Beyond the Scare Factory: Aesthetics, Horror, and the Working Class

Beyond the Scare Factory: Aesthetics, Horror, and the Working Class takes as its premise the idea that the horror genre has always been understood as a popular genre, significantly oriented toward what critics have often called a working-class audience, and argues that it is not only designed to appeal to the working class but is also crucially about the working class and, more particularly, about the desire to stop being working class. Moreover, just as horror tends to fold its working-class audience into its subject matter, a certain important strain of work in horror also folds the standard critique of the genre —the Adorno-style charge that the products of the culture industry are interested only in producing a litany of effects designed to appeal to an audience—into its understanding of its own form.