TV Horror

The CW’s long-standing fan favorite series "Supernatural" follows the adventures of Sam and Dean Winchester as the brothers follow the “family business” of hunting the supernatural. With its unique blend of monster-of-the-week storylines intermixed with the ongoing saga of the brothers’ often troubled relationship, the show is directly tied to traditional Gothic concerns of anxiety, the monstrous, family trauma, and of course, the supernatural itself. "Supernatural" constantly blurs the line between human and monster, good and evil, and like the Gothic itself, individual identities and motivations resist easy categorization.

Along with the variety of supernatural beings that emerge on the show, "Supernatural" provides a rich framework with which to discuss various incarnations of the Gothic, such as the American Gothic, Queer Gothic, Female Gothic, and Postmodern/Meta Gothic. The thirteen essays in this collection discuss how the series both incorporates and complicates Gothic concerns related to traditional tropes, storytelling, women and gender issues, and monstrosity. Just as the Winchester brothers travel across the country in their 1967 Impala, this collection takes readers on a journey through the many ways the Gothic is imagined in "Supernatural."



TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction
Melissa Edmundson

Part 1: Gothic Tropes and Traditions

Chapter 1:
Gothic Anxieties – Then and Now: A Post-9/11 Examination of the Gothic in Supernatural
Alexandra Lykissas

Chapter 2:
The Automobile as Moving Castle in Supernatural
Thomas Knowles

Chapter 3:
Shadows of Hope: Gothic Motifs and Nihilism in Supernatural
Dana Fore


Part 2: Gothic Storytelling

Chapter 4:
“You can’t spell subtext without S-E-X”: Supernatural, Gothic Intertextuality, and the (Queer) Uncanny
Jamil Mustafa

Chapter 5:
“I know everything that’s going to happen”: Supernatural’s Self-Reflexive Compulsion to Repeat (with a Difference)
Michael Fuchs

Chapter 6:
Gothic Imaginings: The Folkloric Roots of Supernatural
Daniel P. Compora


Part 3: Gothic Women: Heroes and Victims

Chapter 7:
Coloniality and the Chicana Gothic: Travelling Myths in the Supernatural Pilot
Leow Hui Min Annabeth

Chapter 8:
Wearing the Woman in White: The Doomed Lives and Afterlives of Supernatural’s Women
E. J. Nielsen

Chapter 9:
“What’s up Bitches?”: Charlie Bradbury as Gothic Heroine
Ashley Walton


Part 4: Gothic Others: Monstrous Selves 

Chapter 10:
“We’ve all been Demons”: Postmodern Gothic and the Fragmented Self
Jessica Seymour

Chapter 11:
“Sympathy for the Devil”: The Neutralization of Traditionally Evil Figures in Supernatural
Samantha J. Vertosick

Chapter 12:
“Psychotically, Irrationally, Erotically Codependent”: Incest and the Gothic Other in Supernatural
Megan Fowler

Chapter 13:
“It’s Possible We All Have a Little Monster in Us”: Dean Winchester, the Mark of Cain, and the New Monster Paradigm
Lisa Schmidt


Notes on Contributors

FX’s American Horror Story: Murder House (the series’ first season) is an important addition to the Gothic canon, manifesting every conceivable Gothic convention, its narrative overwhelmed by a claustrophobic sense of enclosure in space and repetition in time. Indeed, the series manifests what I call the entropic Gothic: its trajectory is relentlessly toward exhaustion and stasis, toward dissipation and death. Symptomatic of this entropic Gothic of American Horror Story is its focus on twins—markers, in the series, of an abiding cultural entropy. The first half of this essay is grounded in the more literal association of twins with reproductive technologies and aging mothers. Twins thus stand in for a series of literal anxieties about interwoven children and homes – about the future of the ‘American Dream’ - that have plagued the United States in particular since the beginning of the recession (2007 through at least the end of 2012). The second half of the essay takes up the more metaphorical meanings associated with twins. American Horror Story’s reiterations of the same, its proliferation of mimetic semblables, mark the entropic drift of the series toward undifferentiation and extinction. Twins metonymically gesture to what the ‘Murder House’ itself represents - a realm of involutionary regression, of reality become virtual reality. The series tracks a fundamental entropic regression of the human to a spent, useless state, in which it is preserved only as what Jean Baudrillard called ‘a kind of ontological “attraction”’.

