I Was a Cold War Monster: Horror Films, Eroticism, and the Cold War Imagination

by Cynthia Hendershot

Horror films provide a guide to many of the sociological fears of the Cold War era. In an age when warning audiences of impending death was the order of the day for popular nonfiction, horror films provided an area where this fear could be lived out to its ghastly conclusion. Because enemies and potential situations of fear lurked everywhere, within the home, the government, the family, and the very self, horror films could speak to the invasive fears of the cold war era. I Was a Cold War Monster examines cold war anxieties as they were reflected in British and American films from the fifties through the early sixties. This study examines how cold war horror films combined anxiety over social change with the erotic in such films as Psycho , The Tingler , The Horror of Dracula , and House of Wax .

Genres: Film, Horror

162 pages, Paperback

First published June 15, 2001

Reviews

[Jonas · Rating 2 out of 5]

Connects 50s horror movies with the erotic, as theorized by French Psychoanalytic Marxist Bataille. He argues that one reason eroticism troubles contemporary society is because capitalism is predicated on acquisition and eroticism is based on expenditure. Many 50s horror films engage this erotic.