Reading List: TV Horror

Also of definite interest to Monster Studies is the very recent work TV Horror: Investigating the Darker Side of the Small Screen (2013) by Lorna Jewett and Stacy Abbott. The two authors are both experts in monstrous media, and their team-up is a must read for anyone interested in monsters on the small screen and offers a great primer on how television has made use of monsters and other motifs of horror. It is a great book, but it frequently left me wanting more. Aside from the opening chapter, their survey is thematic rather than chronological, and I often wanted to know the bigger picture connecting everything together. Similarly, their discussion is usually limited to a small number of texts, and one wonders how other similar works might fit into their schema. These thoughts aside, the book is well-worth a read and will no doubt open many avenues for further research. 

TV Horror: Investigating the Darker Side of the Small Screen

Lorna Jowett (author), Stacey Abbott (author)

Imprint: I.B.Tauris

Publisher: I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd

Series: Investigating Cult TV Series

Hardback £62.00

ISBN: 9781848856172

Publication Date: 18 Dec 2012

Number of Pages: 256

Height: 216

Width: 134

Paperback £14.99

ISBN: 9781848856189

Publication Date: 18 Dec 2012

Number of Pages: 256

Height: 216

Width: 134

Horror is a universally popular, pervasive TV genre, with shows like True Blood, Being Human, The Walking Dead and American Horror Story making a bloody splash across our television screens. This complete, utterly accessible, sometimes scary new book is the definitive work on TV horror. It shows how this most adaptable of genres has continued to be a part of the broadcast landscape, unsettling audiences and pushing the boundaries of acceptability. The authors 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 Carnivale. They uncover 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 Stephen Moffat, together with case studies of such shows as Dark Shadows, Dexter, Pushing Daisies, Torchwood, and Supernatural, they explore its evolution on television.

This book is a must-have for those studying TV Genre as well as for anyone with a taste for the gruesome and the macabre.

Contents:

Introduction: Horror Begins at Home

Chapter 1 | The TV in TV Horror: Production and Broadcast Contexts 

Chapter 2 |Mainstreaming Horror 

Chapter 3 | Shaping Horror: From Single Play to Serial Drama 

Chapter 4 | Adaptation: Translating Horror Tales 

Chapter 5 | The Horror Auteur 

Chapter 6 | Revising the Gothic 

Chapter 7 | The Excess of TV Horror 

Chapter 8 | Horror, Art and Disruption 

Chapter 9 | TV as Horror 

Chapter 10 | The Monster in Our Living Room: From Barnabas Collins to Dexter Morgan

Conclusion: The Road So Far

Authors:

Lorna Jowett is a reader in Television Studies at the University of Northampton, UK, where she teaches some of her favourite things, including horror, science fiction, and television, sometimes all at once. Her monograph, Sex and the Slayer: A Gender Studies Primer for the Buffy Fan, was published in 2005 and recent publications cover Angel, Supernatural, Pushing Daisies and representation in cult television.

Stacey Abbott is a reader in Film and Television Studies at the University of Roehampton and is the author of Celluloid Vampires (2007) and the editor of The Cult TV Book (I.B.Tauris, 2010). Recent publications cover many of her favourite television programmes, including Angel, Alias, Supernatural, Dexter, True Blood and Torchwood. She is the general editor for the Investigating Cult TV Series at I.B.Tauris.