One of the friends in my critique group brought up the subject of horror booming during times of national concern. Her being a converted Democrat, I assume the “national concern” she’s talking about has to do more with Iraq than 9/11. But we won’t split that hair today. This topic of horror booms and national security concerns things going together is something my agent has mentioned, too, and others. Since we’re worried now, we should expect another horror boom, they say. Frankly, I’m not so sure that’s accurate.
We could trace horror back to the cavemen, I suppose, and discuss the drawings they made on the cave walls and how those reflected his fear of the world outside. A more likely starting place would be the penny dreadfuls of the Victorian Era, where Mary Shelly very likley was expressing a fear of the move from religion to science in her novel Frankenstein. But I think we’re best suited looking at the 20th century since that’s really when America came of age, and the topic here is national concern and horror.
The first thing I pointed out when my friend mentioned the recent and upcoming movies and TV shows with horror themes is that most of them will be crap. You’ve almost got to get outside the mainstream to find anyone doing anything decent these days. Look at how many of the recent and upcoming films are inferior remakes of stories that did well when they were first introduced. Hollywood wants money, not groundbreaking art. Social message? Only if you can convey it with quick edits and big explosions. Okay, but enough of that. Let’s look at American horror of the 20th century.
It really pretty much began in the 1930s with Universal Studios classic monster films and pulp magazines like Weird Tales. Yes, America (like the rest of the world) was gripped by the Great Depression, but we didn’t really feel any threat to our national security. World War I — The Great War, the War to End All Wars — was over and we’d won. We were wearing blinders as far as what was happening in Europe during the 1930s, so it’s hard to say Dracula or Frankenstein’s monster were reflections of the rising Nazi party. Once we did enter WWII, the horror boom had pretty much run its course and degenerated into Abbott and Costello comedy.
Horror was reborn in the 1950s. This time there’s a better chance there was some national security issues involved. We’d been shoved into the atomic age and the Cold War with the USSR was a concern. As a result, we had great movies like Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Thing, which showed our worry over Communism, and Them! and the other “big bug” movies that was a reflection of our concern over the effects of radiation. But, the economy was booming and we were still pretty happy with the job we’d done in Europe and the Pacific in WWII. Mostly, I think, Americans were pretty content in the 1950s and horror boomed in the theaters (especially the drive-ins), in fiction and in comic books.
Until Congress got involved. The Comics Code Authority was born in 1954 and marked the beginning of the end of that decade’s horror boom. Bye-bye EC Comics. By 1960 horror was back in the closet and stayed there until Rosemary gave birth to Satan’s son in the film version of Rosemary’s Baby in the late ’60s. The big boom most of us remember built slowly from there and really can be tracked by following Stephen King’s rising popularity, peaking in the late 1980s.
What were we concerned about in the Me Decade? The hostages were freed in Iran. We whipped Grenada in about a week. The USSR was beginning to fall apart. America seemed to be invincible and, arguably, mostly united behind a president who won two landslide elections. Of all the 20th century horror booms, I think the one of the 1980s — the biggest one — shows that horror and national security fears do not necessarily go hand-in-hand. If there was any theme to that decade’s horror it was that pre-marital sex would get you hacked to pieces by some dude in a mask.
So, why is horror apparently heating up again? Probably for the same reason girls are wearing bell bottoms and platform shoes again. Things run in cycles. We’re suckers for nostalgia, and that’s another reason Hollywood is giving us remakes, I believe. Are we worried about Iraq and what Bush is doing there? Sure. But I don’t think most Americans specifically tie national security fears to Iraq (isn’t that what the Left has been saying all along?). The quality horror that may come from the current national security concerns will be more generalized, more subtle … like Invasion of the Body Snatchers. We’re not afraid of Iraq. I don’t think we’re really afraid of Iran. We are afraid of bin Laden, of people on the extreme edges of society. People who, like the Communists of the ’50s, may turn out to be our neighbors building nuclear weapons in their basements.
Nuclear weapons make big explosions. That may be the only thing that will attract Hollywood to “national security” horror stories that actually have the power to scare us.
What do you think?
Steven E. Wedel 
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