best, though, this work of “extreme horror” rises to offer both a critique of and a philosophy of human violence, as nothing that they do to their victims, horrific as it is, are things that humans have not done to each other in our history, a point Ennis has often made.
Certainly baroque wasn’t the only way to go, though. Glen Hirshberg, in his 2002 novel The Snowman’s Children,drew on childhood fears of a killer who stalked his own Michigan county in the seventies—a real-life murderer of at least four children who was never directly identified. In Hirshberg’s case, the events lead, rather than to the melodrama of cat and mouse, instead to the effects that the landscape of fear has on the world around it, particularly the young and impressionable. “One of us, I remember thinking, is a ghost,” says one character in recounting his encounter with a possibly spectral presence, and the line lands because, in a novel set between past and present, it’s not clear if the survivors actually survived. Bill Paxton, who’d played a vampire so memorably in Kathryn Bigelow’s 1987 horror western Near Dark,went behind the camera to direct and star in 2002’s Frailty, which returned to one of the oldest multiple murder stories of all, the same one in Brockden Brown’s Wieland: one where God tells a man to murder others because the evil has gotten into them; and, in the process, that man inflicts unimaginable damage, psychic and otherwise, on his family. The movie, however, ends up being more definitive about the victims’ evil identities, and the existence of something supernatural, than in Brown’s novel. “Demons are taking over the world. They’re everywhere,” goes a line in the film, and in 2002, this seemed a snapshot of current events, as well as a theological or metaphysical opinion.
But all this, one might also suggest, is cathartic, as it helps to distract from the ongoing drumbeat of industrial-grade mass murder that seems a regular part of the American fearscape. Whitman, that late-sixties Texas Tower sniper, was an individual shooter with a long rifle, and his example resonated for years: in recent years, mass shootings have occurred on a weekly basis, horrors that would have been, in some sense, beyond the imagination of that previous generation. And we know that, in some sense, because, in our history of the transformations of historical figures like Whitman into movies like Bogdanovich’s Targets, they didn’t imagine them.
The twenty-first century is the century of the Twin Towers, but it is also the generation of Sandy Hook, and Uvalde, and these are only two of the many assaults that took place in schools; to say nothing of the ones in houses of worship, in Charleston, and Squirrel Hill; or in nightclubs, like the Pulse; or in movie theaters; or grocery stores: the list goes on. One of the great novels of the new century on the theme, Lionel Shriver’s 2003 We Need To Talk About Kevin, is an attempt to bind the horror, to render the aftermath of a school mass murder visible through the lens of those who are related to, and affected by, the individual events. The novel, and its later movie adaptation, are consciously—and wrenchingly—narrow in scope, focusing on the questions of nature versus, particularly, maternal nurture—the same questions The Bad Seed asked a half-century before. But the grinding, ready horror that accompanies the novel is the acknowledgment that this Kevin is not, so to speak, the only Kevin—there seem to be more of them, imitators, even worshipers, in recent years. This is not just a story of individual aberration, like Richard Speck or Jeffrey Dahmer, but of aberration in conjunction with social and institutional factors—the ready access to guns capable of mass slaughter, the lack of political will to do very much about it. Saw offers the possibility of outwitting and escape; CSI the comforting assurance that justice will be done; and none of those can hold a candle to Sandy Hook. When the New York Times Magazine ran a story last year on the investigators whose job it was to document the slaughter, they deemed every single image from the investigation too grisly to show, and rightly so. We prefer, as the examples above and so many others show, to consume our gore unrealistically.
Back at the tail end of the last millennium, we saw how massively successful The Blair Witch Project was at its twin goals of scaring the bejesus out of everyone who saw it and at raking in money. And, accordingly, it started a double revolution.
The “found footage” movie subgenre would blossom, aided—tragically and inestimably—by the way its ostensibly lo-fi camerawork, its weaving together of individual testaments and multiple angles, echoed the images arriving on television, and, increasingly, computer screens in the wake of 9/11. This didn’t necessarily mean low-budget filmmaking: Matt Reeves’s 2008 movie Cloverfield,in its presentation of a monster’s trail of destruction of New York City via multiple cameras recovered after the event, was a case in point, echoing that real-life disaster in an attempt at fictional catharsis. Producer J. J. Abrams, well aware of what his movie was doing, said: “We live in a time of great fear. . . . [watching] something as outlandish as a massive creature attacking your city allows people to process and experience that fear in a way that is incredibly entertaining and incredibly safe.”
