Horror movies are horror movies because they're scary, but there are many more reasons to watch them than the thrill of a good jolt. For the most veteran, and therefore calloused, of horror viewers, the possibility of being scared is a hell of a lot less likely than simply enjoying some rich Gothic atmosphere, cool monster makeup, the fine acting and directing one finds in a good movie of any genre, or, for the baser of us, vats of gore. You know who you are.
When he first published The Book of Horror: The Anatomy of Fear in Film in 2020, Matt Glasby intended to shift the focus of the horror film back on its scary essentials. He came up with a list of seven different ways movies frighten us (exploiting subliminal scares, jump scares, dread, grotesque imagery, and so on), and used "bespoke symbols" (his term) to signify these types of scares throughout his discussions of the plots of and scare techniques deployed in 35 horror movies, now 37 in its 2025 edition. There are also some graphs depicting when these scares appear over the course of each film, which probably brought the book up to an acceptable length.
Glasby lays out a pseudo-formula for the movies he selected, but as is always the case with books of this sort by a single author, he just chose the movies he wanted to write about. He didn't consider movies like Jaws and Alien because "scaring us is not their primary objective" but he included Don't Look Now, which is mostly a Gothic family drama with only one horror-type scene (notice how few "bespoke symbols" appear in that entry!), and Long Legs, a detective story that is either unintentionally or intentionally silly, I couldn't quite decide. One thing is certain: it's about as scary as Grease and nearly as campy. Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer may be an undeniably disturbing realistic look at a human monster, but it's hardly concerned with anything as frivolous as scaring anyone.
Glasby also shows his personal preferences by ignoring any film made before 1960 in his main entries (each film includes three additional paragraphs about three movies for further viewing), and whipping through the rest of the twentieth century before the book is even halfway finished. Although this seems shortsighted and bogged down with the typical inability to view films through the times in which they were made, it actually makes The Book of Horror fresher than it might have been if it had wasted its time by poring over Nosferatu or Frankenstein for the billionth time. And I thought his write ups were generally well thought-out and well researched. He includes a quote from Kubrick that was unfamiliar to me that really validates the director's decision to cast Jack Nicholson in The Shining, despite all of Stephen King's bellyaching.
But what actually makes The Book of Horror a worthwhile library edition has little to do with its author. It's Barney Bodoano's marvelous pen and ink illustrations that will make this book worth peeping at more than once. Are they as disturbing as the ones in Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark? Nope, nope, and nope. But they're creepy enough and masterfully executed and another nice variation that makes The Book of Horror stand out from similar books.
