In his new book, 'Wasteland: The Great War and the Origins of Modern Horror,' historian W. Scott Poole argues the Great War gave filmmakers the visual language that make up scary movies.
"The macabre had existed long before the Great War, in epics, gothic novels, the work of Shelley and Stoker and Baudelaire. But new themes that we connect with horror—dismemberment, mutilation, the dead that return for revenge, the sense that not only a house might be haunted, but that the whole world could become a charnel house—this appeared for the first time and found a far larger audience. What I have seen in the writings of veterans, including those who became some of the first horror auteurs, is a desire to compulsively relive the trauma over and over again. Horror is a language of trauma.”
