I wrote my undergraduate thesis about the transformation of American horror cinema between 1960 and 1980.
The question underneath it was larger than horror: What happens to the stories a culture tells when people stop trusting the systems that are supposed to protect them?
Classical horror usually placed danger outside the social order. The monster came from somewhere else, a distant country, an ancient curse, a forbidden experiment, and established authorities eventually restored order. Experts understood the threat. Communities confronted it. The monster could be contained.
By the end of the 1970s, horror no longer believed any of that.
The threat came from inside the family, the community, the government, or the nation itself. Institutions failed. Expertise could not save anyone. Survival did not guarantee victory, and home stopped being a place of safety.
A Nation’s Nightmare examines that transformation through the Vietnam era, when war, political assassinations, civil unrest, Watergate, economic instability, and televised violence profoundly altered Americans’ relationship with authority. My argument is not that Vietnam single-handedly created modern horror. It intensified fractures that were already forming and made new kinds of fear culturally meaningful.
Again and again, I found myself returning to the same question: Why does the idea that home is gone keep returning?
That question runs through Night of the Living Dead, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Crazies, Last House on the Left, Dawn of the Dead, and the films that followed them. Families become dangerous. Communities collapse. Authorities cannot be trusted. Characters flee toward safety only to discover that refuge no longer exists.
This belongs here because the subject matter may be different from lifecycle architecture, but the instinct is the same. I want to understand the system beneath the visible story: where trust lives, how its parts reinforce one another, what changes when something breaks, and why the resulting behavior makes sense once the underlying structure becomes visible.
Discussing my horror thesis with Michael Berryman, August 2021.