But found-footage movies were clearly eminently capable of reminding viewers that big budgets weren’t necessary, and were sometimes inimical, to the generation of fear. Blair Witch terrified far more by what you didn’t see than what you did: “What the fuck is that? What the fuck is that?” shouts Heather, as she runs into the woods, the camera trailing behind her; and we strain to see, and we don’t see a thing, just darkness, and it’s far more primitively, primally, scary for all that. But, for all its lo-fi genius, in 1999 Blair Witch still relied on the narrative premise that its protagonists be filmmakers: who else, after all, had the cameras to produce the footage, and the visual sensibility to wield them well enough to produce something watchable? But soon enough, others who wanted to develop the formula realized that its sensibility could be harnessed to the fact that similar technology was all around each of us, and getting more prevalent, all the time.
Not that this sense had to be linked to technology: the idea of “found material” as the basis for horror goes all the way back to the beginning of the novel. A bestselling novel that opened the century, Mark Danielewski’s 2000 House of Leaves, harnessed the same sensibility, attaching it to a kind of postmodern gesture, in its ostensible claim to be a manuscript about a haunted house encounter that was ostensibly documented by a family who put cameras all around to see what was going on. But that aspect—in which the novel describes the footage—was soon accentuated by movies that captured the footage itself, like Paranormal Activity, shot, ostensibly, by a day trader with a home video camera.
“You’re supposed to be in love with me, not the machine,” says the trader’s girlfriend, the young woman who’s the focus of the paranormal activity; and the movie—which purports to be a compilation of footage found alongside the trader’s corpse—is about the seductiveness of seeing, of surveilling, and of its dangers. Paranormal Activity is most successful when its home cameras record things that happen when the couple is asleep, helpless—just like we are, watching. If we feel a little creepy, as well as creeped out, watching them sleep, well, that’s the point: “Once we get it on camera, we can figure out what’s going on,” the trader says, and his increasingly bad decisions conflate the violation of his girlfriend’s privacy by both stirring up the demon that accompanies her and refusing to stop filming. “That kind of stuff didn’t happen to me before the camera,” she says, at one point, and she’s right: the camera has brought a new kind of horror home. To everyone.
Like Paranormal Activity, 2012’s Sinister would tie this found footage to the haunted-house genre, but, even more, to the nature of film itself. Ethan Hawke’s true-crime writer, having moved his family into the very house in which a multiple murder has occurred, is provided a breakthrough when he discovers—or is gifted—a series of home movies of mysterious provenance that turn from nostalgic to nightmarish. (Suffice it to say that “Extended Cut Endings,” written on one canister, has an entirely, well, sinister meaning.) The films, it turns out, follow Ethan Hawke’s character around like a bad penny, haunting him in the same way conventional ghosts and spirits seemed to do; and it transpires that these images, in fact, are the gateways for a demonic, child-corrupting force to use to make its way into the world. And in the end, after his daughter kills the rest of her family, she is taken by the demon into the film that is playing, to meet all the other murderous children there. The ghosts, that is, were not just recorded by the machine: they have something to do with the very uncanniness, the very nature, of the machines themselves, especially as they became more commonplace, more enmeshed in every aspect of our lives, in a way that would have seemed almost impossible even a generation before.
“What the hell,” Ethan Hawke says, “let’s do this,” as he sets up a home movie theater to play the films he’s found; and, with his notepad in hand, he looks like nothing so much as a studio executive watching rushes. Producers were, in fact, taking note. Paranormal made back hundreds of times its budget, and its production company, the extraordinarily successful Blumhouse, understood—as Roger Corman and Herschell Gordon Lewis and others had before them—the insane profitability of the horror movie, a profitability that didn’t depend on a lot of expensive bells and whistles. This era would herald a wide range of low-budget, high-concept, and high-grossing horror films. Even David Lynch himself had gotten in on the wave, shooting his 2006 movie Inland Empire on a handheld digital video camera. Many of these and other aughts-era horror films, especially those produced by Lionsgate, would find their audience not in the theaters, but at home via a new digital technology: the DVD, whose ability to include extras of all sorts led to not only a wider appeal, but a deeper one, allowing the creators of this new era of horror to market themselves, and be marketed as, kindred spirits (some under the sobriquet the Splat Pack) and even auteurs.
But it wasn’t just the means of production or playback that were utterly transformed by the digital revolution, of course. Blair Witch had benefited extensively from the reach of its website; Paranormal Activity, for its part, was given a wide release in 2009 (it had been made in 2007) after the studio reached one million online requests for it; the movie’s backers used another newly robust innovation—something increasingly called “social media”—to get people to demand the movie play in their town. Sometimes, though, the Internet proved that virtual life and real life didn’t necessarily coincide. One 2006 disaster-type moviehad a fairly conventional Hollywood gestation, at first, with plenty of bottlenecks and creative disagreements—but generated an enthusiastic, viral frenzy thanks to the screenwriter’s blog, which described in no uncertain terms the source of the movie’s appeal:
I ask Agent the name of the project, what it’s about, etc. He says: Snakes on a Plane. Holy shit, I’m thinking. It’s a title. It’s a concept. It’s a poster and a logline and whatever else you need it to be. It’s perfect. Perfect. It’s the Everlasting Gobstopper of movie titles.
