AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
What truly scares you? Is it the dark symphony of the night?
(SOUNDBITE OF WOLF HOWLING)
RASCOE: Or maybe that ancient, fanged vampire who conducts their song?
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "DRACULA")
BELA LUGOSI: (As Dracula) Listen to them. Children of the night.
RASCOE: Perhaps your fear is closer to home, like a psycho.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "PSYCHO")
JANET LEIGH: (As Marion Crane, screaming).
RASCOE: Or is it the devil that's seemingly behind it all?
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE EXORCISM OF EMILY ROSE")
JENNIFER CARPENTER: (As Emily Rose) And I am Lucifer, the devil in the flesh.
RASCOE: Whatever scares you this spooky season, author Jeremy Dauber says it's all a part of a long, American tradition.
JEREMY DAUBER: One of the things I love doing as kind of a cultural historian is saying, what is it that we can learn from our popular culture about who we are as a country? And horror is really - you know, it just gets under our skin. It gets into our soul and brings all of that out into the light.
RASCOE: I spoke to him recently about his new book, "American Scary: A History Of Horror, From Salem To Stephen King And Beyond." He says the American horror tradition started even before there was an America, with early English settlers and their suspicions that led to the Salem witch trials.
DAUBER: You have these puritans. They're coming over from England. They're bringing that past with them. They're bringing sort of their baggage, so to speak, with them. One of the big buckets of sort of American and universal fear, which is the horror beyond, right? They're very religious people. They're people of faith. They think, OK, this world is a small bridge between, you know, possibly eternal damnation or salvation.
But the other big bucket is what I call the monster next door. This idea that people next to us - marginalized people, women, people of color - they can be terrors to some of these white patriarchs as well. And what you have, then, is that combines very neatly in that witchcraft hysteria.
RASCOE: Well, you bring in some works that readers probably would never consider horror, like the narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass. I mean, clearly, slavery is horrifying. Can you delve a bit into how slavery and the Civil War helped to make up this whole early generation of horror?
DAUBER: Now, I think one of the things that happens is that part of the effort to build up support for the Union side was to present to their, you know, fellow Americans slavery as the horror that it was, to make sure that everybody would sort of get on the side and be willing to sacrifice to overthrow this institution. And so you have individuals who are able to tell those stories as horror stories.
One of the most interesting stories to me - it was a true story of an escaped slave named Box Brown, or that was what he was called. Because he literally escapes by putting himself into a box and kind of going up North that way. And the point that I make about connections, like you're saying, Ayesha, is that it's so similar to all these stories of the time of premature burial, and what have you, that Edgar Allen Poe is making famous.
RASCOE: Those were the stories that were coming from the North from the Union side. What about the South? What are some of the types of stories that came out of that?
DAUBER: Of course, they viewed this in a very different way. Fear goes in all sorts of direction, even ways that we may now find quite morally opprobrious. And one of the fears that sort of animated the South was this idea of an enslaved person's insurrection. The idea that, you know, you have these individuals there in your household, in some cases. They're right next to you. They're your neighbors. And because you're doing these terrible things to them, right? - the South wouldn't have thought of it that way, maybe - but they are going to rise up and murder you in your sleep.
RASCOE: How did we get from the witch trials...
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE CRUCIBLE")
PAUL SCOFIELD: (As Judge Danforth) You have all been found guilty of witchcraft and consorting with the devil.
RASCOE: ...And Frankenstein...
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "FRANKENSTEIN")
COLIN CLIVE: (As Victor Frankenstein) He's alive.
RASCOE: ...To Stephen King...
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "IT")
BILL SKARSGARD: (As Pennywise) You fl...
RASCOE: ...And Freddy Krueger?
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 3: DREAM WARRIORS ")
ROBERT ENGLUND: (As Freddy Krueger) Welcome to prime time.
PENELOPE SUDROW: (As Jennifer Caulfield, screaming).
DAUBER: Well, one thing that I love about, you know, the continuity that you're emphasizing is the way in which some of our monstrous figures - they're the same kind of thing, right? But they changed shape over the generations and the century. So, for example, we have witches in the 1690s, and we have witches in the 1990s, right? But the witches of Salem and the witches of "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" are not quite the same witches.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) Tell about the spell you performed.
