Books
Global TV Horror, 2021
The Horror genre has become one of the most popular genres of TV drama with the global success an... more The Horror genre has become one of the most popular genres of TV drama with the global success and fandom surrounding The Walking Dead, Supernatural and Stranger Things. Horror has always had a truly international reach, and nowhere is this more apparent than on television as explored in this provocative new collection looking at series from across the globe, and considering how Horror manifests in different cultural and broadcast/streaming contexts. Bringing together established scholars and new voices in the field, Global TV Horror examines historical and contemporary TV Horror from Australia, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, France, Iran, Japan, Spain, New Zealand, USA and the UK. It expands the discussion of TV Horror by offering fresh perspectives, examining new shows, and excavating new cultural histories, to render what has become so familiar – Horror on television – unfamiliar yet again.
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Joss Whedon vs. the Horror Tradition The Production of Genre in Buffy and Beyond. Ed. Kristopher Karl Woofter and Lorna Jowett, 2018
Although ostensibly presented as “light entertainment,” the work of writer-director-producer Joss... more Although ostensibly presented as “light entertainment,” the work of writer-director-producer Joss Whedon takes much dark inspiration from the horror genre to create a unique aesthetic and perform a cultural critique. Featuring monsters, the undead, as well as drawing upon folklore and fairy tales, his many productions both celebrate and masterfully repurpose the traditions of horror for their own means. Woofter and Jowett's collection looks at how Whedon revisits existing feminist tropes in the '70s and '80s “slasher” craze via Buffy the Vampire Slayer to create a feminist saga; the innovative use of silent cinema tropes to produce a new fear-laden, film-television intertext; postmodernist reflexivity in Cabin in the Woods; as well as exploring new concepts on “cosmic dread” and the sublime for a richer understanding of programmes Dollhouse and Firefly. Chapters provide the historical context of horror as well as the particular production backgrounds that by turns support, constrain or transform this mode of filmmaking. Informed by a wide range of theory from within philosophy, film studies, queer studies, psychoanalysis, feminism and other fields, the expert contributions to this volume prove the enduring relevance of Whedon's genre-based universe to the study of film, television, popular culture and beyond.
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This book explores aspects of gender representation as presented in a range of Doctor Who texts, ... more This book explores aspects of gender representation as presented in a range of Doctor Who texts, using a variety of perspectives on television cultures, narratives and the TV industry to illuminate them. The aim is to provide the reader with a gathering together and development of discussion around gender representation in the franchise, looking specifically at how Doctor Who has ‘rebooted’ gender for a twenty-first century audience since 2005. The series became accustomed to reinventing itself when the premise of Time Lord regeneration was introduced in 1966 as William Hartnell had to leave the central role, and like both Star Trek on television, and the James Bond series of films, adopts particular strategies for updating and refreshing its formula. The spin-off series Torchwood (2006-2011) and The Sarah Jane Adventures (2007-2011) also enable new opportunities for development and renegotiation of gender representation in shows that are less constrained by a long history, and the book examines these alongside Doctor Who.
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From early examples such as Star Trek and Sapphire and Steel to more contemporary shows including... more From early examples such as Star Trek and Sapphire and Steel to more contemporary shows including Life on Mars and The Vampire Diaries, time has frequently been used as a device to allow programme makers to experiment stylistically and challenge established ways of thinking. Time on Television offers readers a range of exciting, accessible, yet intellectually rigorous essays that consider the many and varied ways in which telefantasy shows have explored this subject, providing the reader with a greater understanding of the importance of time to the success of genre on the small screen.
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TV Horror: Investigating the Dark Side of the Small Screen. I B Tauris., 2013
Horror is one of the most pervasive of contemporary TV genres with shows like True Blood, Being H... more Horror is one of the most pervasive of contemporary TV genres with shows like True Blood, Being Human, The Walking Dead and American Horror Story making a bloody splash across our television screens. Yet not too long ago critics and horror writers claimed that television and horror were incompatible bedfellows. TV Horror: Investigating the Dark Side of the Small Screen explores the often contradictory relationship between horror and television and shows how this most adaptable genre has continued to be a part of the broadcast landscape, unsettling audiences and pushing the boundaries of acceptability.
