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HOST 4 (2) pp. 159–171 Intellect Limited 2013

Horror Studies Volume 4 Number 2

© 2013 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/host.4.2.159_1

Keywords

horrorhorror televisionmelodrama gothic serialitygenre

Lisa schmidtBishop’s University

television: horror’s ‘original’

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abstract

Unquestionably, horror has always existed on television. Nevertheless, a number of scholars and critics have argued that the horror genre belongs properly to film, that television is too much a product of the industrial conditions that both regulate and create it to achieve ‘true’ horror. Not only is this position no longer viable (if it ever was) but it is based upon an assumption about what the horror genre is or should be. If we consider modern horror in relation to the Gothic novel and its immediate coun-terparts the stage melodrama and the sensation novel/drama, it soon becomes clear that television has a special and perhaps unique affinity with the genre as cultural and literary product. Television can do what film cannot, through its historical and contemporary strengths in the deployment of melodrama, particularly in serialized form. Through seriality, television horror reveals the melodramatic nature of the genre. Moreover, it (re)creates that original horror in a way that speaks, perhaps, to some of horror’s less appreciated pleasures and less acknowledged audiences. This article examines this claim through a sketch of Gothic and melodramatic tradi-tions, tracing these through sensation novels, early film melodrama and ultimately contemporary serialized genre television, particularly the CW series Supernatural and The Vampire Diaries. In both series, the Gothic elements are manifested in the show’s manipulation of any and all elements of fantastic lore alongside plentiful gore and intense family drama.

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1. While such critical favourites as Buffy or the X-Files could have been deployed just as readily, I prefer to give some attention to the these two CW shows that have suffered from a relative lack of attention even as they exemplify the increasing reliance of fantastic genre shows on their own melodramatic capacities.

When we think of the American horror genre, more often than not our minds turn to films rather than television. Yet horror has had an extensive pedigree in American television, from the Twilight Zone (CBS, 1959–1964) and Thriller (NBC, 1960–1962) to Alfred Hitchcock Presents (CBS, 1955–1965); from Dark Shadows (ABC, 1966–1971) to Kolchak: The Night Stalker (ABC, 1974–1975); from The X-Files (FOX, 1993–2002) to Buffy the Vampire Slayer (WB-UPN, 1997–2003); and, more recently, from Supernatural (WB-CW, 2005–) and The Vampire Diaries (CW, 2009–) to The Walking Dead (AMC, 2010–). Despite these and many other offerings, however, there is a strong presumption amongst critics and academics that horror belongs to film. This is not because film preceded television but because (so it is argued) film encompasses the formal, technological and industrial conditions to better achieve the experi-ences that define the genre (Hills 2005: 111–14). This begs the question of how horror is defined, with academic work on horror tending to focus on the affects of horror: fear, disgust, terror, etc. From this the analysis might proceed to consider how the affects are produced, the narrative and cinematic elements that produce them, and why these affects are sought by audiences.

There is nothing wrong with this approach per se although, not surpris-ingly, it does tend to privilege film horror; thus I propose to trace an alter-native historical route for the development of horror narratives, one that leads to television rather than film. If we revisit horror’s roots in the Gothic tradition of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, we see that these literary and theatrical sources, already claimed by horror historians, are far from being solely about the affect of fear. They are also, in a word, melodra-matic. Contemplating these cultural antecedents of horror via the melodra-matic lens, we can see that television not only makes sense as a location for horror, but in fact begins to appear ideal because of television’s affinity for serialized melodramatic narrative. Film also does melodrama, but I would argue that television’s intensified deployment of seriality gives it the capac-ity to achieve the affects of melodrama on a more intense scale (not unlike the manner in which it has been argued that film is better able to achieve the affects of horror).

On a slightly different but closely related historical path, I find that melo-drama was, until recently (the past 50–60 years), understood in a way that included many of the affects of horror. I propose that, notwithstanding academic and critical definitions, the separation of melodrama and horror into two inimical genres disregards that they have been and continue to be experienced by audiences simultaneously. The contemporary version of such experiences is exemplified in two examples of ‘post-network’ genre television: Supernatural (SPN) and The Vampire Diaries (TVD). Both of these series are ostensibly ‘horror’ in that they deploy many of the classic tropes of horror yet, with their elaborately serialized narratives, they exhibit intense melodrama. I would go so far as to argue that melodrama is not merely travelling alongside horror conventions but manifests as a basic constituent and product of the horror itself.

