Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Rethinking Horror in the New Economies of Television Stella Marie Gaynor full chapter instant download
Rethinking Horror in the New Economies of Television Stella Marie Gaynor full chapter instant download
https://ebookmass.com/product/the-evolution-of-horror-in-the-
twenty-first-century-lexington-books-horror-studies-simon-bacon-
editor/
https://ebookmass.com/product/new-directions-in-supernatural-
horror-literature-the-critical-influence-of-h-p-lovecraft-1st-ed-
edition-sean-moreland/
https://ebookmass.com/product/new-development-assistance-
emerging-economies-and-the-new-landscape-of-development-
assistance-1st-ed-edition-yijia-jing/
https://ebookmass.com/product/horror-in-architecture-the-
reanimated-edition-joshua-comaroff/
The Leadership Mind Switch: Rethinking How We Lead in
the New World of Work 1st Edition D. A. Benton
https://ebookmass.com/product/the-leadership-mind-switch-
rethinking-how-we-lead-in-the-new-world-of-work-1st-edition-d-a-
benton/
https://ebookmass.com/product/rethinking-new-womanhood-1st-ed-
edition-nazia-hussein/
https://ebookmass.com/product/the-future-of-television-in-the-
global-south-reflections-from-selected-countries-george-ogola/
https://ebookmass.com/product/a-history-of-regional-commercial-
television-in-australia-michael-thurlow/
https://ebookmass.com/product/producing-feminism-television-work-
in-the-age-of-womens-liberation-jennifer-s-clark/
Rethinking Horror
in the New Economies
of Television
Stella Marie Gaynor
Rethinking Horror in the New Economies
of Television
Stella Marie Gaynor
Rethinking Horror in
the New Economies
of Television
Stella Marie Gaynor
University of Salford
Manchester, UK
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2022
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to
the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
institutional affiliations.
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
For Owen, Eimear, and The Monster Squad
Preface
One evening in 2013, I was idly flicking through the television channels,
and I accidentally encountered The Walking Dead for the first time. I
knew of the series, but living in the UK and with only terrestrial television
available in my home, I had not yet seen it. I watched the rest of the epi-
sode, what turned out to be the finale of the second season, and watched
a zombie horde attack and bloodily chomp through various screaming
characters. As the credits rolled, I wondered what this kind of thing was
doing on television. As a horror fan, I usually got all my horror content
from film. Later that year, at a friend’s house, I saw an episode of American
Horror Story, again from its second season. Set in an asylum, all manner of
horror codes appeared to have been compressed into this one episode:
there was a thunder and lightning storm, inmates trying to escape, weird
zombie creatures outside, a nun possessed by the devil, a mad scientist,
and all set against the backdrop of the gloomy and claustrophobic asylum.
I was very curious about this horror that I was seeing from US television
channels. It was violent, it was gory, it was unlike anything I had seen on
television before. So, I decided to investigate.
That investigation developed into my doctoral thesis, in which I found
that while TV was no stranger to horror, there was a marked difference in
what I was seeing in The Walking Dead, American Horror Story, and the
rest that followed. Crucially, it became clear that wider industrial forces
had much to play in what I was seeing as an identifiable cycle of TV hor-
ror, and so a more thorough exploration of horror on TV after The Walking
Dead was required, and so became this book. Horror scholarship has for
many a decade produced valuable work considering the genre and its
vii
viii PREFACE
innermost secrets, exploring what the horror genre tells us about the
human condition, our fears and desires, and what we might not know
about ourselves. As horror on television was developing, this area of study
into the metaphors and allegories of TV horror was being well covered,
but my initial question, or rather, my initial puzzling over what this kind
of thing was doing on TV, drove my approach of considering these horror
texts from an industrial perspective.
