The Saw Is Family: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the Meaning of Murder

This week, horror fans and old goths like me around the world mourn the passing of Tobe Hooper, who died on Saturday at the age of 74, barely a month-and-a-half after we lost George A. Romero. Few directors get to redefine a genre, but Romero and Hooper both achieved this with Night of the Living…

More Weird Tales from the Vault of Fear: The EC Legacy

This is an expanded and up-dated version of a paper originally presented at Watching the Media, a symposium on censorship and culture held at Edge Hill University in 2011. Before Elvis there were EC comics. In the history of horror and censorship, EC comics are a legend: cool, cult objects from the shady, esoteric side…

Weird Tales from the Vault of Fear: The EC Comics Controversy and its Legacy

Before Elvis, there were EC comics. In 1944, American publisher Max Gaines established ‘Educational Comics,’ with a view to selling ‘Picture Stories’ from the Bible, history and science to schools and churches.  The pulp magazines that had inspired comics were merging with paperback novels and passing away, and this separation of popular literature from sequentially…