It led to wild enthusiasm for what was, in the end, a pretty standard movie, which didn’t live up to the commercial expectations the Internet implied. There were, however, snakes on the plane.
But the Internet, quickly, became more than an advertising service for horror, by using the medium to provide chills organically connected to it. The internet-only version of radio, the podcast, has become a welcoming home for the atmospherics of terror and unease: Welcome to Night Vale, which premiered in 2012, purports to be a set of dispatches from the eponymous town, allowing for stories that present phenomena ranging from a mini-city beneath the town bowling alley, a hypnotic glow cloud that eventually becomes president of the school board, and a Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your Home (she ran for mayor, but lost). Like with Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds broadcast almost a century before, the podcast medium excelled at providing horrific “fake news” in an era saturated with it, and with presidential accusations of it. And it wasn’t just podcasts: round the time Night Vale was hitting its stride, ARGs, or “alternate reality games,” were developing online. ARGs put together lo-fi video, snippets of old movies, hard-to-make-out graphics, and flotsam and jetsam from obscure cable channels, to create a window on a mysterious and uncanny world. The classic example, Local 58, which debuted on YouTube in 2015, purported to come from the feed of a local public-access station. But its weather alerts and city council meetings are interrupted by “pseudo-‘official’-looking messages advocating things like moon-worship and mass suicide.” What was the backstory? This was for online communities on sites like Reddit to come together and eagerly discuss. The mystery, in many ways, was the point, the thing itself.
And even better known than the ARGs is the internet-native phenomenon called creepypasta. The word’s etymology comes from “copypasta”—copied and pasted material on the internet, basically—which was then modified, estranged, defamiliarized, for the express purpose of giving the viewer the creeps. It really took off on the anonymous imageboard website 4chan in the mid-aughts; and one excellent example—or, better put, category—of material, the Backrooms, is in essence and heart lo-fi: incredibly prosaic settings (an office space, for example), emptied of everything and going on for what seems like forever. One evangelist for the Internet, cartoonist Scott McCloud, once called it the “infinite canvas”; but horror fans know that infinitude, understood correctly, can be deeply hellish; and the Backrooms show that in all their lack of glory.
The Internet, it should be said, not only broadened as it grew, but deepened: the possibility of trans-regional communities dedicated to the most esoteric aspects of fear—whether it be true-crime; the work of largely forgotten horror directors, writers, or artists; or particular moments in the history of fear—have obviously exploded. One can find Facebook groups dedicated to the subjects, reddit threads, YouTube channels. And the fact that the number of views of these materials—even if they are outside more traditional channels of review and critique—are all often tallied provides an interesting challenge: is it really a niche endeavor, compared to, say, a moderately successful horror movie, if the number of views it receives, translated into movie tickets, would render it a blockbuster?
Perhaps ironically, one of the best treatments of how all these digital trends—the lo-fi, the found footage, the internet communities of shared interest in the highways and byways of horror—all came together is found in a novel. Paul Tremblay’s 2015 A Head Full of Ghosts revolves around a series of events that have been recorded on a reality-horror television show called The Possession, and one character, contemplating the show’s primary subject, comments: “If she was possessed by anything other than faulty brain chemistry and/or DNA, I like to imagine her as being possessed by the vast, awesome and awful monster that is popular culture. Possessed by the collective of ideas!”
The character writes this on her blog, and both her blog and the novel are dedicated to the proposition that these are the ghosts in everyone’s head: constantly jostling, crowding, screaming for control, supercharged and metastasized by the Internet. The blogger, and thus Tremblay, are postmodern commentators not just on the story within the story, but on the novel, and our own reading of it. She presents and articulates all the subtexts, with references to classic horror movies, short stories, and novels ranging from The Exorcist to “The Yellow Wallpaper” and beyond, with a big debt to Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle. It’s a masterful take on the way we read—and watch, and live—now.
Because, after all, the worst lo-fi horror, the ghosts in all our heads, streamed in via our smartphones and media feeds, are the records of dash cameras and body cams, of the stitched-together footage from the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and the 2020 murder of George Floyd. This constant mosaic of video horror, popping up without warning and always only a click away, portends to provide the prospect of total accountability. The idea that sin shall be found out has been the essence of a great deal of horror since Salem, after all. But it was never so easy, and—when justice is done—never so satisfying, even at the cost of the horror of viewing such terrible truths that might, before, have stayed out of sight.
