A Sexual Haunting

“As syphilis spread all over Europe, the horror at its unprecedented virulence spread with it. It was the sexual version of the black plague. As the descriptions of the doctors who first diagnosed the disease make clear, the advent of syphilis had much to do with the iconography of horror. The horrible faces in horror movies have a long history. More often than not, those faces have been derived from the symptomology of syphilis” (E. Michael Jones, Monsters from the Id, p. 116).