With all or almost all animals, even with birds, Terror causes the body to tremble, The skin becomes pale, sweat breaks out and the hair bristles. The secretions of the alimentary canal and of the kidneys are increased, and they are involuntarily voided.... The breathing is hurried. The heart beats quickly, wildly, and violently; but whether it pumps the blood more efficiently through the body may be doubted, for the surface seems bloodless and the strength of the muscles soon fails.... The mental faculties are much disturbed. Utter prostration soon follows, and even fainting.... I once caught a robin in a room, which fainted so completely, that for a time I thought it dead.

These were the symptoms of terror in 1872, as Charles Darwin described them in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, More than a century later, though the world is vastly different, terror hasn't changed. Birds, cats, dogs, and people, when they are frightened, continue to tremble, break out in cold sweats, and faint dead away. Whatever name you give it-fear, .right, terror, horror-the emotion may vary in intensity but remains in essence the same. You may not understand a syllable of a man's language; his customs may be wholly foreign to you; but when his eyes widen, his mouth hangs open, and his hands uncontrollably shake, you can read fear written all over him. The language seems universal among human beings; it also links us to animals, reminding us of our kinship with them. And we can assume that, ten thousand years ago, our remote ancestors joined us in feeling their hair stand on end when they were afraid. In all ages, nations, and even species, fear is the same.

Darwin speculated that fear's instinctual symptoms evolved, like all other features of life, because they aided survival. Fear was a response to some threat in the environment, especially to the approach of a predator. Standing hairs, for instance-or "the erection of the dermal appendages"-may make a threatened creature look "larger and more terrible to its enemies or rivals." An animal that exhibits such behavior would be more likely to win a mate and to escape being eaten; the trait would then be passed on to later, better-adapted generations. Even an apparently self-defeating maneuver like passing out cold can be accounted for in Darwin's view, because some carnivores will not bite an animal that seems dead already. Animals that play dead-as several species do-avoid real death by faking it.

The Expression of the Emotions is still a primary source for behavioral scientists, who still study the relation between animals' behavior and what they presumably feel. Nowadays, "piloerection" replaces both Darwin's clumsy "erection of the dermal append ages" and the more homely "goose-skin," as he occasionally called fear's characteristic prickle. But the phenomenon endures, and science goes on probing it-to small effect as far as I can sec. Scientists freely admit that though we know fear when we feel it or see its symptoms, we may never be able to measure it precisely ()r mark it off clearly from the spectrum of emotions to which it belongs. Uncertainty grows when we consider the varieties of fear, from mild anxiety to out-and-out terror, for which we also have words. Like "fear" itself, these words do not guarantee the existence of any identifiable condition of body or mind They blend into one another-, one man's frisson may Ix' another man's stark horror or a third man's occasion for belly laughs.

In human beings (whom most find more compelling than robins), the body may do what animals do, but mind is likely to be otherwise engaged. Discussing the erection of the hair, Darwin n case reported to him by Dr. J. Crichton Browne, the head of a large Insane asylum:

For instance it is occasionally necessary to inject morphia under the skin of an insane woman, who dreads the operation extremely, though it causes very little pain; for she believes that poison is being introduced into her system, and that her bones will be softened, and flesh turned into dust. She becomes deadly pale; her limbs are stiffened by a sort of tetanic spasm, and her hair is partially erected on the front of the head.

The symptoms were plainly those of intense fear, which sufficed for Darwin's purposes. He therefore passed over the most human 10 the poor woman's case. She was terrified, just as a cat or a might be, yet her fear had no object or at best a wholly imaginary c one What frightened her was not so much the morphine even the needle as a vision that only she could see, the spectacle body rotting away.

Neither I Darwin nor Dr. Crichton Browne disputed the power of a vision to bring on the symptoms of terror. There was nothing insane about the woman's response; madness lay in the lack of correspondence between her imagination and reality. A couple of centuries earlier, any preacher might have informed the learned gentlemen their inmate was wiser than they. Her mistake was merely to suppose that morphine and needles would do the trick; nothing so drastic, only time, was required. Her bones indeed would soften; her flesh would turn to dust; so would the learned gentlemen's for that matter. They would all die, in whatever way, at whatever moment, inevitably. The preacher might have urged the scientist and the doctor to heed the woman's vision, instead of calling it madness or gauging what it did to her hair. She glimpsed eternal truth; they saw mere phenomena.

