This essay collection proposes that “popular cultural documents” offer “unique insights into the concerns, anxieties and desires of their times,” most often employing symbols and metaphors “as a means of approaching their subjects obliquely” (3). The authors identify numerous worries – nuclear threats, juvenile delinquency, untamed sexuality, suburban anomie, alienating consumption, gender anxiety, and, for Britain, national decline – which found expression in British and American popular culture during the “long 1950s” from 1946 to 1964.

Essays by David J. Skal and Kim Newman survey films featuring various takes on Armageddon, including irradiated creatures and other dangers unleashed by science and technology. Elizabeth McCarthy traces images of female juvenile delinquency in 1950s American film and fiction, which both titillated and cautioned about uncontained female sexuality. For the uninitiated, these essays provide a useful guide to the era's many B-films. One wishes, however, for more discussion of structural changes in Hollywood, competition from television, and the rise of a teen market, all of which help explain the proliferation of such low-budget, imitative films, though McCarthy's brief mention of drive-in movies touches upon such issues. Skal's essay, concerned primarily with B-movies, also notes the box-office success and critical acclaim of the star-laden On the Beach (1959). Skal might have said more about what it meant that this film, and the novel on which it was based, found such a responsive mainstream audience in the late 1950s by addressing nuclear annihilation explicitly rather than “obliquely.”

More enlightening are several essays that delve into individual productions, highlight a significant film studio, and compare “science fiction” across different media. Darryl Jones insightfully interprets tensions between modernity and tradition as evinced in the settings and characters of Night of the Demon (1957), though he is less convincing in his attempt to relate the strained relations between the film's American and British collaborators to American ascendency and British decline. Mark Jancovich and Derek Johnston challenge conventional wisdom about the dominance of big- and small-screen “alien invasion narratives” inspired by Cold War paranoia. They highlight antecedents in pulp fiction and comics of earlier decades, and caution against a monolithic approach to the genre. In Britain, films and television programs later dubbed “science fiction” were meant as serious fare for adults; the term “science fiction,” associated with American material for juvenile audiences, was avoided. In the US, film served as the creative medium for science fiction, while in Britain innovation was achieved in television.

Two essays look at Britain's Hammer Film Productions, which broke ground in the horror genre. Wayne Kinsey provides interesting material on the interplay of British film censors and Hammer filmmakers, who, for instance, downplayed gore in the first color version of Frankenstein by submitting a black-and-white cut for approval, which failed to fool the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC). Kinsey's larger point, that today's commonplace sex and violence was once scandalous, comes as no surprise. More intriguing is brief mention of the divergence among British and American censors over a Frankenstein sequel: where depictions of cannibalism appalled the BBFC, American censors remarked on the film's profanity (83). Elsewhere, Christopher Frayling elucidates how, after numerous on-screen depictions had worn thin Bram Stoker's tale, Hammer's film version excavated “the underlying sexual element in the story,” making Dracula “scary again” (126). Ironically, although the film's plot resolution upheld “family values” (130), Frayling notes, critics since the 1970s have viewed the film's sexual elements as a narrative of liberation.

Shifting from film to literature, Kevin Corstorphine assesses the 1950s short stories of Robert Bloch – best known for the novel Psycho (1959) – as a search for authorial voice, a task complicated by Bloch's self-conscious indebtedness to literary “father figures” H. P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allen Poe, and made manifest in prose rich with references to these progenitors. Dara Downey situates Shirley Jackson's novels amid the era's anthropological discourse, finding plots suffused with myth and ritual, and offering a compelling analysis of the domestic spaces and concern with ritualized cleanliness featured in her work. Reading this essay alongside Lorna Piatti-Farnell's discussion of advertising's elevation of homemaking, one wonders to what extent this context might shed further light on Jackson's work. For her part, Piatti-Farnell considers how Sylvia Plath's writing incorporated mass-media images of domestic consumption in order to comment upon disquieting aspects of consumer society, revealing Plath's own ambivalence about her place in a glossy world of abundance.

Finally, Bernice M. Murphy provides a perceptive analysis of Far from Heaven (2002), the highly stylized homage to Douglas Sirk's 1950s melodramas, and Fido (2006), a comedic zombie film set in postwar suburbia. Though seemingly dissimilar in form, both films use strong visual cues and derive entertainment value from audiences’ awareness of “the fifties” as a distinct, distant era, what Murphy describes as the “sometimes humorous, sometimes shocking frisson” that comes “from filtering historical mores and conventions through a twenty-first century sensibility” (231).

Although the editors suggest that the “long 1950s” merit investigation, in part, because they witnessed the rise of a self-conscious generation immersed in and defined by popular culture, these essays say little about audiences who encountered the many expressions of “popular anxiety” found in the book. In approaching their various cultural texts, the authors assume a backdrop of 1950s conformity, yet the evidence of critique and subversion that they reveal raises questions, which go unaddressed, about the very notions of consensus and conformity. As a stimulus to thinking about a “dialogic relationship” (3) between the era's British and American popular cultures, however, the book provides a useful starting point.