![]() In October 1933, Dime Mystery became the home of lurid thrillers filled with outlandish murders, demented cults, and deformed torturers. ![]() Steeger borrowed this melodramatic formula and assigned editor Rogers Terrill to use it to transform an anemic detective pulp, Dime Mystery. The Grand Guignol nightly staged graphic horror plays that used stage trickery to depict beheadings, eye gouging, brain surgery, disfigurements, and other shockers-rarely with any supernatural elements. In fact, Grand Guignol was a direct influence on the godfather of weird menace, publisher Harry Steeger of Popular Publications. The best way to understand what weird menace is about is to imagine a three part mixture: the action-speed of pulp detective stories the mood and settings of Gothic novels and the bloody excess of the Grand Guignol theater of Paris. At the time, the magazines were referred to as “horror pulps.” This wasn’t an inclusive horror, but a specific subset with its own formula. ![]() ![]() The term “weird menace” was given to these pulps by later popular culture scholars. The tale of the weird menace pulps is its own mini-epic that could only have risen out of the anything-goes mentality of the Golden Age of the pulps. The sex-filled spicys deserve their own article some day. Howard made brief ventures into two odd niches of the 1930s pulps, the “spicys” and the “weird menace” magazines. ![]()
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