TV Horror: Investigating the Dark Side of the Small Screen by Lorna Jowett and Stacey Abbott (review)

Loma Jowett and Stacey Abbott, TV Horror: Investigating the Dark Side of the Small Screen. London: I.B. Tauris, 2013. xv + 270pp. £14.99 (pbk)The idea that television and horror are antithetical has become almost axiomatic; television is seen as too technologically restricted, too domestic and above all too parochial to be able to represent the horror genre, still less to push its boundaries. Cinema and literature have commonly been held to be the authentic media of horror: spaces where spectacle, violence and gore may be rather more experimentally produced and, paradoxically, safely consumed. Correspondingly, there has been a lack of academic research about television and its ability to produce horror. Recently, however, something of a reassessment has been taking place with edited collections on recognised television horror productions, such as Stacey Abbott's Reading Angel: The TV Spin-off with Soul (2005) and her collaboration with David Lavery on TV Goes to Hell: An Unofficial Road Map of Supernatural (20η), as well as academic articles on horror as a televisual genre by Matt Hills and others. Jowett and Abbott's TV Horror: Investigating the Dark Side of the Small Screen is, however, the first book to draw together theory and analysis of both historical and contemporary television to argue for a specifically televisual genre of horror, predicated upon its reception within domestic spaces, and television forms and styles which, the authors suggest, themselves act as preconditions for horror.Through a comprehensive and sustained engagement with multiple television forms and genres across UK and US media landscapes, Jowett and Abbott argue persuasively that while the genre might not have been perceived as the best fit for a mainstream medium like television, horror has in fact been part of television for decades. They suggest that due to the 'inherently hybrid nature of television, the [horror] genre also crosses into most other genres from children's programming to comedy to procedural police dramas to reality TV' (xiii). Laying out their argument for the presence of horror throughout the history of television and, perhaps more importantly, their argument for television as a medium particularly suited for horror, TV Horror analyses selected productions for the modes, forms and aesthetics through which television horror might be orchestrated and the contextual and industrial imperatives which both drive and problematise its production. While the authors use the schema proposed by Mark Rogers, Michael Epstein and Jimmie Reeves of TVI, TVII and TVIII, corresponding roughly to the model suggested by John Ellis of television produced in eras of scarcity, availability and plenty, to contextualise television history, they reject a teleological reading of television horror as a genre. Jowett and Abbott convincingly resituate horror across television genres, historical periods and production ecologies and thereby recover a history of horror on television as well as investigating the rise of more overtly identified horror productions within the current media landscape.Opening with a strong argument for the 'synergy between horror and television, as certain events are made all the more frightening by being broadcast on TV within the domestic space' (xii), Jowett and Abbott make their case through a series of modular but rhizomatic chapters which both reassess and analyse the uses and pleasures of horror on television, as well as within specific productions. Chapter one traces the evolution of television production and programmes across UK and US broadcasting models to establish an interpretative framework and identify industrial and institu- tional reasons for the development of television horror and its subsequent marginalisation. Building upon this history, chapter two indicates the areas in which television horror manifested regardless, uncovering genres, both likely and unlikely, in which horror was deployed as part of a televisual hybridity. …