While rooted in European myths and classic cinema (Cabinet of Dr Caligari, Nosferatu), the horror genre reveals dark recesses of American culture—so much so that other nations have tried to ban these Hollywood products from the 1930s onwards. To read these as reflections of American society (and even as causes of changes) is tempting, yet this relationship of image and society is constantly complicated by powerful artists, technological innovations, marketing and intertextual relations with other media.

Moreover, horror also speaks to continuing “positive” themes of American culture—a nation committed publicly to heaven (sometimes on Earth) also believes in hell.

American horror were already set high standards by the 1930s, when actor Lon Chaney Sr and director Tod Browning had established careers. Studies of physical deformity and the supernatural skirted the edges of the “respectable” production code, which tinkered with lines or images but avoided these often primal figures. The year of 1931 alone saw archetypal figures in Tod Browning’s Dracula (with Bela Lugosi), James Whale’s Frankenstein (with Boris Karloff) and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Even Tod Browning’s 1932 Freaks, mingling human deformity with vengeance mutilation, played (with cuts)— while European nations, closer to the horrors of the First World War, objected to the onslaught.

Horror film production continued through the Second World War (with occasional attempts to read distorted violence as European). It gained a new life with the Cold War when it intersected with science-fiction films exploring new technologies. Creatures distorted by nuclear holocaust swarmed the screen after Godzilla (1954) arrived from Japan—giant tarantulas, shrews, ants, etc. Other menaces came from space—not only UFOs but mind-controlling Martians. Still other dangers lurked within the hearts of people embodied by compelling actors, such as Vincent Price and Christopher Lee, aided by new technologies like 3-D and Percepto (which supplied electric shocks to the audience at a crucial moment in The Tingler, 1959). Films like I was a Teenage Werewolf (1957) courted the baby boom; David Skal cites a California physician in that era who felt horror movies were “self administered psychiatric therapy for America’s adolescents” (1993:256). Serving this “need,” American International Pictures emerged, with director Roger Corman, as the home of rapid and cheap B-movies based on blood rather than character or technology. At the same time, television and magazines helped keep alive classic older traditions.

In subsequent decades, monsters became more invasive and devastating. In 1968 Rosemary’s Baby introduced demonized middle-class children who would disturb movies like the Exorcist (1973) or the Omen (1976). Women’s roles have become stronger than brides or victims of the 1930s and 1950s, but horror still tends to be a man’s game as demon or slayer—the Alien series (1979–) is an exception.

Increasing violence again made those outside America queasy. Explicit violence, present since the late 1950s, grew over decades in slasher movies as well as mainstream cinema. Physical distortions based on foam latex and digitalization also expanded the genre. Horror films, moreover, intertwined with works by authors like Stephen King or Anne Rice. King, in Brian De Palma’s vision of Carrie (1976) created horror from an erstwhile center of American everyday life—high school. Both King and Rice root evil in American places and traditions in streams of novels that echoed the growing serialization of horror films, where Halloween (1978–) uses a shared American children’s holiday as its ongoing framework. Meanwhile, in the 1970s, blaxploitation flicks like Blacula (1972) and Abby (1974) provided separate but equal demonics. At the same time, horror has been seen as an attractive lure for the increasingly important teenage market.

The 1990s, by contrast, saw a resurgence of quality horrors (instead of B-movies), reflecting and mining traditions. The Vietnam generation (for whom Jacob’s Ladder (1990) provides an especially chilling memorial) grew up to an Oscar-sweeping Silence of the Lambs (1991), found humor in the The Addams Family (1991) and style in Coppola’s Dracula (1992) or the reflective Gods and Monsters (1998). New special effects have buoyed remakes like The Mummy (1999) and Godzilla (1998), while extreme violence and distortion were serialized in Hellraiser (1987) and the teen-oriented I Know What You Did Last Summer (1998). One might read these 1990s productions as apocalyptic, but for every Hannibal Lecter there is another romance or Disney flick.

Horror is part but not all of American psyche—the temptation of the forbidden, but also a desensitized experience of the modern, mapped out in the American everyday.