Horror Studies - Volume 4, Issue 2, 2013

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.

Ghostwatch was an infamous mockumentary broadcast by BBC1 on 31 October 1992, documenting the ‘live’ investigation of a London haunted house. Its careful recreations of the conventions of live television were such that it successfully fooled many of its spectators into believing that BBC personalities, playing themselves, were in danger, and Britain was undergoing a massive haunting facilitated by television itself. A suicide was attributed to the programme, as well as several cases of post-traumatic stress disorder in children. This article links Ghostwatch with the supernatural implications that media of transmission are often understood as having, at least since the early linkages between spiritualism and telegraphy. It also explores how the programme exploits the conventions of liveness as a dark parody of the ways children are taught to understand television: as a semi-permeable barrier that looks even as it is looked at. Finally, it considers the implications of the BBC becoming perverted into a national haunting force in terms of its putative role as a nation-building public service broadcaster.

Looking to capture the popularity and excitement surrounding the first truly successful ‘found footage’ horror film The Blair Witch Project (1999), in 2000 MTV began airing Fear, a reality competition-style television series that found contestants completing dares while exploring a haunted location to win money. Continuing the early tradition of MTV pushing boundaries and inventing formulas, Fear utilized the aesthetics made popular in Blair Witch and combined them with the increasingly popular reality competition format. While this union of seemingly disparate concepts did not last long in its own right, Fear set the standard for future paranormal reality television shows in terms of affective programming. Fear had a unique relationship between producer, consumer and technology, as the contestants filmed the show themselves, as well as utilizing surveillance cameras. This results in a more personal, amateur presentation that is indicative of a larger cultural trend in the twenty-first century, with a convergence of audience and performer, consumer and producer. Most interesting for Fear is that these lines are blurred not by ideology, but affect.

This article examines a new type of text that has arisen due to the twenty-first-century obsession with the paranormal: the ghost-hunting reality show. Even though spiritualism originated amidst strong female leadership and mediumship has long been associated with women, the most popular ghost-hunting shows portray the activity as a hypermasculine affair. This article seeks to understand why reality television has attracted men to the traditionally feminine work of talking to the dead and how these men have converted this work into a masculine endeavour. I argue that the hypermasculine nature of the ghost-hunting reality show is due to the potentially emasculating circumstances in which the male participants find themselves. In addition to declaring their belief in the paranormal – an act that goes against the traditionally masculine principle of rationality – these men participate in a genre that demands ostentatious displays of emotion. Referring mainly to Ghost Adventures, this article demonstrates that to combat these supposedly feminizing conditions, as well as their likeness to other typically female roles, such as medium and Gothic heroine, the male ghost hunter calls upon conventions from more ‘manly’ genres, such as the western, action-adventure, science fiction and the detective story.

Contemporary representations of the paranormal are framed both as fiction and reality. Many primetime programmes showcase paranormal phenomena while positing themselves as documentary television. This article looks at one subgenre of paranormal reality shows, ghost hunting, and specifically at its uses of technology as a way of positioning the art of ghost hunting as a scientific endeavour. At the same time, we consider the rhetorical technologies that are put into place, not only in such ghost-hunting programmes, but also in the ghost tourism industry, in order to, as one of the brothers on the show Ghost Lab said defiantly to the invisible specters with whom he was trying to communicate: ‘Make me believe!’ Putting paranormal reality television in dialogue with historical records of the spiritualist movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we explore the differences between the Gothic, Victorian, Modern and (what we might call) Postmodern Fantastic: contemporary paranormal narratives that offer its viewers the ability to sustain the sense of ambivalence produced in the Fantastic indefinitely, by allowing them to believe without being believers.

Demons ([1985] 2007) and Demons 2 ([1987] 2007) offer self-referential commentaries on the power of media to shape audiences: demons literally step off the screens of the cinema (part one) and television (part two), turning everyone they bite or scratch into one of their exponentially growing number. The demonic contagion spreads through two vectors, first, violent media and then the violence those media engender, and the result is gruesome death, gruesome transformation, or both. These vectors transgress the boundaries of media, representation, nation, and ethnicity, and in doing so they erase them, creating a homogenous, murderous mass. The threat of lethal homogeneity the demons carry becomes a metaphor for the potential of converging global media to redesign their consumers into a mass of identical beings defined not by history or culture but solely by consumption. Since both media technologies and bodily contagion are the demons’ means of reproducing, the demons both use media and are media, and they are determined to spread until the world is pure media with nothing to mediate. The films’ portrayals of media are not entirely pessimistic, however: as demon media transform old ways of being, they open new possibilities.

Portraiture and British Gothic Fiction: The Rise of Picture Identification, 1764–1835, Kamilla Elliott (2012) Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 336 pp., ISBN: 1421407175, h/bk, $59.82

European Nightmares: Horror Cinema in Europe since 1945, Patricia Allmer, David Huxley and Emily Brick (eds) (2012) New York: Columbia University Press, 288 pp., ISBN: 978 0 231 162206 7, c/bk, £55.00, ISBN: 978 0 231 16209 8, p/bk, £18.00

TV Horror: Investigating the Dark Side of the Small Screen, Lorna Jowett and Stacey Abbott (2013) London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 270 pp., ISBN: 978-1-84885-617-2, h/bk, £59.50, ISBN: 978-1-84885-618-9, p/bk, £14.99