Comet Atomic
Author's posts
Sep 29 2026
The Wolf Man and the Werewolf Craze
By the late 1950s, America had monster fever. Frankenstein’s monster, Dracula, the Mummy, and other creatures from Hollywood’s past were finding new audiences on television just as movie theaters filled with radioactive mutants, aliens, giant insects, and teenage monsters. Somewhere in the middle of this wonderfully strange cultural moment lurked another enduring figure: the werewolf. …
Sep 29 2026
Frankenstein in Mid-Century Pop Culture
By the middle of the twentieth century, Frankenstein’s monster was no longer confined to a stormy laboratory in a black-and-white horror movie. He was appearing on television sets, magazine covers, model-kit boxes, Halloween masks, novelty merchandise, and eventually even in a suburban sitcom. Few fictional characters made the transition from horror icon to pop-culture personality …
Sep 23 2026
Atomic Age Halloween: Costumes, Candy & Pop Culture in the 1950s and ’60s
Halloween in mid-century America occupied a wonderfully strange space between old-fashioned harvest traditions and the rapidly expanding world of television, advertising, supermarkets, suburbia, and mass-produced pop culture. By the 1950s and 1960s, the holiday had become increasingly recognizable as the Halloween celebrated today: children roaming neighborhoods with bags of candy, drugstores filled with boxed costumes …
Sep 22 2026
Vintage Halloween: How Mid-Century America Celebrated October 31
Picture an American neighborhood on Halloween night in the 1950s. Porch lights glow against the early darkness, jack-o’-lanterns flicker beside front doors and groups of children move from house to house carrying paper bags or plastic buckets. Some wear homemade ghost costumes. Others peer through stiff masks attached by thin elastic bands. Inside the houses, …
Sep 22 2026
The Golden Age of Classic Horror: Monsters, Movies & Mid-Century Halloween
Imagine Halloween sometime around 1962. A plastic vampire mask waits on the kitchen table, a cardboard skeleton hangs crookedly on the wall, and somewhere in the house a television set glows in the dark as Frankenstein or Dracula begins after the late news. At the drugstore, monster magazines compete for attention with comic books, while …
Sep 19 2026
The Creature From the Black Lagoon
In 1954, something strange emerged from the water. Universal Pictures had already given movie audiences Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, the Mummy, the Invisible Man, and the Wolf Man. Most of those characters belonged to an earlier generation of horror, however. By the 1950s, movie screens were increasingly populated by extraterrestrials, radioactive mutations, scientific experiments, and creatures …
Sep 18 2026
Dracula in Mid-Century Pop Culture
By the 1950s and 1960s, Count Dracula had escaped his Transylvanian castle. He was on television, in monster magazines, on model-kit boxes, in toy aisles, at Halloween parties, and even represented by a lovable vampire grandfather on a prime-time sitcom. The terrifying aristocrat of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel had become one of the most recognizable …
Sep 17 2026
Raymond White Skolfield: A New Deal Artist Who Captured American Life
Born on this day, September 17, 1909, in Portland, Maine, Raymond White Skolfield was an American painter and printmaker whose work preserved scenes of city streets, working people, industry, waterfronts, and the landscapes of his native Maine. Although his name is less familiar today than many artists of the twentieth century, his work survives in …
Sep 16 2026
The Color of Pomegranates: Surrealism, Poetry & Visual Art
Few films look quite like The Color of Pomegranates. Sergei Parajanov’s extraordinary work feels less like a conventional motion picture than an illuminated manuscript brought to life. Figures stand inside carefully arranged compositions. Books flutter in the wind. Pomegranates bleed their juice onto pale fabric. Carpets, fruit, lace, stone, water, animals, religious objects, and human …
Sep 15 2026
Yuri Norstein: Master of Animated Dreams
Every September 15 offers an opportunity to celebrate Yuri Norstein, the Soviet and Russian animator whose relatively small body of films has had an influence far beyond its size. Born on September 15, 1941, Norstein became one of the great artists of world animation through films that seem almost impossible to separate from dreams, memory, …
