"American Scary" by Jeremy Dauber

The arrival of the nuclear age ushered in yet another chapter in America’s horror history. Jeremy Dauber, the Columbia University professor who previously wrote a history of comics in this country, now digs a little deeper for American Scary.When John Hersey’s Hiroshima filled an entire issue of the August 31, 1946, issue of The New Yorker, the public learned what it was like to be incinerated by an atomic bomb. Other horrors were to come. Dauber starts in the American Republic’s early days when the Devil might have been walking in the forests that flourished at the time. There was slavery—categorized by Dauber as “the American horror story”--an institution that led to a gruesome civil war and divisions that haven’t entirely healed to this day. There were the horrors faced by Native Americans. On the literary side, you have Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft, and we’re off to the races. Ray Bradbury and Stephen King follow, but Dauber even finds horror in a copy of Good Housekeeping, where a 1944 story called “The Storm” proved to be disturbing.The 20th century was loaded with horrors on the big screen, with Frankenstein, Dracula, and the Wolf Man becoming Hollywood’s holy trinity of horror. But those mythical creatures didn’t seem so scary after World War II. Once mankind realizes that all life could be snuffed out across the entire planet by a single act of madness. Movies made the point. You have Them (irradiated ants) and, among the many cinematic giants stirred up in the atomic age, It Came From Beneath the Sea, a giant octopus disturbed by an A-bomb test. You had paranoia (Invasion of the Body Snatchers). You even had arbiters from outer space warning us to back off the bomb (The Day the Earth Stood Still), a film our president apparently needs to see.The Thing From Another World took the UFO craze and turned it on its head in 1951, setting up John Carpenter’s 1982 shape-shifting remake. Dauber made the point that these films (and others like them) made you wonder just who your friends were.You don’t need a horror history to recognize that Jaws and The Exorcist were creepy. But Dauber adds the Rocky Horror Picture Show to his list of 70s standout films.As comprehensive as Dauber’s compilation is, I would like to have seen more radio horror (Arch Oboler et al) included and at least some reference to TV’s Outer Limits (the 1963 B&W version).Perhaps inspired by American Scary, Dauber just produced Press One for Invasion, a novel for juvenile readers about an alien invasion through the eyes of a cell-phone-toting youngster.