… and the haunted season hits the streets full force right after Labor Day.
Adolf Hitler is as darks as it gets. Just to be clear, this is not a political entry. Just one on terror, and the German dictator is the absolute on the subject.
He’s also a fascinating study for anyone looking for ideas on their next horror piece, film or print.
This entry came to me while rereading Alan Bullock’s Hitler, A Study In Tyranny. When I first read it in graduate school, I was caught up in the power of one man’s ability to control the masses as a radical revolutionary. Now, decades later as a horror author and technology writer, I find this book one of the most compelling and riveting accounts of absolute madness I’ve ever read. This is one juicy steak of a book that’s a slab of insanity where you can smell the blood on every page. And it’s the finest account of the madman you’ll ever read.
Bullock begins with Hitler’s birth in Brauna on the River Inn in the emptiness of Austria and Bavaria, then hurtles the reader forward at a breakneck pace recreating an historical account of a figure who, from the very beginnings of his childhood, believed he was better than everyone else around him. A man who came to live with an innate belief that all those around him owed him everything and anything. A man who advanced with lightning speed an almost indescribable force of oration, and with that same voice convinced a mass of followers to destroy anything in its path.
This truly is an historical narrative of horror.
The horror of vehement hatred, genocide, and mass propaganda designed to annihilate Hitler’s most fierce enemy: the Jew. This is all well known to anyone who’s studied the maniac at any length, but it is Bullock’s fabulous attention to detail in his account of Hitler’s madness that is so striking, calling out the obscenities of the savage mind where so many modern historians miss the mark. Take just one sliver of an example where Bullock perfectly captures the image of Hitler as the epitome of horror, quoting, “‘Was there any shady undertaking, any form of foulness, especially in cultural life, in which at least one Jew did not participate? On putting the probing knife carefully to that kind of abscess one immediately discovered, like a maggot in a putrescent body, a little Jew who was often blinded by the sudden light?’”
This is only one example that leaves the reader stunned with all color drained from the face. From there, Bullock indeed creates a masterpiece of the monster who went on to nearly conquer the world and bring in his butchery of an endless thousand-year reign of terror ruled only by a master race of freaks conjured up by a sickness of the sickest.
If you’re a filmmaker or a writer or a poet of any kind looking for ideas for your next personal fright fest, it’s not a bad idea to read Bullock’s Hitler, A Study In Tyranny. Be assured to leave the lights on.
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