The configuration of the US television industry had brought forth so
many iconic series by 2010 and The Walking Dead, each one well exam-
ined and explored: The Sopranos (HBO, 1999–2007), The Wire (HBO,
2002–2008), True Blood (HBO, 2008–2014), and Nip/Tuck (FX,
2003–2010). It seemed that many conversations with my friends revolved
around what expensive, long-form, American TV drama they were watch-
ing and would each insist that I watch it too. That television drama was
eliciting such excited chat as any new film release, alongside the surprise
on my part that these conversations about TV shows were also including
horror, revealed to me that exploration as to what was going on in the
television industry that was including horror in its glossy and big budget
series was much needed.
As scholarship in the 2010s regarding the television industry was alight
in its haste to unravel and understand the rapid changes and shifts that
were occurring, as Video on Demand services forced more traditional
channels to sit up and look lively, it was clear that this cycle of horror
would hold significance to the quickly changing television industry and
vice versa. When considering horror on TV for this book, two areas of
academic thinking needed to be pushed together: television studies and
horror studies. When I started this project, the most comprehensive study
on TV horror was TV Horror: Investigating the Darker Side of the Small
Screen, by Lorna Jowett and Stacey Abbott in 2013. That book was crucial
in my own understanding of horror and its place on television. Jowett and
Abbott’s book is a richly detailed look at horror as a stalwart of television,
always there, but sometimes in disguise. This cycle of horror that had
grabbed my attention, kicked off by The Walking Dead, was bold, proud,
and, as this book shows, part of an arms race of drama series, violence,
gore, and boundary pushing genre exploitation. Similarly, The Television
Will Be Revolutionized, Second Edition, from Amanda D. Lotz in 2014,
lays out the television landscape and its trials, tribulations, and continuous
ability to adapt. This formed the bedrock of my industrial approach and
the way I was to think about the horror genre in its contemporary form
PREFACE ix
xi
Contents
1 Introduction 1
Bibliography 19
xiii
xiv Contents
8 Established Horror185
Thursday Night Must See TV 186
Dinner Is Served 188
The Horror Procedural 189
“Have you ever seen blood in the moonlight?” 191
Broadcast Body Horror 193
Broadcast Horror and Broadcast Ratings 195
Broadcast Bites 197
xvi Contents
9 Renegotiating Horror213
Fox and the Horror Cycle 214
The Cultural Renegotiation of Horror 215
Promoting Scream Queens: Season One 216
Season Premiere and Ratings Spin 217
The Expansion of Scream Queens Second Season 218
The Slasher and Scream Queens: Building on the Classics 219
The Slasher: Trash or Classic? 221
Scream Queens and Intertextuality: What Fresh Hell Is This? 222
Murder and Homage 223
The Power of Controversy Compels You 226
Capitalizing on Controversy 227
The Exorcist on Fox: Legacy and Homage 229
The Devil Is in the Detail 231
Ratings, Renewals, and Risks 233
Horror: A Cornerstone of US Television 234
Bibliography 236
10 Conclusion241
Bibliography 245
Index247
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
premiere of the seventh season of The Walking Dead (AMC 2010–), epi-
sode 7.01 “The Day Will Come When You Won’t Be,” featured a long
and protracted scene that critics likened to torture porn. TV critic in Forbes
Erik Kain said of the episode:
Tonight’s killing was tasteless and gory and gross. It left audiences reeling,
myself included […] like the episode left me unclean, dirty, sick to my stom-
ach. I’m not sure if this was great drama, or just torture porn. I’m not sure
how to feel, only that it feels wrong. (2016)
that consisted of cop shows, sitcoms, and game shows. To appeal and
reach broadly across the nation, networks and the advertisers that funded
them had to assume that inside the homes where their show was airing,
the entire family could be sat around the television. The “imagined audi-
ence,” Ien Ang explains, is “institutionally produced.” The industry’s idea
of who is watching their shows, and in turn, who is watching the advertise-
ments, is not necessarily who is actually watching (1991, 3). At this stage
of television’s development, for the networks and advertisers their focus
was on achieving high numbers of viewers overall, rather than specific
groups within those numbers. With only three channels to choose from,
that “imagined audience” had to be gently entertained and not be alien-
ated, offended, or inclined to switch over or switch off entirely. This led to
a policy of what NBC Executive Paul Klein called Least Objectionable
Programming, creating programming that would be the least likely to
offend, keeping shows formulaic and unlikely to push any boundaries
(Primetime TV: The Decision Makers, ABC 1974). Klein described the
audience as consuming the medium rather than individual or specific pro-
gramming. Combining this with the “imagined audience” means that at
this time, in the network era, horror drama was difficult to place on televi-
sion. It may well offend and it may well cause viewers to change channel
or switch off entirely.
