Masked men to morphine addiction: The original TV Little House on the Prairie was a true American horror story

By the show’s final seasons, however, its depiction of hard-hitting issues began to veer into actual horror-style storylines. One especially grim two-parter from the seventh series saw a 15-year-old girl being kidnapped by a masked man, and then, it is implied, sexually assaulted, resulting in her becoming pregnant. The episode, called Sylvia, shows her father punish her and she is shamed by other Walnut Grove residents; then her rapist returns and she dies in an accident trying to escape him. Dr Elizabeth Erwin, co-creator and editor of Horror Homeroom – a website which analyses works of horror through critical theory – recently wrote an article about this particular episode in which she argued that “[its] premise is something straight out of a horror movie” and that it “meshes together elements from a variety of horror sub-genres, most notably Giallo – a highly stylised Italian horror subgenre – and slasher”.