By WILLIAM J. WRIGHT

At around 8:30 p.m. on New Year’s Day, 2024, author, critic and film historian David J. Skal lost his life in a devastating and wholly preventable auto accident in Glendale, California. The facts reflect a tragedy that plays out daily on America’s roads and highways. A 23-year-old male traveling at an excessive rate of speed lost control of the black BMW he was driving and crossed the median at the intersection of Elm Avenue and Glenoaks Boulevard into oncoming traffic, striking the silver Honda driven by Skal’s longtime partner. Skal, who had been riding in the front passenger seat, died at the scene. The driver of the BMW was treated for injuries at a local hospital and arrested for reckless driving and suspicion of DUI. 

The loss to David J. Skal’s family and friends is unimaginable. That his partner will face what will likely be a long and harrowing recovery without the man he dearly loved is heartbreaking. The loss to genre scholarship is unfathomable.

Born in Garfield Heights, Ohio, on June 21, 1952, Skal grew up in the epicenter of the monster boom of the late ’50s and early ’60s. A self-described “monster kid,” David Skal was one of Uncle Forry Ackerman’s millions of devoted nieces and nephews. “Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman and King Kong were the first movies I ever remember seeing on television in the late 1950s, and were, no doubt, a corrupting influence … But it was finally Famous Monsters of Filmland and the Aurora model kits that sealed my fate,” Skal told me in a 2006 interview. However, his devotion to monsters was hard-fought, at least initially. “It took forever to convince my father to let me read monster magazines,” Skal said. “He actually surprised me one night by bringing home the original Dracula filmbook issue of Famous Monsters, which I literally read to pieces and had to get a replacement.”

A skilled writer, Skal graduated from Ohio State University in 1974 with a Bachelor’s degree in journalism. Despite his already impressive writing pedigree, he would go on to work extensively in theatre. Still, monsters and the fantastic were never far from his mind, and in the 1980s, he published three relatively well-received sci-fi novels, Scavengers, When We Were Good and Antibodies. 

Skal’s shift to nonfiction with 1990’s Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of Dracula from Novel to Stage to Screen immediately established him as one of the horror genre’s most engaging and knowledgeable historians and critics. Following Hollywood Gothic, Skal published The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror in 1993. A comprehensive study of horror, The Monster Show remains the essential text for contextualizing horror’s place and importance in 20th-century culture, art and film. With his next book, 1995’s Dark Carnival: The Secret World of Tod Browning, Hollywood’s Master of the Macabre, cowritten with film historian Elias Savada, narrowed his focus to concentrate on the troubled life and legacy of the director of 1931’s Dracula. More definitive works of genre scholarship followed, including Screams of Reason: Mad Science and Modern Culture, an in-depth look at the mad science archetype in media; Claude Rains: An Actor’s Voice, the first book-length biography of the actor beloved by monster movie fans for his roles in The Invisible Man and The Wolf Man; Death Makes a Holiday: A Cultural History of Halloween (republished in 2016 as Halloween: The History of America’s Darkest Holiday); and Fright Favorites: 31 Movies to Haunt Your Halloween and Beyond, a holiday collaboration with Turner Classic movies. Skal’s final published work, the sensational Something in the Blood: The Untold Story of Bram Stoker, the Man Who Wrote Dracula, was released in 2016. Skal also co-edited the Norton Critical Edition of Dracula, a first edition with Nina Auerbach, published in 1996, and a second in 2021 with John Edgar Browning.

However, David J. Skal’s research and scholarship of classic horror films went beyond books. A talented documentarian and producer, Skal contributed commentary tracks and featurettes to the Universal Monsters Legacy Collection DVDs that are in themselves masterclasses in classic horror. 

The above is by no means a complete (or even exhaustive) list of David J. Skal’s contributions to the study of the horror genre. Skal traveled extensively as a lecturer and guest at academic and fan-oriented events. In 2012, he became an author-in-residence at Dublin’s Trinity College while researching Something in the Blood, his biography of Dracula author Bram Stoker. During his tenure at Trinity, Skal taught a class based on his 1993 book The Monster Show. (A rundown of Skal’s class schedule and required reading/viewing remain at the author’s perpetually under-construction website – in a word, essential.)  

Although I interviewed him in 2006, I never had the pleasure of meeting David J. Skal face-to-face. I’d love to say we were friends, but we were, at best, internet acquaintances. Over the years, we exchanged occasional Facebook pleasantries. He personalized a copy of Hollywood Gothic I bought from his eBay store with a typically cheeky “Dracula? I never even heard the name before! Greetings from Transylvania,” which still brings a smile (albeit now, one bittersweet) to my face every time I read it. 

In that old interview from a long-defunct horror mag called Penny Blood, conducted at the height of the “torture porn” uproar, I asked Skal if he had any intention of revising The Monster Show to address the ongoing evolution and relevance of horror in the post-9/11 world. His response was shocking, insightful, and, in its way, a gentle challenge to the next generation of genre critics, historians, and scholars: “I couldn’t help but notice the implicit allegory of Saw, for example,” said Skal, “just how much are we willing to sacrifice for ‘freedom’? I have no current plans to update The Monster Show any further, but I hope other writers will continue the exploration.” Still, I intended to follow up on that original chat someday. Intended to… You always think you’re going to have enough time, right? Rest in peace, David J. Skal.