The Silver Scream

The images are indelible: The ­silhouetted vampire slinking upstairs in F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu. Knife-wielding, wigged-out Norman Bates whipping back the shower curtain in Psycho. Regan MacNeil’s revolving demon head in The Exorcist. Jack Torrance hacking through the bathroom door in The Shining. All among the most iconic moments in cinema — and all from horror films. Yet despite the genre’s reputation for gore, these scenes tend to be anticipatory, less depictions of violence than portents of it. Since the earliest days of motion pictures, no other form has so effectively traumatized ­viewers by dramatizing trauma — and death — as an impending, indiscriminate, inevitable threat.

We find these moments frightening for how viscerally and grotesquely they depict ­menace snarling into peril, but their abiding resonances are also broadly social. In “Return...