The Creature from the Black Lagoon, the Tingler, the Mole People--they stalked and oozed into audiences' minds during the era that followed Boris Karloff's Frankenstein and preceded terrors like Freddy Krueger" (A Nightmare on Elm Street)" and Chucky "(Child's Play).""Ghouls, Gimmicks, and Gold "pulls off the masks and wipes away the slime to reveal how the monsters that frightened audiences in the 1950s and 1960s--and the movies they crawled and staggered through--reflected fundamental changes in the film industry. Providing the first economic history of the horror film, Kevin Heffernan...

The Creature from the Black Lagoon, the Tingler, the Mole People--they stalked and oozed into audiences' minds during the era that followed Boris Karloff's Frankenstein and preceded terrors like Freddy Krueger" (A Nightmare on Elm Street)" and Chucky "(Child's Play).""Ghouls, Gimmicks, and Gold "pulls off the masks and wipes away the slime to reveal how the monsters that frightened audiences in the 1950s and 1960s--and the movies they crawled and staggered through--reflected fundamental changes in the film industry. Providing the first economic history of the horror film, Kevin Heffernan...

The conductor announces Oakland Station resort, and the passenger cars quickly empty. It is summer in the late 1800s, and travelers from New York City and Paterson are eager to begin their vacations. They have come to enjoy a mountainous place of pristine beauty, cooled by a river, ponds, and springs. After two and a half centuries as a sleepy farming community within sight of New York City, Oakland had become a summer resort with its own railroad station and grand Victorian hotels.

First settled nearly a century before the American Revolution by ten Dutch families, this Ramapo Mountain...