Gore Is More

Michael Goodrum reviews Jeremy Dauber’s “American Scary: A History of Horror, from Salem to Stephen King and Beyond.”

By Michael GoodrumFebruary 7, 2025

• SF

• History

LONG BEFORE THE PRESENT horrors we face, British cultural theorist Mark Fisher suggested that American history should be “reclassified as horror.” Jeremy Dauber’s American Scary: A History of Horror, from Salem to Stephen King and Beyond (2024) responds to Fisher’s call, offering readers a narrative that oscillates between considering horrifying events, horror narratives and, when it is at its most effective, the interrelationship between the two. What we have, then, is history on the grand scale: eight chapters, of roughly equal length, that take the reader from the colonial era to the present. We might, therefore, see this as an intervention in two relatively distinct areas—“narrative histories” of the United States and “histories of American horror.” Given Dauber’s mission to cover the whole history of the US, and the North American colonial past prior to that, it is the narrative history market that might benefit most from this book.

Dauber’s American Scary is the latest contribution to cultural histories of American horror. Its most notable predecessor is David J. Skal’s The Monster Show (1993), though Skal’s book limits its scope to much more recent history. W. Scott Poole’s Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting (2011) offers a similar historical scope and American focus, and is remarkably successful in showing how the horrors of the past inform our present, especially in its 2018 second edition, which was updated to deal more directly with the Black Lives Matter movement. There are others to consider, less complete in their coverage—most of which can be found in Dauber’s comprehensive endnotes, should the reader feel curious. Skal does not begin his narrative until the interwar period, meaning Dauber’s approach is considerably more expansive. Poole has a similar chronology but adopts a different method, weaving the past much more closely into the present through considerations of more recent horror narratives that dramatize the historical anxieties being discussed.

The book itself consists of eight chapters, each coming in at around 50 pages. The first chapter, on the colonial and revolutionary era, is more closely focused on historical narrative—owing, perhaps, to an assumption of lesser familiarity and an acknowledgment that this period produced fewer horror stories to feature. The second, on the early republic, offers more extended analysis of the famous stories of the age—classics by Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe—with a working-through of the influence of the gothic to frame them. By the third chapter, readers find themselves immersed in narratives of the enslaved, the Civil War, even reaching into the Progressive Era. As readers move through these chapters, Dauber shifts steadily from the real to the cultural, largely driven by a greater availability of stories and their fame. By the fourth chapter, Dauber has reached the origins of Hollywood, of pulps—in short, of the explosion of American horror. If the trend has so far been one of a drift from real to unreal, this now accelerates, becoming what might be termed “bibliographical,” or an attempt to document as many horror narratives as possible. As one might expect with a bibliographical approach, however, there are points in the book where its practice becomes more about listing rather than working through texts in more detail. In the book’s defense, this reads like a deliberate decision: if one works on the basis that the intended reader is someone who wishes to know about “the horrifying narrative of American history” rather than someone who is already well-versed in it, the decision makes complete sense. My only reservation would be where some helpful theory is gestured at rather than properly introduced—if writing for a more general audience, one cannot assume working familiarity with, for instance, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s “Monster Theory.”

This is not to say that theory is absent; it is generally included in short, readable ways that work toward grounding the ideas and examples under discussion. When deployed most effectively, this leads to chapters that consider text and context with a sprinkling of theory in the analysis to really come to grips with what these particular narratives might mean; the second and third chapters are perhaps the best organized, with a nice balance between narrative and analysis. It is, however, worth noting the highly creditable breadth of material Dauber covers here: not merely the “greatest hits,” as it were, of American horror narratives, but a wide-ranging survey of the genre that can act as a point of departure for readers who wish to know more.