1 These shows are apt case studies for revealing the contemporary horror experience as growing increasingly near to the Gothic, and thus to the ‘origi-nal’ experience of horror. Furthermore, their ongoing popularity with female-driven audiences contradicts much of the received wisdom about horror audiences. The two shows fit neatly within the brief history that I propose to trace, of the entwined history of horrific and melodramatic narratives. These source narratives were popular reading and theatre-going for mixed


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2. Unlike other genres, horror would seem to be defined by the very emotion it attempts to invoke but to say this is not necessarily to simplify the matter. Indeed, much ink has been spilled attempting to define the horror experience precisely, and to separate authentic from inauthentic horror. For the purposes of this argument, I do not wish to trouble over these distinctions or to make any presumptions about just how much or how little gore is requisite to an adequate genre experience. Let us assume that there is a tradition of storytelling, the objective of which is to arouse one or more of the following emotions: fear, anxiety, terror, horror, disgust and suspense. Let us name as horror the texts which attempt this.

3. For the record, the general argument about television and the ‘ooga booga’ line remain intact in the 2010 edition of Danse Macabre.

audiences, albeit frequently working class; not surprisingly, they were excori-ated frequently by critics as well.

the probLem of teLevision horror

To reiterate, the claim that horror does not ‘belong’ to television presumes the meaning of horror as a genre.2 Critics who claim that television horror can only fail do so on the assumption that television cannot provoke the necessary emotions. One such critic is the horror institution Stephen King; he argued in his Danse Macabre that television horror lacks the capacity ‘to put on the gruesome mask and go “ooga booga”!’ (1981: 235). King was speaking to the limitations upon the portrayal of certain ideas and narrative themes on network television. For King, if a story is to horrify there should be no restric-tions upon its content; one of the requisite qualities of horror is to be uncom-promising, to push beyond that which is merely comfortably macabre. To be fair to King, he wrote this in 1981 when his contention perhaps had more force.3 Television has changed significantly since the 1980s, entering what is often called the post-network era. To a person such as myself who remem-bers television from that time, shows like Supernatural and The Walking Dead are astonishing in their gory verisimilitude. It is not just a question of gore however. If discomfort were a constituent of true horror, then King’s point would be well taken, particularly in a context in which the industrial mandate for all programming during prime time hours was to be family friendly (Hills 2005: 118). But again, this aspect of television narrative has been altered quite significantly; television now incorporates storytelling that is nearly as macabre as anything that can be found in film. This is not only true of the cable chan-nels; on the broadcast networks ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX and the CW there can be found gore and perversity in plenteous quantity. Nonetheless, to counter the objection to television horror by noting that ‘television has changed’ is to miss the more substantial argument: that television was always an appropri-ate venue for horror.

It is worth observing that television has been characterized by some as an adequate location for ‘Gothic’ narrative. Matt Hills discusses this aspect of the criticism of television horror in some depth, noting that critical descrip-tions of the Gothic on television connote a more literary and aesthetically subtle experience (read: no gore) than other types of horror that presumably would give rise to actual dread and fear (2005: 119–23). To be sure, the idea of the Gothic holds connotations of a certain atmosphere and certain content: vampires, ghosts, werewolves, castles, full-moons and peasants with pitch-forks – the conventional trappings of the supernatural. Yet to define Gothic in this gentle, family-friendly way is to damn with faint praise, particularly if we consider the narratives in their original reception context. Generally considered to be the first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto (H. Walpole, 1764) was both perverse and uncompromising in its content, dealing with gory death, ghosts, murder and rape. Another founding text of the Gothic, The Monk (M. Lewis, 1796), replete with rape, torture and incest, was consid-ered quite shocking, so much so that some critics felt compelled to condemn it and its author as immoral and blasphemous (which of course ensured its popularity) (McEvoy in Lewis 1995: viii). Some types of Gothic stories trammelled in the actual supernatural – ghosts, witches, curses, demons – while others merely suggested the supernatural in a manner crafted to make hairs stand on end. The latter was the stock in trade of Ann Radcliffe;


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4. Of course, anyone who has studied horror (or who is a dedicated fan, not that these two identities are mutually exclusive) knows that what is ‘scary’ is extremely variable and depends upon many factors. There is no such thing as a narrative element that is scary to everyone, for all time.

5. In episode 3.02 of Supernatural a despairing mother who knows her child is a demon changeling resorts to strapping her offspring into the back seat of her car, putting the car in gear and letting it roll gently into a lake. Shooting such a scene could only be simple and relatively cheap; no special or visual effects were required and the shot itself is brief: a car going into the water. This might arguably have been one of the more provocative scenes the show has ever presented, and it is difficult to argue that it would have been designed differently if it were shot for a film.

