Reviews

Recovering 1940s Horror Cinema: Traces of a Lost Decade by Kristopher Woofter, Ian Olney, Mario Degiglio-Bellemare, Louise Fenton, Kier-la Janisse, Rick Trembles, Paul Corupe, Blair Davis, Cory Legassic, Anne Golden, Gary D. Rhodes, Mark Jancovich, Selma Purac, Peter Marra, David Hanley, Dennis R. Perry, Karen Herland

sistermagpie's review

4.0

The accepted narrative about horror movies in the 1940s is that it was just a really bad decade for them, that the war, especially, killed the taste for them. This book doesn't entirely change that view--it's still not a great decade for horror movies outside of Val Lewton. But it is a really interesting collection of essays talking about how it was a decade where there was a lot of genre mixing, so a lot of what were classified as thrillers, for instance, draw on horror. Really, one essay argues, when people look for the seeds of "new horror" in Peeping Tom and Psycho they should be going further back to some of the killer movies of the 40s. There's also a good essay on the nearly forgotten Poverty Row film "Ghost of the Vampire," which goes against the grain in surprising ways, and a great discussion of Rondo Hatton, whose disfigurement due to exposure to mustard gas in WWII made him an actor best known for playing "The Creeper."