The Brooklyn Rail

W. Scott Poole’s latest book is ostensibly an exploration into how the horror genre can sometimes serve as a critique of US imperialism. For Poole, tracing the growth of American horror (primarily on film) helps elucidate the many ways American global expansionism (military and market-based), fear of the other/racism, has created a culture that is both driven and distracted by violence. In a wide-ranging survey that touches on Rod Serling’s “Twilight Zone” and EC Comics, strange touring carnivals and Vietnam, apocalyptic Christianity and “Call of Duty,” there is much here for both history buff and horror/Sci-Fi fan. As Poole states in his preface, “There lives, somewhere in our psyches where it has crouched on its haunches since the earliest human experience, a yearning for the taboo and the terrible.” Using Ray Bradbury’s phrase “dark carnival” throughout to refer to both media productions and the military-Capitalism that structures American lives, Poole claims that while we may want our “dark carnivals” to be places to visit “desired only because we can leave”—we are trapped, “denizen(s) of the dark carnival.”

Poole’s claim is as troubling as it is complex. He suggests that by being American, we are already part of the problem. In Poole’s America, “horror is the lingua franca. Horror defined the American century…provided the legitimacy, the justifications (for) American empire.” But he also positions horror as a form of media (film, television) as attempting to shake “us out of our sleep,” suggesting that specific films provide a critique that shows the American empire as it truly is. Of course, much of the history that Poole explores over more than three hundred pages is well-known to most of us who pay attention (and I’m using words like “us” and “we” as a response to Poole’s use). That Poole disagrees with me is apparent in his visiting and revisiting discussions of Iran-Contra, Vietnam (which carries a particular weight in his text), US invasions and/or policies in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Haiti, the Middle East, and so on. I imagine that, as a fellow historian, Poole and I would have very energetic conversations—particularly around the suggestion that it’s through horror that Americans can find critique of Empire or his assertion that “it’s only been in the last few years that some of the basic tenets of American exceptionalism have been questioned.” Clearly, Poole and I know different people. But all of that aside, what drew me to this book and what I really want to focus on is the way he writes about the history of horror and sci-fi media—it’s in these passages where he really excels and really holds my interest.

Poole starts with an interesting premise: there are two films that can serve to represent different modes of horror and also different ways of shaping American experience. Presenting this frame in his chapter “The Shark and the Chain Saw,” the suggestion is that Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) presents a “revisionist Western” that is a shockingly realistic depiction of America’s violence—in the world and against its own people. In contrast, Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) presents a more comfortable framework that allows its audience to rest in the assurance that a white male American hero can save us from the monster that comes out of the deep. Once the monster is dead, life returns to normal. For Poole, these two types of horror are directly linked with the way Americans experience our reality: “The horror emerges and then subsides…the shark attacks but a hero blows it to chum.” As an aside, Jaws doesn’t have a happy ending for everyone and, like many genre films, a gorgeous blonde woman has to end up a mutilated corpse. While Poole slides over most discussions of the genre’s reflection/inspiration of American misogyny, his writing on Spielberg and Hooper is his strongest in the book.

Using a discussion of Spielberg, Hooper, and Poltergeist (1982) as a starting point, Poole launches into a discussion of the overused genre trope of the Native American burial ground. This becomes a place for Poole to reference the genocide of Native people and how this genocide is foundational to American violence—both in our government’s military expansionism and the stories white America tells. Films as disparate as The Amityville Horror (1979), The Shining (1980), Pet Sematary (1989), and the Poltergeist series (1982–1999) “all deal in various ways with the idea that, as the famous line from Pet Sematary has it, ‘the sour ground’ became a place of darkness because of its history.”

Poole covers a great deal of ground both in US history (1600s to the present day) and the history of horror and Sci-Fi, and it’s easy to get lost or confused in entire sections that do deep dives into Vietnam, Manson, Nixon, and so on without any connection to the media the text is purportedly about. And while it’s useful to know that SFX master Tom Savini (Dawn of the Dead, Friday the 13th, etc.) was heavily influenced by his service as a combat photographer in Vietnam, just as it’s interesting to learn that George A. Romero’s zombies possibly reflect his own experiences in Vietnam, the expansive coverage of America’s ongoing wars of Empire failed to hold my attention. Maybe other readers don’t already know how our country exports home-grown violence abroad and has done for generations. But again, I was more interested in sections like his writing on Haiti and white America’s obsession with racist constructs and “voodoo” that shows up in White Zombie (1932), Angel Heart (1987), The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988) to name a few. Poole’s at his best when he scales back on the history and focuses on film and how that history and attitudes show up in and are influenced by the media.

The writing on Ray Bradbury and Rod Serling (who confusingly shows up in more than one section) is compelling but the forays into Heinlein (an easy target) and connections between ultra-conservative writers and Reagan have been done before. In contrast, the section “Elm Street” reads as more aligned with his broader goal. In his analysis, Poole suggests that perhaps some of the appeal of the first installment in the Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) franchise is that “the horror Craven spliced together from moral panic and poverty and a strange footnote to the Vietnam War.” But the franchise films that followed succeeded because their “churlish use of violence and victims, turning them into little more than props for Freddy to slice and dice, fit into a decade remembered as much for its cruelty as for Thriller and John Hughes comedies.” Obviously, Poole and I experienced a very different eighties but his analysis in this section helps me to somewhat better understand a franchise I’ve never found compelling.

While ultimately, this is an interesting read, there is more history and less horror and that’s disappointing. There are weird omissions (writing about Sci-Fi as a vehicle to explore racism without mentioning Star Trek), no mention of America’s obsession with vampires (despite the Lugosi section), and confusing critiques including brief negative sideswipes at X-Files and American Horror Story along with a couple of anti-critical theory comments (even though he does drive-bys of Adorno and Friedan). Poole’s defense of torture-porn horror franchise Hostel doesn’t hold up although his discussion of the Purge series is a space where his connection between American political violence and horror is most legible. While I came away with no deeper understanding of why so many Americans flock to slasher and torture-porn flicks, and I was frustrated by his overall lack of attention to misogyny and gender in horror, Poole does present an interesting question: “does horror ask us to stop thinking or to start?” I’m not sure that he successfully answers that question but he presents an interesting read all the same.