Hans Staats

In the age of behavioral surplus, data mining as a subset of surveillance capitalism has become the standard for programming and media distribution. According to Shoshana Zuboff, the rise of computer-mediated transactions has deeply impacted the modern economy in terms of data extraction and analysis, new contractual forms due to better monitoring, personalization and customization, and (the especially ominous proclamation) continuous experiments. How does this apply to 1980s horror?

Season 2 of the television series Atlanta (FX, 2016-present) embarks upon and finishes with a deeply probing examination of race in America. The most recent season of Atlanta begins and ends with a series of abnormal incidents that illuminate a carnival atmosphere that is at once terrifying and absurdly comical. As Ladan Osman points out in her analysis of the Childish Gambino (Donald Glover) song “This Is America,” the difference between “illusion and a vision that achieves the substance of enchantment” is nearly impossible to determine. This is a point that is also true of the second season of Atlanta.

“Teddy Perkins,” S02E06 of the television series Atlanta (FX, 2016–present), has quickly established itself as one of the most accomplished explorations of horror and political speech. Aired a month before the release of the Childish Gambino (Donald Glover) song “This Is America” (May 5, 2018), “Teddy Perkins” presents an unflinching and beautifully photographed interpretation of the relationship of horror to politics and racial identity. The role of Teddy Perkins, a reclusive and idiosyncratic brother to former piano virtuoso Benny Hope (Derrick Haywood), is played by Glover, who presents himself in whiteface. During the filming of the episode, Glover remained in makeup off camera and was referred to by the crew as “Teddy” on-set. Furthermore, Glover is not listed as playing the character in the credits to the episode, which instead lists “Teddy Perkins as himself.” Reminiscent of the dramatic anticipation of the unnamed monster in horror films ranging from Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931) to Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978), Glover’s performance illuminates the contemporary social environment of the politics of race and horror by way of the traumatic experience of stardom within the music and entertainment industries.

This essay focuses on the media interface between the golden age of American horror comics (1948–1955), the television news series Confidential File (KTTV, 1953–1958), and the cultural function of the figure of the child regarding moral panic and public anxiety. Starting with the horror comic book series Tomb of Terror (Harvey, 1952–1954), I examine the deep impact of Entertaining (or EC) Comics’ best-selling publications on the US cultural imaginary, while at the same time drawing attention to the performance of juvenile delinquency in Confidential File. Taking the same line of argument further, I propose that the Tomb of Terror story “Tag … You’re It” (July 1954) emphasizes the power and agency, rather than the violence and savagery, of the cruel child.

In this essay, I complicate the origin story of the slasher movie by considering the family horror film in relation to the concept of food. Specifically, I argue that the reactionary politics or “Reaganite entertainment” associated with Poltergeist is prefigured by the morally ambiguous killer in Psycho, Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), who is framed by a monstrous family history that is situated in precisely the same locale that the farm-to-table ethos associates with the nourishment and well-being of the body politic. The free-range stalk-and-slash narrative in Psycho, in other words, is characterized by a killer who hides away from the victims that he encounters. Rather than pursuing his quarry with unrelenting purpose, Norman, like Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen) in Texas Chainsaw Massacre, is a reclusive figure who is intruded upon by the victim.

In this essay I explore the intersection of the War Gothic and the monstrous anthropocene in Anglo American comics and graphic narratives between 1950 and 1982. More specifically, I focus on the transition between New Trend EC war comics (Two-Fisted Tales, 1950-1955; Frontline Combat, 1951-1954) and DC war tales (Weird War Tales, 1971-1983) after changes in the Comics Code Authority (CCA) made the use of horror elements possible. Furthermore, I examine the connection between the notion of the EcoGothic body and the ruined battlefield as Gothic landscape in Swamp Thing (DC, 1972-1976) and The Saga of Swamp Thing (DC, 1982-1985). After the CCA boycott of classic horror archetypes is lifted in 1971, publications like Weird War Tales and The Saga of Swamp Thing exploit the overlap of and complicity between Gothic discourse and the realm of military experience. As a result, the war hero and superhero are converted into a leading figure of the anti-war and deep ecology movements. Contextually, I look at the moment or period between the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Topics covered in this essay include military mobilization, imagining the enemy, the experience of combat, the space of the battlefield, military technology, destruction and reconstruction.

Barbara Creed, in the opening to her paper “Baby Bitches from Hell” (1994), asks a deceptively straightforward question. Why do girls star in horror films more frequently than boys? Including The Bad Seed (1956), The Innocents (1961), Carrie (1976), and Poltergeist (1982), monstrous little women “haunt the celluloid corridors of popular cinema.” Celebrating the “multifarious image of the evil girl-child,” Creed, Rhona Berenstein, Vivian Sobchack, and Linda Williams’ “Scary Women” symposium (UCLA, Jan. 1994) heralds a tectonic shift in horror film studies. Immediately following the Northridge Earthquake (17 Jan. 1994), “Scary Women” boldly redefines the location of gender and sexuality within the horror genre.

Marking the twenty-year anniversary of “Scary Women,” I examine the representational status of girlhood within the modern American horror film during the years 1956-1982. Throughout the period of transition from classic to modern phases (1955-1961), the performance of girlhood illuminates a hauntingly perennial cinematic preoccupation with the normal and pathological. Building upon and expanding this argument, I offer a comparative analysis of the Baby Bitch as foundational to the form of the queer child, the performance of identity and girlhood in Hollywood cinema, and the persistent association of electronic media with paranormal or spiritual phenomena.

KEYWORDS: Queer child, media studies, horror film

Isabella van Elferen’s Gothic Music: The Sounds of the Uncanny is a welcome addition to Gothic literary studies, media apparatus, and critical theory. In addition to the work of Fred Botting, Jeffrey Sconce, Robert Spadoni, Stefan Andriopoulos, and Caetlin Benson-Allott, Gothic Music is a thought-provoking monograph not only for scholars working in the area of “the fantastic” (SF, fantasy, Gothic, horror, etc.) broadly construed. It is also, more importantly, a literary and cultural history that challenges and upgrades our general understanding of the Gothic tradition across a range of media and orthodoxies, including literature, film, television, computer games, Goth club nights, and festivals.

Richard J. Hand’s full-length study of the golden age of American horror radio (1931–1952) is a welcome addition to the ever-expanding field of cinema and media studies. Beginning in the second half of the 1970s, when the horror genre is put on the agenda of film studies, scholarship has tended to remain encumbered by the disciplinary boundaries of gender, psychoanalysis and auteurism. Rather than assume that an overarching theoretical and generic unity exists within and flows from horror cinema, Hand provides an intermedial history of the influence of crime and horror on the U.S. cultural imaginary by focusing on the relationship between horror radio, television, film, comics, theater and literature.

What exactly is the difference between the monster as an instrument of Puritan vengeance and the embodiment of what Puritanism repressed? In my view, one of the dominant locations of the monster within a cultural geography of the American horror film, spanning from 1978 to 1982, is the now extinct teen-centered “fun in the sun” movie of the late 1950s and early 60s. Moreover, “the trite frivolity” of beach films, “which in the ‘60s became a conspicuous alternative to the relatively troubling delinquent dramas about the suburban youth population,” points to a colonial American intellectual history and the stereotypical image of Protestant Christianity during the eighteenth century (Shary 2, 84).