From the famous “Psycho” shower scene to “Poltergeist” and Chucky, America has a fascination with horror. Jeremy Dauber, professor of Jewish literature and American studies at Columbia University, joins host Krys Boyd to discuss how horror reflects worries of a collective culture, how the genre helped the fight against slavery and how changing gender roles spark new creations. His book is “American Scary: A History of Horror, from Salem to Stephen King and Beyond.”
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Transcript
Krys Boyd [00:00:00] The National Retail Federation expects 72% of Americans to celebrate Halloween this year and to spend a combined $11.6 billion to do it. We love candy. We love costumes and decorations. And more than anything, we love stories that make us want to sleep with the light on. From Kera in Dallas, this is Think. I’m Krys Boyd. From the very earliest days of our history as a nation, Americans have sought out terrifying entertainment and what might seem at a distance like just a ghost or witch or vampire story can often be traced directly to the particular anxieties plaguing this country at any given time. Changing roles for women. The arrival of immigrants from new places and our long and shameful history of chattel slavery and racism. Jeremy Dauber is professor of Jewish literature and American Studies at Columbia University. His new book is called “American Scary: A History of Horror from Salem to Stephen King and Beyond.” Jeremy, welcome to Think.
Jeremy Dauber [00:01:01] Thank you so much. It’s great to be here.
Krys Boyd [00:01:04] Humans are wired to pay attention to what scares us so we can avoid things that might kill us. That is universal. I wonder, then, what is unique about American horror?
Jeremy Dauber [00:01:16] Well, you know, I think that’s exactly it, is that we take these universal fears and depending on our history, our cultural background, our particular circumstances, they take very specific flavor to take a very silly example. If you were in a geographic locale without spiders, you probably wouldn’t find giant spiders nearly as scary. Right? But I spend most of my time in the book talking about sort of much more particular fears that are related to American history and culture.
Krys Boyd [00:01:45] So there are two things we are broadly afraid of. One is like these cosmic or supernatural threats that remind us of how small and powerless we are.
Jeremy Dauber [00:01:55] Yes, that’s right. I mean, the way sometimes I think about them, there are these two big buckets of fear that we kind of deal with. And as you say, the first of them is, you know, this big thing out there that sort of we’re powerless about and that takes different forms in history. You know, when we start the American story or one American story and we have all these Puritans coming from sort of England, you know, they’re very scared of God and, you know, and damnation and the devil. And that really is that big force out there in the 1950s. It was atomic missiles launched from the Soviet Union, but it’s still something big and massive and destructive that you don’t have any control over necessarily.
Krys Boyd [00:02:33] The other bucket is the converse of that, right? It’s all the things that are close and constant in our lives that could pose a threat. And you call it the monster next door.
Jeremy Dauber [00:02:43] That’s exactly right. I mean, I think that once something that very much scares us is we look at somebody we know or something even that we love or that we think, you know, and we say there’s something there that we didn’t know. We didn’t understand. There’s some kind of monstrosity there. And even if that never happens and hopefully never happens in our own lives, we know that that fear is kind of out there of something, you know, and often that takes very ugly forms in American history.
Krys Boyd [00:03:09] Reading this book, I was struck by the fact that what is particularly dark about the threat some Americans have perceived from, say, immigrants or indigenous or black people or women, collective fears of these people have generally made life more dangerous for these people.
Jeremy Dauber [00:03:27] Yeah, I think that’s a great that’s a great point. I mean, you know, as we said before, sometimes there are fears that people feel like they have nothing that they have no control over. But people want to have control over their fate and their destiny. And so sometimes that can take very maleficent forms. When you say, well, there are these fears and I’m going to do something about and I’m going to take something into my own hands, and that can go to some very ugly and terrifying places.
Krys Boyd [00:03:51] Is there anything about the way we process horror and fears through stories that faces up to our history of cruelty and wanton destruction as a consequence of fear? Like, can you read guilt into any of the horror stories that have captivated us?
Jeremy Dauber [00:04:06] I think a lot of times, you know, one example, I think that’s a great way of putting it. And I think that one example from me, which is very interesting, is that this great American author, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and he wasn’t born Hawthorne, he was born Nathaniel Hathorne, but he added the W to his name because he was related. He was a direct descendant of one of the judges in the Salem witchcraft trials. And he was so dealing with that guilt that he actually not only changed his name, but created a series of horror stories all about the haunting nature of sin and guilt in in American life and in his own life and, you know, in American life writ large. So that absolutely played itself out in some of his work and some of the other great works over the centuries to come that I talk about.
Krys Boyd [00:04:51] Do you think there’s any reason that people who have success with one horror story tend to stick with the genre? I mean, it’s very interesting that people don’t write a horror story and then a romance and then a comedy.