ALYSON HANNIGAN: (As Willow Rosenberg) Oh, OK, first of all, so scary. And this giant snake came out of my mouth, and there was all this energy crackling, and this pack of demons interrupted, but I totally kept it together. And then next thing, you know? Buffy.
DAUBER: In a similar way, it was very interesting for me to watch the first sort of big zombie movie in America, which comes out of the 1930s, and realize that, as a great depression-era movie, it's really about class.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "WHITE ZOMBIE")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) Zombies?
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #3: (As character) Yes.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) Behind my service.
DAUBER: You know, you have these sort of living dead or undead, you know, working the factories, essentially, you know, forever and ever and ever, right? And that's a real nightmare of class. Fair to say that "Night Of The Living Dead" or "The Walking Dead"...
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "WALKING DEAD")
ANDREW LINCOLN: (As Rick Grimes) This isn't a democracy anymore.
DAUBER: ...Those aren't really its preoccupations.
RASCOE: Women were big readers and writers of early horror, but then later on, like in the '70s, male teenagers, you really get into this, like, slasher. How did that happen?
DAUBER: If we're talking about a period of the slasher kind of reigning supreme in some way - right? - that '80s period, very big. And I think this gets to, you know, an interesting thing about the 1980s, which was a period that was marked by sort of the Reagan kind of moral majority era and the AIDs crisis. Is this idea that sex is scary - something that a teenage boy finds very scary at times. We have all these slashers who are punishing people - mostly women, quite frankly - but punishing people who are sexually active.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "FRIDAY THE 13TH")
BETSY PALMER: (As Mrs. Voorhees) Did you know that a young boy drowned the year before those two others were killed? The counselors weren't paying any attention. They were making love while that young boy drowned. His name was Jason.
DAUBER: And I think that that was a way of sort of dealing and thinking about those fears without actually, you know, expressing them so explicitly. You could say, oh, it's just about a summer camp, you know, in which things go horribly wrong, and this person is targeting teenagers in the "Friday The 13th" movies. But, you know, it's about something underneath that.
RASCOE: We talked about the spiritual horror of the past. What are those fears that you think are driving horror these days?
DAUBER: There's so many different kinds, but I think I'll really focus on two of them. One is this way in which we live so much of our lives virtually. A movie like "We're All Going To The World's Fair" really shows the kind of terrifying and absorbing and almost suffocating nature of that kind of ability to lose your own identity.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "WE'RE ALL GOING TO THE WORLD'S FAIR")
ANNA COBB: (As Casey) I swear someday soon, I am just going to disappear.
DAUBER: The other is this kind of, you know, monster next door question, where, you know, we're in a period of time where maybe people don't trust each other or their neighbor or other people quite as much as they used to. Social media may have something to do with that. And as a result, it's not surprising that movies like "Barbarian" or "Civil War"...
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "CIVIL WAR")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #4: (As journalist) We're American, OK.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #5: (As militia man) OK. What kind of American are you?
DAUBER: ...Are really kind of bringing up this idea or sort of the new Netflix show, "Monsters," - right? - which is about true crime, right? Saying, OK, you know, you scratch sort of this seemingly idyllic environment, and underneath there are terrors.
RASCOE: I mean, you make a great argument for how essential horror is to our collective story as Americans. But do you think that the genre gets the respect that it deserves?
DAUBER: I think increasingly it's beginning to. I think that's right. And I think that that usage that we all use of the word genre is kind of an interesting question too. Because for a long time, we didn't have these divisions. We're talking about people like Henry James and Edith Wharton, right, and Daniel Hawthorne. And people would not have said, oh, I'm looking at them as horror writers, of course. But they certainly were in that haunted house. Part of what I'm hoping to do is not only give horror more respect, which I think it certainly deserves, but also sort of show that long story.
RASCOE: That's Jeremy Dauber. His new book is "American Scary." Thanks for talking with me, Jeremy, and happy Halloween.
DAUBER: Thank you, and to you too. Happy Halloween.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THE DEAD DON'T DIE")
STURGILL SIMPSON: (Singing) Oh, the dead don't die anymore than you or I. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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