Opinion: Why Americans love scary stories — none of them scarier than our own

American history is kind of terrifying: Native American genocide, slavery and witch trials; the Civil War, the Great Depression and Vietnam; AIDS, 9/11 and COVID. As Jeremy Dauber writes at the start of his casually magisterial, endlessly erudite “American Scary,” “You can write America’s history by tracking the stories it tells itself to unsettle its dreams, rouse its anxieties, galvanize its actions.” He then does just that, analyzing nearly 400 years of scary literature, film, comic books, television, video games, urban legends and just about anything else that might haunt you on a sleepless night.
One sign of Dauber’s sense of purpose is that cinema doesn’t even enter the picture until page 135. By then, the author has taken us on a lively tour of Salem-inspired literature, slave narratives (”Slavery was part of the American story from the beginning, and of course, it is a horror story”) and the likes of Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ann Radcliffe (a massive influence on Gothic fiction in America even though she was British) and many of their lesser-known peers. And he’s just getting warmed up.
Marching through the centuries, Dauber nimbly matches real-life calamities with fictional horrors. But he never loses sight of the imagination, that essential ingredient of stories about frightful phenomena both classical (vampires, werewolves) and modern (nuclear annihilation, the internet).
This is a book that could launch a thousand reading lists and syllabi. But Dauber, who has also written histories of comic books and Jewish humor, never strangles the fun out of fear.
He’s the best kind of cultural historian, one who does an epic amount of research to make the big picture accessible. We see this in both the byways he chooses to travel and the wit and language he uses to describe them.
Take, for example, his account of the 1952 EC Comics story “ ’Taint the Meat … It’s the Humanity!” about a butcher who rakes in profits by selling rotten meat that ends up killing his own kid along with his customers. His wife finds out and takes matters into her own hands. “Actually,” Dauber writes, “she takes the butcher’s cleaver into those hands, chops her husband up into little tiny pieces, and stocks those pieces in the meat display case for our distress-slash-delectation.”
Dauber sees American horror as falling into two categories that sometimes overlap. One is “the fear of something grand, something cosmic” — an enraged God or maybe a creature conjured by the macabre master H.P. Lovecraft. The other — or Other — is the perceived “monster located right next door. … Indigenous tribes. Black people. Immigrants. And always, always women: witches and sirens, painted as emasculators in so many different stripes. All reminding the audience of the ugly monster that lies within themselves, from the monstrous double of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘William Wilson’ to Penn Badgley’s Netflix serial killer series, titled, simply, ‘You.’ Not to be confused with Jordan Peele’s 2019 meditation on the horror double, called ‘Us.’ ”
Dauber, a professor of Yiddish language, literature and culture at Columbia University, isn’t just whipping out handy references when they serve him. He connects the dots and drills into themes that run through not merely American horror but also American culture writ large.
Horror, more than most genres, captures societal anxieties and converts them into entertainment. As Nazism made inroads both abroad and at home in the 1930s and ’40s, the werewolf served as a symbol of “seemingly innocuous people, civilized, friendly, turning into homicidal beasts.” Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” about a housewife going mad as her physician husband looks on condescendingly, speaks across the 20th century to “The Stepford Wives,” Ira Levin’s 1972 novel (and the basis of movies in 1975 and 2004) in which a Connecticut suburb’s independent-minded women are turned into compliant drones.
“American Scary” is laden with such “Aha!” moments, and though it seems to define its subject broadly, it’s possible that we have come to define it too narrowly. American horror truly is everywhere. It was on our cellphone screens as we stared at the murder of George Floyd in 2020 and on our TV screens as we witnessed the carnage of Vietnam in the 1960s and ’70s. All that bad karma has to go somewhere.
Such ideas have been explored by other capable writers, including Robin Wood and Carol J. Glover (both of whom are cited in “American Scary”). But I’m not sure whether anyone has approached the task with Dauber’s combination of thoroughness, lucidity and wit.
Many pop culture books amount to deathly dull fan service. Some are enlightening but narrow. And a few are expansive and revelatory. “American Scary” lands, resoundingly, in that last category.
My advance copy, well-traveled and tenaciously thumbed through and underlined, looks as if a knife-wielding psycho or razor-fanged beast had its way with it. It’s even partially dismembered: The front cover came off due to excessive use and is now being used as a bookmark. I could be accused of this violence, but I would face my accusers with a wicked grin.
Speaking of “Wicked,” the hit musical that is the fourth-longest-running Broadway show of all time (and a potential big-screen blockbuster come November), gets its due here. So do “The Blair Witch Project,” “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “The Last of Us” and, of course, the ever-looming colossus of American horror, Stephen King — whose own book about the history of his genre, “Danse Macabre,” was published in 1981.
A lot of horrible things have happened since then, in fiction and in reality. As Dauber so deftly explains, the line between the two realms can be frighteningly fine.
Chris Vognar is a freelance culture writer.