The third season of Netflix’s Stranger Things—the streaming platform’s breakaway horror hit created and produced by the Duffer Brothers—was released amidst much media fervor in July of 2019. Set (thus far) in 1983-1985, the show focuses on the presence of a monstrous force in the small town of Hawkins, Indiana, and the motley crew of preteens, teens, and adults who team up to fight it. Season three was a slight departure from the tone and pacing of the previous two seasons; additionally, season three also marked the introduction of the narrative’s first canonically queer character, Scoops Ahoy employee Robin Buckley (Maya Hawke). Although it has not been made explicit yet, viewers are also left with the sense that Will Byers (Noah Schnapp)—on whom the first two seasons largely center—may also be queer, and he has certainly been coded as such throughout the narrative.

What is interesting about how the (potential) queerness of these two characters is represented is ultimately that their queerness isn't treated as the linchpin of their character—instead, their characters are fully integrated into the narrative, and their sexuality is incidental rather than constitutive to how they fit into the show. When Robin reveals to Steve Harrington (Joe Keery) that she is a lesbian, it is a sweet moment, but it is also remarkably *boring;* further, Robin does not fall victim to the Bury your Gays trope that the horror genre has in the past utilized all too often, and it appears that she will continue to be a significant member of the cast in the upcoming season four. As such, in this presentation I will further explore how Stranger Things has been and continues to be a positive installment of the new queer horror movement.

MONSTRUM 2 presents six feature essays, four in English, one in Italian, and one in French. Based on her Master’s thesis and a three-week course for the Montreal Monstrum Society (MMS) in the fall of 2018, Alexandra Dagenais' French-language essay addresses the motif of the possessed woman in the demonic possession subgenre as a manifestation of female sexuality repressed under the constraints imposed by the patriarchal order. Combining a psychoanalytic theoretical framework, from Robin Wood's notion of the return of the repressed, with Julia Kristeva's notion of abjection, as well as other feminist horror theorists, Dagenais explores how the spectacle of exorcism demonizes female sexuality. Ellen N. Freeman's essay extends from the research she did for the three-week course she conducted for MMS in the winter of 2018; it argues that Tom Six's controversial, excessive first two Human Centipede films offer a critical grotesque realism that can be traced to the Bakhtinian carnivalesque. In Freeman's analysis, The Human Centipede, First Sequence (2009) and Full Sequence (2011), are savvy reflections of spectatorial desire and horror's attractions-style presentation.  Erin Giannini's study of the hit TV series iZombie takes on the series' repurposing of the traditional association of zombies with consumption to investigate the sociopolitical and ethical dimensions of food sourcing and production. Significantly, Giannini points to the series' investment in class dynamics in the United States as a key factor in its important critical project.  As Will Dodson's memorial preface explains, we lost friend and colleague Jeff Jeske in January 2017. Jeske's essay, written in 2010, is presented here posthumously in honour of a friend who left us too soon. In it, Jeske highlights the mythical elements of Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and the stripping of such qualities of cosmic dread in the stylistically self-conscious, but ultimately more thematically hollow, 2004 remake by Marcus Nispel. Jeske tracks the later film's failure as a postmodern retrospective reimagining of gender dynamics, stripped of the productive nihilism of Hooper's original, independent vision. Valentina Mazzilli's Italian-language essay argues that in his writings as a poet and theoretician, Pier Paolo Pasolini  deployed a critique of booming consumer capitalism in the Italy of 50s and 60s through a championing of the pre-industrial and archaic. She demonstrates that this theme is at the heart of his 60s cinema in Comizi d’amore (1964), Teorema (1968), and Porcile (1969). And Papagena Robbins looks at the proto-feminist call for personal redemption and critique of patriarchal forces in the voice recordings of a 1960s wife and mother in the experimental Gothic documentary Must Read After My Death. Robbins situates Dews' film's critical power within the Gothic mode's willingness to expose the "key epistemological impasses around the auto/biographical, female agency, and the evidentiary mediums themselves."