6. Alexandra Warwick recently wrote of the Gothic that despite the recent explosion of work on the subject ‘if there is any general consensus, it seems to be that Gothic is a mode rather than a genre, that it is a loose tradition and even that its defining characteristics are its mobility and continued capacity for reinvention’ (2007: 6). Ben Singer echoes this in relation to melodrama: ‘Charting melodrama’s genealogy has proven so problematic, and the literature on melodrama is so inconsistent, because over the last two hundred years the genre’s basic features have appeared in

the apparently supernatural in Radcliffe’s novels would turn out to be the work of the human agents. In either case, the Gothic presented ideas and situations that were subversive or taboo, derived from such plot devices as murder, conspiracy, rape, torture, incest, adultery and blasphemy. Thus the literary Gothic, despite its contemporary connotations of a more gentle yet aesthetically pleasing horror, was originally as horrifying as – say, a Stephen King novel. Of course, shock or fear are not derived solely from gruesome content in itself. As much as the condemnation of television horror would seem to have something to do with its inability to be ‘extreme’, I would suggest that in the mind of King and many others, a good scare is best achieved through the conceptually gruesome, although there should be no stinting on any necessary explicitness.4 From Hills’s discussion of television horror, there seems to be a consensus among critics that the best examples of cinematic horror are founded in the visual and aural expression of ideas rather than gore and special effects for their own sake. In sum, that which is ‘extreme enough’ to be true horror must somehow achieve the correct balance of discomfiting images/sounds and appalling ideas.

To recall that the literary Gothic was a subversive and shocking popular genre dispels somewhat the assumption that television horror is a diluted form of the genre. It is true that, as much as television has changed, it does still have limitations derived from institutional and economic factors. Television (particularly for networks) shoots faster and with smaller budgets than films, which in turn affects both the quantum and the quality of the horror in a given episode. There will be occasions when a particularly horrifying idea is not restricted by time or money,5 but even so it can be admitted that televi-sion horror is different. Rather than characterizing this difference in terms of being ‘lesser than’, I prefer to explore how it is ‘more than’ by pointing to what television can do that is unique to television. As I have already hinted, the uniqueness of television horror relates to the medium’s affinity with melo-drama. Melodrama, particularly in serialized form, turns out to be a constitu-ent of the Gothic experience of horror.

a taLe of two genres

Throughout the nineteenth century both the melodramatic and the Gothic exercised a powerful influence on the Victorian imagination, often through the very same literary and theatrical works.6 Indeed, the same novels tend to be cited as influential to either or both Gothic and melodrama, partic-ularly in the field sometimes referred to as the ‘female Gothic’. The latter describes a variety of Gothic fiction that features female protagonists (and was often written by women) who enter a dangerous house ruled by a potentially dangerous man. In most cases, the heroine falls in love with this man; the work of the narrative is to determine whether or not he can be trusted. Such works include Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and later Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938) along with a popular cycle of films that emerged from Hollywood in the 1940s, many of them adaptations of novels (Hanson 2007: 36).

One particular manifestation of the Gothic and/or female Gothic that is the so-called ‘sensation’ narrative, a type of story that was extremely popu-lar during the 1860s in both novel and stage formats. Sensation novels are clearly melodramatic in intent and impact; indeed, scholars have already documented ‘the similarities between the women’s sensation novel and


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so many different combinations’ (2001: 44).

other melodramatic forms’ (Mitchell 1977: 29). However, these novels also owe much to the nineteenth-century fascination with the macabre. Sensation novels tend to feature female protagonists who resort to horrific crimes in order to evade or escape their situations in life. Thus terrible, ostensibly ‘actiony’ plot activities are placed alongside story elements which emphasize emotions, relationships, the familial and the domestic. Many sensation plots contained prurient content: ‘passionate, devious, dangerous and not infre-quently deranged heroines, and […] complicated, mysterious plots – involv-ing crime, bigamy, adultery, arson and arsenic’ (Pykett 1992: 47). In one of the best-known sensation novels, East Lynne (E. Wood, 1861), Lady Isabel Carlyle engages in an adulterous affair with a dissolute seducer, produc-ing an illegitimate child; the woman is subsequently abandoned and perma-nently injured in a railway accident. She returns to her original husband’s home in disguise, taking the position of governess to her own children. This plot will be familiar to students or aficionados of the ‘woman’s film’, particularly those films of the 1940s preoccupied with mothers in similar straits to Isabel. In films such as The Great Lie (Goulding, 1941), The Old Maid (Goulding, 1939) and Now, Voyager (Rapper, 1942), a woman must confront the fact of her own desire for an unattainable male and frequently finds herself in loco parentis to a child whom she loves, either her own or someone else’s, standing by proudly as the child flourishes or suffering as the child ignores or mistreats her.

