Scary Stories to Keep In the Dark
I don’t know if I can tell you how profoundly Scary Stories to Tell In the Dark affected me as a kid.
I don’t just mean that it scared the pants off me or gave me nightmares (though it did both). The stories in the series—folklore collected over decades and adapted for young audiences—are some of the most effective short-form horror I’ve ever read. They’re weird, incisive, and surreal, with twists that are far creepier than M. Night Shyamalan could aspire to. It inspired my friends and I to start creating our own scary stories, sharing them after lights-out or testing them on playgrounds.
And then there’s the art.
Stephen Gammell’s art was passed around nineties-era libraries and sleepovers with the kind of reverence held for the gnarliest scabs and pages torn from our parents’ porn mags and romance novels. I remember sensing that the books were somehow an illicit form of pleasure, on the same level as sneaking out of bed to watch Tales from the Crypt on TV. I knew I wasn’t supposed to be seeing it, which made it all the more alluring.
For many kids in the US, the books were, in fact, literally illicit; the three-book series was the number-one most challenged in schools and libraries during the nineties. According to the ALA, it beat out children’s books reviled for positive queer rep (Heather Has Two Mommies and Daddy’s Roommate) and unflinching memoirs of sexual violence and racism (I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings), or even modernized answers to Lord of the Flies (The Chocolate War). Among the accusations leveled at Scary Stories was that it “revel[ed] in gore and violence, glorifying the occult, satanism, necrophilia, even cannibalism.” A parent and former PTA president in Washington led a campaign to ban the books at her children’s school, saying that “There’s no moral to them. The bad guys always win. And they make light of death. There’s a story called `Just Delicious’ about a woman who goes to a mortuary, steals another woman’s liver, and feeds it to her husband. That’s sick.”
Moreover, she told the Seattle Times, “This is adding fuel to the fire, giving kids ideas of what to do to frighten other kids… They cannot be doing our children any good.”
Where does the idea that children’s literature has to “do good” come from? And why is it so pervasive? It’s almost unquestioned, this belief that stories for children must provide moral instruction; or at the very least, justify their entertainment value in terms of the good they do.
Just as pervasive is the opposite idea: that children who are given access to stories that aren’t moralizing will be ruined, tainted, and tempted to a path of vice, if not straight-up criminality or evil. “Think of the children” has been applied to everything: Beavis and Butthead (which I also devoured at a so-called “impressionable age”) and Captain Underpants, video games and romance novels. Exposure to crude humor, immorality, sexuality, cussing, violence, or even historically accurate depictions of racism, colonialism, and misogyny—all are considered psychically damaging to children’s developing minds.
The horror genre has often gotten swept up in these kinds of moral panics. It’s so often viewed as irredeemable, and even its creators can struggle to justify why horror makes compelling entertainment.
In the 1950’s, comic books came under fire for this exact reason. During World War 2, some critics and conservatives targeted comics, claiming that they promoted violence and Fascism. Superheroes dominated comics at the time, though, and many WW2 storylines featured superheroes on the frontlines, punching America’s enemies in the face; claims of superheroes’ suspect patriotism subsequently didn’t get a lot of traction. But after the war, according to comics historian Carol Tilley, “Publishers introduced new genres such as romance, jungle, horror, and true crime, which flourished…That publishers intended these newer genres for a nonchild audience failed to keep young readers from devouring titles with deliciously provocative titles such as Untamed Love, Forbidden Worlds, and Shocking Mystery.”
Comics were, at the time, one of the most popular and accessible media for young people. They were cheap for one thing; ten cents for a single issue, compared to two dollars for a hardcover. Carol Tilley again:
Unlike the “shallow and inane” content that characterized much of mainstream juvenile literature, comics gave young readers an opportunity to participate, at least vicariously, in “the rumbling realities” of the everyday adult world. Comics also served as an important social currency for young people, who frequently developed elaborate trading procedures and shared purchasing arrangements…Children’s tastes in reading have never been monolithic; still the pervasiveness of comics as reading materials points to this medium as the most dominant cultural force in children’s lives during the 1940s and 1950s.
Enter Frederic Wertham, anti-comic crusader. Wertham was a psychiatrist working with youth in impoverished neighborhoods in New York City, mostly treating what were at the time called “juvenile delinquents.” Some of the young people he worked with had mental illnesses, but many of his patients had the catch-all diagnosis of “behavior disorders,” whose symptoms were things like petty criminal acts, skipping school, and daydreaming. Wertham noticed that many of his patients had a love of comic books in common—unsurprising, given their status as a dominant cultural force—and decided that this passion was both the root cause and an easily identifiable symptom of youthful delinquency.