Lorna Jowett and Stacey Abbott demonstrate how TV horror continues to provoke and terrify audiences by bringing the monstrous and the supernatural into the home, whether through adaptations of Stephen King and classic horror novels, or by reworking the gothic and surrealism in Twin Peaks and Carnivàle. They uncover the omnipresence of horror in mainstream television from procedural dramas to children's television and, through close analysis of landmark TV auteurs including Rod Serling, Nigel Kneale, Dan Curtis and Steven Moffat, as well as case studies of Dark Shadows, Dexter, The League of Gentlemen, Pushing Daisies, Torchwood, and Supernatural. They expand debates about the nature of horror by exploring its evolution on television. The historical breadth of the discussion, alongside detailed analysis of an exciting and diverse selection of television series, makes this book a must-have for those studying TV genre, as well as for anyone with a taste for the gruesome and the macabre.
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Articles and Book Chapters
Doctor Who: New Dawn - Essays on the Jodie Whittaker Era. ed. Brigid Cherry, Matt Hills, and Andrew O’Day. Manchester University Press., 2021
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Monstrum ‘Supernatural—The End of the Road: A Reflection’ ed. Stacey Abbott and Simon Brown, 2020
Monstrum 3.1 September 2020, special edition ‘Supernatural—The End of the Road: A Reflection’ ed.... more Monstrum 3.1 September 2020, special edition ‘Supernatural—The End of the Road: A Reflection’ ed. Stacey Abbott and Simon Brown: 71-77.
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Gothic Afterlives: Reincarnations of Horror in Contemporary Media. Ed. Lorna P. Farnell, 2019
The Canadian webseries Carmilla (2014-) is both an adaptation of Sheridan LeFanu’s 1872 novella a... more The Canadian webseries Carmilla (2014-) is both an adaptation of Sheridan LeFanu’s 1872 novella and—with three 36-episode seasons (and a season zero), inter-seasonal content, over 35 million YouTube views, and a movie on the horizon—a successful transmedia production in its own right. This chapter will examine various aspects of Carmilla and its operation as a digital reimagining for the twenty-first century, arguing that its success demonstrates the flexibility of Gothic tropes, characters and narratives. Dracula is often seen as the ‘sire’ of vampire fictions across most popular media, though aficionados might observe that it was predated by several other vampire tales, most notably ‘Carmilla’ and its female vampire and ‘victim’. The updated setting (a university campus) and mode (straight to camera pieces ‘filmed’ on journalism student Laura’s webcam) make the characters and their situation familiar for viewers who might never have read ‘Carmilla’ by drawing on teen genres and found footage horror. Adapting the novella as a single frame vlog-style webseries clearly involves various negotiations of the ‘original’, not least, as creator Hall notes, that ‘everything happens in Laura’s dorm room’ (in O’Reagan 2014). All the regular characters are female and ‘somewhere on the LGBT spectrum’ (Hall in O’Reagan 2014), a call back to the way LeFanu’s novella has frequently been adapted or used as inspiration for lesbian vampire stories. Undoubtedly this also helps the webseries find its audiences: despite entrenched assumptions about horror and who it is ‘for’, women have long been horror fans and Carmilla has a loyal fan following of ‘creampuffs.’ By analysing the various creative decisions in adapting ‘Carmilla,’ this chapter argues that the webseries is a key site challenging all kinds of outmoded assumptions about Gothic and horror, from its target audience to its use of spectacle and gore.
