The Horror of War and the Thrill of Horror
THE FIRST WORLD War wasn’t just itself a great horror. In Wasteland, W. Scott Poole makes a compelling case that it launched a great age of horror fiction.
After the armistice of November 1918, a wave of vivid memoirs, plays, novels, and poems tried to grapple with the civilization-shaking event that everyone had just experienced. These gradually gave way to more sanitized recollections, as each nation tried to move on from the conflict. Yet that wartime experience didn’t disappear from the culture, Poole argues. It went underground, feeding a resurgent horror genre, especially in the new medium of film. Movies transmuted the effects of poison gas, flamethrowers, machine guns, and massive artillery barrages into creatures that reminded audiences of their all-too-real confrontations with death and dismemberment. While most of Europe and America tried to turn away from an industrial war’s killing fields,
