TV Horror: Investigating the Dark Side of the Small Screen

Lorna Jowett · Stacey Abbott

Jan 2013 · I.B.Tauris

About this ebook

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.

About the author

Lorna Jowett is Reader in Television Studies at the University of Northampton, UK.