Even as the great Werner Herzog reimagined NOSFERATU in 1979 and deepened the tragic isolation of Dracula, his vision was fast becoming an anachronism. That same year the film ALIEN spoke to a new kind of visceral horror that was rising to ascendancy as the tragic monster would finally give way to chest-bursting gore. A year before, George Romero’s DAWN OF THE DEAD had turned monsters inside out. In lurid colors, the enigmatic zombie once controlled by Bela Lugosi in WHITE ZOMBIE became an intestine-eating killer, breaking through walls to get at their victims. There was no mystery here, no eerie pleasure to be gleaned from shadows, no creeping dread. The monster newly became a force of nature without meaning, empty of metaphor. We now sublimated our anxiety for giddy delight in torture.

Films like John Carpenter’s 1982 THE THING attempted to merge the classic creature feature with gore and blood, but the focus was still on all the terrible things that could happen to the human body. As Famous Monsters of Filmland passed the horror movie magazine torch to Fangoria, pop culture embraced body horror and explicit violence, putting Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Mummy back in their respective graves. Scholar Peter Bebergal will explore how in the late 1970s, the beloved monster of the creature features lost ground to the horrors of exploding heads and summer camp killers, and discuss possible reasons why.