A Place of Darkness is about as academic as they come; expect discussion of the “paradigm of monstration” and the ways weird films “provided a counternarrative to the emerging American rationalist epistemology.” But the book’s central arguments make for great reading, as Phillips lays out the ways that proto-horror movies contained distinct and disparate rhythms (suspense, surprise, superstition), how the need for legitimacy led to literary adaptation as a horror standard, how movies developed alongside audiences to bring new immediacy to onscreen dread, and how shifting visions of the Other forced movies to constantly renegotiate what, exactly, people were meant to be afraid of.
Film is a telling lens for cultural history, whether you’re turning ‘The Room’ into a Twitter meme or combing through silent films for an academic book about how the horror movie was born.
Phillips draws these elements together under the idea of horror as an exploration of cultural fears within ‘acceptable’ parameters. When “the pressure to create a homogeneous American culture necessitated securing the popular American movie screen for the purpose of indoctrinating immigrants,” the past was an old world fraught with terrors, and the present was a new one full of uncertainty. “Both on the screen and in the discussions surrounding early screen practice, a line of demarcation was drawn between the incredulous, civilized, white American male and the superstitious, uncivilized, gendered, and racialized Other.” (Though this book ends with Dracula and Frankenstein, there’s a straight line to the cultural conversations modern films are having with their own genre histories — look no further than Get Out for a horror movie that tackles this dynamic head-on and radically redraws that line of demarcation.)
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