At its best, Dauber’s approach provides sufficient narrative detail of social and cultural sweep to be both informative and entertaining; at its least effective, a reader might feel they are adrift in a neatly sketched bibliography of American horror that has lost a little sight of its historical narrative (it does not help that chronology can become a little detached and dislocated within chapters). This is most evident in the chapters covering the Cold War, which tend to fall back most obviously on overarching narratives—communism, nuclear anxiety—and lose sight of some of the other elements driving contemporary American fear. An unfortunate side effect of this is that the book does not fully mine the complexities around race, gender, sexuality, and science that fed into much of the horror of this era. It is not absent, by any account, but a marginalization of the marginalized can work toward reproducing ideas of center and periphery: of who gets to be “American,” of who gets to be afraid, and of who is the source of fear. While the pendulum of quality swings between too much and not enough, it tends more frequently toward the better end of things. That Dauber occasionally loses control over such a broad canvas is understandable; horror is replete with those who have struggled to control their creation, and the genre is none the worse for it.

Once the narrative reaches what we might conceive of as the foundations of the present moment of horror, in the 1970s, Dauber is on very firm footing. His readings of Stephen King, Steven Spielberg, John Carpenter, Wes Craven, and others are necessarily fleeting but assured and informative. It seems unlikely that readers of this book would approach this era unaware of its major landmarks; were they to do so, though, they would learn a great deal. Dauber keeps the individual trees firmly in view here, while also giving a strong sense of the range and complexity of the woods in which they sit. Readers familiar with the terrain will also discover things about the interrelationship of horror across media and the way these narratives engaged with their historical context. This continues into Dauber’s engagement with post-9/11 horror in the book’s final chapter—a chapter that covers a dizzying array of material across film, television, and literature, and features the best, and shortest, review of Freddy vs. Jason (2003) to date: “Attack of the Fifty-Foot Cash Cow.” I have not just picked this out for the joke (though it is a good one): it is indicative of Dauber’s approach more generally. The punch line is revealing, demonstrating connections between individual films and wider horror trajectories (in this instance, early 2000s remakes, reboots, etc.), and establishes an entertaining and informative pathway through complex and densely populated neighborhoods of horror. Readers can sit happily, if uncomfortably, alongside our winking horror host.

Dauber offers his readers two things in this book: a narrative history and a history of narratives. For a narrative history to achieve success, it needs to be coherent, stay engaging, and have something about it that makes it stand out from its competitors. Dauber achieves all of these goals. The question with narratives, however, is not just what they contain, but also who they are seen as being for (and then how they are used by a range of people, in perhaps unintended ways). While Dauber occasionally nods to awards, or to the size of print runs, or to box office performance, a great deal more could be done to ground the success or otherwise of horror in specific historical moments and audiences. For instance, how does the transcendental success of Stephen King in the 1970s and ’80s align with both historical factors (the age of anxiety amid the Cold War endgame in which he first found fame) and industrial factors (the rise of the chain bookstore), as well as his individual talent? Similarly with slashers, Dauber acknowledges that the audience was largely constructed as straight, white, and male for the films of the 1980s, but ’90s films like Scream (1996), I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997), and Urban Legend (1998) actively sought to broaden the appeal of the genre beyond its “traditional” fan base. This might seem like splitting hairs, in a genre more famed for splitting heads, but the conjunction of pushback against this attempted diversification, and the new sociopolitical context after 9/11, contributed to the development of new directions in horror. Such shifts were often projected as a “return to authenticity” in some way, a notion that the horror tropes of the 1990s were unable to cope with the post-9/11 world and needed to “return” to a gore-is-more approach; in this, it aligned with discourse emerging from some quarters that 9/11 heralded an “end of feminism,” so an exploration of how such narratives sit within that would have been a helpful addition. Narrative, visual, and rhetorical shifts therefore do require closer attention than they receive here, if the book is to work as both a narrative history of the US and a history of its horror narratives. The question of who is engaging with narratives, and how, is highly relevant—especially so if the project is mapping out how fears relate to the history of the United States.

Overall, this is a book that will reward both casual and close reading. As a profitable index of suggested readings in American horror, it is second to none. To be so good on that front, though, it whets rather than satiates a reader’s appetite as to more rigorous critical engagement. If, however, you are curious about the dark paths that crisscross the American past, American Scary is an indispensable guide.