"Rich with excellent illustrations and clever anecdotes, this book will appeal to fans of horror as well as film students and scholars interested in a readable overview of the history of the genre."-Rebecca Bell-Metereau, Author Of Hollywood Androgyny<BR><BR>"A breathtaking panorama, written with wit and candor, showing how the horror film has shaped cinema from the origins of the genre until now."-Tom Conley, Harvard University<BR><BR>Ever since horror leapt from popular fiction to the silver screen in the late 1890Æs, viewers have experienced fear and pleasure in exquisite combination. Wheeler Winston Dixon's A History of Horror is the only book to offer a comprehensive survey of this ever-popular film genre. Arranged by decades, with outliers and franchise films overlapping some years, this one-stop sourcebook unearths the historical origins of characters such as Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Wolfman and their various incarnations in film from the silent era to comedic sequels. A History of Horror explores how the horror film fits into the. Hollywood studio system and how its enormous success in American and European culture expanded globally over time. Dixon examines key periods in the horror filmùin which the basic precepts of the genre were established, then burnished into conveniently reliable and malleable forms, and then, after collapsing into parody, rose again and again to create new levels of intensity and menace. A History of Horror, supported by rare stills from classic films, brings more than fifty timeless horror films into frightfully clear focus, zooms in on today's top horror Web sites, and champions the stars, directors, and subgenres that make the horror film so exciting and popular with contemporary audiences.