Jeremy Dauber [00:05:06] Well, you know, it’s a it’s a great question because I think some of it has to do for a long time with the way in which consumers consume culture. So for many, for for most of American history, the description that you’re giving. Right, which is a very accurate one now, really wasn’t the case. Right. So someone like Edith Wharton did write a ghost story and then she writes a satire, a novel of manners, and she writes Henry James does the same kinds of things. And these are some of our greatest American ghost story writers, for example. But in the 20th century, we begin to have sort of these marketing trends that say, okay, well, we have this, you know, place in the bookstore. We have this place in the pulp newsstand or in the video store. It needs to have a particular category head. And so people get in that kind of typecast. I feel like now that is changing a little bit back and I think in a wonderful way where, you know, you have someone like Jordan Peele, you know, he starts out as really one of the nation’s top comic comedy figures and now has become one of the, you know, great horror auteurs. And it wouldn’t shock me if he kind of goes back and forth or does something else altogether.
Krys Boyd [00:06:16] Any examination of horror as entertainment will have to grapple with this question, which is why we seek to deliberately scare ourselves with stories when reality for most people contains plenty of scary and frightening thing.
Jeremy Dauber [00:06:32] Yeah, it’s a great question, and I know that you know myself as an eight year old, you know, or a ten year old when I was reading Stephen King novels way too early and staying up at night, I was like, why am I doing this to myself? That’s terrible, right? And that’s the question in miniature. I do think as I’ve gotten older and thought about it more, you know, that that it’s this is an old answer, but I think it’s a good one that what we’re able to do is have that sense of control that we’ve already been talking a lot about. In a world where so much of life is out of our control that we can put those fears into a fictional setting and we can work through them and then we can leave them, we can close the book, or we can go walk out of the movie theater and we can say, You know what? I’m better than that. I mastered that. And even though part of us knows that that’s not really the case, it kind of puts that monster in bay for a while, and that’s something.
Krys Boyd [00:07:23] So in the beginning of European colonization of North America, those settlers encountered civilizations already established and thriving on this content. So they understandably met resistance from indigenous peoples very early. Then we told horror stories about what ambush and abduction.
Jeremy Dauber [00:07:41] Absolutely. And you know, one of the books that has the claim to being a very strong claim to being the first American bestseller is it is an account excuse me, by a woman named Mary Rawlinson of what we might call a Native American captivity narrative. Right. So it talks about the story of being taken prisoner by a buy rating party of Native Americans. Now, the historical background to this is complicated and it’s not all one sided. But what’s interesting, I think about it is the way that Rawlinson attempts to use this word. We’re using a lot control her experiences first by writing them down, by grappling with them, and by making it into a story of religion and a faith and of saying, Well, I have faith that I’m going to be rescued. I’m going to be delivered. And indeed, at the end she is to tell this story simultaneously. She demonizes her captors not only by saying, well, they they they you know, they took me captive, but by really putting them almost in league with the devil. And that kind of is taking those old categories from from England. Right. From Europe and putting them on to sort of this new landscape. Right. Bringing old ghosts over to the quote unquote, new world.
Krys Boyd [00:08:52] So does that explain how we moved from an unquestionably real fear of conflict with other humans to someone like increased Mather, who was son of the clergyman, Cotton Mather, and his obsession with witches?
Jeremy Dauber [00:09:05] Well, you know, and what’s interesting, one of the things I love and you know about thinking about and I thought a lot about about writing the book is what the word real means to people. Right. So for Increase Mather For the Mather family, the devil was real, right? The devil was a real thing. Now, what complicated things, especially in Salem, was that the devil was also a real deceiver. And so it could create illusions and, you know, could could be very crafty in that kind of way. So what what the evidence was was was questionable. But that sense of this world is a narrow bridge between salvation and damnation that was as real as, you know, Neptune. Right. So that became very powerful as a sort of motivating factor.
Krys Boyd [00:09:51] So I had always thought the alleged witch tituba in Salem, who was a historical figure and of course was later memorialized in fictional content. But scholar, I thought she was African, but scholarship now suggests she was from the Caribbean.
Jeremy Dauber [00:10:06] That’s my understanding of the scholarship. Yeah. Is that she you know that sometimes she was called African, that really she came to New England via some of the Caribbean and that, you know, that that was sort of her background.
Krys Boyd [00:10:21] How and why did the witch panic eventually subside?