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Disney's Star Wars: Forces of Production, Promotion and Reception. Ed. William Proctor and Richard McCulloch, 2019
Disney has often been criticised for gendering its products, and recent animated Disney movies (B... more Disney has often been criticised for gendering its products, and recent animated Disney movies (Brave, Frozen) have attempted to address changing views about female protagonists, with varying degrees of success. The acquisition of Lucasfilm by Disney, and the massive success of the first Disney Star Wars movie makes an interesting case study that illuminates various aspects of promotion, marketing, reception and consumerism. Fans, parents, and consumers of all ages have become increasingly vocal about the way representation operates in popular culture: this public debate encompasses diversity in terms of race/ ethnicity, dis/ability, sexuality and gender. Star Wars: The Force Awakens, pre-release promotional images and materials assured audiences, would feature old favourites alongside new characters seemingly designed to pre-empt criticisms about lack of diversity. Princess Leia is now General Leia; the main hero of the film is a young woman, Rey; the other major new lead, disaffected stormtrooper Finn, is played by an actor of colour, and the villainous Captain Phasma is female. While some criticised Rey for being a wish fulfilment fantasy (in fan terms, a Mary Sue), the film’s massive success seems to speak for itself—audiences clearly are willing to embrace female and minority protagonists in major movies.
Yet while the film itself met with general enthusiasm, the related products and merchandise had a rather different reception. Rey’s absence from most of the Force Awakens product lines provoked angry responses, especially from female fans who already felt let down by the invisibility of female characters in merchandise relating to Avengers: Age of Ultron. Working as a companion piece to Paul Booth’s analysis of “Disney Princess Leia,” this chapter examines the #wheresrey controversy, the relative visibility of Rey and Phasma in merchandise, and responses to this from fans, placing it in a broader context of pop culture promotion and consumerism, assumptions about genre audiences, ongoing debates about ‘blue’ and ‘pink’ aisles in toy retail outlets, and the range of voices within fandom/s.
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Horror: A Companion. Ed. Simon Bacon, 2019
This chapter examines twenty-first century TV horror, using Netflix series Santa Clarita Diet as ... more This chapter examines twenty-first century TV horror, using Netflix series Santa Clarita Diet as its main focus. Examining aesthetics, setting, structure and embodiment, we argue that the series continues horror's tradition of transgressing boundaries.
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Science Fiction, Critical Frontiers, 2000
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Joss Whedon vs. The Horror Tradition: The Production of Genre in Buffy and Beyond, 2018
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Television Finales: From Howdy Doody to Girls, ed. Douglas L. Howard, David Bianculli., 2018
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Journal of Popular Television soecial edition on the Politics of Doctor Who, 2018
This article argues that while long-running science fiction series Doctor Who (1963-89; 1996; 200... more This article argues that while long-running science fiction series Doctor Who (1963-89; 1996; 2005-) has started to address a lack of diversity in its casting, there are still significant imbalances. Characters appearing in single episodes are more likely to be colourblind cast than recurring and major characters, particularly the title character. This is problematic for the BBC as a public service broadcaster but is also indicative of larger inequalities in the television industry. Examining various examples of actors cast in Doctor Who, including Pearl Mackie who plays companion Bill Potts, the article argues that while steady progress is being made – in the series and in the industry – colourblind casting often comes into tension with commercial interests and more risk-averse decision-making.