It has often been said - though a proper survey remains to be taken - that human beings are the only species who know they must die, who can conjure up the event as if it were happening now and react accordingly. Animals fear death, but the fear seems to come on them only when death immediately threatens. They do not brood upon it, for animals, death is an endemic surprise. Dr. Crichton Browne's madwoman reminds us that human beings can also imagine being dead, a very different thing from death and perhaps a more frightening one. Deprived of soul, spirit, force, whatever you may call it (this fear requires no religion), human flesh is meat, and it goes meat's way. Few seventeenth-century preachers would have balked at summoning up the madwoman's vision in their congregations' minds. Then, as in all prior Christian centuries, the lesson was plain and familiar: Put your faith in flesh and you'll end up feeding worms; put your faith in spirit, subdue the ephemeral flesh, and you'll transcend the grave.

Well into the eighteenth century such lessons went on being preached, but they sharply dwindled after 1750, and I know of no one who preaches in that style now. By 1872, the idea that the flesh will rot seemed as horrifying as ever, to mad and sane alike. The idea, however, had long since lost its religious usefulness; though it could still frighten, it no longer admonished. Indeed, decorum hardly admitted notions of deadness into public discourse. Fond as they were of funerals and all the panoply of mourning, the Victorians exhibited a thoroughly modern squeamishness in regard to the symptoms of being dead. They continued a development that began at the end of the seventeenth century and has not ceased-hiding deadness away, cosmeticizing corpses, denying ever more strenuously that anything nasty happens to the body after death. The gaudy American funeral industry that Evelyn Waugh lampooned in The Loved One (1948) and Jessica Mitford lambasted in The American Way of Death (1963) is only the most grotesque by-product of a long, slow, immensely complex process of deliberate forgetting.

It may seem paradoxical that death itself, especially violent death, has remained immune to the taboo against deadness. In their newspapers, melodramas, and popular fiction, the Victorians exhibited the same fervent interest in the varieties of dying that their Elizabethan and Jacobean ancestors had gratified at bloody stage plays and public executions. We have inherited that interest, and we cultivate it, if possible, with even greater fervor. But our interest fades once the deed is done; what happens to the corpse thereafter belongs in a different zone, a shadowy one, where we, like the Victorians, would prefer not to tread. Those Elizabethans and Jacobeans (and the generations before them) exhibited a very different attitude, one that must strike a modern observer as callous, revolting, utterly incomprehensible, or perhaps all three. Before the eighteenth century, though decay was horrible enough to induce repentance, it was not strange; it did not bring on the peculiarly modern sensation of terror at the very idea of being dead.

The roots of any such large-scale change are impossible to locate with precision. Our recoil from deadness may be just one aspect o1 the overall tidying up that has been going on in Western culture for the last two hundred years. Frequent baths, efficient disposal of garbage and excrement, the banishing from ordinary view of all things that smell bad-these and many other apparently hygienic practices have reached a high degree of thoroughness in the most advanced Western nations, and the sequestering of the dead may merely have moved alongside them. This is probably progress; certainly no one would wish any of it undone. But progress, as Sigmund Freud was fond of pointing out, exacts costs that often work unseen. By the end of the eighteenth century, deadness had entered the realm it still inhabits: Being dead had joined the ranks of what Freud, in a famous 1919 essay, called "The `Uncanny.' "

Freud's point works better in German: Das Unheimliche literally means "the un-home-like" and suits itself well to Freud's definition as "that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar." It may also, however, be something "that ought to have remained secret and hidden but comes to light." As might be expected, Freud proceeds to discover a good deal 01 castration anxiety in the business, along with survivals of primitive beliefs and emotions. With these tried-and-true formulas he manages to answer a number of questions. Yet he never quite smooths out the apparent discrepancy between those two possible meanings of das Unheimliche. Nor does he satisfactorily explain a classic occasion for the feeling, though he cites it more than once: "doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact animate.'

