Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

Beginning during this same era and peaking in the mid-to-late 1970s (as well as extending into the 1980s), Marvel and DC published lighter horror titles, including House of Secrets (DC), House of Mystery (DC), Werewolf by Night (Marvel), and Tomb of Dracula (Marvel). Some of these even boasted a “horror host” in the vein of the Crypt-Keeper, Vault-Keeper, and Old Witch characters that had provided introductions and closing commentary for EC’s classic horror titles. Other independent houses such as Charlton and Gold Key continued offering dark or sci-fi fare (The Twilight Zone, Ghost Manor, Star Trek, The Many Ghosts of Doctor Graves, and more). Some of the proper superhero titles even got into the supernatural on occasion as the market and taste for “real” horror returned. Interestingly, comic book treatments (as opposed to magazines) burgeoned for the first time in years, causing their new creators to chafe at the restrictive CCA. The Code continued to exert a stranglehold on the mainstream comics industry, even as a few iconoclasts tried to push the envelope, most notably the Code-less “Underground Comix” in the late 1960s and 1970s, which, in keeping with the era’s counterculture vibe, tried to stun the establishment awake by dealing overtly with themes, characters, situations, and images of sex, drug use, and violence, as opposed to using mere sociopolitical implication. Most of these eventually folded or morphed into something more “respectable,” though a number of fine writers and artists—Greg Irons, William Stout, Robert Williams, Dan O’Bannon, Moebius, and others—were involved throughout this period of civil and artistic upheaval, arriving on the far side to enjoy larger rewards as their prescient outsider viewpoints were finally ingested and assimilated by society as a whole, and by popular culture specifically.

  By the dawn of the 1980s, several new independent companies had sprung up, pushing the boundaries of eroticism/sexuality, violence, and conceptualism to fill the horror/sci-fi/mature comics void, among them Vortex (Black Kiss), First (American Flagg!), Eclipse (The Rocketeer), and Pacific (Twisted Tales, Alien Worlds). Eschewing the CCA, they would use artists and writers from EC and Warren on occasion, but would also highlight individuals greatly influenced by EC’s long shadow, as well as the Underground Comix movement, including Dave Stevens, Bruce Jones, Richard Corben, Bernie Wrightson, Howard Chaykin, and Jeff Jones.

  Ironically, the final blow for the end of self-censorship and the resurgence of horror comics into the world of “acceptable” fodder for mass entertainment would not come from indie publishers, most of whom would collapse under their own ambitions, though Dark Horse, Fantagraphics, and DC’s more mature-oriented Vertigo still exist and are still publishing at the time of this writing. The real progress was foreshadowed by one venerable DC title that had originally been created by Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson in the early 1970s: Swamp Thing. In 1982 this was revamped and relaunched under the title The Saga of the Swamp Thing. In the hands of the writer Alan Moore (who would go on to work further revolutionary changes on the comic book form with the likes of From Hell and Watchmen), Saga lived up to its full potential, though Moore, a Brit, found it difficult to work under the strictures imposed by the CCA. Saga soon stopped carrying the seal, becoming the first comic to do so since the industry’s adoption of the code in 1954. DC followed suit four years later with Frank Miller’s groundbreaking Batman limited-series The Dark Knight Returns (1986). The CCA self-regulating code and seal have since been abandoned entirely.

  The impact of horror comics on extraliterary forms of horror entertainment has been significant. In the 1970s the British film company Amicus released two anthology films (part of a wider series of horror-themed anthology films) based on EC comics, Tales from the Crypt (1972) and Vault of Horror (1973), starring major name actors such as Joan Collins, Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, and Ralph Richardson. Tales from the Crypt was also adapted as a popular HBO television series (1989–1996) and two accompanying feature films, Demon Knight (1995) and Bordello of Blood (1996). EC comics have also been adapted for radio and children’s television cartoons. Novelist Stephen King and film director George Romero collaborated on a well-received anthology movie consisting of EC-style stories, 1982’s Creepshow, which was followed five years later by a (distinctly lesser) sequel. The production company behind Creepshow, Laurel Entertainment, went on to produce two popular American horror television series in the same vein, Tales from the Darkside (1983–1988) and Monsters (1988–1991). Swamp Thing has been the subject of two feature films (1982 and 1989) and a cable television series on USA Network (1990–1993). Alan Moore’s graphic novel about Jack the Ripper, From Hell, was adapted as a major Hollywood movie starring Johnny Depp in 2001. Both artistically and socially, horror comics have a long, large, and important legacy.