Jeremy Dauber [00:10:27] Well, it’s a great question. And I think that it really speaks to, you know, in some ways, not just the way that hysteria and mass panics very frequently take place in real life, but also the narratives of a story, because we tell stories about our lives that it kind of, you know, it grew and grew and grew and eventually just got out of control. And then people started realizing, you know, this is going too far. It was one thing and again, a terrible thing, but it was one thing to say, well, here are all these marginalized people, these people of color, some women, people who are, you know, off on their own. Right. Okay. We can demonize them. But it really started going after more and more central figures in these communities, even leaders of these communities. And at that point, you know, the powers that be, I think, sort of said, you know, okay, this has gone too far. And it kind of snuffed out. And in some ways that’s the way horror stories work. They they reach a kind of a pitch and then they say, well, they’re not going to sustain anymore, and then we’re going to reach a kind of catharsis or closure in some in some uncomfortable, haunting sense.
Krys Boyd [00:11:31] Well, it’s such a fascinating parallel between the real events that happened and then centuries later, in 1953, Arthur Miller writes this play depicting those events in The Crucible.
Crucible Clip [00:11:42]
Jeremy Dauber [00:12:00] And you know what was fascinating to me? I didn’t know about a lot of this in sort of working on the book, you know, that Salem became, you know, really an omnipresent interest for American writers. I guess I might have intuited it, but I didn’t know all the way through. You know, and as you say, well into the 20th century and even into the 21st, we have movies like Robert Eggers The Witch, which is sort of set in that same setting, even if not Salem specifically, necessarily. And so, you know, you have and as you as you’re implying, you know, here we have with Arthur Miller a way of saying, yes, the setting is Salem, but I’m also talking about the hysteria and the panic around McCarthyism and sort of communism, you know, communist accusations.
Krys Boyd [00:12:47] And of course, today, Donald Trump uses the term witch hunt a lot to suggest that he has been unfairly persecuted.
Jeremy Dauber [00:12:55] You know, I think that these fear, you know, fear is a currency. And and as you say, you know, some tropes, some motifs, some images, some monsters have, you know, are worth a lot. And so this idea of politicians sort of trading on fear, using it, using these particular forms, you know, if you understand how to use them, you’re willing to use them. They have a great deal of power to them.
Krys Boyd [00:13:19] Jeremy, you, I think, rightly described slavery as the American horror story, as monstrous in true facts as anything that storytellers could make up. And while enslaved people were treated like the real danger, it was white people who cast aside their high thinking ideals about freedom to abuse these many millions of innocent victims. How did stories incorporate that weird dissonance, or did they incorporate that dissonance?
Jeremy Dauber [00:13:47] Yeah, I mean, I think that as is very frequently the cases you’re implying, Krys, sometimes they didn’t, right? Sometimes they kind of, you know, reading this from sort of a modern perspective and maybe even from a contemporary perspective, you know, you almost don’t see that enormous elephant in the room. And it looms haunting over this by its very absence. So there’s certainly a good bit of that. Sometimes, I mean, it needs to be said. Sometimes you have writers who are incorporating it in ways that we would feel very uncomfortable with what we would detest. There are very plausible arguments to suggest that Edgar Allan Poe, who is a Southerner, essentially, you know, is a marylander, is writing some of these stories as racial allegories in which the real fear is that of, you know, enslaved people sort of rising up against their masters and against their owners. So, though and that bleeds in, so to speak, to this kind of horror story that was told sort of in the south of, you know, here is this danger not thinking or not paying attention to. As you point out, the fact that that danger is something which is being caused by the nature of this cruel and horrific institution that’s being, you know, impressed upon them.
Krys Boyd [00:14:59] Poe was also writing at a time that the country was rapidly urbanizing and industrializing huge changes. I mean, how would you say his writing incorporated all that anxiety around change?
Jeremy Dauber [00:15:12] Yeah, I think it’s a it’s a really great question. I mean, Poe is someone who, you know, is a failed novelist and is first he writes one novel. He considers himself to be a failed novelist at least, and turns to poetry and to the short story where he really shines. And that novel is a novel of kind of navel exploration, the narrative of Arthur Gordon payments called. And, you know, it’s really, again, about the sense of here we go, we’re going out, we’re being big. And yet, you know, in these spaces, these blank spaces on the map, they’re like monsters, you know? And that wasn’t necessarily what Poe becomes best known for in our reading of him. Right. We think of him really as a psychological horror figure, you know, having these uncanny doubles or these madmen who kill, you know, people and bury their hearts underneath floors. But, you know, he has this side of him, as you’re saying, Krys, as well of saying, you know, growth can be scary.
Krys Boyd [00:16:11] You cite the legend of Sleepy Hollow as maybe the first great ghost story in American literature. What particular fears did Washington Irving draw on in that tale?
Jeremy Dauber [00:16:21] Well, let me say that, you know, part of the joy of writing this book was really encountering things that I had not read since, you know, high school, let’s say.
Krys Boyd [00:16:29] Yeah.