​Critical reviews of Gary D. Rhodes's The Birth of the American Horror Film (2018), Ruth Franklin's Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (2016),  and Abel Ferrara's 2014 film Pasolini (which is receiving a long-awaited North American release this year) follow. And, as part of MONSTRUM's continuing commitment to developing scholars,  the issue ends with Arielle Corriveau's discussion of the Soska Sisters' film American Mary as a work of feminist Grand-Guignol cinema.

MONSTRUM operates under the stewardship of co-editors Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare and Kristopher Woofter, and is supported by an editorial board of respected scholars in horror and related fields. We thank our collaborators, instructors, contributors and peer reviewers for making MONSTRUM possible.

Contributors: Arielle Corriveau, Alexandra Dagenais, Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare, Will Dodson, E.N. Freeman, Erin Giannini, Anne Golden, Jeff Jeske, Valentina Mazzilli, Papagena Robbins, Kristopher Woofter.

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

In this essay, Logsdon discusses John Logan's _Penny Dreadful_ as a "codification" of the overwhelming anxiety of living in an age characterized by mass-shootings, generally perpetrated by deranged young white adults; by jihadists' acts of violence that target the Western World;  by senseless be-headings, used by ISIS and other terrorist groups to terrify the Western world; by the continued existence of a sub-culture of serial killers; and by the rise of atheism and Satanism as a response to the fading of the JudeoChristian paradigm. In this essay, Logsdon pays special attention to the series' spiritually-conflicted protagonist Vanessa Ives (brilliantly played by Eva Green), whose decision to cast her crucifix into the fire at the end of season two may be the most significant action of the entire series (so far).

Les Revenants (Canal+ France, 2012-15) is one of the most relevant French TV-Series from the last decade, given its high-concept story and its international success. This chapter aims to explore the nature of Les Revenants' significance, focusing on the connection between style and substance, and how they shape and nuance each other in fascinating and thought-provoking ways. To tackle this association, this chapter first outlines an overview of how to understand 'style' and 'substance', the binomial concept around which this volume revolves. Then, it scrutinises the aesthetic strategies at the beginning of the pilot episode, both in its cold open and its opening credits. Through close reading of these two sequences, the analysis details how the interrelation between a noteworthy style and an elusive substance can create a weird, uncanny mood, one of the show's main aesthetic achievements. Finally, this chapter concludes exploring how the narrative offers a double reflection on substance: on a thematic level by exploring spiritual issues, and on a metatextual level by renovating the essence of the zombie sub-genre.

Aesthetics philosopher Noël Carroll affirms that grotesque forms ‘are all violations of our standing categories or concepts; they are subversions of our common expectations of the natural and ontological order’. In breaking structural boundaries, consequently, the grotesque appears as deformations, aberrations, exaggerations, metamorphosis or startling portmanteaus. Given both its nightmarish texture and the evil ingenuity of Dr Lecter’s murders, Hannibal (NBC, 2013‐15) ploughs fertile ground in putting together conceptually distant and even contradictory elements. Hence, this article explores how the aesthetic and philosophical principles of the grotesque are a pervasive presence throughout the entire Hannibal TV series, defining its style, characters’ personality and metaphorical themes. Putting art theory in dialogue with the Hannibal televised text, this article demonstrates how the grotesque ‐ one of the key concepts in Gothic horror ‐ permeates every level of the show, from the opening credits to the protagonist’s inner transformation, converting the narrative into a comprehensive and cohesive liminal artistic ecosystem.

