#BookReview ‘Behind The Horror’ by Dr Lee Mellor

About the book…

Uncover the twisted tales that inspired the big screen’s greatest screams.

Which case of demonic possession inspired The Exorcist? What horrifying front-page story generated the idea for A Nightmare on Elm Street? Which film was inspired by an 18th-century Japanese folktale?

Unearth the terrifying and true tales behind some of the scariest Horror movies to ever haunt our screens, including the Enfield poltergeist case that was retold in The Conjuring 2 and the creepy doll that inspired Chucky in Child’s Play.

Behind the Horror dissects these and other bizarre tales to reveal haunting real-life stories of abduction, disappearance, murder, and exorcism.

First published in 2020 by Dorling Kindersley in paperback, ebook and audiobook formats,‘Behind The Horror: Real Stories Behind The Big Screen’s Greatest Screams’ is a deep dive into the origin stories, and inspirations for, the most culturally significant horror films of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Starting with Fritz Lang’s ‘M’, moving through to ‘Rope’, ‘Jaws’,‘The Town That Dreaded Sundown’ and up to modern times with ‘The Conjuring’,Dr Lee Mellor examines why the films were so significantly successful in tapping into the fears of the times they were released in.

It also seeks to answer the age old question,’Where do you get your ideas from?’

From my perspective, I found a whole load of trivia to bamboozle friends and family with whilst developing a better understanding of my favourite films. This is especially true of those based on books, such ‘The Silence Of The Lambs’, which is itself, allegedly based on the social reporting of the ‘Ed Gein’ case. It illustrates how tales of a person dressing up in human costumes, wanting to transform into something ‘other’ can be transmuted into a moral panic over ‘that weird fella who lives over there and is a bit too close to his mother’

There is an interesting article on the use of Ed Gein and The Silence Of The Lambs as examples of latent homo- and trans-phobia here, which discusses the history of how framing individuals in a certain way reflects the fears of the time very succinctly. It also focusses on how we, the public, take things at face value-or at least did until the the emergence of fake news-and tend to continue that narrative because it suits the overarching patriarchal hegemony.

Some of these stories make for truly horrifying reading which surpasses even the most tortured films -I for one have never seen ‘Texas Chain Saw Massacre’,but know enough about it to be aware that I could not handle it. And the story behind it was even worse than I could have imagined.

The best bit of the book, for me, was the background of ‘A Nightmare On Elm Street’ where a series of unexplained deaths following the Vietnam war, of Vietnamese men, really astounded me. Sleeplessness being fatal was a concept I had truly never considered, and after reading this book, I read further about sleep deprivation being used as torture device and it was so fascinating. In the 80’s-90’s, much of pop culture was about getting the most out of each day, the rise of the Yuppie and sleep being for the weak. The ‘me me me‘ generation were being tackled by the younger, teenagers who had to come together to collectively fight the sleepwalking adults, and also atone for the sins of their parents.

Freddy Krueger, as an allegory of the Vietnam War, ‘The Serpent And The Rainbow’ as an exploration of the ‘heathen’ and ‘the othering’ of so-called primitive cultures in Haiti, and so forth, really hold a mirror up to the culture in which they inhabit and provide a reasonable basis not only for their initial success, but also their lingering in the public consciousness.

The other month I watched Jaws, with my youngest daughter (10) and the way she hid behind her cushion and screamed with pure delight/terror tickled me so hard. When we finished, she said it was the best film she had ever seen, and I’m not going to lie, I was so happy that it reached her on that level because her older sisters had proclaimed the special effects dubious, and less than convincing.

This is not what we saw, we watched the steadfast Chief Brody trying to fight capitalism as the mayor of Amity placed capitalism as a priority over the lives of holidaymakers (which never made any sense!) The David fighting the Goliath, the friendship that develops between Brody, Quint and Hooper, the edge of your seat thrills as the strings kick in on the soundtrack…it made for such a wonderful viewing experience that I had patiently been waiting for since her eldest sister was a similar age!

So thank you, Dr Mellor, for expanding my knowledge of the world, getting me to think harder, read wider and enjoy more, these classic films which cover all sorts of monsters but, in the end, return to the most insidious of all, humankind.

About the author…

Lee Mellor, PhD (abd) is an author, criminologist, CEO, and musician based out of Toronto, Canada. His books, the national bestseller “‘Cold North Killers’” (2012) and ‘Rampage:Canadian Mass Murder and Spree Killing’ (2013) focus on the under-explored topic of multicide in Canada. Mellor’s academic works include “‘Homicide:A Forensic Psychology Casebook”” (2016), “‘Understanding Necrophilia”” (2016), and two chapters on literary criminology for “The Criminal Humanities” (2016). Recently, he authored a substantial portion of “The Crime Book” (2017) for DK’s Big Ideas, Simply Explained series.

As chair of the American Investigative Society of Cold Cases’ academic committee, Mellor has consulted with police investigators on unsolved murders in London, Pennsylvania, Missouri, and Ohio.

He is the co-founder of Grinning Man Press, and is a contributor to and editor-in-chief of the e-magazine Serial Killer Quarterly.

Until his career as an author took off, Lee devoted a great deal of time to writing, performing, and recording storytelling music. He was voted among the Top Ten Singer-Songwriters in Montreal three years in a row, and in 2008 ranked #3 next to Leonard Cohen and Rufus Wainwright. His first album Ghost Town Heart (2007) was considered one of the best “country” albums of the year by numerous indie publications and reviewers, and is notable for the songs “Liberty Street” and “Nowhere, Manitoba.” In 2011, he recorded ten more tracks for his second album Lose – with the title track and “Suzy Blue Eyes” being two of his more popular tunes.

Links-http://leemellor.com/

Twitter @dr_mellor @penguinrandom