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

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 roder of the day for popular non-fiction, horror films provided an area where this fear could be lived out to its horrible conclusion. Because enemies and potential situations of horror lurked everywhere, within the home, the government, the family, and the very self, horror films could speak adequately to the invasive fears of the Cold-War era. This study examines Cold-War anxieties as they were reflected in British and American films from the 1950s through the the early 1960s. It 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"".