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4 - Not Just Horrifying: TV Horror Audiences’ Abject Spectrums

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 February 2024

James Rendell
James Rendell
Affiliation:
University of South Wales
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Summary

Abstract

Developing the abject spectrum model, this chapter analyses online audiences’ responses to horror television. This begins with audiences’ varying affective barometers to Penny Dreadful's gore, before evidencing myriad emotional responses before, during, and after viewings of The Haunting of Hill House. Different audiences’ biographical relationships to The Exorcist shape reactions, offering what I term ‘knowledge-as-affect’, whilst Asian extreme/J-horror fans’ mixed responses to ‘Imprint’ question pre-existing orientalist understandings of these fandoms. Audiences’ ideological deconstruction of the zombie present polysemic readings of In the Flesh while Black audiences read The Walking Dead and Fear the Walking Dead's as reflecting the systemic oppression of Black citizen in the US. Comparatively, Black gamers praise TellTale's Walking Dead videogame's complex characterization of its Black lead. Finally, audiences’ employ pragmatic aesthetics that elevates Hannibal as art and negotiates Rihanna's casting in Bates Motel.

Keywords: affect, fandom, anti-fandom, repeat viewing, subtext, aesthetics

The first half of this book examined how horror rose from the depths of premium cable subscriptions to bedevil the post-television landscape, birthing in a host of channels and services that supported existing brand identities within an increasingly crowded marketplace of broadcast-and online-native portals. Textual analysis was employed to undertake a range of case study readings ‘supported and developed around […] wider contextual or extratextual framework[s]’ (Creeber, 2006, p. 35), which argued horror TV interpellated genre fans, target brand audiences, and wider viewership via various textual and paratextual features. However, media's ‘[m]eaning comes into being only with the person who experiences it’ (Nowell-Smith, 2000, p. 15). Moreover ‘neither signification nor information guarantees meaning’ (ibid.). Therefore, Part 2 of the book focuses on myriad audience responses to TV horror by conceptualizing and applying the abject spectrum model. Chapter 4 does so by analysing viewers’ online post, presenting a ‘portfolio of interpretation […] [highlighting] that contextual and individual factors form […] viewing experience[s]’ (Hill, 1997, p. 5).

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Information
Transmedia Terrors in Post-TV Horror
Digital Distribution, Abject Spectrums and Participatory Culture
 , pp. 191 - 230
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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