Americans can’t look away from horror stories, whether it’s slasher films on the big screen, true crime on the TV screen, or viral videos on the small screens of our phones. And in a lot of ways, as the historian Jeremy Dauber argues, American history is one horror story after another—from the terror the Puritans felt and wrought in the dark of New England, through the atrocities of Native American genocide and enslavement, down to modern fears of nuclear war. Dauber’s new book, American Scary: A History of Horror, from Salem to Stephen King and Beyond, plumbs the depths of the nation’s past to draw unexpected parallels between contemporary terrors and older ones, whether Frankenstein’s connection to Black history or Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s veiled xenophobia. Dauber, a professor of Jewish literature and American studies at Columbia University, joins the podcast to talk about old standbys, forgotten gems, and new classics of the horror genre.
Go beyond the episode:
- Jeremy Dauber’s American Scary: A History of Horror, from Salem to Stephen King and Beyond
- Read Charles W. Chestnutt’s story about a white master’s worst fear, “Mars Jeems’s Nightmare,” from the collection The Conjure Woman (1899)
- Watch The Night of the Hunter (1955), Charles Laughton’s only feature and arguably the most American horror film
- Read Alice Sheldon’s story “The Screwfly Solution,” first published under the pseudonym Raccoona Sheldon in 1977
You know we love horror—here are our spookiest episodes: queer horror, vampires, witches, books bound in human skin, haunted houses, wonder doctors, cryptids, magic, ravens
Tune in every (other) week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek and sponsored by the Phi Beta Kappa Society.
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