Jeremy Dauber [00:16:30] And and really finding out, you know. You know, the words haven’t changed for the person who’s reading them as a lot, you know. And saying, this is funny. Like, this is actually really a satire. And Washington Irving, you know, is able to basically be part of this first, let’s say, post-revolution generation, write his name for George Washington and saying, okay, really, I’m going to have this kind of rationalism that really kind of was affiliated with this, found the founding fathers with that kind of generation. Right? So it turns out when you read it with adult eyes and I apologize for spoiling a several hundred year old story, right. That, you know, there probably wasn’t a headless horseman after all. And, you know, as I said, the Gen-X person maybe coming of age watching the Disney animated movie, I was not aware of that.
Headless Horseman Jingle [00:17:32] .
Jeremy Dauber [00:17:33] But it’s really about the, you know, a trick played on the credulous Ichabod Crane and the way in which his own sort of love of ghost stories is turned against him in a certain kind of way. And that was kind of a lot of what Irving sort of did, was it, you know, we’re part of this New republic, we’re part of this new country. We’re forward thinking. All of this stuff is kind of silly, to be perfectly honest. You know, it’s funny.
Krys Boyd [00:17:58] Speaking of Disney, I mean, most of us now don’t think of these films as examples of horror content, even, you know, mildly scary ones like The Headless Horseman. But the early ones in particular have some deeply unsettling scenes.
Jeremy Dauber [00:18:12] I think you’re right. You know, these cartoons were not really necessarily designed for children, certainly not only for children. And in fact, Walt Disney, when he was talking with his animators for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, he said, I want you to model some of these scenes on sort of like the transformations from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Right. I want this to be a real horror movie feel to it, and indeed it is. And one of the other interesting things about Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is that if you look at it with adult eyes, you know, it really is a movie about the same kind of issues of the Great Depression that was going on when it came out. It’s a movie about someone who’s homeless, who tries to find a job. Right. Who is being tormented by someone from the upper class. You know, a lot of that stuff makes its way in.
Krys Boyd [00:18:58] Moby Dick is, to this day, seen as one of the most important novels in American history. It is unquestionably a kind of horror story. But who is Melville’s real villain? Is it the whale or is it the mad captain bent on destroying that whale?
Jeremy Dauber [00:19:14] Yeah, I mean. Well, I think you framed it so well that the answer, I think, rightly suggests itself. I mean, one of the things Melville was a huge fan of Hawthorne’s right. And so that that same thing that we were talking about, about obsession and drive and guilt, like all of these sort of haunting things, those are the things that really in some sense suffuse Ahab’s character. And, you know, I think it’s not surprising that this is the figure that even though, you know, there’s a big freaking monster in the entire thing, right? What we focus on really is the human monster is Ahab, I think, 100%.
Krys Boyd [00:19:49] And is there an allegory for something else wrapped up in that story.
Jeremy Dauber [00:19:55] You know, one of the amazing things about Moby Dick is that you could basically say there’s a way. And one of the reasons, as you said, I think quite rightly, that’s still considered one of the great American novels, is that you could make an argument that there’s an allegory for almost anything in Moby Dick. And I think you would not be wrong. So I think absolutely, you know, but I think for our purposes in this discussion, the one that you brought up first is the truest one that that one of obsession of drive and of ruling everything out in that monomania.
Krys Boyd [00:20:25] And that’s timeless, right? That can happen to anyone in any time for almost any reason.
Jeremy Dauber [00:20:30] Yeah. And so, you know, if someone says, boy, this is really a novel about the 1850s whaling industry, you know, that’s true. But that’s, you know, but we don’t read it as a historical curio in that kind of way or because of his, you know, Melville’s sort of long disquisitions on, you know, I can’t remember if I pronouncing this word correctly, but cetacean biology. Right. It’s because really, we care about that human element and we see that drive in other kind of more contemporary figures.
Krys Boyd [00:21:00] I’ll confess I could barely get through Moby Dick the first time, and I’m not inclined to run back. But I am curious now in the 21st century whether it could also read as an environmental morality tale.
Jeremy Dauber [00:21:14] I think absolutely. You know, one of the things of these naval works, let’s say, of the 19th century there, and I, you know, is this encounter with the like this sublime encounter with sort of nature, which is strong and over mastering and sometimes hostile and scary and and, you know, will resist any attempts by humans to try and conquer it. I think that’s a very plausible reading, not just of that novel, but a lot of these naval stories. And when certainly we have a lot of that feeling now and let’s say contemporary anxieties about climate change, about and about yes, we have done something to the climate, but this climate, you know, we think we can control it. But really what we’ve done is unleashed a monster.
Krys Boyd [00:22:00] How did westward expansion shape the kinds of horror stories we told in this country?
