Are We Not Men? Islands of Fear and Hope in Hollywood Horror Movies, 1930s–50s

Horror films were particularly popular with American cinema audiences from the 1930s to the 1950s, and islands or island-like places feature prominently in many productions from Island of Lost Souls (1932) and King Kong (1933) to Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954). These locations were more than mere settings for some arbitrarily chosen story, this paper argues. The fears articulated in horror movies in general were embedded in specific and changing social and cultural anxieties from the Great Depression to the age of a possible nuclear apocalypse. To these existential fears, the island – although dangerous and frightening in itself – added opportunities for expressing hope, agency, and resistance through its symbolic links to ideas of traveling and adventure, of utopian thought or the experimental laboratory.
Moreover, this texture containing elements of both fear and hope offered contemporary openings to elaborate on, discuss, criticize, re-affirm and/or undermine notions of social and cultural order like gender, race, sexuality and humanity itself. Employing the films and surrounding source material, this paper aims at stressing these debates over seemingly stable ideas of order and will demonstrate that documents as complex and multi-layered as motion pictures of the horror genre offer valuable perspectives for cultural history.