Television: Horror’s ‘original’ home

Unquestionably, horror has always existed on television. Nevertheless, a number of scholars and critics have argued that the horror genre belongs properly to film, that television is too much a product of the industrial conditions that both regulate and create it to achieve ‘true’ horror. Not only is this position no longer viable (if it ever was) but it is based upon an assumption about what the horror genre is or should be. If we consider modern horror in relation to the Gothic novel and its immediate counterparts the stage melodrama and the sensation novel/drama, it soon becomes clear that television has a special and perhaps unique affinity with the genre as cultural and literary product. Television can do what film cannot, through its historical and contemporary strengths in the deployment of melodrama, particularly in serialized form. Through seriality, television horror reveals the melodramatic nature of the genre. Moreover, it (re)creates that original horror in a way that speaks, perhaps, to some of horror’s less appreciated pleasures and less acknowledged audiences. This article examines this claim through a sketch of Gothic and melodramatic traditions, tracing these through sensation novels, early film melodrama and ultimately contemporary serialized genre television, particularly the CW series Supernatural and The Vampire Diaries. In both series, the Gothic elements are manifested in the show’s manipulation of any and all elements of fantastic lore alongside plentiful gore and intense family drama.