Jeremy Dauber [00:22:06] That’s a great question. I mean, I think that, you know, there is a number of different ways to think about that question. But one of one of the ones and we can talk about a number of them, but one of the ones that I like the most is you have these areas and you have these places where necessarily you are going to be a stranger, right? And you’re relying on the kindness of strangers to make your way across the West. Those could be guides. That could be people who operate, you know, inns or places to stop along the road or what have you. And as a result, the idea of sort of the let’s call it the predator, you know, the person who operates the kind of hotel where you check in and you don’t check out, that kind of can become more part of the American landscape than perhaps it could when everybody is sort of living in a closer community. You know, Salem would not have had that kind of thing. But we have these sort of stories. We have these this family called the Benders who operated one. And they, you know, they travelers, they would take in travelers and they would kill them and they would rob their bodies. And this became, in some ways a certain kind of metaphor for the dangers of this anonymity as one went west. So that’s one only one of the stories that we talk about that talking about the book, that it’s a powerful one.
Krys Boyd [00:23:20] To return to the terrors of slavery. It’s interesting because it seems that horror could be used to justify this practice and it could also shape the literature that would ultimately make the case that we could not continue such an immoral way of being.
Jeremy Dauber [00:23:35] I think that’s right. I mean, one of the ways I like to think about fear is as as water, right? And water in some ways takes the shape of whatever channels you cut. Right. And everybody is cutting their own channels. The South, you know, they’re cutting certain channels, you know, and then and the north to sort of simplify. Right. And as you say, you can you can manipulate that in all of these different ways. And people absolutely did.
Krys Boyd [00:24:01] Yet you note in the book this poignant observation by Frederick Douglass that compared prejudice to a belief in ghosts, which is to say, I guess not at all based in reality, but a pervasive and perverse force within society.
Jeremy Dauber [00:24:15] Yeah. I mean, I think one of the things that haunts all of us in all of our different ways is how much we want to say about certain kinds of things. They could be beliefs that could be attitudes, they could be problems. It could be social issues. Right. This is over. I’ve. I’ve declare this dead. Right. It’s done. We’re finished. And yet they keep haunting us. They keep coming back. And I think that that is really part of our horror story is that we would like to put these things in the ground. But that’s not how monsters work, unfortunately.
Krys Boyd [00:24:47] That classic moment at the end of horror movies that suggest that even though things look all right for now, evil has not been defeated.
Jeremy Dauber [00:24:55] Yeah, I think that’s right. And I think that’s true of the best horror of horror movies and horror works is that they leave you with this kind of haunted sensibility, you know, so that you can say, Yes, I’ve exercised my control. This monster is defeated. But then, you know, you leave in three hours later. You’re like, Really? Really? Is that true? You know, I want to turn on my outside light just to be sure, you know? So you’re absolutely right. You know, that that I think is very important to the whole effect.
Krys Boyd [00:25:23] Most of us now associate the War of the Worlds with that Orson Welles radio play in the 1930s.
War of the Worlds (1938) [00:25:29] .
Krys Boyd [00:25:47] But H.G. Wells, different spelling, no relation. Actually wrote the story in 1897. So why might a story about Alien invasion have hit home for readers in the late 19th century?
Jeremy Dauber [00:26:01] Well, you know, it’s a great question. And as as you know. Right. And as the listeners know, the book is called American Scary. But every so often there are people who are so powerfully and incalculably influential. I just had to put them in. And Welles is one of these people. Write The Time Machine, Invisible Man, War, the Underdog Tomorrow, War of the Worlds, especially write hugely powerful. And what ends up happening in the late 19th century and Welles really exemplifies this in War of the Worlds, is to say, essentially God is dead, right? God is dead as an animating, fearful force. But we’re going to replace it with something that’s sort of similar but also hostile, malevolent and incalculably powerful and and.
Krys Boyd [00:26:43] Cannot be appeased. Right.
Jeremy Dauber [00:26:45] And and can’t be appeased and can’t be appeased. And for Welles’s contemporary, a guy named Arthur Machen, that’s the sort of pagan gods that find their sort of real, most powerful formulation in America in the work of H.P. Lovecraft. But for Welles, it’s aliens. Right. And as you say, totally hostile, totally unrepeatable, and in some way scientifically plausible at that point. Mars really, you know, there could have been aliens. People didn’t know. Right. So, you know, the idea that they come and, you know, just incredibly hostile and also, you know, what defeats them ultimately, Of course. And again, I apologize for spoiling if you haven’t thought. Right are bacteria. Right. It’s not human military action that’s useless. So that’s very, very scary. Right? There’s no control.
Krys Boyd [00:27:33] How did the introduction of the medium of cinema change the way we explored what scared us in this country?