  Jason V Brock

  See also: Horror Literature as Social Criticism and Commentary; Small Press, Specialty, and Online Horror; Part One, Horror through History: Horror from 1900 to 1950; Horror from 1950 to 2000; Part Three, Reference Entries: Bradbury, Ray; Moore, Alan; Pulp Horror.

  Further Reading

  Arndt, Richard J. 2013. Horror Comics in Black and White: A History and Catalog, 1964–2004. Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland.

  Benton, Mike. 1991. Horror Comics: The Illustrated History. Dallas: Taylor.

  Gifford, Denis. 1984. The International Book of Comics. New York: Crescent Books.

  Goulart, Ron. 1986. Great History of Comic Books. Chicago: Contemporary Books.

  Hajdu, David. 2008. The Ten-Cent Plague. New York: Picador.

  Round, Julia. 2014. Gothic in Comics and Graphic Novels. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

  Wright, Bradford W. 2001. Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

  HORROR CRITICISM

  Although horror studies is generally seen as a component of or a tool for evaluating cultural history, its significance alongside other, more “established” disciplines is seen by certain disciplines as somehow outside the study of intellectual ideas and patterns. However, modern developments over the last four decades have featured a broadening of the range—and acceptability—of inclusion in intellectual history, revealing in the process a rich sense of communication between “high” and “low” culture. The study of horror both in literature and in film was, in many ways, seen as outside the study of intellectual ideas and patterns perhaps because scholars failed to see the ways in which more established disciplines and horror criticism have mutually appropriated ideas and subject areas from one another. However, history has shown that horror’s critical relegation would not stay that way for long.

  Horror films are narratively constructed under an elaborate, self-cognizant, yet continuously evolving sociopolitical system of ideas and beliefs, a system that was not, to use the words of Peter E. Gordon, “developed chiefly by intellectuals,” but that was developed collectively through empowered groups and individuals before diffusing into culture (Gordon 2014, 10). It is interesting to note that, in addition to culture, intellectual history, according to Gordon, is also concerned with politics, yet both culture and politics are inextricably tied to horror and vampire films. It may be speculated that, in part, intellectual history discounts horror and vampire studies because their particular objects of intelligent study are first mass culturally circulated and consumed, that is, dirtied or sullied, in “the realm of public discourse” before they are taken up for examination by scholars (Gordon 2014, 10). This may or may not be the case, but what can be said, with relative certainty, is that horror and vampires, when treated by intellectuals, reveal an elaborate design that has existed since their inception.

  Horror studies, to cite the “Editorial” of the inaugural issue of the academic journal Horror Studies, examines “all cultural manifestations of horror, from the more familiar forms it assumes in literature and film, through to such lesser-known modes of expression as fashion, dance, fine art, music and technology” (Horror Studies 2010, 3). In the discipline’s early years, however, it focused almost exclusively on the study of horror cinema
, a subject area that, until the 1970s and 1980s, made only sporadic appearances in film studies journals and other discourses. This changed with the work of film critic Robin Wood, whose influential essay “An Introduction to the American Horror Film” (1979) is commonly credited with jumpstarting the discipline. Until that point, the horror genre itself had been treated like a second-class citizen, despite its apparent success among theater houses. In fact, little has changed today: the horror genre is still deemed “lowbrow,” yet it has not lost its ability to draw in audiences. Wood’s real scholarly achievement, notes contemporary horror studies scholar Adam Lowenstein, was in organizing (with Richard Lippe) “The American Nightmare,” a special retrospective at the Toronto International Film Festival in 1979 that screened films by, and included discussions with, directors such as Wes Craven, Brian De Palma, George A. Romero, Stephanie Rothman, and David Cronenberg. Wood introduced horror cinema to Marxism and psychoanalytic theory (his essay “The American Nightmare: Horror in the ’70’s” [1986] continues this tradition), arguing that the horror genre’s true subject is the recognition of all that is repressed or oppressed by civilization. He located at the center of American culture the contemporary American horror film and its conventions. Lowenstein adds:

  The American Nightmare bravely sought to move beyond the conventional associations attached to the horror genre: heartless exploitation, slipshod filmmaking, gratuitous violence, unrelieved misogyny, and an inherent silliness that precludes any substantial aesthetic or political ambitions. Against all odds, Wood wanted to take the horror film seriously. In fact, he titled his wide-ranging essay that opens the program notes “An Introduction to the American Horror Film,” with its unmistakable connotations of wiping the slate clean, of showing us anew something we thought we understood perfectly well (or never deigned to understand at all). (Lowenstein 2016, 260)

  Australian film studies professor Barbara Creed debuted her influential essay “Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine” in 1986 (expanding it to a book-length project in 1993), and it, like Wood’s work, relied heavily upon psychoanalysis (as well as psychosexualism), locating horror within childhood. By 1987, film studies professor Carol J. Clover published “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film” (expanding it to a book-length project in 1992), which introduced the relatively new discipline of gender studies to the study of horror cinema. Finally, philosophy professor Noël Carroll rounded out what has become the canon of horror criticism with his The Philosophy of Horror: Or, Paradoxes of the Heart (1990), which examined philosophically, as well as cognitively, the aesthetics of horror fictions from film and radio to novels and short stories. In doing this, Carroll began to push the boundaries of horror studies beyond mere film.

  Through the 1990s and mid-2000s, several scholars took up the proverbial torch by following Carroll’s lead and moving beyond film, all the while relying upon the initial, seminal studies. Not least among these scholars are (in no particular order): Tony Williams, Adam Lowenstein, David J. Skal, Cynthia Freeland, Ken Gelder, Harry Benshoff, Richard J. Hand, Gregory A. Waller, Steffen Hantke, Rick Worland, Peter Hutchings, James Kendrick, Isabel C. Pinedo, I. Q. Hunter, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Mark Jancovich, Steven Jay Schneider, Ian Conrich, Kendall R. Phillips, Stephen Prince, Caroline Picart, Linda Badley, Jeffrew Andrew Weinstock, and many others. Yet, curiously, a closer look at the work of many of these same scholars shows a preoccupation with the much older discipline of literary studies and the Gothic. Fundamentally, Gothic studies are horror studies’ older brother, though it is not unusual nowadays to see these two disciplines grouped together in trade publications and anthologies. Gothic studies are primarily concerned with both literature and the Gothic conventions established during the Romantic and Victorian periods. The two primary schools are the English and American Gothic, though in the last ten years these schools subdivided into more specialized units, such as the Southern Gothic, Asian Gothic, Irish Gothic, Australian Gothic, Spanish Gothic, and the more holistic Global Gothic. Yet it is not unusual to see the Gothic conventions and discourses of these schools appropriated by scholarship in horror studies, simply or especially because horror’s cinematic roots are chiefly Gothic until the period of the 1940s. Scholarship on Gothic fiction (“horror” to modern eyes) is almost as old as the genre itself; consider, for example, Ann Radcliffe’s 1826 essay “On the Supernatural in Poetry” in The New Monthly Magazine. However, the first modern studies of the Gothic, both critical and laudatory alike, appear in the 1920s in such distinguished literary journals as the PMLA (Publications of the Modern Language Association), and again in the 1930s at the hands of André Breton and Montague Summers. Today, Gothic studies boasts of a critical and scholarly empire grander even than horror studies, with works from such scholars as Fred Botting, David Punter, Benjamin F. Fisher, Charles Crow, S. T. Joshi, Glennis Byron, Jerrold E. Hogle, William Hughes, Andrew Smith, Glennis Byron, Dale Townsend, Angela Wright, and Carol Margaret Davison, as well as several newer, equally accomplished scholars, not least among them Johan Höglund, Brigid Cherry, Andrew Hock Soon Ng, Catherine Spooner, and Xavier Aldana Reyes, who are bridging the divide between horror and the Gothic.

