PITTSBURGH — To Ben Rubin, horror is about much more than cheap thrills and creature features.
"I love the genre and I think it reflects a lot of our society," said Rubin, a horror studies collection coordinator with the University of Pittsburgh Library System. "It's not just gory and fun. ... It helps us understand what it is to be human and navigate the horrors of the real world."
Over the past few years, Rubin has been helping Pitt slowly amass a collection of archives from some of the most celebrated horror filmmakers and authors of the 20th and 21st centuries. That includes acquiring the archives of "Night of the Living Dead" director George Romero in 2019 and, in November, securing the works of "Chiller Theatre" host "Chilly Billy" Cardille.
It's all a part of Pitt's big-picture plan to create a dedicated center for the study of horror on its Oakland campus, according to Ed Galloway, the associate university librarian for archives and special collections at Pitt's Hillman Library.
"Romero was our entree into the horror world," Galloway said. "It wasn't just to get the Romero collection. It was to envision something bigger and something that's not replicated in other academic universities."
Pitt is home to the archives of many icons in their field, including Hill District native and celebrated playwright August Wilson. But the horror collection could be its own museum of annotated scripts, little-seen promotional material, rare books and artifacts recognizable to any horror fan.
In addition to the Cardille archive, Pitt recently secured materials from western Pennsylvania-based horror author Gwendolyn Kiste. Those archives are still being processed and inventoried, but items connected with Romero and frequent collaborators Dan Kraus and Jack Russo are currently available for research purposes by anyone regardless of their affiliation with the university. They just need to make an appointment, Galloway said.
Horror aficionados will surely geek out on some of the items on display at Hillman Library and those found in various archives. There's everything from a Romero-penned script for a never-made "Resident Evil" movie to items from Cardille's stint as a wrestling host for WIIC-TV (now WPXI-TV) to first-edition novels "Frankenstein" by Mary Shelley and "The Phantom of the Opera" by Gaston Leroux.
There are all kinds of more obscure treats to be found as well, like Japanese promotional art for "Dawn of the Dead" and original artwork for the Romero-penned children's book, "The Little World of Humungo Bongo."
Rubin believes there's "lot of capacity for research" in all these horror treasures, especially for Pitt students who may have only heard of someone like "Chilly Billy" casually referenced by their parents.
"It's important to the horror genre and what we want to do with horror studies," Rubin said of Cardille's archive. "He's the first of the horror hosts. We wouldn't have had people like Elvira without Bill Cardille. He's this bigger piece of the Pittsburgh media landscape.
"Maybe students aren't as interested, but we have this responsibility to document the history of this city, and this really does that."
Rubin has been a horror buff since his days growing up in the Florida panhandle, when he would often check out horror stories from the local library and sneak over to friends' houses to watch the latest scary flick. His mother wasn't a horror fan, but Rubin had an uncle who fed into his growing love for the genre and introduced him to the movies and books that would eventually define his professional pursuits.
Galloway, on the other hand, wasn't particularly into horror before Pitt acquired Romero's archives. That led him to watch Romero's films and seek out the works of horror authors like Stephen King, which gave him a newfound appreciation for that world, those who are passionate about it and how it could fit into an academic setting.
"In this new arena, it is certainly unique and fun because the people are fun," Galloway said. "We usually don't deal with collections with fans."
Though Pitt's crop of horror archives is impressive, Rubin and Galloway consider their collection far from complete. Galloway said he hopes that Pitt will start housing the archives of living authors that can grow as they produce more work, as well as those of more women and BIPOC horror creators.
Ideally, these horror resources will put the university on the map as the primary destination for aspiring or established horror scholars.
"I think it's exciting to recognize genre studies broadly but also horror specifically and its role and impact," Rubin said. "It's a genre that has a very dedicated fan base and sells tons of books and movies and has largely been maligned. We can kind of shift that [and show] that it does have a reason to be at a university and be studied."