El artículo estudia uno de los fenómenos más populares en la última ficción televisiva -la figura del zombi- y cómo su evolución está ligada tanto a la dinámica propia de cualquier género artístico como al «giro afectivo» de la sociedad contemporánea. Para analizar la sentimentalización del zombi contemporáneo, en primer lugar se explorará la condición metafórica que tradicionalmente ha ido amarrada a estas narrativas desde su reinvención por parte de George A. Romero. A continuación, se estudiarán las causas y se detallarán ejemplos de la progresiva humanización que ha protagonizado el muerto viviente en cine y televisión. Por último, el artículo se centra en tres series contemporáneas que abordan el zombi desde perspectivas estilísticas, temáticas, ideológicas y emocionales innovadoras: 'In the Flesh' (BBC Three, 2013-2014), 'Les Revenants' (Canal Plus France, 2012-2015) e 'iZombie' (The CW, 2015-).

Historically, the sea holds symbolic power within British culture, a space of imperial triumph and mastery over nature. The British coastline, similarly, has served as both a secure defence and a space of freedom and abandonment. However, since the decline of both the empire and the maritime industries, these certainties have eroded, along with the
physical coastline itself. Subsequently, these spaces have become haunted, returning them somewhat to more primal conceptions of the natural world. This article examines how television, as the cultural exponent of choice in Britain during the same period, has
provided the perfect medium to explore the gothic seas: an environment of terror and unease, fear and uncertainty. From Jonathan Miller’s Whistle and I’ll Come to You (1968) to Remember Me (2014), this article details how the appearance of the gothic sea in British culture hastens a broader examination of national myth, virtues and values.

Desde que en 1968 se estrenara La noche de los muertos vivientes (Night of the Living Dead, George A. Romero, 1968) el zombi ha funcionado como una de las figuras alegóricas más importantes del cine de terror. Ahora que las ficciones televisivas están de moda, convirtiéndose en uno de los fenómenos culturales más notables de los últimos tiempos, el género ha conseguido evolucionar gracias al formato serializado. El potencial metafórico que caracteriza a esta criatura se ha visto revitalizado por la aparición de narrativas que nos invitan a ponernos en su piel, dotándolo de capacidades cognitivas que lo convierten en protagonista de sus propias historias. Nuestro objetivo, por tanto, consiste en estudiar el origen de la humanización del muerto viviente y, por último, analizar la serie In the Flesh (BBC Three: 2013-2014), uno de los casos que mejor han sabido utilizar esta novedosa particularidad.

The TV horror explosion arguably demonstrates a merging of horror with other genres, an embrace of genre fusions that suggests a ‘loosening up’ of generic tropes and conventions marking a shift away from fixed genre forms (see for example The Walking Dead (AMC 2010-present) and Preacher’s (AMC 2016-present) embrace of Western/Horror traits and Bates Motel’s (A&E 2013-2017) conflation of teen-drama/slasher elements). Such a thematic shift can also be seen in recent TV Horror’s depictions of non-essentialist representations of gendered and queered identities. The central text for analysis in this chapter is anthology Gothic horror series American Horror Story (henceforth AHS) which appropriates and pays nostalgic homage to a number of horror texts drawn both from TV and cinema. Across its (currently) seven seasons, the show has garnered a cult following in the LGBTQ+ community and attracted a wealth of interest in queer academic circles . I want to suggest that the appeal of AHS as the Queer Horror TV show par excellence, lies specifically in its anti-essentialist queer appropriation of both gender and genre. Via the show’s focus on the concept of identity-as-costume, the queer fans of AHS experience a jouissance-filled immersion in genre, gender, identity and temporal forms that are all effectively shown to be constructed, culturally imposed and therefore, able to be assumed and rejected at will.

