Gallery One — The Monsters

The hundred posters in these four galleries are the visual spine of this book. They were chosen from an archive of more than a hundred and fifty thousand cataloged one-sheets, cross- referenced against the rankings that horror audiences themselves have made — the Reddit lists, the Rotten Tomatoes counts, the crowd-ranked polls with tens of thousands of voters. This first gallery covers the years when the American monster was assembled. Universal built a face for Dracula, for Frankenstein's creature, for the Mummy and the Wolf Man, and those faces have not changed since. Behind them sit the silent films that taught Hollywood how to frighten people in the dark, and ahead of them the British studio that took the same monsters and put them in color and blood. Look at how much of it is design rather than photography — in this era the poster was drawn, and the drawing is what people remember.