Jeremy Dauber [00:27:40] Well, I think that’s a really good question. I mean, to me, you know, there is how to put this, that there’s cinema really allows a bunch of people to, you know, come into a communal space. They had done this with theater for many centuries, obviously, but to do a communal space to watch exactly the same thing over and over again and to, you know, really kind of see things thanks to the camera angles, thanks to the way in which this is sort of constructed and put together, where you have a really shaped and focused sense of the horror that is that is placed before you. You know, you can control where I’m sitting in a theater and you can control some things with stagecraft. I’m talking about a stage in play, but you can’t control where my eyes go. Right. But but with a theater, you know, if you want to focus on on The Phantom of the Opera, his face, you know, there’s nowhere for me to go except to close my eyes and put my hands in front of my face, you know? That’s it. So that becomes very powerful. And then, of course, we have all these different iterations in the technology of movies which allow for different kinds of scares. So, you know, starting in the very early 1930s, we have the introduction of sound. And so then we have the introduction of screams. And so we can have, Fay Ray in King Kong screaming for all she’s worth, you know, masterfully. But that really happens only a couple of years after we could hear our first scream in a movie theater for the first time.
Krys Boyd [00:29:13] And we imagine we might feel safer in a crowd of innocent people. But fear is so contagious that if everyone else around us is terrified, we’re going to be swept away.
Jeremy Dauber [00:29:22] I think that’s exactly right. One of the things that I love about thinking about the movie going experience is that joining together sometimes of fearfulness, right? When you’re in a movie theater and, you know, 100 people are holding their breath at the same time. Right. It’s very different from watching it, you know, at home by yourself or on your phone or something like that. Right. And then when there’s like the catharsis, when there’s that outburst of relief or sometimes even of laughter or of cheers when, like, the bad monster gets it, you know, there’s nothing like that either, you know? It’s just amazing.
Krys Boyd [00:29:59] Jeremy We were the country that unleashed the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but that did not keep us from realizing that technology could just as easily be used on us. How would you say horror evolved at the dawn of the nuclear era?
Jeremy Dauber [00:30:16] Yeah. You know, it’s really important, I think, because. For the first time. You know, we talked before about in the previous segment about War of the Worlds, right? And here we have aliens, right? But here we have humankind has the capacity to destroy the world itself for the first time. And I think all of us who, you know, have grown up in the shadow of Hiroshima, you know, we don’t almost understand the way in which that reshaped kind of the collective imagination. It’s hard for us to grasp that, how it reshaped the collective imagination. But again, our minds and our culture searched for ways of talking about that without necessarily talking about it explicitly. Sometimes we did with movies like Fail Safe or Dr. Strangelove, but a lot of times it was through things like Alien Invasions and there’s a version of the War of the Worlds that comes out in 1953, and it’s very clearly kind of pitched to being about sort of a Cold War story rather than sort of really from a hostile kind of God sort of thing.
War of the Worlds (1953) [00:31:19] .
Jeremy Dauber [00:31:28] So that’s that’s one kind of approach that that really ends up happening. The other question I think that comes up is really an increased attention to humans capacity to do these things. What does it mean to be the kind of individuals or the kind of societies that could do that?
We Come in Peace – War of the Worlds (1953) [00:32:07] .
Jeremy Dauber [00:32:14] And that was something that plays itself out in all sorts of ways as as the decades go on.
Krys Boyd [00:32:20] And it wasn’t just wars or attacks from abroad that could bring bad things into our lives. People who looked very familiar could say harbor a communist threat, which was a real concern for a while.
Jeremy Dauber [00:32:32] That’s exactly right. So when you talk about the monster next door in the 1950s, I mean, you have to talk about Invasion of the Body Snatchers, right? I mean, here is this first is based on a novel and then becomes a movie. Now, the novelist swore up and down that he did not put in a communist subtext, but I don’t necessarily agree. And certainly weak people can read things into things, even if the authors don’t intend them. And certainly everyone says, here we are. We’re in a lovely town, all-American town. I use that very, you know, consciously. And all of a sudden it starts becoming hollowed out from within. These people who we think we know, we think we love. They’re pod people. They’re just all, you know, like everybody else. They’re all the same. There’s no individualism. They don’t got to care about. They don’t have that good Ole and the all-American drive. In short, as you say, they’re communists, right? They’re terrible. Right. And this was sort of that 1950s ethos of this. And it was just going to keep spreading and spreading and spreading in the horror movie. And it’s not too far a line to draw from there, too. That kind of domino theory of saying, well, if this falls, then this one is next and this one is next. And you know, of course that was an ethos that impacted so much of Cold War geopolitics in the next decades.
Krys Boyd [00:33:41] I mean, to get deeper into that, the idea that a content creator isn’t necessarily looking to overlay contemporary issues onto this scary story that they’ve created for entertainment, that doesn’t mean they weren’t influenced by the zeitgeist, right?
