Horror in the fine arts

There was some debate here last week around the LA Times story linking the popularity of horror to bad times. Personally, I've always been a believer. Clarence, on the other hand, posted: "And I'm still iffy on the idea of unsatisfying and troubling times in real life motivating audiences to go see horror ... "
As I was reading City Beat this week, one more piece of the puzzle fell into place, and the fact that it didn't occur to me before indicates how far removed and on a pedestal I put ART from the other arts. The title of the story was:

SUPERABUNDANCE OF HORROR

War plus Expressionism equals two rooms of shock at LACMA

"... Like most everything else German, Expressionism went to war in 1914, with only isolated malcontents and extreme leftists standing against the militarist tide. Artistic results of this lemming’s leap are on display at LACMA, as Shell Shocked: Expressionism after the Great War displays post-Armistice selections from the Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies.
...Even canvases having little to do with the war are shot through with battlefield images, such as the goofy, broken Christ in Max Beckmann’s Descent from the Cross, all knees, elbows and pale twisted death, like a corpse jutting from the mud and wire of No Man’s Land. The exhibit’s signature piece, Otto Lange’s Vision, rolls the guilt, misery and dread of lost war and bitter postwar into a single naked figure sitting quaking like a penitent child as accusing faces surround.
... [and bringing in film] Germany’s postwar Expressionis t cinema, one of the marvels of 1920s European cul ture, is represented by posters and selected clips f rom Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) and M (193 1), the former a dystopian parable as well as arguably the first science fiction film, and the latter the frame for Peter Lorre’s monstrous performance as the ultimate displaced outsider – a child molester even the criminal underworld despises. Both speak to disillusion many times worse than the patriotism hangover endured by the American writers and artists of the Lost Generation, just then laying bare their own psychological wounds in fiction and verse. Read the whole story here
My simple point is that fine art often goes dark or horrific in scary times, so why not film.