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Monstrum: “The Death of Death”: A Memorial Retrospective on George A. Romero (1940 - 2017) Ed. Kristopher Woofter, 2018
Dawn of the Dead is one of the most successful independent films to be made, balancing... more Dawn of the Dead is one of the most successful independent films to be made, balancing budget and income, and it frequently appears on lists of Top Horror Films. Without a doubt, Dawn is also the forerunner of today’s popular zombie apocalypse subgenre
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Horror Television in the Age of Consumption: Binging on Fear. Ed. Kimberly Jackson and Linda Belau, 2017
The werewolf has been consistently aligned with the masculine. As Chantal Bourgat du Coudray poin... more The werewolf has been consistently aligned with the masculine. As Chantal Bourgat du Coudray points out in the 1980s the werewolf’s monstrous body ‘still tended to be coded in terms of excessive masculinity’ (2006, 85) in movies. Many 21st century TV representations take this route too, from True Blood to The Vampire Diaries and Teen Wolf. Cashing in on the popularity of both the supernatural and the paranormal romance, such series frequently position thei(male) werewolf as the opposite of the (male) vampire, who has, according to writer Brian McGreevy, become an ‘emo pansy.’ US TV werewolves in particular exhibit particular traits aligning hypermasculinity with social class. The male werewolf is often violent, bestial, blue-collar, macho, manly, aggressive, ‘hot’ blooded compared to the vampire’s cold, and frequently coded as trailer trash, or a ‘bit of rough’. This chapter examines how ongoing narrative arcs in True Blood, The Vampire Diaries and its spin-off The Originals develop their werewolf characters (and their werewolf mythologies), as well as how channel branding and audience demographic inflect the trope of werewolf-vampire rivalry. Yet werewolves also appear in one-off episodes of ongoing series and this can offer a disruption of the status quo, both in terms of the series and of the werewolf trope and Supernatural’s self-contained episode ‘Bitten’ (8.4) is examined from this angle. The episode uses the characteristic features of found footage horror to stage an exploration of masculinity via horror’s clash of the mundane and the fantastic, contrasting the series’ previous uses of the reality TV format by offering a serious first-person perspective that shifts attention away from the two male protagonists. Finally, drawing on these examinations of both the typical and the disruptive TV werewolf, the chapter explores how Hemlock Grove’s apparently typical presentation of its vampire-werewolf protagonists simultaneously extends and subverts some of the key features of the trope, particularly in relation to whiteness, class and masculinity.
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Horror Studies, 2017
Vampires are essentially immortal and thus, while contemporary vampire television series are gene... more Vampires are essentially immortal and thus, while contemporary vampire television series are generally set in the present, the epic scale of a vampire’s existence affords vast potential for period drama via flashback. This article examines the different ways vampire TV has accessed the spectacle of period drama, presenting an alternative version of its usual televisual self, and playing with a different set of genre conventions. Period flashbacks are designed to provide novelty and spectacle, and also afford the pleasure of seeing a different version of a well-known character appearing in a new context. Yet, this article argues that contemporary vampire television series, exemplified by Angel (1998–2004), The Vampire Diaries (2009–17), True Blood (2008–14) and Being Human (2008–13), tie this new perspective to recurring characters and ongoing thematic preoccupations, balancing novelty and the epic sweep of historical period with the familiarity and repetition characteristic of serial drama on television. Thus, vampire TV shows integrate elements and conventions of period drama but use them, sometimes subverting and disrupting them, to feed ongoing development of narrative, characters, themes and aesthetics common to many vampire representations. This article identifies and examines similarities between vampire television and period drama, and the ways in which the combination of two sets of televisual conventions both mesh harmoniously and produce interesting tensions in the former.
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Horror Studies, special edition TV Vampires, 2017
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Reading American Horror Story Essays on the Television Franchise, edited by Rebecca Janicker
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Lorna Jowett and Stacey Abbott demonstrate how TV horror continues to provoke and terrify audiences by bringing the monstrous and the supernatural into the home, whether through adaptations of Stephen King and classic horror novels, or by reworking the gothic and surrealism in Twin Peaks and Carnivàle. They uncover the omnipresence of horror in mainstream television from procedural dramas to children's television and, through close analysis of landmark TV auteurs including Rod Serling, Nigel Kneale, Dan Curtis and Steven Moffat, as well as case studies of Dark Shadows, Dexter, The League of Gentlemen, Pushing Daisies, Torchwood, and Supernatural. They expand debates about the nature of horror by exploring its evolution on television. The historical breadth of the discussion, alongside detailed analysis of an exciting and diverse selection of television series, makes this book a must-have for those studying TV genre, as well as for anyone with a taste for the gruesome and the macabre.
