Horror is as Pennsylvanian as scrapple.
From the Gothic fiction of authors like Charles Brockden Brown and Edgar Allan Poe, to the creature features of George A. Romero and mindbenders of M. Night Shyamalan, the commonwealth has long been a hub for the genre.
Now it’s a locus for studying it too. The University of Pittsburgh’s recently announced Horror Studies Center is home to a global research network and a horror studies archive that was founded in 2019, among other initiatives. According to the school, the interdisciplinary center is the first of its kind worldwide.
To learn more about the project, Pennsylvania’s deep ties to horror, and why the genre is worth studying, PA Local spoke with Adam Lowenstein, director of the center and a professor of English, and film and media studies. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
PA Local: Some people consider Pittsburgh to be a birthplace of the modern horror genre. Why is that?
Lowenstein: In Pittsburgh and horror, all roads lead to George A. Romero. He is the most influential and well-known filmmaker to ever come out of Pittsburgh. He was the lucky or unlucky — depending on how you look at it — recipient of incredible success with his debut feature, which was Night of the Living Dead. Not only was it a huge popular success … it became an immediate cultural touchstone, which it still is today.
The fame of Night of the Living Dead immediately made Romero a legend in the genre, and then [his] subsequent films … movies like Martin and Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead and The Crazies … cemented the connection between Romero and Pittsburgh and horror.
How would you define horror studies, and why is it important to study horror?
Horror studies is an emergent field. It takes its cue from fields like English studies, film studies, cultural studies, religious studies — any field that has a commitment to the idea that you could learn just about anything by going deeply enough into a field that seems quite narrow and specific when you first look at it.
For instance, one of the events that we’re co-sponsoring right now is a photo exhibition at the Jewish Community Center in Squirrel Hill here in Pittsburgh that’s called Camera as Passport: The Ship of Photographers. It’s a group of stunning photographs by a group of German Jewish photographers who had their European careers cut short when Hitler came to power. They were all lucky enough to get on a ship to America to escape Europe, and they eventually got to America and established new careers here.
It’s a stunning and poignant portrait of the Holocaust, and you realize that all of these photos you’re looking at — many of them would not have been existent if they had not escaped Europe. This is an example of the intersection between horror and history. The Holocaust is one of the most horrific events in history, and to understand it, you need to have a vocabulary of horror to deal with the real pain and loss and suffering that go with an historically traumatic event like that.
Wow. I don’t know that I would have ever thought of it through that lens.
I get that reaction a lot, and that’s part of the joy of running the world's first horror studies center … seeing people sort of expand their sense of what horror can encompass, and how large and broad and ambitious it can be.
What makes the University of Pittsburgh a good fit?
The first natural organic connection is that the University of Pittsburgh is a flagship university in the city of Pittsburgh. Then there’s also the fact that it’s the University of Pittsburgh that founded the world’s first horror studies archive.
There was a relationship established shortly after George passed away between the Romero family and the university that brought his materials to the University of Pittsburgh, where they now are the founding acquisition of a much larger archive that includes materials from all kinds of authors and filmmakers and artists and film festivals, you name it really — all things horror that can be studied in perpetuity by anyone. We’ve had visitors from all over the world coming to Pittsburgh to study these materials.
How do you think that opening the Horror Studies Center will benefit the broader Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania community?
We really want to share our resources and our initiatives with as broad an audience as possible. This is particularly crucial for horror, because it is a popular genre. There are people who might not ever think of themselves as attending a university that still have a passion for horror and are willing to learn things through the lens of horror that we really want to reach. Those communities are right here in our city, but they’re also in our region.
In recent years … we partnered with Pitt’s community engagement center in the Hill District in Pittsburgh, and with two wonderful artists: the filmmaker Rusty Cundieff, who’s a Pittsburgh native but has lived in L.A. a long time [during] a very successful film career that includes breakthrough horror films like Tales from the Hood, and then the celebrated poet Linda D. Addison, a multi-award winning author who has donated her papers to the archive. She is an incredible talent and also one of the most prominent African American woman poets working in any genre, [and] in horror specifically.
They were able to partner with us to talk about the idea of Black horror to an audience in the Hill District. This was an audience outside of the university that was able to hear the kinds of conversations that we promote within the university. I know that both Rusty and Linda felt as proud as I did about how wonderful it was to make that kind of connection.
Pennsylvania certainly has a number of notable names in the horror genre, as well as horror works set here. Do you think there’s something unique about Pennsylvania that inspires such iconic works of horror?
I feel most comfortable talking about Pittsburgh first, but I think this can be expanded to Pennsylvania at large in certain ways. Some of the most famous Pittsburghers include not just George A. Romero, but also Andy Warhol, August Wilson, Fred Rogers — and each of these talents really benefited, I think, from not being in New York or LA, where their work would sort of be easier to accomplish in many ways, but also not as unique. I do feel like that sense of being off the beaten path in some way really creates character and individual innovative projects that are very bold and independent.
Philadelphia might be taken in a similar frame, in that it’s so close to New York, but it’s not New York. So there’s a sense I think of, things are different here and and we have to maybe work a little harder and maybe in a little bit of a different kind of voice than if we were in New York itself.
Interesting. I have to say, I didn’t think that Mr. Rogers would come up in a conversation about horror.
Oh, well, he’s absolutely absolutely relevant. George [Romero] actually directed an episode of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, and it was the episode where Fred is getting his tonsils removed. There’s a horrific aspect to a medical operation like that. If you watch the episode … it’s really quite striking in its commitment to showing quite graphically what’s going on in this operation. This is something that Fred wanted to share with his audience, and I think that’s amazing.
Wow, I had no idea. That’s so interesting.
See? Horror leads to all kinds of unusual places.
Are there any lesser known works of horror, or people who have made works of horror, that are tied to Pennsylvania and you think don’t get enough attention?
In Pittsburgh, George was really a kind of one-man film industry from the ’60s through the early 2000s. And what that means is that if you were somebody interested in filmmaking in Pittsburgh — of any kind, not necessarily horror in particular — you were probably apprenticing with George in some way.
For instance, Tony Buba, who is a celebrated documentarian, has made wonderful films about Braddock in particular. He trained with George on his films. Peggy Ahwesh — also originally from Pittsburgh, celebrated feminist experimental filmmaker — she apprenticed with George. She was a production assistant on Creepshow. Greg Nicotero, who is now one of Hollywood's most successful producers — he’s behind the entire Walking Dead franchise … and a number of other projects — he apprenticed with Tom Savini, who’s George’s makeup effects artist, early in his career.
So there’s a way in which horror opens doors to filmmaking careers that aren’t necessarily in horror. And I think this is a real credit to how George ran his life and his business as a matter of family connections and generosity and real commitment to the city that he called home for many decades.