Excellent collection of essays on the history of the horror film, the aesthetics of horror, and audience reception of the horror film. Many of the essays presented here can be seen as useful companion pieces to Noel Carroll's seminal book The Philosophy of Horror or Paradoxes of the Heart (1990) as they continue to explore the question of horror affect and why people like to be scared by movies. Also of particular interest are two essays which discuss the under-explored silent-era horror film (see below).

"Shadow-Souls and Strange Adventures: Horror and the Supernatural in European Silent Film" by Casper Tybjerg

Tybjerg argues that despite the fact that most histories of the horror film begin their story with the first Hollywood sound horror films, Tod Browning's Dracula and James Whale's Frankenstein (both 1931), while paying only passing attention to such "precursors" as Murnau's Nosferatu (1922), there are a substantial number of European silent films (especially from Germany, but also from Denmark, Sweden and Russia) that should arguably be considered a part of the horror genre proper due to their common features of the supernatural and depictions of nightmarish situations. Tybjerg also usefully explores the relation between "fantastic" literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the development of the horror film in Germany in the 1910s and 1920s which, of course, served as an influence for the "golden age" of the Hollywood sound horror film of the 1930s.

"Before Sound: Universal, Silent Cinema, and the Last of the Horror-Spectaculars" by Ian Conrich.

Conrich performs a service similar to Tybjerg's but this time concentrates on the cycle of "horror-spectaculars" produced by Universal before the advent of sound: The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), The Phantom of the Opera (1925) and The Man Who Laughs (1928). Conrich does not insist that these pre-sound horror films represented a fully developed genre, but rather that the periodization that tends to be inforced using sync sound as the demarcation can efface continuities and create somewhat false divisions. By tracing certain continuities of technical staff, themes, and film style across this divide, he shows that silent and sound horror films have more in common than often asserted.

Noel Carroll is trained as both a philosopher (aesthetics, philosophy of art) and a film scholar. Carroll's book seeks to provide a definition of fictional horror (novels, film, tv shows, etc.) and to explore our emotional and cognitive engagement with horror, or to put it another way, why are we afraid of fictional horror and why do we like it? First, Carroll introduces the term "art-horror" to describe fictional horror and distinguish it from real life horrors. Carroll's definition of "art-horror" is primarily object-based, that a work of art is part of the horror genre if it includes an impure entity which violates cognitive and cultural categories (i.e., a monster) and is threatening. Carroll then explores the "paradox" of the subtitle, which is why are people afraid of fiction? The more general question addressed is how does fiction generate emotions in its audience. This section is the most philosophical as Carroll explores various theories such as the "illusion theory" of fiction and the "pretend theory" of fiction. Carroll also spends considerable time exporing characteristic horror plots and the relation between suspense and horror. The main criticism of the book which many have pointed out is that Carroll's definition of horror is too narrowly circumscribed as it excludes from horror those fictions which present humans as the agents of horror and threat including, for example, a large percentage of the modern horror film (from Psycho to Texas Chainsaw Massacre to Hostel) and also many of the stories by Edgar Allan Poe. This seems wrong both intuitively and categorically. However, I think there are ways to reconcile Carroll's theory with these types of "non-monster" horrors (Carroll even alludes to this possibility himself) and either way Carroll's book is still extremely valuable and useful for anyone studying the horror genre. It is a must read.