"Since almost all of us still think as savages do on this topic,' says Freud (evidently not including himself in that majority), "it is no matter for surprise that the primitive fear of the dead is still sc strong within us." Perhaps so, but older cultures feared the dead as vengeful spirits, not as rotten, reeking things. And that old fear was grounded in belief; it could be met and mastered by rituals designed for the purpose. Modern fear of deadness gets no solace from worn-out platitudes about heaven and the afterlife. We may believe that we'll end up sitting on clouds, strumming harps; we may cherish some subtler notion of the soul's survival, or none at all. Whatever happens to the soul, it cannot save the body, which will turn to clay and can be seen already moving in that direction before death. Nothing can console this modern fear-which is why, on the whole, we prefer not to discuss the subject.

Yet, of course, we know it well. We can picture what goes on underground, in those gleaming, satin-lined caskets, especially if we've never seen it. Such secret knowledge renders the subject unhome-like in both of Freud's senses: familiar and strange, hidden and blatant, all at once. And the fear it inspires is focused on just the instance of the uncanny that Freud cited without exploring it: the line, if there is one, between being alive and being dead. When the loved one dies and is buried or cremated, we wish that only her ethereal aspect survive-her soul perhaps, her memory certainly. At the same time, we remember that she lingers on in a more material form, even if it's only a handful of dust. And we may well be made uneasy by the mysterious kinship between the human being she once was and the hidden thing some part of her is now. Maybe the difference between being alive and being dead is not so absolute as our wishes would make it. Maybe the dead retain more of life than we care to acknowledge; there may be more of death in life than we can think of without a shudder.

At the end of the twentieth century, these are literally unspeakable matters. We have been born into a late stage of a process, more than two centuries old, that has almost totally removed the aftereffects of death from most Western experience, leaving them to cavort in the imagination. We do not discuss the frailty and ultimate dissolution of our flesh, and when the fact leaps at us, as the AIDS epidemic has made it do, it elicits redoubled horror thanks to the entrenched strength of our denial. Even as we deny that our flesh must decay, however, we surroun ourselves with fictional images of the very fate we strive to hear nothing about They are everywhere: in books, films, and TV, in advertising, in toys and games for all ages, in children's breakfast food. No American child (even one lucky enough to escape Count Chocula) can grow up without learning what a vampire is-an undead creature, uncannily both living and dead, that rises from his coffin in the after-midnight hours to drain our blood and to make us his own. The vampire belongs to a lively crew of ghouls, ghosts, zombies, and man-mad monsters, all of which seem, with their insistent display of what death does, to deny our very denial.

They don't, of course. In the midst of a culture hell-bent o saving no to deadness, vampires and their ilk fit smoothly, as if they had always been there. No contradiction follows from the pitting of fictional ghastliness against a scoured and would-be-immortal real life. There is no debate, and one side does not correct or eve impinge on the other. As in late-twentieth-century American politics, these apparent opposites agree at bottom on practically everything. The tireless repetition of the horrors of being dead has grown into an enormous international industry, which it never would have done if its message were simply "You will die and rot." That might have sufficed for an eighteenth-century preacher, whose audience half believed him; in any case, the audience was a captive one, and the preacher held out salvation as the eventual reward for enduring him. But twentieth-century readers, moviegoers, and TV-watchers, who pay good money for the opportunity to be scared by walking corpses, cannot be so cheaply satisfied. They demand entertainment and somehow the thought they abhor beyond all others has been wrenched into a way of amusing them.

It looks paradoxical at best-psychotic at worst-that one might go from an hour on the Nautilus machines or in an aerobics class, where the body is urged to the acme of aliveness, directly to a screening of Night of the Living Dead, which pits animated corpses against the living and lets the corpses win. If this were the fourteenth century, the spectacle of death's ravages would admonish pride of life. The admonition might go unheeded-people might go on living pridefully, as they evidently did after the plague had claimed a third of Europe-but there would at least be a coherent relation between the two experiences. In the late twentieth century there seems to be none. Pride of life has carried the day; death' s ravages are bearable now only because they have been processed to enhance that pride instead of mortifying it. From Count Chocula and the cutesy rituals of Halloween to the most vomit-provoking splatter film, scary entertainments can entertain only because even as they apparently violate the taboo against showing the aftereffects of death, they transform them into affirmations of the body's impregnability.

