An eclectic and insightful collection of essays predicated on the hypothesis that popular cultural documents provide unique insights into the concerns, anxieties and desires of their times. 1950s popular culture is analysed by leading scholars and critics such as Christopher Frayling, Mark Jancovich, Kim Newman and David J. Skal.

An eclectic collection of essays about the ways in which popular texts articulated the powerful undercurrents of unease and anxiety which characterized 1950s life in America and Britain

Acknowledgements Dedication List of Illustrations Note on Contributors Introduction 'A-Bombs, B-Pictures and C-Cups'; D.J.Skal 'It's in the trees! It's coming!' Night of the Demon and the Decline and Fall of the British Empire; D.Jones Mutants and Monsters; K.Newman 'Don't Dare See It Alone!' The Fifties Hammer Invasion; W.Kinsey Genre, Special Effects and Authorship in the Critical Reception of Science Fiction Film and Television during the 1950s; M.Jancovich & D.Johnston Hammer's Dracula ; C.Frayling Fast Cars and Bullet Bras: The Image of the Female Juvenile Delinquent in 1950s America; E.McCarthy 'A Search for the Father-Image': Masculine Anxiety in Robert Bloch's 1950s Fiction; K.Corstorphine 'Reading her Difficult Riddle': Shirley Jackson and late 1950s' Anthropology; D.Downey 'At My Cooking I Feel It Looking': Food, Domestic Fantasies and Consumer Anxiety in Sylvia Plath's Writing; L.Piatti-Farnell 'All that Zombies Allow' Re-Imagining the Fifties in Far From Heaven and Fido ; B.M.Murphy Bibliography Filmography Index