These and other woman’s films have become, for some, synonymous with melodrama. Certainly they meet the criteria for melodrama as outlined by Peter Brooks in his foundational work The Melodramatic Imagination: ‘[t]he indulgence of strong emotionalism; moral polarization and schematicization; extreme states of being, situations, action; overt villainy, persecution of the good, and final reward of virtue; inflated and extravagant expression; dark plottings, suspense, breathtaking peripety’ (1976: 11–12). Still, we need not draw a straight line from nineteenth-century melodrama to the woman’s film of the 1940s and 1950s. Indeed, there is substantial evidence that melodrama as understood by the Victorians was nothing like ‘the woman’s film’; it was a gory, action-packed spectacle, both in the context of theatre and in early film (Singer 2001: 163). Steve Neale has examined the use of the term melodrama in early cinema trade publications and demonstrates that ‘melodrama’ did not apply to the woman’s films or ‘weepies’ but rather to improbable, often crime-related or fantastical plots hinging on coincidence and accident, clearly drawn from the sensation drama. Indeed, Neale argues convincingly that the account of melodrama as associated with women’s film must be rejected based on his analysis (1993: 67). Examining early cinematic melodrama, Ben Singer concurs with Neale that the mark of these films is not romance and domesticity but action, adventure, thrills and, yes, emotional shocks; thus melodrama was not an exclusively ‘feminine’ genre as we presently under-stand it. It is worth noting, too, that the use of the term ‘melodrama’ to refer to stories featuring crime and action continued into and beyond the clas-sical period (Neale 1993: 70). At the time of their release, many Hitchcock films were referred to as melodrama. Contemporaneously, Variety continued to use the term melodrama as referring to thrillers and other action-centric stories on television (Neale 1993: 71). Furthermore, the use of the adjective ‘sensational’ in relation to melodrama continued well into the 1950s; for instance a review of Rebel without a Cause (Ray, 1955) referred to the latter as ‘sensational’ (Neale 1993: 73).


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7. Boucicault, a playwright who made a career from the railway scene, had been a railway engineer and had personal knowledge/experience of people dying in train (particularly underground) accidents. One of those who died in such an accident was his son. There was much ordinary, mundane anxiety about the potential dangers of trains, even as they became a normal part of life (Daly 1998: 58). It seems that a major part of the pleasure of the railway rescue is that a human can be ‘fast enough’ to beat the train and save a life.

Another striking commonality between melodrama (as defined by Singer and Neale) and horror is that both held as one of their primary objectives the foregrounding of a technologically realized spectacle. That is, it seems that those who partook of nineteenth-century sensation melodrama were seek-ing above all a prodigious display of violence realized by means of cutting-edge technology (Daly 1998: 55). This presentation generally took the form of a threat of gory death, or death itself. The dangerous, onstage spectacles included waterfalls, speeding trains, and burning ships. Often they involved peril to a young, virtuous woman. A staple of the sensation drama was the railway rescue scene; indeed, as symbols of the new, industrialized world of progress, trains appeared to be an obsession of popular Victorian culture (Daly 1998: 48).7 The sensation drama was a display of humanity’s techno-logical ingenuity that was intended to awe and frighten, and it flourished just until the next form of technological ingenuity – cinema – arrived (Daly 1998: 55). Similarly, a significant component of the horror-viewing experience has always been to view the technical artistry of make-up and special effects artists; in the days of Lon Chaney, going to a horror film was a chance to witness the star’s latest physical metamorphosis (Skal 1993: 70–71); later, it was to see what Rick Baker or Tom Savini had accomplished with their make-up effects in the latest zombie flick (Hills 2005: 89). That such spectacles amounted to a break in the narrative flow was irrelevant; in both sensation melodrama and horror, narrative coherence was not necessarily the goal. In sum, if we were to attempt to sketch a map of influence from the Gothic to the horror film, we would do well to incorporate melodrama and the sensation narrative. In their emphasis on fantastical plots, mortal danger and the visual presentation of the extreme and the shocking, these narrative forms closely resemble what was to be the horror genre of the twentieth century.

