Hunter on horror

One of my favorite movie critics, Stephen Hunter of the Washington Post, writes on the upcoming wave of horror movies:

The existence of horror as a theme in literature certainly suggests that stories which inspired fear were a staple of the imagination long before boys and girls sat next to each other in darkened auditoriums, waiting for the scary parts and a chance to cuddle without moral meaning. It had to be a modern invention because life in the pre-industrial age was pretty much a daily horror story in itself. But as a prose phenomenon, our own dark genius Edgar Allan Poe seems to have invented the horror thing back in the 19th century, along with the detective story, presumably as a way of dealing with his own gin-driven demons, which got him in the end. That too establishes a principle: When dealing with fear, it seems that a way to reduce the anxiety it creates is to confront it in safe circumstances. You're sort of rehearsing your own death, so that when it arrives, you won't go all to pieces. Thus, tales that look at what in life is seldom looked at -- death by suffocation or other forms of terror, the clammy pallor of the corpse's flesh, the stench of the tomb, the whole tradition of death-haunted dark places like cemeteries or alleyways or medical schools -- seem to have a documentable fascination.