Horror Stories

Horror Stories, which published 41 issues between 1935 and 1941, specialised in sensational and salacious cover paintings.  Naked and semi-naked women were forever being menaced and tortured by assorted mad scientists, cultists, vampires and monsters.  This cover, from the August-September 1937 issue, is characteristic of the magazine, in that it depicts a naked woman without actually showing anything.  It also prefigures a popular trope of post-war men's magazines in that it features a woman being frozen into a solid block of ice by the villain, apparently to add to his collection of frozen nudes seen in the background.  I the men's magazines the villains would invariably be Nazis, of course, whereas here it is just a common or garden mad scientist of no particular political affiliation.  Similar perils illustrated on the covers of Horror Stories included women being covered in wax and molten metal, (although not gold - that had to wait for the men's magazine Nazis).

All of these perils were, of course, proxies for rape which, in the thirties and forties obviously couldn't be overtly referred to on a cover.  By the sixties, men's magazines were more openly implying various forms of sexual assault on their covers, but the likes of Horror Stories had to substitute other forms of female violation both on their covers and in their pages.  Horror Stories had a companion magazine, Terror Tales, which ran from 1934 to 1941, featuring similar content and stories and sharing the same pool of authors.  The style of lurid pulp horror stories published by both magazines proved to be highly influential post-war, particularly upon the new genre of US horror comics.  While wartime paper shortages might have killed both publications in 1941, Horror Stories enjoyed a brief afterlife of sorts, with four British reprint issues appearing in the UK in 1948.