There is a third dynamic that most certainly binds together the Gothic, the sensation melodrama and horror: critical disdain. In all three forms, the prec-edence given to sensation, situation, extreme suspense and action mitigates against what would be considered a more proper and restrained narrative construction, leading to cultural disapprobation. This disapproval frequently has had much to do with the genre’s commercial, market-driven identity; for some, the profit motive will always distinguish a story, in any format, from true art. Furthermore, it is not surprising that sensation dramas were viewed as trash given their audiences; the novels were read and written predomi-nantly by women (Mitchell 1977: 30) while theatrical sensation dramas were popular with the working class as a whole (Voskuil 2002: 245–46). Singer gives numerous examples of the reviews of sensational theatre, which demonstrate this cultural snobbery. One critic writing in 1919 bemoaned the fact that, ‘[a]t present the method adopted [in writing melodramas] would appear to be that some person conceives an abomination known as “a situation”: the more ludicrous and revolting it be the more he treasures it’ (Daly 1998: 42). This could just as well have been a review of a 1980s slasher film as a nineteenth-century stage melodrama.

The serialiTy facTor

For Singer, one of the characteristics of sensational melodrama is a ‘non-tra-ditional’ plot structure (2001: 44), by which he is referencing the way that melodramatic plots frequently lack the coherence of more restrained and (presumably) more artistically sound modes of storytelling. The precedence


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8. Singer speculates that the sensational serialized drama with the heroine tied to railway tracks could have offered sites of identification for both men and women in the same manner that slashers do according to the theory of Carol Clover in Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Singer 2001: 222).

placed on the emotional situation in melodrama means that narrative econ-omy must sometimes take a back seat. In the context of soap opera criticism, this quality has been defined sometimes as an absence of episodic closure, otherwise known as ‘seriality’. Seriality refers to story arcs that transcend indi-vidual episodes, sometimes extending over seasons or even the entire run of a show. Importantly, scholars of soap opera have commented on how the lack of closure in these narratives ensures a multiplicity of connections between characters. To know these characters and their world in turn requires a unique competence and investment from the viewer (Allen 2004; Feuer 1994; Modleski 1984). Horace Newcomb (2007) and Jason Mittell (2006), commenting on the recent changes in television narratives, have made the same observations about serialized narratives in general, noting that the increased seriality of television narratives is an invitation to viewers to engage more deeply with the story. Indeed, some narratives have become so complex that repeat view-ings and collective problem-solving are required to make sense of them.

But seriality is nothing new; it was prevalent in the consumption of nine-teenth-century melodramatic narrative. Many of the Gothic and sensation stories mentioned above were published in serialized form initially. Sensation novels were issued in volumes to be affordable or in some cases were serial-ized in monthly magazines (Mitchell 1977: 29). In fact, the majority of read-ing of the nineteenth century (particularly of the emerging middle class) was accomplished via serialized story magazines, newspapers and dime novels (Singer 2001: 269). Many of the serial films that were popular in the 1910s had close intertextual links to stage melodrama as well as these serialized stories in print; accordingly, Singer claims that film serials of the late nine-teenth and early twentieth centuries (such as The Perils of Pauline [Gasnier and MacKenzie, 1914]) are a direct descendent of melodramatic theatre (2001: 291). Of course, the serialization of stories was just one more aspect that lead to their being devalued by critics (Singer 2001: 264), with some having argued that sensation novels were seen as degraded in part because they came from the degraded form that was serialized fiction. The very fact of serialization of a story rendered its ‘aesthetic integrity’ questionable (Pykett 1992: 30) as it interfered with the contemplative mindset presumed to be necessary for a thoughtful reader. The serialized story was also associated with hasty read-ing of a busy, urban, technological life (i.e. train reading) – the lives of the uneducated masses with their gruesome stories (Pykett 1992: 31). These criti-cisms will be eerily similar to anyone who is familiar with criticisms of the horror film, particularly the slasher with its emphasis on women in peril. In fact, Singer suggests a direct connection between the slasher and the ‘serial queen melodrama’:

The serial-queen melodrama – at least this variation of the genre – can be regarded as one of the first systematic explorations and exploitations of a strain of perverse stimulus that would later shape the psycho-killer crime thriller, the slasher film […].

(2001: 255).

Yet even as such popular stories were lamented by critics, they had a broad appeal to both men and women.8 Put another way, serial melodramas had something to offer to those whose taste was for action and those whose taste was for emotion; if the reader/viewer found both appealing, then there was twice as much to enjoy.