Yet while the film itself met with general enthusiasm, the related products and merchandise had a rather different reception. Rey’s absence from most of the Force Awakens product lines provoked angry responses, especially from female fans who already felt let down by the invisibility of female characters in merchandise relating to Avengers: Age of Ultron. Working as a companion piece to Paul Booth’s analysis of “Disney Princess Leia,” this chapter examines the #wheresrey controversy, the relative visibility of Rey and Phasma in merchandise, and responses to this from fans, placing it in a broader context of pop culture promotion and consumerism, assumptions about genre audiences, ongoing debates about ‘blue’ and ‘pink’ aisles in toy retail outlets, and the range of voices within fandom/s.
Lorna Jowett and Stacey Abbott demonstrate how TV horror continues to provoke and terrify audiences by bringing the monstrous and the supernatural into the home, whether through adaptations of Stephen King and classic horror novels, or by reworking the gothic and surrealism in Twin Peaks and Carnivàle. They uncover the omnipresence of horror in mainstream television from procedural dramas to children's television and, through close analysis of landmark TV auteurs including Rod Serling, Nigel Kneale, Dan Curtis and Steven Moffat, as well as case studies of Dark Shadows, Dexter, The League of Gentlemen, Pushing Daisies, Torchwood, and Supernatural. They expand debates about the nature of horror by exploring its evolution on television. The historical breadth of the discussion, alongside detailed analysis of an exciting and diverse selection of television series, makes this book a must-have for those studying TV genre, as well as for anyone with a taste for the gruesome and the macabre.
Yet while the film itself met with general enthusiasm, the related products and merchandise had a rather different reception. Rey’s absence from most of the Force Awakens product lines provoked angry responses, especially from female fans who already felt let down by the invisibility of female characters in merchandise relating to Avengers: Age of Ultron. Working as a companion piece to Paul Booth’s analysis of “Disney Princess Leia,” this chapter examines the #wheresrey controversy, the relative visibility of Rey and Phasma in merchandise, and responses to this from fans, placing it in a broader context of pop culture promotion and consumerism, assumptions about genre audiences, ongoing debates about ‘blue’ and ‘pink’ aisles in toy retail outlets, and the range of voices within fandom/s.
Slayage: The Journal of Whedon Studies and other publications have featured a range of writing and scholarship about queer issues, identity, and representations related to the Whedonverses, but there has not yet been a publication dedicated solely to queer Whedon studies. This special issue, therefore, seemed timely, if not overdue.
Past decades have also seen female characters become more prominent in supposedly male-targeted genres such as action, horror and science fiction, with scholars analysing how characters such as the female action hero or slasher horror’s final girl both challenge and uphold conventions of genre and gender. With the expansion of the TV landscape and the resurgence of fantasy genres across popular culture, more female heroes have appeared on screen, and have received mixed reception from viewers and audiences. Naturally superheroes require supervillains and, balancing the rise of ‘hot chicks with superpowers’ fighting patriarchal villains, there has been a concomitant rise in female supervillains, often as foes of male heroes but also as foils or shadows to female heroes. Using a range of female villains from TV and superhero history, this talk examines how the threat of the female supervillain is often signalled by overt sexualisation, or as I like to call it, evil cleavage. Increasing calls for diversity in popular media from games to cinema and behind the scenes as well as on-screen, have led to some controversial gender swapping of existing characters, and have undoubtedly shaped current iterations of the female supervillain. Attributes of competence, power, arrogance, sexualisation are displayed (with greater or lesser degrees of success) alongside intersectional identities designed to promote the idea of inclusivity, and in some cases to actively appeal to under-served audiences. From Harley to Hela, Maleficent to Missy, Cat Woman to Catra, female villains are alive and well, and raising hell in television.
Doctor Who’s season 11 premiere will mark the first time in the show’s 55-year history that the Doctor character will be played by a woman, Jodie Whittaker. This move adds Doctor Who to an influx of sci-fi and fantasy franchises that have already put women at the helm. But this new woman Doctor is expected to have a trait that many of those other heroines don’t have: a sense of humor.