About four years ago I wrote a piece about the mostly
unacknowledged history of horror as a television genre and how it has never
really managed to get “a claw-hold on the small screen the way it has in cinema
houses, while dumb sitcoms, cop shows, and doctor shows continue to
proliferate.” Horror has rarely been acknowledged as a thriving or even a
legitimate television genre, yet monsters and murders have made their mark in TV, not just in overt genre programs such
as “The Munsters” or “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” but in ones that straddle the
lines such as “CSI” and “The Mighty Boosh.” As cable stations concerned with quality and open to
experimentation continue to expand the possibilities of what is permissible on
television, horror has found a more comfortable home on pay channels such as
HBO and AMC. If nothing else, after sixty years of The Quatermass Experiment, “The Twilight Zone,” “Dark Shadows,”
“The X-Files,” and “The Walking Dead,” TV horror has made a deep enough impact
that it warrants a study much deeper than the 2,700-or-so words I gave it back
in 2009. Lorna Jowett and Stacey Abbott have done precisely that with their new
book TV Horror: Investigating the Dark Side of the Small Screen.
The multitudinous programs the writers cover in just 225
pages really draws attention to how overdue this study is. Because of that
past failure to acknowledge horror TV, Jowett and Abbott had many, many stones to
fling over. They trek to all corners of the topic to discuss how horror has
infiltrated non-genre programs, how the televised version differs from its
cinematic cousin, how the “mainstreaming” of horror has changed what we are
able to see on our TVs, how children have always been more open to the genre
than programmers often realize, how horror programs function as metaphors for
the entire genre, and how the television set, itself, has functioned as a thing
of horror. The discussion is academic but always readable and accessible, though
I am now convinced that academic writers get paid based on how many times they
use the word “liminal.” A word non-academic writers love to use to make
themselves sound academic is “seminal,” and I’ve always promised myself I’d never
use it here on Psychobabble. I’m going to break that vow—just this once—because
“seminal” is exactly what TV Horror is.
It is the first thorough discussion of that creature in the closet, that thing
the academics refused to acknowledge until now. Let there be many more
intelligent studies of horror TV such as this one and many, many more horrifying
programs to study in the decades to come.