Many commentators have expressed surprise, often tinged with outrage, that gut-wrenching scenes of violence are greeted by today's horror-movie audiences with laughter. Viewers imagine with alarm that these audiences-usually composed of less genteel people than the alarmists themselves-would respond to a real scene of carnage in much the same way: Rather than calling 911, such callused folk would guffaw and walk on by. No satisfactory evidence of that behavior has ever been found, but the callus-building effect of exposure to violence on the screen, large or small, seems logical and therefore necessary. The analogy with pornography is exact. In both cases, evidence of a cause-and-effect link is lacking, yet the desire to find one remains so strong that research goes on unstoppably.

In both cases, what the researchers have missed is the simple fact that, at the end of the twentieth century, anyone who sees a film or videotape knows the difference between a picture of a thing and the thing itself. The point seems too elementary to be worth making; it ought to be so. Yet cultural commentators at all levels of sophistication, from the unaccountably august Susan Sontag to the Cincinnatians who sweated in the summer of 1990 over the harm caused by Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs, evidently fret still about the danger that lurks in pictures. In the case of horror and violence, to make a simple equation between the image and the reality is to miss the most characteristic trick of horror entertainment, perhaps the only thing that makes it entertaining. Horror films and stories are fiction and admit it; they revel in being made articles, presenting themselves to an audience that knows the fact well and is ready to play the game on those terms.

The game isn't subtle, though it's easily missed by naive or horrified observers. It simply entails the entertainer's constant endeavor to catch the audience off guard - to show it on film, for example, something so gross or alarming that its experience of horror fiction offers no precedent. The audience, in response, counters each move with a burst of hilarity that says, "You can't fool us." Reality has little to do with the proceedings; what's at stake is fictional experience, most importantly that of other horror filr Today, this cat-and-mouse game has reached such a high degree of sophistication that horror films are among the archest, most so conscious products of contemporary culture. In many cases, tf are little more than technological showpieces, extravagant displays of imitation human bodies getting mauled in ever more outlandish ways. The audiences that applaud such films do honor first of all the special-effects designer, who has brilliantly tried to outwit them - though, of course, he has failed.

In this way, the horror of death and dying is rendered safe; it turned into a celebration of being permanently alive, forever immune to decay. Death and dying are made to provide pleasure not of an intellectual sort or even exactly an emotional one, but t gut thrill of deep breaths, shouts, and half-serious clutches at t viewer in the next seat. Fear of deadness has become a reliable reservoir of muscular innervation that can be tapped at any time without much inventiveness or, it seems, any anxiety that it will ever run dry. The cleverest horror films may offer political commentary, even social criticism, thereby winning the approval of those who would otherwise never glance at a horror movie. But such things are extras; they're far from necessary, and they sometimes threaten to impede horror's fundamental errand-to assure the viewer that his flesh will always remain firm and intact, that for all this display of rot and carnage, there is nothing to fear.

Vampires, zombies, and the like come to us so tightly woven into the fabric of everyday culture that they appear natural and inevitable. Most portrayals present them as unfathomably ancient, mankind's dogged companions since the first days when there was such a group as mankind. In Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), for instance, the king vampire is said to be five hundred years old at least . There must have been vampires before then for him to get that way, but Stoker leaves the matter vague. When Anne Rice, in The Queen of the Damned (1988), felt obliged to reveal the origin of vampires, she set the event in prehistoric Egypt, and even then there is a demon, older than the dunes, who brings it about. Scholars of frightening fictions enjoy imagining that if a contemporary film or novel introduces a vampire, it aligns itself with a tradition so old we might as well call it human nature. Throughout history, the comforting story runs, people have loved to sit around the flickering fire, chilling one another's blood with tales of monsters and the vengeful dead.