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Although cinema initially took up the legacy of nineteenth-century (seri-alized) melodrama, it is arguable that the tradition now falls within the juris-diction of television. For something else has changed about television since the 1980s, and that relates to what some have referred to as increased narra-tive complexity (Mittell 2006), or more simply, increased seriality in both cable and network offerings (Newcomb 2007; Feuer 1994). The shows that I have already mentioned – SPN, TVD, The Walking Dead – are built upon serial-ity and, indeed, derive a great deal of their affective powers from seriality. Seriality means that the story is built upon connections between episodes, that characters have a memory and a history, and that single episodes, while providing limited resolution in some instances, most often invite and demand viewing of the next, and the next. There are the crises of the moment, of deal-ing with a marauding ghost or mob of zombies; however, such moments are simultaneously advancing the more in-depth story, the story of the charac-ters themselves. Serialized shows demand an investment from the viewer beyond a single, one hour block of time, but with this investment comes the possibility of greater emotional impact. If seriality gives an author time to develop the story of a character or characters, it also ensures that, having become acquainted with that lengthier story, the viewer will be that much more invested in the character’s situation. Not to put too fine a point on it, serialized television shows can create astonishing levels of emotional crisis and catharsis because they have time on their side.

Supernatural and the Vampire DiarieS as seriaL meLodrama

In genre shows, the serial aspects of the story are apparent in what is gener-ally referred to by fans and producers as the ‘myth-arc’ aspect of the show; thus in SPN there are the aspects of the plot relating to Sam and Dean Winchester’s destiny as key players in a war between Heaven and Hell, Sam’s demon blood, the deal made by Sam’s mother with Azazel, the role of the demon Ruby, the intentions of the angels, and so on. In TVD the story also centres on two brothers, using the vampire condition as a kind of prism for exploring the relative moral qualities of two brothers. Stefan is a vampire who will only drink animal blood, while Damon is an unrepentant killer. Elena, the female lead, falls in love with Stefan and he with her; meanwhile, Damon is also in love with Elena. A friendship emerges between Elena and Damon, one that frequently turns on the question of whether or not Damon can be (or can become) a man who is worthy of her friendship. Although there are many plot machinations in the show having to deal with vampires, witches, spells, magical objects and family legacies, the driving force of the narrative is the gradual revelation of the respective characters of the two brothers. Over time, the characters become ever more layered as the story gets thicker.

The plots of SPN and TVD are intricate and would require the spill-ing of much ink to explain completely; suffice it to say that the plot details retain little of their true melodramatic qualities at being outlined in brief; to understand the psychological and emotional complexities of the characters requires a commitment. Only a viewer who has watched every episode and is invested in the characters of Sam and Dean could fully appreciate the melo-drama of the Season Five finale, in which Dean’s need to be present for the Lucifer-possessed Sam ultimately leads to salvation (and saving the world). Similarly, only an invested viewer could appreciate the pathos of the final


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episode of TVD’s Season Two, in which Stefan allows himself to succumb to the temptations of blood drinking in order to save his brother Damon’s life. As with soap opera and other melodramatic narratives, a viewer requires that particular viewing competence to grasp all the emotional resonances of these climactic moments.

Most important, both shows meet the criteria of both Brooks and Singer in their emphasis on moral conflict. Brooks’ ‘moral world’ is quite literally real-ized through serialized fantastic melodrama. In TVD, much of the plot is a metaphorical exploration of themes of love, sacrifice and redemption. Towards the end of Season One, the show begins to dramatize Damon’s struggle with his conscience, raising directly the question of for what, or how much, a person can be forgiven. In SPN, the battle is both metaphoric and literal, with human beings caught in between; the most extreme crises always involve Sam and Dean having to make decisions about what they are willing to do, what moral wrongs they might be willing to commit, to save the world from marauding angels and demons. If, as Brooks claims, a part of the popularity of melodrama is due to the exploration of ‘the moral occult’, I would argue that the conventions of horror deliver in spades, for the ethical dilemmas of horror narratives are heightened by the presence of the fantastic. The fantastic makes the stakes that much higher, and in many cases provides a justification for what would otherwise be plot absurdity.

