"It might seem that there are enough things to be afraid of in real life. Poverty and pain, crime and corruption, oppression and depression, disease and death—all these lurk in the shadows, and sooner or later they pounce on everybody. And yet for a substantial audience, purely imaginary terrors represent an authentic experience." With these words, Les Daniels shuts the door on "real life" and opens a shady path into the horrible, the terrible, the macabre, and the uncanny. Why do people like to be scared? What scares them? How to Hitchcock, Shakespeare, Poe transform our ordinary fears into "purely imaginary terrors"? What is the appeal, on otherwise sensible people, of pulp fiction, horror films, haunted houses, and murder mysteries? Les Daniels explains in this far-reaching and pioneering history of mass media psychology. With a list of topics that runs from Dracula, Frank Frazetta, and Robert Louis Stevenson to Charles Manson, H.P. Lovecraft, Christopher Lee, and the Rolling Stones, Living in Fear unearths images overlooked or forgotten in the history of the movies, literature, comics, radio, theatre, and television. Guaranteed to send a frisson through the most jaded horror fan, here are a host of insights and leads for the student of popular culture, and hours of entertainment for fans of Stephen King, John Carpenter, and other contemporary terror inspirers.