The scenario is certainly plausible. As everyone knows and Darwin documented, human fear acts much like fear in animals. Animals don't, so far as we know, tell each other scary stories, but then human beings are gifted with imagination, and they probably always used it much as we do now. Anthropologists have gathered plenty of ancient myths, from cultures all over the world, that make an anthropologist's hair stand up and seem to have the same effect on those who believe them. Classic Western literature, from Homer to Shakespeare, is studded all over with episodes of horror. They are only episodes-the first full-fledged horror stories seem to have appeared only in the nineteenth century-but the impulse must have been present long before, though somehow its realization got delayed.

Modern horror stories are often set in the distant past, a more credulous, differently haunted age. Even when the setting is contemporary, as Stoker's and Rice's are, the horror usually comes from long ago and far away. The first English vampire story, John Polidori's "The Vampyre," appeared as late as 1819, but there is evidence of a much older tradition of belief in undead bloodsuckers. In his introduction, Polidori attached "The Vampyre" to that venerable line: "The superstition upon which this tale is founded is very general in the East. Among the Arabians it appears to be common; it did not, however, extend itself to the Greeks until after the establishment of Christianity," and so on, a weighty pedigree for a pretty slight piece of work. A typical Westerner, Polidori seemed to think that Arabs in 1819 were more ancient than medieval Christians; his own research apparently extended no further than a 1732 issue of the London Journal, which reported a case of vampirism in Hungary.

Whatever its literary merits. "The Vampyre" came into the world as a thoroughly up-to-date, commercial article ca. 1819. It was published in The New Monthly Magazine, which had been founded only five years before, on of the many British periodicals born in the first decades of the nineteenth century. The New Monthly aimed to please upper-middle-class readers with literary tastes-a class that, until quite recently, hadn't existed in sufficient numbers t make such enterprises profitable. And Polidori's tale looked little different from the run of magazine short fiction: The vampire gin gimmick was new, but the gloom-and-doom atmosphere was commonplace, and the bloodsucking Lord Ruthven amounted to only a slight twist on that popular favorite, the depraved aristocrat. Yet Polidori claimed a direct connection between his calculate money-maker and Hungarian folk legends.

There was nothing new about that strategy either: It had bee popular among more careful, honest writers at least since Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto more than half a century earlier, and remains a staple of fictions that intend to raise gooseflesh. In fact, nothing linked "The Vampyre" to folk legends, Hungarian or otherwise. The only connection was a predatory, even vampiric one:, would-be commercial writer, prowling after material that would gratify a proven contemporary taste, hit upon some old legends and molded them in modern form. Unlike the folksy Hungarians, Polidori's intended readers did not believe in vampires, nor did h expect them to do so. "The Vampyre" solicited no belief; it was a entertainment, and a minor one at that, a half hour's diversion for urban, affluent readers in search of a pleasant little chill. Polidori' credulous Hungarians had responded quite differently to their vampire: Several, he reports, had been "tormented" by him; four had died from his attacks.

For Polidori and his readers, there was something scary about the past itself, especially the distant past, and most of all when it wore the exotic trappings of eastern or southern European Catholicism. He: and other gooseflesh mongers sought to draw on that source of chills as well, and their successors go on tapping it today. Fear of deadness is closely related to fear of the past; both took on their modern form at the same time, about the middle of the eighteenth century, when Gothic buildings (which had been moldering in quiet neglect for centuries) were suddenly found to provide delicious chills. Decayed walls and towers made the perfect milieu for ghosts, skeletons, and the like; by the turn of the nineteenth century, they had become standard fixtures of scary entertainment, and they play the same role today. But exploiting the past for its gooseflesh value establishes no meaningful bond between the exploiter and his materials. In no way does it make the modern version a continuation of its old sources. From the middle of the eighteenth century onward, there may be a certain continuity in the tradition of wringing pleasure out of fear, though it is full of gaps and bouts of wholesale amnesia. There is no continuity, however, between those entertainments and the myths, legends, and superstitions on which they draw. Indeed, our steadily growing alienation from the past has helped to make such entertainments possible.