But the same technology, and its dissemination, also reinforces the unsettling fact that we live in a panopticon, providing a creeping paranoia that even the most imaginative narratives of the seventies could hardly have portrayed. They are all around us. And they have phones, and can record all our secrets, and upload them to the cloud. And Salem’s lesson, that what looks like accountability can sometimes lead to hysteria, seems never so meaningful in an age that also features Internet dogpiling and manufactured viral outrage alongside genuine examples.
And, perhaps even more unsettling, it’s becoming harder and harder to tell if it’s humans responsible for any of it, or simply ghosts in the machine.
Back in the mid-sixties, Harlan Ellison wrote one of the first great AI stories. In “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream,” he describes the revenge of a sentient AI called AM:
At first it meant Allied Mastercomputer, and then it meant Adaptive Manipulator, and later on it developed sentience and linked itself up and they called it an Aggressive Menace, but by then it was too late, and finally it called itself AM, emerging intelligence, and what it meant was I am . . . We had given AM sentience. . . . We had created him to think, but there was nothing it could do with that creativity. In rage, in frenzy, the machine had killed the human race, almost all of us, and still it was trapped.
The rest of the story is dedicated, in Ellison’s often fervid sixties style, to the working out of that revenge. There were other such works, of course, including several movies: the seventies Colossus, the Forbin Project; The Terminator,of course; and more recent science fiction entries, some based on classic science fiction—I, Robot, taken from the classic Asimov short-story collection but given a mecha-dystopic twist—and some based on older horror tropes. (The 2022 movie M3GAN, for example, feels a lot like the Chucky movies of the eighties, only with an AI gloss to it.) But as much fun as “if this goes on” future-set science fiction is—like the horror stories of Netflix’s Black Mirror, named, appropriately, after the off-screen look of the phones we spend so much of our time staring into—the series’ title makes clear that the dystopia it sketches is actually very much an echo of the now.
And it’s less apocalyptic than algorithmic. Possibly the most interesting thing about the fears that AI is now developing is how utterly un-uncanny they will be: the glutinous drip of AI-generated disinfo, the enshittified crap that now passes for search results and customer recommendations, the Russian troll farms pumping out bots and responses that may shift the course of American elections. Lo-fi, in other words: the ghosts that we fear the most are the ones in the machines, the ones that are curdling our preferences without our knowing it, not the ones who clank about hunting Sarah Connor.
And, most important, is what those algorithms are doing to the insides of our heads. In certain ways a response to Videodrome, 2021’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair isn’t just about the menace of video. The movie is set against an increasingly important venue for horror: the game. Survival horror games, and, now, immersive horror games, have flourished over the last quarter-century, ranging from the late-nineties Resident Evil (which would spark its own film franchise adaptation) and Silent Hill to Alien: Isolation and Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice. More than thirty virtual-reality products based on horror franchises were made between 2014 and 2020, creating an “overwhelming almost ‘hellish’ experience, even for the seasoned horror fan.” The movie’s spinoff, World’s Fair, is an online game, a next-level Ring that you agree to play instead of watch; and when you say the initiatory incantation three times and cut your finger, you enter its world. But although the movie is quite canny about whether the game has any supernatural effect (it frequently name-checks Paranormal Activity), that’s certainly not its point. The teenage protagonist of the movie continues to talk, as she makes more and more in-game videos, about leaving her body, disappearing, losing control; and, as all of us have seen in the last decade, you don’t need demonic forces for any of that to happen online. Real life—or, at least, the version of it that plays out on our computers and cameras—is more than powerful enough.
This has been excerpted from American Scary: A History of Horror, from Salem to Stephen King and Beyond by Jeremy Dauber (Algonquin Books)
Discover the Book
America is held captive by horror stories. They flicker on the screen of a darkened movie theater and are shared around the campfire. They blare out in tabloid true-crime headlines, and in the worried voices of local news anchors. They are consumed, virally, on the phones in our pockets. Like the victims in any slasher movie worth its salt, we can’t escape the thrall of scary stories.
In American Scary, noted cultural historian and Columbia professor Jeremy Dauber takes the reader to the startling origins of horror in the United States. Dauber draws a captivating through line that ties historical influences ranging from the Salem witch trials and enslaved-person narratives directly to the body of work we more closely associate with horror today: the weird tales of H. P. Lovecraft, the lingering fiction of Shirley Jackson, the disquieting films of Alfred Hitchcock, the up-all-night stories of Stephen King, and the gripping critiques of Jordan Peele.
With the dexterous weave of insight and style that have made him one of America’s leading historians of popular culture, Dauber makes the haunting case that horror reveals the true depths of the American mind.
By clicking 'Sign Up,' I acknowledge that I have read and agree to Hachette Book Group’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Use
