But the real problem with Skal is not his sociopolitical analysis--it's his horror-historical one. Skal subtitled his book A Cultural History of Horror; unfortunately he uses the amorphousness of that second word to justify an arbitrary placement of emphasis on certain aspects of horror art while unreasonably ignoring others, all in an ill-conceived and quixotic quest to Say Something About Life, accuracy be damned. Skal's previous efforts in the horror-crit field include books on the long road Dracula took on its path from book to movie and a biography of Tod Browning, Dracula's (and Freaks's) director; it's unsurprising and disappointing, then, that a full third of The Monster Show is devoted to detailing these pet subjects in the guise of using Tod Browning's life as a metaphor, that of America-as-freak-show. Skal inflates the importance of these films and filmmakers (particularly that of the influential but still obscure Freaks) at the direct expense of other important facets of early film horror (Frankenstein is by no means uncovered, but it's goofy to give it no more space than Freaks; James Whale, director of Frankenstein and its Bride, is given scant mention compared to the far less technically competent, and not really even all that more interesting, Tod Browning). Skal also puts a bizarrely strong emphasis on the gruesome work of photographer Diane Arbus: Well and good, but I can think of several equally or more viable candidates for giving the low art of horror the gloss of high-art legitimacy--Dali, Magritte, Bacon (Skal does at least try with him), Warhol, Mapplethorpe, Reed, Bowie, Fellini, Scorsese, Lynch...the selection of Arbus seems due almost completely to the fact that she's known to have seen Freaks in a movie theater.

Skal also misreads the third horror archetype (in addition to Frankenstein's Monster and Dracula; he also cites Freaks, but c'mon, already) as Jekyll & Hyde; J&H were the obvious inspiration for the Hollywood werewolf concept, but the Stevenson story was merely the John the Baptist for the Jesus Christ of Lon Cheney Jr's Wolf Man (linked inextricably with the Bela Lugosi Dracula and the Boris Karloff Frankenstein by generation after generation of American kids, who really never have a definitive Jekyll/Hyde image in mind). In a misguided attempt to pinpoint the moment at which Dracula and Frankenstein (the monster) became linked in the public consciousness, he spends a chapter detailing the misadventures of one Horace Liveright, an American bohemian and would-be multimedia impresario who finagled the screen rights to Dracula and attempted to do the same with Frankenstein. But Liveright failed in the latter attempt; why Skal focuses on him instead of any number of the members of the British theatrical troupe that formed the backbone of the story (producing and performing, as they did, simultaneous stage adaptations of the two horror classics) is a complete mystery. Additionally, Skal gives short shrift to the zombie and serial-killer/mass-murderer archetypes, too, discussing them (when he does so at all) as subsets of the Vampire/Dracula image, whereas in horror films and literature of today they're clearly their own entities, drawing on their own sets of themes and fears.