Danielle Hancock

This blog post was originally published in Stirling Gothic's The Gothic Imagination and may be found at the following web address:
http://www.gothic.stir.ac.uk/uncategorized/where-the-camera-can-not-tread-sounding-the-unseeable-in-game-of-thrones/

This Critical Television Studies Online blog article explores the use of female grotesquerie within hit Netflix series Orange is the New Black, arguing the sights, sounds and implicated scents of female bodies to be instrumental in cultivating audience/character perspectives and relationships.

This paper explores the developing form of binaural or '3D' audio horror, asking to what extent the use of binaural recording within new audio horror extends and explores the horror genre, and the horrific properties of sound and sound mediation.

This paper explores the extent to which Sarah Koenig's Serial may be aligned with a new "authentic" journalistic identity, based in the exploration and expression of new podcast media properties and identity.
NB Elements of this paper are adapted from the co-authored paper "I Know what a Podcast is: Post-Serial Fiction and Podcast Media Identity", co-authored with Dr Leslie McMurtry, Expected Publication: 2017/18.

Welles' fiction has inspired many adaptations and reimaginings, in cinematic, televisual, graphic and audio artforms. Perhaps of all these, the most widely known adaptation of H. G. Wells' fictions is The Mercury Theatre on Air's radio play, " War of the Worlds " (1938), based on Wells' 1898 novel of the same title. Whilst the Mercury Theatre's writers initially deemed Wells' story too familiar to 1930s audiences to generate an effectively frightening or gripping narrative, director Orson Welles persisted, and the adaptation was made, albeit with significant alterations: the location was altered from London to New York, the time frame brought up to near-present day (the remake in fact, being set exactly 1 year into the future of its original broadcast), and the form being altered from written, " memoir " style, to a minute by minute live news broadcast. The play was highly effective, and gained rapid infamy following reports of it having spawned mass panic across New York. Whilst the veracity of these reports is now queried, the adaptation is still regarded as a pioneer moment in radio and sci fi history, revealing not only the power of live mass media, and the import and trustworthiness of radio in the run up to WWII, but also the timeless nature of Wells' story. Whatever the form or delivery, it seemed, Wells' dystopic vision of Martian invasion would always strike a resonant note within Western culture. With this in mind, this paper explores three 21st century, podcast adaptations of " War of the Worlds " , texts which consciously redevelop both Wells' and Welles' original works yet in vastly altered contexts. Podcasts, as pre-recorded sound files designed to be listened to on personal, privatised audio media, and on individualistic time frames, can be seen to embody modern fears regarding new audio media, in which traditional, collective and community-based broadcast values are seen to decline in favour of fragmented and antisocial " head-phone culture ". Likewise, whilst The Mercury Theatre's " War of the Worlds " aired in the run-up to WWII, a time when listeners were fearful of cultural invasion, the story's podcast evolutions emerge in an era typified by ambiguity regarding terrorist invasion. Post 9/11 Western culture is fearful of terrorist threat, yet uncertain, and often critical, of British and American overseas involvement in the " War on Terror " , and of Western colonial legacies. Thus this paper asks how Wells' story evolves and becomes meaningful, both within such new, highly individualistic, privatised and mobile audio media, and the societal context which it inhabits. In short, it is asked, how does War of the Worlds work in the age of isolation, apathy and Nationalistic uncertainty? Author Biography: Danielle Hancock is currently writing her doctoral thesis at the University of East Anglia, under the supervision of Professor Mark Jancovich. Her thesis explores the development of new audio cultures within first wave dramatic and narrative podcasting, focussing largely on horror and sci fi genres. She has publications forthcoming on horror/sci-fi podcast Welcome to Night Vale, and radio drama and national identity, has blogged with Stirling University's Gothic Imagination project, and the Critical Television Studies Blog, and has delivered numerous conference papers on various topics of audio fiction. Her studies are kindly funded by the University of East Anglia.

NB This paper shall be given at the upcoming Patrick McGrath Symposium 'Asylums, Pathologies, and Themes of Madness', held at Stirling University on Jan 16th 2016.

In September 2015 Patrick McGrath read aloud his short story “The Smell” on BBC Radio 4. The story itself is, typically of McGrath’s fiction, oriented around an unreliable and increasingly unstable narrator whom, it transpires in the tale’s climax, has been long dead for the whole time that he has told the story. This paper seeks to query the ways in which bringing an oral narrator (and indeed an authorial narrator at that) to such a story can destabilise current notions of the unreliable narrator and audience dynamic, to offer a new understanding of both the story and its ‘teller’. If the unreliable Gothic narrator is most commonly understood in terms of literary convention, in which questions of intonation, pace, pitch and voice are left to the reader’s interpretation and imagination, and wherein  ‘true’ authorial identity is most commonly obscured in favor of the narrator’s proposed identity as storyteller, then McGrath’s radio reading offers something quite different. It shall be posited that though such a reading offers a definitive voice to the tale, one which both denies the listener the ordinary ambiguities of literary form and recalls starkly McGrath’s presence behind the narrator’s words, in radio’s intimate format is also enabled a new relationship between reader and narrator, one which is now based in the Uncannily disembodied, uncertain terrain of radio transmission, and which meets the listener in a more assertive, viscerally unnerving and crucially ‘live’ manner than a literary form can allow as we hear the voice of the mad, untrustworthy and undead narrator. Here, then, I seek to show that in radio form the insane Gothic narrator becomes both stabilised and yet more fluid and unknowable in new and exciting ways.

This article examines the origins and evolution of horror podcasting, arguing the media form to contribute new and important aspects to both the Horror and Gothic genres, and to contemporary understanding of new audio cultures.
The article is free to read and available through the below link to Palgrave Communications.

This article uses cult hit podcast Welcome to Night Vale, and explores the programmes uses of mediation, sound and audience as a means to open discussion on the horror podcast genre.
Published in Horror Studies Journal, Vol 7 Issue 2, pp 219 - 234 (Nov. 2016).

Whilst witnessing the dawn of a new political era, America had already entered a new media epoch. Alongside the ascendancy of Donald Trump, there has been a revival of grassroots media and the rise of the podcast as a mass media form. Perhaps no media exemplifies the Post-Truth era as clearly as the podcast in its diffracted and unregulated proliferation. In particular, the popular genre of podcast horror offers a uniquely apt means by which to express and explore the anxieties and tensions of the world of Trump. This chapter surveys how horror podcasts have exploited audio’s curious liminality as both deeply intimate and uncertain. This includes case studies of two successful American podcasts: the extrapolated horrors and alternative histories in the anthology series The Truth; and the neo-Gothic Americana of serialized ‘community radio-show’ Welcome to Night Vale. In analyzing how these shows portray America, the podcast form is argued to hold unique creative insight and communic...

This article uses cult hit podcast Welcome to Night Vale, and explores the programmes uses of mediation, sound and audience as a means to open discussion on the horror podcast genre. Published in Horror Studies Journal, Vol 7 Issue 2, pp 219 - 234 (Nov. 2016).