Dark Romance

A vampire leans toward a willing woman, his elongated canine teeth visible to the cinema audience. That image opens this study of how horror films mix desire and dread. Viewers keep watching, the author argues, the way a captive heroine stops resisting, anxious about what they might miss if they look away.

The book traces this tradition from the silent period to the present day. It covers recurring motifs such as vampires, the beauty-and-the-beast pairing, the abuse of women on screen, and slasher films, along with other patterns in the genre. Because horror has rarely faced censorship, the author suggests its films reveal a great deal about the people who make and watch them.

Several chapters focus on individual figures, including director Alfred Hitchcock and actress Barbara Steele. The result is an accessible yet probing account of the sexual anxieties that horror cinema reflects and works through.