Whisper House Press

Writers Cantina is a new writing conference held last and this year in West Valley City, Utah. This afternoon, I joined an audience twenty or so folks at the horror panel (because of course). One of the leadoff questions for the panel as posed by its moderator, Blake Casselman, was to wonder at the seeming resurgence in horror as of the last decade or so. Why is horror back? Why do people want more of it?

I, of course, immediately had a lot to say about this topic, but—as it turns out—I’m not a member of this panel. I eventually realized I actually do have a platform, whether or not anyone is paying attention: this site. So here we are. Let’s dive deep.

For starters: I learned, largely through reading Paperbacks from Hell (Grady Hendrix, 2017), that Horror as a genre in literature has had a lifecycle that included a boom in the late 70s through the 80s and then had a kind of falling off in the 90s. There were plenty of contributing factors, of course, including the increasing cost of paper and a decreased appetite for schlock (or, in more approbatory terms, “pulp”).

In my mind, the end of the Cold War contributed to the shift away from Horror in the 90s. Just as it birthed modern horror with the advent of the Godzilla films (widely known to be a metaphor for the destruction caused by the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki), it may well have fallen with the supposed end of history as the end of the USSR in 1989-1990.

Many (but not all) of our closest calls with nuclear annihilation came during the latter years of the Cold War. A horror film was broadcast during prime time (The Day After, 1983) captured our collective terror about the end coming from above with only a few moments’ (if any) notice. As a culture, we needed to get okay with (or to ignore) the possibility that the entire world could end at any time. We expressed this fear throughout the Cold War in horror films (e.g. Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 1956 then 1978) and books (e.g. On the Beach, 1957; Failsafe, 1964). When relief came at the end of that era, horror had perhaps served its purpose for a while.

And I won’t be the first to say this, but with 9/11—in America at least—brought back for most of us the idea that something bad could happen, on a grand scale, at any moment. Horror was reborn as a way of treating with those fears. This is not the ingenious contribution I wanted to add to the Writers Cantina panel. It was the Cold War stuff I wanted to chat about.

If there were a metric for assessing the unpredictable terrors of the world since 1999 or 2000, where the X-coordinates measure the amount of knowledge we have and the predictability of the world around us, the graph would look like a steep cliff followed by a falloff into an abyss. The instability suffusing the United States has only increased over the last two decades, and our fears are more and more a part of our everyday lives (e.g. covid). So uncertainty has spiked, and along with that, our collective love of horror has spiked along with it. After all, can anyone else remember a June/July movie release window with so many promising horror pictures debuting? It’s a golden age.

What are some of your favorite Cold War horror films? What fears were they exorcizing?