In 1997 in Silicon Valley, California, Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph founded Netflix, a DVD sales and rental company. Only 12 months later they dropped the sales part of the business, and focussed on DVD rental by mail. Come 2007 and Netflix expands into online streaming of its movie library. 2013 saw Netflix begin to make its own original 'television' drama (House Of Cards, 2013 - ). While scholars and critics have wailed that we are approaching the death of TV many times over the last 50 years,TV has always survived. But it was Netflix and their move into both the streaming of movies and creating its own original drama, that gave television as we know it, its biggest threat yet. This paper will examine what it is that makes Netflix so successful, how this gave the rest of the television industry 'the fear,' and what the model of Netflix means for the development of horror.

Using the first season of Hemlock Grove (Netflix, 2013 – 2015) as a case study, this paper will explore exactly what Hastings meant when he said “we want to out HBO, HBO.” Looking specifically at Hemlock Grove, I will explore how and why Netflix used horror to expand its original drama output. Television scholars before have explored in great detail the concept of the genre hybrid in relation to TV drama. In this paper I will push this idea further, and demonstrate how Netflix instead uses much more complex micro-genres. Hemlock Grove, ostensibly a werewolf drama, in the context of the online streaming platform with vast amounts of data to mine, and through its use of micro-genres, twists together werewolves, vampires, extreme abjection and body horror, with a psychosexually driven serial killer in there for good measure. Taking into account the horror TV and film offerings in the years after 2010, Netflix gave us Hemlock Grove. This paper will unlock through industrial analysis, exploration of the Netflix methods and models, and textual analysis of Hemlock Grove, what a horror serialization is, and can be, in the sprawling world of the online streaming service.

Following the phenomenal success of the first three seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on the WB Network, writers and producers Joss Whedon and David Greenwalt moved their character Angel to his own spin-off series in 1999. While Angel, which followed its namesake vampire with a soul who had become Buffy’s tragic love interest, never quite matched the popularity of Buffy, the spin-off was notable for being specifically aimed at adult audiences and acquiring an intensely loyal following. In this in-depth study of Angel, Stacey Abbott demonstrates that producers of the show used the commercial convention of the spin-off not simply to repeat Buffy’s successful formula but to create a complex televisual experience with its own distinct identity and creativity.

Through close textual analysis of a range of individual episodes, this volume focuses on the series’ unique visual style and the ways it experiments with the conventions and form of television programming. Abbott clearly situates Angel within traditions of the horror genre on television and in so doing addresses how the horror genre has evolved to suit the changing landscape of contemporary television. She also challenges the tendency to attribute the success of contemporary cult television to a sole auteur by examining the contribution of Angel’s writing team and addressing how contemporary television is characterized by a collective creativity. Finally, while there has been a vast amount of scholarly interest in Angel’s parent show in terms of feminist issues, this volume positions Angel as a key text within gender and feminist studies that offers a clever deconstruction of contemporary masculinity.

In all, Abbott argues that Angel uses narrative, genre, visual style, and theme to create an ambiguous moral landscape in which characters struggle to negotiate the correct path when the consequences of their actions are unknown. Fans of Angel and students and scholars of film and television studies will enjoy this thought-provoking analysis of the series.

Gunslingers. Demons. Military black ops. Sapphic romance. There is a seeming discord to these televisual tropes, but they all come together to create a whole greater than its parts in SyFy’s Wynonna Earp (2016-21). Initially pitched to the network as “Justified meets Frozen” by series creator and producer Emily Andras, this absurdist shorthand conveys a great deal about the series, which centers on sisters Wynonna and Waverly Earp as they protect their generically western town, Purgatory, from demons and other supernatural threats. The outlandishness of the premise is echoed by the outlandishness of the show itself; it’s deeply generically hybrid, occupying an interstitial space between westerns, police procedurals, horror, and mystery, with a constant thread of comedic self-awareness that undergirds the narrative.  The plots are often comically complex, the villains are excessively flamboyant, and the special effects are winkingly lowbrow—a combination very much in keeping with the high concept, low budget network aesthetic of SyFy.

