Ah, the zeitgeist! It was there, and it had been for some time, only no one knew how to pick up the pieces and make it work. Radio horror, mystery and noir continued into the 50's, and some of it jumped over to early television. Then there were the EC comics; huge with kids, highly controversial with adults. In his strange way Ed Wood picked up on the zeitgeist, fumbled, yet one could make a case that he paved the way for William Castle (except that Castle had probably never heard of him!). No matter. The problem was that there was no genius, no one with the major talent to get the horror mojo working again; no Browning, no Whale, no Lewton,--no Erle C. Kenton! So the horror stuff came back by a weird osmosis, piecemeal style, with The Black Sleep here, Curse Of the Demon there, the Castles, then the Hammers, and before long it was up and running again. It took a while, but horror has always been the black sheep (not sleep) of literary genres no less than movie ones, especially in the U.S., with even so major a figure as Edgar Allan Poe not wholly embraced by the literary intelligentsia in his native land (abroad, yes).