The Dark Side of ‘the Good Life’: California and the Birth of Modern Horror

Abstract

The chapter discusses Chinatown’s (1974) bleak depiction of Southern California’s rapid infrastructural development. Then it discusses a movement identified by the Los Angeles Times critic Robert A. Kirsch, who identified the tendency to engage with contemporary anxieties which made California the region which, more than any other, shaped the direction of post-war American horror in fiction and film. Works by Richard Matheson and Shirley Jackson are discussed in relation to California’s relationship with the ‘Suburban Gothic’ sub-genre, as is the 2021 television show Them, which depicts 1950s Californian suburbia from an African American perspective. The chapter briefly discusses the ways in which two Hitchcock films – Shadow of a Doubt (1943) and Psycho (1960) – anticipated the wider national preoccupation with the activities of dangerous (and white) ‘rogue males’ whose acts of psychopathic violence would, from the 1970s onwards, became irrevocably associated with California thanks to the activities of serial killers such as Ed Kemper, the Zodiac Killer, and Joseph D’Angelo, the ‘Golden State Killer’. The chapter concludes by discussing Joel Schumacher’s 1987 vampire film The Lost Boys, which is set in a fictionalised version of Santa Cruz, the Californian city most irrevocably associated with serial murder in the 1970s.