I must disagree with Brooks and Singer on one point, and that is in their contention that moral dilemmas in melodrama are starkly polarized. No doubt this was once true, but I would argue that melodrama has incorpo-rated increasingly sophisticated ethical problems over the years. This must be a reflection of our contemporary situation just as much as eighteenth- and nineteenth-century melodrama was a reflection of its own context. As much as human agents may hunger for moral clarity, we are daily confronted with the fact that moral decision-making is a complex business, and there can be more than one matrix for that decision-making, more than one ethical style. Therefore it is hardly surprising that the moral situations faced by characters in serialized melodrama are often no-win situations; the fact that there can be no perfect decision, no complete resolution, is that which gives rise to the intense pathos of the moment. We want to see vindication for the Winchesters but their road becomes ever darker and less certain; we want to see a Damon who is either easy to hate or easy to love – but we will have neither. That the Winchesters are literally chosen by heaven and that Damon and Stefan are vampires are facts that only serve to enhance the characters’ deepening moral crises. As time goes on and the story lengthens, grows in complexity, the possibility of a morally satisfying conclusion becomes ever more remote, ensuring that moments of high melodrama will emerge.

In addition to moral crisis, melodrama requires sensationalism, strong emotion and pathos (Singer 2001: 44–45), and there can be no question that these would apply in any horror show since their plots are based around shock-ing events, sometimes gore, sometimes suspense. The recently completed first season of The Walking Dead is certainly a stand out for sensationalism, with its movie-quality zombie gore and uncompromising post-apocalyptic themes, and as I have already noted, SPN has amazed me at times in its depiction of violent events, of which I can offer only a sampling: beheadings; electrocu-tions; stabbings; ax murders; cut throats; exploding, rotting and dismembered bodies. TVD can be singled out for the sheer pace at which it piles shocking reveal on top of shocking reveal. Moreover there is no shortage of pathos;


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first, around the Stefan-Elena romance, and second, in relation to the love that Damon keeps a secret, as well as his apparent desire to keep proving that he is a monster by acting monstrously, without remorse. In one poignant moment, Damon confesses tearfully to his next (female) victim that he misses being human so badly that he cannot bear to think about it or remember what it was like. He then erases her memory and the fact of his confession. In another scene, the dying Damon deliriously confesses his love to Elena. Believing that he will die, she allows him to kiss her. Meanwhile, his brother Stefan, who is depicted within the world of TVD as a ‘problem drinker’, a vampire who cannot drink human blood without becoming the worst, most violent kind of vampire, is allowing himself to lose the better part of himself, to drink human blood again in return for a cure for Damon.

concLusion

There is a purpose to drawing attention to genre history, one that goes beyond merely striving for accurate labels. To expand our understanding of melodrama so as to include horror or, conversely, to expand the definition of horror to include melodrama, is to invite new questions and challenge old assumptions about gender and audiences. In our present critical context, the association of the term melodrama with the woman’s film and soap operas has become so pervasive that melodrama is often assumed to deal only with stories having to do with family and relationships, topics that are associated with women’s genres and presumably women’s preoccupations. Meanwhile, genres like horror (and others) are defined in terms of certain kinds of narra-tive action: murders, chases, hauntings and so forth. Since the traditional analysis of narrative considers the dwelling on emotion as a stoppage of narra-tive action, melodrama is defined as action-less while other genres (fantastic genres, for instance) are action-full.

Perhaps scholars have abandoned easy generalizations about spectatorship and gender preferences, but a casual glance at the popular media landscape evidences the ongoing presumption that female audiences prefer action-less genres (melodrama) while male audiences prefer action-full genres (horror). By taking a glance at a century-old legacy, we have the opportunity to real-ize that action and melodrama are by no means mutually exclusive and that both male and female audiences enjoy melodrama and action. In fact, action is essential to creating the most impactful, emotional and sensational situations, situations that are full of pathos, anxiety and moral implications. This was as true of the Gothic novel as of the sensation novel, and it is as true of the horror film as of stage melodrama. Consider the plight of Ambrosio who at the beginning of The Monk is innocent of much but fatally proud and devoid of empathy. He is taken in by a woman who insinuates herself into his monas-tic life by disguising herself as a man. Manipulating his best and his worst characteristics, she seduces him and gradually draws him into a plot to rape a young girl, in the course of which he also commits several murders. The girl he rapes turns out to have been his sister and the woman who seduces him an incarnation of Satan himself. Ultimately Ambrosio is coaxed and manipu-lated into the worst of all sins; he signs his soul over to Satan out of fear of torture and execution. And this is only one character trajectory in the novel; there are many other characters who have their own, intertwined fates. The plot is unrestrained, even ridiculous, but these machinations are necessary to create the final situation in which Ambrosio, utterly lost, signs over his soul


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just moments before he is to be released from his prison. His despair and regret is that much keener for the fact that his very soul is at stake; with-out such fantastic plot elements, the melodrama of the moment when Satan reveals himself would be less acute.