But the Big Three would not hold dominance forever. From its incep-
tion in 1986, the free-to-air broadcast network Fox set itself apart by tar-
geting a younger audience. As “the great generational divide [began to
open] up between baby boomers and their parents, networks discovered
the youth market” (Hilmes 2001, 264). Particularly during the early
1990s, Fox “made a strong pitch to African American viewers, an audience
the three major networks ordinarily ignored” (Curtin and Shattuc 2009,
25). Fox brought to light that there were other, valuable viewers, not just
the white, middle-class “imagined audience.” The industry dominance
during the network era of the Big Three and Least Objectionable
Programming was coming to an end.
Spanning from the mid-1980s to the start of the 2000s, the multi-
channel transition (Lotz 2014) saw the arrival of the Fox network in 1986,
The WB and UPN in 1995, and an influx of cable channels all now fight-
ing for a share of the audience. The growth of cable was rapid and was set
in motion by two major factors: industry deregulation and the increasing
use of satellite technology to transmit television. In the 1970s, cable
growth was restricted by Federal Communications Commission (FCC)
6 S. M. GAYNOR
Mutta Katri ei enää voinut hillitä iloansa. Hän lensi sedän kaulaan
ja suuteli häntä kummallekin poskelle ja olisi varmaan muiskauttanut
kolmannen kerran keskelle suuta, ellen minä viime hädässä olisi
ehtinyt väliin. Katri sanoi äkäisesti:
"Älä sinä, Kalle, nyt ole niin mustankipeä! Kyllä sinä ehdit osasi
saada."
"Ähä, siitä sait! Joko huomaat, että minä vielä saan naisen
lämpenemään? Mutta muistakaa, mitä minä puhuin perillisestä.
Voisin vielä lisätä, että minusta tulee lapsen itseoikeutettu kummi."
"Se olisi liian kovaa. Sitä ei hän ole ansainnut", puutuin minä
puheeseen.
Pian puhui meille ääni vatsasta, ettei elämä ole paljasta kuhertelua
ja suutelemista. Rupesimme ajattelemaan Helsinkiin siirtymistä.
Minä ymmärsin, että taistelu leivästä tulisi tästäpuolin kahta
katkerammaksi, vaikka useat tutut aviomiehet väittivätkin, että
nuorenmiehen talous kuluttaa yhtä paljo, jopa enemmän kuin
perheen ylläpito vaatii.
Sitte hän puhui vielä monenmoista, mutta niin hiljaa, etten voinut
kuulla.
"Se riippuu siitä, että sinun suussasi on vika. Mutta ei saa moittia
mitään sen vuoksi, ettei satu sitä ymmärtämään. Sinäkin kirjoitat
hämäriä, käsittämättömiä runoja, mutta siitä huolimatta minä luen
niitä, vieläpä kiitänkin."
*****
"Tiesithän sinä, että minä olin köyhä. Miksi sitten otit minut?"
"Mutta historia?"
MADONNA.
Liikutettuna kysyin:
"En. Mutta sen uskon, että madonna tuntee itse onnea. Katso,
miten kiihkeästi se painaa lasta rintoihinsa!"
"Katri!"
*****
Kesken kaiken tuli toiselta taholta uusia huolia.
"Rakas veljeni!
Kaarinalta."
"Saammepa nähdä!"
"Niinpä rukoile!"
"Älä sinä, Kalle, aina puhu turhia. Meillä on tässä tärkeitä asioita."
Aivan kuin ei olisi ollut kysymys hänen rahoistaan, vaan minun tai
jonkun muun!
*****