Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 February 2024
Abstract
This chapter addresses future studies into post-TV horror and the utilization of abject spectrums beyond horror. The chapter considers post-TV horror's transnational facets and the need to research non-Anglophonic horror television, before signalling how media's general digitization prompts further consideration of televisuality structuring other horror media. Positioning fans as active creatives, the chapter considers Creepypastas as grassroots digital folktales and horror media that have their own fandoms. The chapter explores how abject spectrums can be applied to and complicated by horror videogame playing, whist pedagogical settings can paratextually direct students’ abject spectrums. Finally, while abject imagery displays strong affinities with horror iconography and themes, the chapter evidences other genre media that can galvanize audiences’ abject spectrums.
Keywords: horror, abject spectrums, digital media, pedagogy, non-fiction, reality TV
This book has sought to examine two central and interrelated components: 1) the increased popularity and variety of twenty-first century horror television within a post-TV paradigm that includes screen media content and broader transmedia ecologies. 2) abject spectrums as a conceptual model that accounts for the heterogeneity of responses and readings of horror television and how these filter into audiences’ own participatory cultures and meaning-making practices. This section ruminates on where we might turn our attention to build on these components and the fields of Horror Studies, TV Studies, Digital Media Studies, and Audience and Fan Studies.
Naturally, with any study supported by case studies there are further examples that can support and/or add further complexity to analyses, arguments, evaluations, and concepts. Certainly, as Chapter 3 attests to, the transnational potential for formal and informal dissemination routes of TV horror further enriches the field on inquiry beyond commonly examined Anglophonic territories (see Abbott and Jowett, 2021a). Much like the study of horror film (e.g. Schneider and Williams, 2005), the international production and circulation of televisual horror allows us to research industries that produce such genre vehicles, cultures that the genre is contextualized against, and global audiences who consume the genre.
Furthermore, post-TV has challenged, but not eradicated, television's ontology that has fostered new areas of horror media beyond traditional broadcast that evince televisual qualities.
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