Many other classics of the horror tradition have been no less melodramatic. I would not be the first to remark that Dracula (Browning, 1931) can be received as much as romance as horror (Berenstein 1996: 24). Frankenstein (Shelley, 1818), too, evinces the Gothic and melodramatic in equal measure; it is one thing to lose a fiancée, but to lose her, as Victor Frankenstein does, because her head has been torn off by a monster that he created in his lab – that is a special flavour of anguish. In The Shining (King, 1977), a father not only overcomes his worst impulses and proves his love to his child but does so by sacrificing himself to an evil, haunted hotel. The trajectory of the Final Girl (as per Carol Clover’s theory, 1992) could be viewed as pure melodrama; after all she spends much of a film running, falling and screaming, and when she ultimately picks up a weapon and dispatches the monster, there is much potential for cathartic satisfaction. When the supernaturally long-lived monster inevitably rises again, we scream at her in frustration and anxiety for not expecting it.

These are moments drawn directly from the melodramatic imagination, in which the fantastic is a powerful ally. For Brooks, the melodramatic imagina-tion is a style of storytelling that relies upon narrative and stylistic excess; the excess is just a means to an end. Any narrative emphasis on ghosts, magic, the impossible and the irrational would be a particularly literal way to explore the sacred moral world, an exploration that is sought eagerly by consumers of melodrama. Similarly, in the television texts in question (SPN and TVD), the horror enables the melodrama; the supernatural elements of the story elevate or exacerbate the situations of the characters to an extent that the costs of a personal crisis could be paid in spilled blood and lost lives. In other words, the moral fabric underlying this fictional reality is constantly tested; the plots of these shows are constructed in such a way that severe outcomes, not just for the lead character but entire communities, in some cases the entire world, hang on the decision-making of the protagonists. Thus the supernatural (ghosts, vampires, werewolves, angels, demons, gods, etc.) is used to explore fundamentally melodramatic situations. The external action that turns on the familiar fantastical trappings of the supernatural is really a pretext for ques-tions having to do with emotion, relationships and morality.

This has been only a cursory exploration, but it is now apparent that horror’s complex roots include alongside the Gothic adventure such unex-pected phenomena as theatrical melodrama and serialized sensation novels. Given these sources, I contend that television is a more than hospitable loca-tion for the horror genre; indeed, in some ways the aesthetic possibilities of contemporary television are extremely congenial to the original meanings and objectives of horror. The genre is about affect, but it is not only the affect of horror. It is also about those affects associated with melodrama; these may be fear, terror and disgust, to be sure, but they are also sadness, grief, long-ing and regret. Just as consumers of horror take pleasure in being frightened, they can take a melodramatic pleasure in scenarios of sentiment. While film continues to present compelling melodrama and compelling horror, some-times both at the same time, it does not have the luxury of being able to present a fantastic, serialized narrative, unless in the form of a multiple sequel franchise. Television can achieve scares on its own terms and, beyond this, it can and does offer scares mingled with pathos.


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As for texts like SPN and TVD, some might be tempted to view these shows as genre hybrids, melodrama grafted onto horror. I prefer to see their serialized fantastic melodrama as a return to their roots. If we consider the original incarnation of horror in the Gothic novel with its immediate coun-terparts in the female Gothic, stage melodrama, and the sensation novel, it becomes clear that television horror has a special and perhaps unique affinity with the genre as cultural and literary product. Through seriality, television horror reveals (and revels in) the original melodramatic underpinnings of the genre and creates horror of a kind that speaks, perhaps, to some of horror’s less-acknowledged pleasures and less-acknowledged audiences.

references

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Berenstein, R. J. (1996), ‘“It will thrill you, it may shock you, it might even horrify you”: gender, reception and classic horror cinema’, in B. K. Grant (ed.), Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, pp. 117–42.

Brooks, P. (1976), The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the Mode of Excess, New Haven & London: Yale University Press.

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suggested citation

Schmidt, L. (2013), ‘Television: Horror’s ‘original’ home’, Horror Studies 4: 2, pp. 159–171, doi: 10.1386/host.4.2.159_1

contributor detaiLs

Lisa Schmidt holds a doctorate in Media Studies from the University of Texas at Austin and teaches at Bishop’s University in Sherbrooke, Quebec. Her fields of interest include genre film and television, sound studies, and fan studies. All of these subjects are viewed through the lens of feminist theory and practice.

Contact: c/o Champlain College Lennoxville, P.O. Box 5003, Sherbrooke, QC, J1M 2A1, Canada.E-mail: [email protected]

Lisa Schmidt has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.


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