Wertham became a central figure in the national campaign against comics. His 1954 book Seduction of the Innocent outlines his sweeping argument: reading comics that depicted crime—regardless of whether crime was in realistic contexts, or in science fictional, Western, or supernatural ones—damaged children’s ethical, social, and mental development. He backed this up with evidence gathered from his clinic in Harlem, which predominantly treated Black and Latino children, as well at public hospitals in Manhattan and Queens.
Interestingly, Wertham’s personal papers were under embargo until 2010, nearly thirty years after his death. Nobody was allowed to access them except for a single biographer. Dr. Carol Tilley delved into his archives in 2012 for her own research, and found that much of the evidence in his book was starkly different in his research notes; he rewrote anecdotes from colleagues as firsthand accounts, altered patient statements and cherrypicked quotes, inflated numbers, and disregarded his patients’ experiences of violence, abuse, poverty, and racism, all of which had far larger effects on their daily lives and development than their reading habits.
But this didn’t come out until nearly sixty years after Seduction of the Innocents. In the intervening half-century, his claims had profound effects. The comics industry hobbled itself with the creation of the Comics Code Authority, hoping to preempt government regulation. Horror comics in particular were targeted; comics couldn’t even have the words “terror” or “horror” in their titles. No more gore, violence, or any depictions of monsters; vampires, ghouls, and werewolves were all banned, as were any stories where evil triumphed over good. Stories involving any kind of authority—police, clergy, judges—had to show such institutions in a positive light, and any romance had to emphasize the sanctity of heterosexual marriage.
And yet, in a shocking twist NOBODY could have predicted, forcing comics to become family-friendly, respectable, and morally sound did not actually effect delinquency rates. Arrest rates rose in the latter half of the 20th century (but which, given other factors, does not necessarily conclude that youth were more violent). What happened instead is that Wertham’s research, and others’ like it, leaked into the public conscience: the truism that children must be protected from “adult” ideas, stories, and media, lest it make them into monsters. It draws a direct line between the media you consume and your actions as a person. Consuming such media is harmful to minors; creating such media is criminal and done with the purpose of tempting innocents into dangerous and immoral beliefs.
What I find interesting is this direct line from Wertham’s screeds against comic books—he literally said, “Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic book industry,” proving that Godwin’s law does, in fact, predate the internet—to Scary Stories to Tell In the Dark’s frequent banning to newer fandom discourse claiming explicit art of fictional teens boning each other is the same as child pornography. At the heart of all of this rhetoric is the same set of interconnected beliefs:
Explicit media damages young people
Consuming explicit media is co-morbid with predatory, violent, and criminal behavior
Media that young people might encounter must demonstrate good morals to counteract this
Those morals coincidentally happen to be authoritarian, puritanical, and heteronormative
And of course, the other commonality of these arguments: all have no actual evidence to support them. The arguments instead trade on cognitive biases that conflate correlation with causation, and, I think, a peculiar existential anxiety that makes older generations simultaneously fear and infantilize young adults. Young adults become Schroedinger’s teenagers: simultaneously super-predators and naive innocents, sadists-in-waiting and little lost lambs, and all points in between. This essay is already too long to go into how innocence and criminality are racialized, gendered, and classed; let’s just say that it has been exhaustively studied, with methodologies that are way more sound than Wertham’s.
So what’s my point here? Why am I equating smutty fanart, Stephen Gammell’s creepy masterpieces, and campy gore-fests like Tales From the Crypt? The thing is, I don’t think all media needs to serve a higher purpose. We don’t need to justify the pleasures of reading or consuming media by claiming that it edifies us. There are plenty of stories that profoundly changed my life and way of thinking, or that I appreciate as aesthetic or subversive masterpieces. I also love Maximum Overdrive for being loud, ridiculous garbage where a baseball coach gets killed by vending machine. The argument that horror can be artistically accomplished and subversive does not erase the fact that some of it is misogynistic, racist, bloody trash. But there is room in the world for trash; room for appreciation and critical engagement with it, as well.
Let the people have trash! Let us find ways to engage with it! I promise, it won’t be the end of civilization.
Further reading:
“Seducing the Innocent: Fredric Wertham and the Falsifications That Helped Condemn Comics” by Carol L. Tilley, originally published in Information and Culture in 2012. You can also read summaries of her research in the New York Times and io9.
“The Horror” by Louis Menand, discussing the 1954 Senate hearings about the comics industry, in which Wertham testified.
“Let Them Read Trash” by Jeffrey Wilhelm. A scholarly defense of letting children read garbage that makes their parents uncomfortable.
The Shitty Fandom Takes twitter, in case you want to experience amazingly illogical purity culture in its current form
I should also say that I watched the movie adaptation of Scary Stories To Tell In the Dark this summer, and it’s frankly not trashy enough. Many of the visuals are directly inspired by Gammell’s art though, which makes it worth watching.
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