I’m very sorry to hear of the passing away of author David J. Skal (1952-2024).
When I signed with FSG to write my first book, one of the first things my visionary editor Denise Oswald did was hand me a copy of Skal’s 1993 The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror. I had already known about the author on account of his first huge success Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of Dracula from Novel to Stage to Screen (1990).
That one had been a runaway bestseller — I’d sold many a copy during my time at Brentano’s. But Monster Show was a true revelation to me. Denise had recommended it as a model of a perfect pop culture book, and she was right. My autographed paperback copy is wrecked, I’ve gone through it so many times. It’s basically my Bible of Gothic horror; it very much informs my understanding of the genre as represented in that section of this blog. As did his next book (with Elias Savada) Dark Carnival: The Secret World of Tod Browning, Hollywood’s Master of the Macabre — which has the added beauty of weaving carnivals and vaudeville into the mix.
Skal had studied journalism at Ohio University and had been a film critic, but he also had a background in theatre, working in p.r. and communications at Hartford Stage Company, the ACT in San Francisco, and Theatre Communications Group, which publishes books as well as the magazine American Theatre (where I was Affiliated Writing Fellow back in 2001). He was a cultural historian, and the draw in his writing (in addition to his wit) was his Big Picture understanding. He didn’t look at films in a vacuum, but saw them in relation to books, theatre, art and what’s happening in the world — war, depression, the AIDS crisis. His identity as a gay man gave him a special awareness of, and sympathy for, the plight of the outsider. That was a major theme in his writing about horror: monsters, mad scientists, outcasts.
Skal’s other books included V Is for Vampire: The A to Z Guide to Everything Undead (1996), the Norton Critical Edition of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (co-edited, 1997), Screams of Reason: Mad Science and Modern Culture (1998), Vampires: Encounters with the Undead (2001, an anthology compiled by Skal), Death Makes a Holiday: A Cultural History of Halloween (2002), Claude Rains: An Actor’s Voice (2008), and Something in the Blood (2016), a biography of Bram Stoker.
In 1995 wrote three episodes of the A&E show Biography: Bela Lugosi: Hollywood’s Dark Prince and Lon Chaney: Son of a Thousand Faces This led to his writing, directing and producing several non-fiction video featurettes: The World of Gods and Monsters: A Journey with James Whale (1999), She’s Alive! Creating the Bride of Frankenstein (1999), Mummy Dearest: A Horror Tradition Unearthed (1999), Monster by Moonlight! The Immortal Saga of ‘The Wolf Man’ (1999), The Road to Dracula (1999), In Search of History: The Real Dracula (2000), The Opera Ghost: A Phantom Unmasked (2000), Now You See Him: The Invisible Man Revealed! (2000), Bud Abbott and Lou Costello Meet the Monsters! (2000), Back to the Black Lagoon: A Creature Chronicle (2000), The Universe According to Universal (2002), Carla Laemmle Remembers: An Interview with David J. Skal (2003), Jules Verne & Walt Disney: Explorers of the Imagination (2003), and The Frankenstein Files: How Hollywood Made a Monster (2004).
And of course, he was a talking head in more documentaries, tv specials, and “added features” about Gothic horror films than you can care to name. His most recent appearance was in Boris Karloff: The Rest of the Story (2022).
The news of Skal’s passing was most unexpected. He was only 71 years old. But of course he did venture into realms that were never meant to be visited by man!