Weird Menace

Weird menace, also called shudder pulp, is a subgenre of horror and detective fiction that flourished in American pulp magazines of the 1930s and early 1940s, in which a hero is pitted against sadistic villains such as mad scientists, evil surgeons, or deranged killers, in stories built around graphic scenes of torture and threatened brutality, often directed at a scantily clad damsel in distress. The subgenre grew out of Dime Mystery Magazine, which began as a straight crime-fiction title before developing the new style in 1933, and was dominated, alongside Popular Publications titles such as Terror Tales and Horror Stories, by that shift. The vogue for weird menace pulps was brief, running from late 1933 until 1941, when a reform movement aimed at pulp content brought the genre to an end.