From Mary Shelley's Villa Diodati ghost-story summer in 1816 to the A24 horror renaissance and the streaming-era Halloween economy—this is the story of how Halloween became America's most-filmed holiday. Hollywood Halloween Horrors traces two centuries of the haunted-holiday spectacle on screen: silent-era origins, the Universal Monsters cycle that codified Halloween's visual vocabulary, the Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff era, the television Halloween tradition from 1952's Ozzie & Harriet to today, the John Carpenter Halloween franchise that defined the modern slasher, the Scream / self-aware nineties, the A24 horror renaissance, and the streaming-era reinvention from Stranger Things and Wednesday through Hubie Halloween.

Illustrated with nearly 200 color and black-and-white images, this book draws from a private collection of vintage Halloween and horror movie posters spanning 1931 to the present—most of which have never appeared in a Halloween reference work—together with publicity stills, set photography, lobby cards, and television-ephemera images from the broader Snapshots of the Past archive.