Nevertheless, scholars who write about horror fiction love to describe it in mythic, legendary terms, as if there were any plausible resemblance between a postindustrial American teenager, screaming in delight at a monster movie, and some medieval peasant who trembled in the dark for fear a ghost would get him. Perhaps the scholars worry that the horror tradition has produced too few masterpieces to justify the labor of studying it. If so, they're right. By ordinary academic standards, a very short shelf will hold all the goosefleshy works worth looking at, and we've already had enough glum essays on Frankenstein. When they've been gussied up as "popular culture," such things still need to be read psychoanalytically, psychosexually, or in some other way that makes them symptoms of forces higher and better than themselves. Otherwise, the embarrassed scholar sinks in a morass of throwaways, churned out for profit and scanned at idle moments, then junked. Even now, when the academic canon has been nearly kicked to pieces, these are not the building blocks of a scholar's reputation.

Scary entertainment, as we know it today, showed its first stirrings in the middle of the eighteenth century, when deadness and pastness began to acquire the eerie aura they possess yet more powerfully 250 years later. But this aura alone would not have led to Gothic novels, horrid melodramas, magazine ghost stories, horror movies, or any of the other shows that try to frighten their audiences. These have all been commercial ventures; they would not have been launched without a public that wished to be entertained by playing on its own emotions, even unpleasant ones, simply for the sake of the exercise. That public made its earliest appearance toward the end of the eighteenth century and has grown steadily since, until it now includes virtually every inhabitant of Western Europe and the industrialized Americas. Increasingly, this potential audience has been urban, secular, cut off from any religious or ethnic tradition. Such people's hair may prickle in fright just as a medieval peasant's did, but modern fright is a kind of connoisseur-ship, a deliberate indulgence that recognizes no aim beyond itself.

This attitude toward one's own feelings is another eighteenth-century invention. It first became fashionable in the rarefied, pc circles that had the time and money to be frivolous, but it sc invaded the middle class and has spread along with it ever sir As early as 1802, in the preface to Lyrical Ballads, William Wordsworth felt moved to voice a complaint we haven't heard the end

a multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting wit u combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state c almost savage torpor. The most effective of these causes are the great national events which are daily taking place, and the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies. To this tendency of life and manners the literature and theatrical exhibitions of the country have conformed themselves. The invaluable works of our elder writers ... are driven into neglect by frantic novels, sickly and stupid German Tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse.

It was our world already, nearly two centuries ago.

Like generations of artists after him, Wordsworth deplored these developments, both because they seemed to deaden the soul a because they gave his own work small chance of widespread success. Like later generations of social commentators, he saw contemporary life as a pathological state resembling drug addiction: Each shock of the new made the citizen's skin a little thicker, and ever higher voltages were needed to make him feel anything at all. Instead of trying to cure the disease-as, needless to say Wordsworth's poetry did - novels, plays, and poems merely imitated the outside world, furnishing stronger and stronger jolts to their audiences' jaded nervous reversion to savagery, the loss of all sense of the past in a frantic, sickly, and stupid rush after the next cheap thrill.

As Wordsworth's distant heirs, we can hardly help admiring him for describing our own cities so far ahead of the fact. His indictment of the popular culture of 1802 also applies pretty well to ours. But Wordsworth missed-he could not afford to notice-the immense vitality and invention displayed by the shows he found so pernicious. He was witnessing, on a very small scale, the defining habits of an entertainment industry: shameless imitation and pandering to the fad of the moment, desperate recycling of what has just scored a success until it wears out and gets discarded. Commercial culture of all sorts continues to operate in just these ways. It has spawned few masterpieces, but for all its slavishness, it makes an amusing show in its own right. And if we feel that Wordsworth's vision of a savage society has at last been realized, we should remember that he thought it had already happened two hundred years ago.

Except for a few canonized novels and stories, scary entertainment has been confined throughout its history to the commercial run of the mill. Perhaps this is because the effects it aims at, no matter how skillfully they are handled, remain physical: cold sweat on the brow, upstanding hairs on the nape of the neck, involuntary gasps and shudders. Intellectual activity has little to do with the experience and may even spoil it. For most of its history-until very recently, in fact-commercial chills always came mingled with other more or less automatic responses, like guffaws at the antics of bumpkins and tears at the plight of an imperiled heroine. From Gothic novels and melodramas to horror films of the 1920s and 1930s, even fictions that were known for scariness usually went after a range of widely different feelings as well. Late-century horror mavens, taking as their standard the relatively singleminded films that came into vogue after the 1950s, often turn up their noses at such apparent bastards as the spooky-house comedy, which might send the buffoonish East Side Kids into a haunted mansion and expect to wring both chuckles and shrieks from the encounter.

