Creature Comforts: Monster Movies in an Age of Anxiety

A cultural history of the strange comfort monsters once offered America and why they lost their hold.

In the ’60s and ’70s, something was stirring in the cobwebbed tombs of the American imagination as creature features became an integral part of pop culture, with headlining monsters appearing on newsstand comics, magazines, cereal boxes, toys, and children's books. For many, this garish world of monstrous pop culture was a comfort, an external expression of grotesquery, strangeness, and anxi...