The sheer number of vampires, unquiet spirits, and zombies that shamble around in pop culture makes it difficult to believe there was a time when many Americans saw horror as literally un-American. In this video, W. Scott Poole explains how World War I and figures like Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney, and Boris Karloff created the first golden age of horror in the 1930s and ’40s, as seen in It’s Alive!.