All cinema is well documented historically. Horror is no different. But if you're looking to gain some insight into scary movies intellectually and from the gearwork, there are some good choices. I've got 3 up above. David J Skal, a dude who when interviewed (Check out Eli Roth's History of Horror on AMC+, I don't have the streaming service, but I caught the episodes upon their initial run on the cable outlet) looks and sounds like a scholar with an edge. His The Monster Show gives you horror from its inception on the stage (for example, grand guinol) to the earliest silent ones, right up to the last, oh say, quarter of the text, which dances with the modern era. Skal doesn't just look at the flicks, however. He's like a librarian in the stacks of the Rue Morgue, giving you the cultural effects of the macabre, how society can be a bit of a Monster Show itself.
When you're prepared to truly turn the corner from the radioactive monsters and Edgar Allan Poe adaptations of the 50's and 60's, Jason Zinoman's Shock Value shows you where the curtain drew back and real life and humanity's harsher elements made their way into the movies. Introducing you to the life stories of George A. Romero, Wes Craven, John Carpenter, Dan O'Bannon, Brian DePalma, and others, you understand the origins of "new horror" and why they were so controversial.
If you want to really zone in, Joseph Lanza's Texas Chainsaw Massacre: a cultural history is a tome that gives you a keen back and forth of how insane the 70's were, and how the worldview of politics and society and this low budget lightning in a bottle informed each other. (You'll learn a lesson, though. We are right back where we started from. It's all cyclical)
I'm hoping Zinoman's book is where the true scholastic evaluation of horror's development stops its documentation. I don't want to know where the mindset is for some of the folks behind movies that really don't seem to care that they not only passed the edge about 20 mile markers back, they fucking drove over it and set it on fire.
Lastly, the companion piece to the BBC series of the same name, Clive Barker's A-Z of Horror give you an artistic view of the macabre using the alphabet as a clever guide. Filled with glossy photos both gruesome and beautiful, this book covers the total history of horror, in a fashion merging Skal and Zinoman's books with the technique of a visual guide. Side note: I've met a couple of people who've met Mr. Barker personally, and swear he's the nicest guy ever. Such horror has come from the mind of the man Stephen King once beamed about; "I've seen the future of horror, and its name is Clive Barker"; it is hard to believe dude is a total sweetheart.
Speaking of Mr. King:
From 6th grade on, I would borrow my sister's Stephen King books frequently. I was caught a little off guard when I read Danse Macabre. This was not one of the Maine Master's stories of frightful occurrences, this was an evaluation of the art of horror, from the page to the screen. It was where I was tipped off to the knowledge of the existence of maestro George A. Romero, and the new (at the time) southern gothic slow burn novel, Anne Rivers Siddons The House Next Door. It seems Mr. King has always read as much as he wrote, and how that's possible, I'll never know. But I'm glad he has time to do both.
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