Weird menace

Eventually, the two distinct genre variations branched into separate magazines; the detective magazines returned to stories predominantly featuring detection or action, while the eerie mysteries found their own home in the weird menace titles.

[1] Some magazines, for instance Ten Detective Aces (the successor to Detective-Dragnet), continued to host both genre variations.

[2] Popular Publications dominated the genre with Dime Mystery, Terror Tales, and Horror Stories.

In the 1930s, the Red Circle pulps, with Mystery Tales, expanded the genre to include increasingly graphic descriptions of torture.

For example, The American Mercury published a hostile account of the terror magazines in 1938, "This month, as every month, the 1,508,000 copies of terror magazines, known to the trade as the shudder group, will be sold throughout the nation...

Magazine cover. A cloaked figure with a raised machete stands in the foreground, over a naked blonde woman being held down on a stone platform. In the background approaches a man in a suit holding a revolver.
Cover of the August 1934 issue of Dime Mystery Magazine