Although horror shows on television are popular in the 1990s thanks to the success of Chris Carter's The X-Files, such has not always been the case. Creators Rod Serling, Dan Curtis, William Castle, Quinn Martin, John Newland, George Romero, Stephen King, David Lynch, Wes Craven, Sam Raimi, Aaron Spelling and others have toiled to bring the horror genre to American living rooms for years. This large-scale reference book documents an entire genre, from the dawn of modern horror television with the watershed Serling anthology, Night Gallery (1970), a show lensed in color and featuring more graphic makeup and violence than ever before seen on the tube, through more than 30 programs, including those of the 1998-1999 season. Complete histories, critical reception, episode guides, cast, crew and guest star information, as well as series reviews are included, along with footnotes, a lengthy bibliography and an in-depth index. From Kolchak: The Night Stalker to Millennium, from The Evil Touch to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Twin Peaks, Terror Television is a detailed reference guide to three decades of frightening television programs, both memorable and obscure.

The "masterfully chilling" novel that inspired the hit AMC series (Entertainment Weekly). The men on board the HMS Terror — part of the 1845 Franklin Expedition, the first steam-powered vessels ever to search for the legendary Northwest Passage — are entering a second summer in the Arctic Circle without a thaw, stranded in a nightmarish landscape of encroaching ice and darkness. Endlessly cold, they struggle to survive with poisonous rations, a dwindling coal supply, and ships buckling in the grip of crushing ice. But their real enemy is even more terrifying. There is something out there in the frigid darkness: an unseen predator stalking their ship, a monstrous terror clawing to get in. “The best and most unusual historical novel I have read in years.” —Katherine A. Powers, Boston Globe

Characterized as it is by its interest in and engagement with the supernatural, psycho-social formations, the gothic, and issues of identity and subjectivity, horror has long functioned as an allegorical device for interrogations into the seamier side of cultural foundations. This collection, therefore, explores both the cultural landscape of this recent phenomenon and the reasons for these television series’ wide appeal, focusing on televisual aesthetics, technological novelties, the role of adaptation and seriality, questions of gender, identity and subjectivity, and the ways in which the shows’ themes comment on the culture that consumes them. Featuring new work by many of the field’s leading scholars, this collection offers innovative readings and rigorous theoretical analyses of some of our most significant contemporary texts in the genre of Horror Television.

Focusing on programs from the 1970s to the early 2000s, this volume explores televised youth horror as a distinctive genre that affords children productive experiences of fear. Led by intrepid teenage investigators and storytellers, series such as Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated and Are You Afraid of the Dark? show how young people can effectively confront the terrifying, alienating, and disruptive aspects of human existence. The contributors analyze how televised youth horror is uniquely positioned to encourage young viewers to interrogate—and often reimagine—constructs of normativity. Approaching the home as a particularly dynamic viewing space for young audiences, this book attests to the power of televised horror as a domain that enables children to explore larger questions about justice, human identity, and the preconceptions of the adult world.

Horror has found a resurgence on television in the post-millennial years. This book will investigate the changing and challenging roles that gender has undergone in TV horror, examining a range of shows, including Hannibal, American Horror Story, The Walking Dead, Penny Dreadful, Supernatural, The Exorcist, iZombie, and Bates Motel.

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.

This study sheds light on the impressive work done by writers of television series, highlighting their sources of inspiration and their exceptional talent for maintaining interest and mirroring changes in mentalities in lifestyle. It offers numerous original interpretations of various categories of such television shows, and explores the ways in which older series have been developed, and what has been maintained and changed in more modern TV series.