Jeremy Dauber [00:33:56] That’s exactly right. Not at all. So one of my favorite articulations of this actually is by Stephen King, who is talking about a lot of these big bug and big monster movies of the 1950s. And he says, you know, okay, here are these guys. They’re making like Attack of the Giant, you know, Spider or whatever. And they’ve got like two hours to write the screenplay before they go out, right? And they’re like, How are we going to make the spider big? And they don’t care about this at all. They’re like radiation. Atomic radiation. Right. And of course, you see where this is going. And King points out, and quite rightly, that the fact that that’s what comes first to mind really shows how omnipresent it is. And, you know, you can do this. I sometimes have my students do sort of an analogous thought experiment to say, what’s your reason now for kind of the monstrosity? And, you know, people are not necessarily saying atomic radiation. They might say climate change. Right? They might say something else directly. You know, it’s going to be much more contemporary fears, and anxieties. They’re going to give that narrative excuse.
Krys Boyd [00:34:54] Speaking of anxiety, there’s the fear of like tricksters hiding in plain sight who’ve been damaged by contemporary society. I’m thinking of someone like Norman Bates, who seems like this meek character but is as dangerous as he could possibly be in that movie.
We All Go a Little Mad – Psycho [00:35:10] .
Jeremy Dauber [00:35:17] Yeah, I mean, one of my favorite sort of small points in Psycho a Norman Bates is in which Norman Bates plays a star role, you know, which is a small point, but is that, you know, the Bates Motel is sort of a victim of the interstate highway system. I think you could say basically. Right. It’s like, you know, he’s off the main road now. That is not the reason why Bates does what he does. But it’s interesting, again, that Hitchcock chose to kind of put in keep that in as a you know, as a small sort of note to those kind of anxieties. One of the other interesting things, which I think we forget in sort of all the, you know, attention to Bates, the shower scene and, you know, Bates dressing up as his mother and all that. Is it the last few minutes of the movie are fairly long I mean, it seems almost interminably long by 2024 standards description of a psychologist about exactly how Norman Bates got to be the way he is. And now we would all say, well, you know, check. We understand this. You know, we got it, you know, childhood trauma, we get it. But at the time, psychoanalysis and that kind of mode of really thinking about how people the monster next door is shaped and formed. Right. Is something that’s fairly new. And so it needs to be sort of brought out in this kind of detail.
Krys Boyd [00:36:36] Hitchcock also had a fascination with characters who were innocent but looked guilty.
Jeremy Dauber [00:36:42] Yes, I think that’s right. I mean, one of the things that is the flipside of the monster next door is the person you think is the monster next door. But is it one of the movies that of this period of Hitchcock’s That is not as well known is a movie called The Wrong Man. And even the title, you know, you just get it right. I mean, you know, here is someone who is, in fact, he’s been fingered and sort of the efforts of the institutions come, you know, come in. It’s around this time also that Kafka begins to kind of, you know, make his way much more commonly into the American experience. Kafka, obviously a Central European writer from from about 50 years before. But out of this sense of the Kafka esque of Here’s an innocent person, they’re caught up in the gears of this bureaucratic system and everything goes wrong.
Krys Boyd [00:37:28] Did true crime accounts like Truman Capote In Cold Blood lay the groundwork for like 70s and 80s slasher movies?
Jeremy Dauber [00:37:36] You know, I that’s a great question. I think that one of the things that in Cold Blood does and some of these other kind of accounts and it’s interesting that some of the great horror movies, including Psycho The Night of The Hunter from sort of that earlier period, are really based on true crime accounts, although they’re very frequently changed and altered in all sorts of really fundamental ways. But, you know, what you have with these accounts is a sense of randomness, right? A sense of why did they do this? Well, because they were at home. Right. Why why? Why was the family killed in cold blood? Because for no really good reason. What’s interesting about a lot of the slasher movies is that there are very frequently reasons that are given for why the slasher kills these people. Usually it’s because women are sort of imputed to have, you know, sexually sort of liberated behaviors, which is misogynist in its own ways. Right. But this is something that has a kind of cause and effect, even if it’s a vastly disproportionate effect for a cause that isn’t as problematic as the movie makes it out to be. But it’s cheek by jowl. With that, there is this sense of almost individualistic, absurdist view of the universe that I think really, after the Kennedy assassination, really starts ramping up where you say, well, things just happen because they happen.
Krys Boyd [00:38:57] So the only thing scarier than a reason for things to happen and having that reason to be part of your life is is no reason at all.