  Monstrous Pedagogies: Seven Texts about Teaching Horror

  Burger, Alissa. 2016. Teaching Stephen King: Horror, the Supernatural, and New Approaches to Literature. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

  Golub, Adam, and Heather Richard Hayton, eds. 2017. Monsters in the Classroom: Essays on Teaching What Scares Us. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

  Hoeveler, Diane Long, and Tamar Heller, eds. 2003. Approaches to Teaching Gothic Fiction: The British and American Traditions (Approaches to Teaching World Literature). New York: Modern Language Association of America.

  Moreland, Sean, and Aalya Ahmad, eds. 2013. Fear and Learning: Essays on the Pedagogy of Horror. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

  Nevárez, Lisa A., ed. 2013. The Vampire Goes to College: Essays on Teaching with the Undead. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

  Powell, Anna, and Andrew Smith, eds. 2006. Teaching the Gothic (Teaching the New English). Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

  Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew, and Tony Magistrale, eds. 2008. Approaches to Teaching Poe’s Prose and Poetry (Approaches to Teaching World Literature). New York: Modern Language Association of America.

  Queer studies has also seen several key players, from Linda Williams, Jack Halberstam, and Harry Benshoff, to Patricia MacCormack, Steven Bruhm, and George Haggerty, who have focused on theories of deviant representation and difference both in horror cinema and in literature of the Gothic(s). Queer writings share a long and curious history with horror and the Gothic. Richard Dyer (1998) notes in “Children of the Night: Vampirism as Homosexuality, Homosexuality as Vampirism” that one of the first gay stories to be published was indeed a vampire story. Early (as well as relatively later) Gothic fiction, when it was not the product of women, Dyer points out, was predominantly written by gay men. Benshoff’s work on twenty-first-century queer horror cinema in Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film (1997) argues that monsters in American cinema were, and continue to be, framed in accordance with the socialized conception of homosexuality—“or more broadly queerness”—of the particular era in which they appear (Benshoff 1997, 131). In a 2012 update to his book, Benshoff examines how queer monsters continue to come out of the closet, and these days in much greater numbers. Studies like Benshoff’s are important, for without the use of a queer studies lens, these developments might have remained hidden from horror studies. Moreover, without acknowledging their queer status, or the queer status of certain other past and future monstrous figures, queer studies will remain decidedly limited.

  Just as the late 2000s through early 2010s saw a “vampire renaissance” (then, subsequently, a “zombie renaissance”) in fiction and film, horror criticism also saw a golden age, which is currently still unfolding with no end in sight as yet. Today, horror criticism has branched out into more disciplines than ever, and
the last decade alone has seen an almost daunting number of books and articles going to print in the field. Publishers are finding horror studies more lucrative now than ever, especially university presses, which are finding themselves in need of titles that will keep them afloat. These days, scholarly self-justification for studies in horror is starting to become more and more passé given the mass of critical materials on the subject that have appeared since the late 1970s. However, if one publishes in a media studies journal or queer theory journal an analysis of, say, the sexual representations in Jeepers Creepers (2001), then the analysis is “media studies” or “queer theory.” But if it is published in the journals Horror Studies or the Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, or in the University of Wales Press’s new “Horror Studies” book series, then the analysis is labeled “horror studies.” Publishing in horror studies journals can thus still carry with it a certain taboo, perhaps because horror cinema’s grim nature and populist appeal has a tendency to blind some critics to horror studies’ intellectual capacity. However, the kinds of contributions horror and Gothic criticism are able to offer to both film and literary studies, as well as queer studies, more than evidence their legitimacy as a division of intellectual history.

  Indeed, horror criticism not only broadens film and literary studies, it can help to change minds as well. Educators who use horror studies and criticism in their curricula do not have to limit themselves to giving a historiography of horror fiction, poetry, and film, but can instead help their students to observe and understand horror’s functionality within a much broader cultural framework. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen aptly notes in his seminal work Monster Theory: Reading Culture (1996) that monsters do cultural work. Helping students to understand monsters through this particular critical lens can incite in them the desire to begin the process of divorcing their minds and actions from oppressive ideologies and promote inclusivity. Few other disciplines have the ability, let alone the capacity, for stimulating such a rich sense of communication between “high” and “low” culture. In the end, perhaps therein lies the real dilemma: that such a restrictive hierarchization is not preserving intellectual history but rather impeding it.