.....with thanks to Alex Naylor, "A Review of Reynold Humphries' The American Horror Film: An Introduction," (Edinburgh University Press, 2003) in Scope: An Online Journal of Film Studies, November 2004.
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The American Horror Film is now eight decades old. The genre had its origins in the 1930s just as the Bah�� community was about to launch its first teaching Plan in the mid-1930s. While it is not my intention to try and survey the broad range of critical and cinematic material that belongs to the horror genre I will make some general remarks of a sketchy and superficial nature and draw some comparisons and contrasts with the evolution of the Bah�� community in those eight decades. One can examine these eight decades of horror films using a number of fruitful and explanatory paradigms used by film critics and analysts. A study of horror and of Gothic, for example, can easily intersect. An engagement of horror with Gothic scholarship would seem a more or less necessary part of any introductory work on horror. -Ron Price with thanks to Alex Naylor, "A Review of Reynold Humphries' The American Horror Film: An Introduction," (Edinburgh University Press, 2003) in Scope: An Online Journal of Film Studies, November 2004.
As humanity was about to enter
the most perilous stage of its
existence seemingly coincidentally
the horror film arrived on the scene.
As if to counter the world's horrors
a Plan was devised and systematically
pursued across an immense field,
part of a holy, a stupendous enterprise,
a historic, a sublime mission, lending
a fresh luster to the unfoldment of
�Abdu�l-Bah�'s vision of our destiny.
As those horror films succeeded one
another in decade after decade this
vision and destiny were slowly fulfilled
in a series of turning points, with their
joys and triumphs, their brilliant victories
and their crises which from time to time
threatened to arrest the unfoldment and
blast all hopes the progress had engendered.
Ron Price 30 November 2006
