Review by Choice Review
Skal chronicles the marginal aspects of the horror genre in this fascinating, entertaining, and sanguinary history, which touches film, literary, and other cultural manifestations of the genre. Eschewing the typical skeletal outline of the genre, Skal dissects the 20th-century cultural phenomenon of horror by playing with the rotted psyches and repressed flesh of things Horatio never dreamt of. One almost gets the sense, however, that the writer of the first and last chapters was not the same man. In the latter section of the book, his ludic treatment of horror changes to an intense, preachy analysis, with an odd narrative digression regarding one woman's conversion into a vampire. Skal ushers readers into old and new freak shows, shining brilliant lights on the seemingly trivial aspects of our society, and turning over rocks and bones to expose wild, hypnotic, and compelling correlations. The work unearths the personal histories of real but peculiar Hollywood characters like Tod Browning and Bela Lugosi and paints a grand surreal mural that would make Bosch or Francis Bacon proud. An essential and splendid book for students, intellectuals, and other monsters at any academic level. T. Lindvall; Regent University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Skal follows his exceptional tracing of Dracula on stage and screen, Hollywood Gothic [BKL O 1 90], with a chronicle of the horror genre in twentieth-century American popular culture that, although hardly as well done, is just as much fun. Skal calls his effort a "cultural history" because he strives to relate thematic trends in horror to currents in both high and normative cultures. For instance, the first U.S. sound-movie horror hits (Dracula, Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) are seen as mass-market reflections of, from high culture, surrealism, and from the newspapers (so to speak), popular notions of the Freudian conception of the unconscious mind. Skal presses none of his theories too hard (none are original, anyway), instead tossing them in as clever, plausible mortar between the shiny, hyperbolic bricks of movie production trivia and minibiography (of such major figures as Tod Browning, the ex-carnival performer who directed first Lon Chaney's hit silents then Dracula and Freaks) that are the bulk of the text. Besides the movies, Skal covers 1950s horror comics, Stephen King, Michael Jackson's music videos, and Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho. ~--Ray Olson
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This entertaining survey mixes behind-the-scenes Hollywood anecdotes with intriguing social analysis. Skal ( Hollywood Gothic ) considers the archetypes depicted in Dracula , Frankenstein , Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Tod Browning's Freaks as responses to the Great Depression that contained metaphors of class warfare. Scientific sadism in films of the 1940s drew on partial knowledge of the Third Reich, he argues, while movie monsters of the '50s personified Bomb-bred mutants or Cold War brainwashers. Skal links 1960s films' anxiety about sex and reproduction to the introduction of the Pill and Thalidomide, and suggests that horror flicks of the '70s and '80s show signs of the post-traumatic stress syndrome suffered by many Vietnam veterans. Though he analyzes Stephen King's novels, Michael Jackson's ``Thriller'' video and Famous Monsters magazine, his book might have been richer had he delved into more non-Hollywood aspects of pop culture, such as heavy metal music. Illustrations not seen by PW. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Skal, author of a terrific history of the Dracula subgenre, Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of ``Dracula'' from Novel to Stage to Screen ( LJ 9/15/90), offers an incisive analysis of the (mostly) American horror film. He demonstrates how historical, social, and political factors influenced (and were influenced by) Hollywood's production of this changing but almost always popular genre. Skal ventures from Tod Browning's ``mutilation allegories'' of the post-World War I 1920s, to the early archetypes of the 1930s (Dracula, Frankenstein, and the one-of-a-kind movie Freaks ), to the mid-1950s, and on to the AIDS metaphors in today's sex-and-splatter films. Skal also includes fresh production information and trivia. The Monster Show is much better than Walter Kendrick's recent The Thrill of Fear (Grove Pr., 1991), which deals more with literature than film. This sharply written, thoroughly researched, and unflaggingly compelling book is the best ``serious'' nonsurvey of the genre to date. For all cinema collections.-- David Bartholomew, NYPL (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Frightfully well-done survey of modern horror, eclipsing Stephen King's seminal Danse Macabre (1981) for clarity of writing, if not personableness or depth of idea, and Walter Kendrick's The Thrill of Fear (1991) for cultural savvy. Where Kendrick found horror literature, film, etc., to be primarily a way of coping with fear of death, Skal (Hollywood Gothic, 1991, etc.) stands with King in discerning within the genre responses to myriad contemporary social ills, from economic stagnation to AIDS. Skal opens with a striking symbol of the symbiosis of horror and societal unease: Diane Arbus, photographer of outcasts and misfits, sitting in a darkened Manhattan theater in 1961 watching a rare screening of Tod Browning's notorious horror masterpiece, Freaks. A rundown of Browning's life and of the nearly parallel career of Bram Stoker's Dracula and its many offshoots follows (some of the Dracula material is cribbed from Hollywood Gothic), culminating in the watershed year 1931, when Dracula, Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Freaks burst onto the screen, defining American horror (like King and unlike Kendrick, Skal avoids extensive discussion of premodern horror). While Skal's text is intensely (sometimes forcibly) idea-driven (he finds the 1931 films, for instance, revolving ``around fantasies of `alternative' forms of reproduction,'' responses to the ``dust bowl sterility and economic emasculation'' of the time), he never forgets that horror is foremost a mass entertainment, and he enlivens his narrative with a wealth of enjoyable anecdote and fact (e.g., that Bela Lugosi, who spoke almost no English, learned his lines phonetically) as he covers every aspect of contemporary horror--from EC comic books, Aurora plastic models, and Stephen King to oddball TV horror hosts and the impact of latex makeup. Skal's love and respect for the genre shine through this impeccably researched, lively chronicle: a top-drawer choice for horror fans. (One hundred illustrations--not seen.)
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Review by Choice Review
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