Unfortunately for purists, hodgepodges like The Ghost Creeps adhered more faithfully to the scary tradition than did highly admired later films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, with its nearly relentless drive toward raising gooseflesh. The same "tradition" however, applied to two centuries of scary fictions, is a misnomer, since for most of that time practitioners of the trade had only the dimmest sense that they possessed precursors or that their own work continued anything. They were opportunists, most them, laboring moment by moment in the interest of providing momentary pleasure and (especially) getting paid for it. They us what came to hand, dropped it when profits fell, and seldom complained about the oblivion that overtook them and their products. Only since the 1920s has scary entertainment-usually call "horror"-become self-conscious about its past and anxious about its future.

Now, the would-be entrant on the horror field can refer to dozens of anthologies and scholarly studies of the genre; he can rent or buy a videocassette of nearly every relevant film, radio broadcast, or show; he is catered to by a glut of magazines and newsletters that specialize in the most arcane details of horror's manufacturing. At the end of the twentieth century, horror has grown so aware of itself that it threatens to die of effeteness. Now maybe the best time to tell horror's story, because horror seems about to emit its last gasp.

Last gasps, however, are habitual gestures in this genre that is not one. Victims and villains have been emitting them nonstop for more than two centuries, and though the forms have varied wildly, the urge that enlivens them seems stronger now than it ever was. The forms have burgeoned and died, too, but the desire to be scared -along with its twin, the desire to be scary-never fails to rise again, providing new generations of buyers and sellers of fear. Mild physical exercise brings pleasure, and artificial fear puts muscles and glands into a special kind of play that, so long as it remains play, leaves behind delicious after-the-game euphoria. That joy is innocent; I would hate to see it fade. So long as we remain without faith in a bodily afterlife yet unable to believe that when the soul departs it, the body really returns to the earth, spectacles of carnage and rot will go on furnishing occasions for these ghastly aerobics. Right now it seems that, exhausted by repitition and self-consciousness, horror fiction cannot go on. It will go on.

In the meantime, it may look as if I've set up the story of scary entertainment as both a gruesome business and, if you like continuity or meaningfulness, no story at all. In fact, for its whole 250year history, the business of scaring and being scared has formed one of the most vivacious sideshows of our culture. The fire might be fueled by the grimmest of fears, but it has burned bright and spanned a gorgeous spectrum. From dour eighteenth-century preachers, lured against their wills into amusement as well as instruction, the trail leads to horror mavens of the 1990s, who haunt video stores in search of the latest breakthrough in phony gut-spilling. Along the way, we meet infatuated collectors, mad self-dramatizers, scrambling hacks, stern remonstrators, fools, gulls, lunatics, and occasionally a genius. The road meanders, peters out, starts up again from an unexpected spot; if it fails to make a story, it makes a fine display.

No moral comes tagged on at the end; there are no heroes and no villains. Instead of adopting the standard family tree of scariness, I've explored how fear blends into other feelings and cohabits with them. Instead of forcing run-of-the-mill work to yield up deeper, richer, more stable meanings, I've tried to read culture's throwaways on their own terms-not as unconscious folklore, unwitting criticism of gender roles, unsuspected assaults on the status quo, or any of the other blind ingenuities with which critics of popular culture try to credit them. I've gone in search not of meanings but of feelings, those momentary prickles of the scalp and sudden intakes of breath that provide mysterious pleasure. For good or ill, and whether we remember it or not, we live in a culture that plays on our bodies more than our minds-steadily more, it seems, till the mind becomes a vestigial organ like an appendix, better off gone. That culture has been slowly, irregularly in the making since the eighteenth century, and artificial fear has counted among its trustiest instruments. In the process, it may have ruined us for Wordsworth, but it's given us two centuries of incomparable fun.