Jeremy Dauber [00:39:06] I think that’s right. I mean, you know, the leader of the free world was killed by some loser with a rifle for reasons that we will never end up knowing because, you know, you know, he was killed himself before we found out anything. That just seems impossible. And I think that that led to some of this sort of conspiratorial turn, you know, this paranoiac turn in sort of the late 60s, the 70s, because you have people saying, okay, well, that can’t be we need to put meaning into this. The world can’t be that absurd that that could happen. I don’t want to lean too much on just the Kennedy assassination. I don’t think that’s the case. But it’s symptomatic and emblematic of a kind of increasingly powerful ethos that I purchase alongside.
Krys Boyd [00:39:45] Our nuclear fears lingered for a very long time. Can you remind folks who aren’t familiar with the sensation around the TV movie The Day After?
Jeremy Dauber [00:39:57] Yeah, well, as you say, they lingered for a long time and there were points in in, you know, our history that the Cold War heated up. And one of those was this period of the early 1980s, right. With Ronald Reagan in the Oval Office, with Margaret Thatcher, the prime minister. And there was a lot of saber rattling that was going on. And people who were young at that point remember thinking like, is this going to happen? Is it really is there going to be sort of a nuclear attack? And, you know, here there was this television movie called The Day After 1983, which showed the destruction of an American city via a nuclear attack. And, you know, it was it was so terrifying. 50 million people, if I’m recalling the number correctly, watched this this show. And it was just something that really served as a wake up call to the kind of destruction that was present or potentially present in kind of a nuclear exchange that was really a another high watermark of nuclear anxiety.
Krys Boyd [00:40:56] How did the shape of horror stories shift as the 80s gave way to the fears of the 1990s?
Jeremy Dauber [00:41:02] Well, you know, is a great question. One of the things that was really interesting in terms of the shape of the stories was that the horror market had had a bit of a bubble, let’s say, in the 1980s, the genre of horror market, both in film and in fiction. You know, you had a lot of people saying, let’s find the next Stephen King. Let’s pump out a lot of books, you know, like that. And what ended up happening was it kind of, you know, the bubble popped and people said, you know, we don’t want necessarily be associated in quite the same way with that horror thing. We’re going to call it a thriller or suspense, and we’re going to focus on things which are a little bit more a little bit more grounded. And so monsters that might have once been sort of supernatural are sort of given a very good disguise in the forms of people like Hannibal Lecter.
Krys Boyd [00:42:02] In the modern era. We have a lot of scary stories about things that are just seemingly exaggerations of the way conditions exist right now. You mentioned the work of Jordan Peele. I’m thinking of the Hulu series The Handmaid’s Tale, based on Margaret Atwood’s earlier novel. These are, you know, fables of societies gone just a little more wrong than current society.
Jeremy Dauber [00:42:22] I think that’s absolutely right. And you know, this this kind of sometimes it’s called in sort of genre fiction, the if this goes on kind of model. Yeah. Right. What will happen? What will happen to this extent? You know, and it’s a way of sort of suggesting to us that we’re on a road. And one of the great fears of being on these roads is that to mix metaphors slightly, the momentum keeps going and you can’t stop. And that you know, and in that sense, you know, Gilead in the in The Handmaid’s Tale or sort of the the kind of body switching that sort of suggested can get out really are meant to be almost snapshots of a certain kind of seeable future. And you know, the hope is in each of these cases that you know we kind of recognize that and move away from it. So in that sense, they’re trying to warn us. And hopefully these these shocks wake us up to these warnings.
Krys Boyd [00:43:20] Jeremy, do we actually learn anything from horror stories and whatever message they might offer or do they just give us a sense of control knowing that within an hour or two the story will be over and we can feel relatively safe again?
Jeremy Dauber [00:43:35] Well, you know, I think is a great it’s a great way of putting it. I mean, on one level, you know, we may be dismayed by the fact that if it’s a lesson we learn, we feel like we must feel like we need to learn it again and again and again, because I keep going back to it. On the other hand, I do think that there is the capacity of great horror works, and all the ones we’ve been talking about today are great to kind of unsettle us so that even if we don’t come to a definitive conclusion or a definitive learning or a definitive change, right. We are sort of a little bit kicked off of our our comfortable perch by them. And that stays with us lingering even as we kind of go about our day and that maybe that will allow us to pause. And like all great kind of literature and work, kind of look at the world at least a little bit differently or a little bit more thoughtfully.
Krys Boyd [00:44:27] Jeremy Dauber is professor of Jewish literature and of American Studies at Columbia University. His new book is called “American Scary: A History of Horror from Salem to Stephen King and Beyond.” Jeremy, thank you for making time to talk about all this.
Jeremy Dauber [00:44:41] Thank What a wonderful conversation. Thank you so much.
Krys Boyd [00:44:44] Think is distributed by PRX, the public radio exchange. You can find us on Facebook and Instagram and wherever you get podcasts, just search for KERA Think. Again, I’m Krys Boyd. Thanks for listening. Have a great day.