This self-aware, lowbrow aesthetic means that shows like Wynonna Earp rarely achieve the kind of visibility that prestige TV does; its genre hybridity makes it difficult to categorize, which in turn means that contemporary viewing practices driven by the idea of “curation” often ignore shows like Wynonna Earp, which fly under the radar in terms of broader media coverage and are difficult to categorize tidily. However, that invisibility also gives the show room to grow into a narrative that centers both strong, complex women and queer characters, offering not just a transgression of genre but also a transgression of cultural scripts so often reified by mainstream TV. This paper will explore how the production of and the content within Wynonna Earp is consistently rhetorically transgressive in ways that deserve more scrutiny.

The vampire is no stranger to American TV drama. In the 1960's vampire Barnabas Collins swept across gothic daytime soap, Dark Shadows. Buffy eliminated countless vamps and demonic creatures in the 1990s. Then post millennium we all fell in lust with the dark romantic bloodsuckers of True Blood and The Vampire Diaries, before AHS: Hotel brought us a pop gothic vampire set against an art deco backdrop. So while mainstream vampires got sexy, another interpretation of this classic monster was about to worm its way on to television.

This paper will investigate The Strain (FX, 2014 - ), and the position of the vampire on US TV.  Television drama is inherently hybrid in nature – it borrows from many other televisual forms - the serialization of horror can blur and merge monsters into new incantations. This paper will explore how the institutional strategy at the basic cable channel FX, has a direct influence on the vampiric monster presented in the series.
I will examine how FX and The Strain have blurred the vampire narrative and its traditional lore's with new conventions: demonstrating how this both underpins the the priorities of the channel and its competitive urges, and how it develops the vampire itself. I will present the philosophy of FX and its 'scattergun' approach to new programming, the controversy that surrounded the first season of The Strain, and a look at the old and new school mythology contained in the series.
Contemporary TV drama offers huge potential to challenge and redefine the vampire and its  conceptual and narrative forms. Recognising the channels' influence on the end product, I bring an industrial studies perspective to the vampires, parasites and worms that populate The Strain.

Its safe to say that the slasher is a disreputable film genre. Infamous for its extreme violence, repetitive plots and endless sequels, its not the obvious choice for a broadcast networks' foray into the burgeoning TV horror canon. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter in 2011, now creator of Scream Queens Ryan Murphy, said of American Horror Story that it definitely wasn’t  “... a slasher film.” Only six years ago Murphy was keen to distance himself and his work, away from the depraved reputation of the slasher film. While the current surge of dramas across television leaves viewers drowning in a deluge of allegedly 'quality' TV, the use of the disreputable, and poor taste slasher genre, complicates this notion of quality TV drama.

This paper is taking an industrial perspective on the small screen horror genre. Scream Queens illustrates the changing attitudes within the TV industry towards horror. It is a useful example of the industrial practice of commercial channels seeking a well defined and specific 'quality audience.' Historically targeting a younger and more savvy audience than the other free to air networks, the Fox channel were keen to reach a very specific demographic with their small screen horror contribution. With Scream Queens, Fox executives targeted the “young upscale audience,” that the advertisers who fund the channel, so dearly seek. For funding advertisers at Madison Avenue to back a much maligned horror genre; for it to appear on a free to air network who are at the mercy of the Federal Communications Commission; the savage broadcasting standards and practices department at Fox giving the green light; demonstrates how much TV's attitude has changed. 

Through the lens of the television industry itself, this paper will explore in the first instance how and why Fox came to be making, of all things, a slasher series, and how the network went about promoting the show, and importantly, to whom. I will illustrate how Scream Queens became of huge importance to the network, as they became the first broadcast channel to dramatically change how they negotiate with prospective advertisers. Moving on from this, I will examine how Scream Queens complicates notions of 'quality television;' mixing as it does the notorious slasher with squeaky clean pop culture, horror movie references both obvious and obscure, and of course, the glorious set piece killings that litter the first season of Scream Queens