Looming onto the television landscape in 2011, American Horror Story gave viewers a weekly dose of psychological unease and gruesome violence. Embracing the familiar horror conventions of spooky settings, unnerving manifestations and terrifying monsters, series co-creators Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk combine shocking visual effects with an engaging anthology format to provide a modern take on the horror genre. This collection of new essays examines the series' contribution to television horror, focusing on how the show speaks to social concerns, its use of classic horror tropes and its reinvention of the tale of terror for the 21st century.

This book traces how the American freak show has re-emerged in new visual forms in the 21st century. It explores the ways in which moving image media transmits and contextualizes, reinterprets and appropriates, the freak show model into a “new American freak show.” It investigates how new freak representations introduce narratives about sex, gender, and cultural perceptions of people with disabilities. The chapters examine such representations found in horror films, including a prolonged look at Freaks (1932) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), documentaries such as Murderball (2005) and TLC’s Push Girls (2012-2013), disability pornography including the pornographic documentary Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan Supermasochist (1997), and the music icons Marilyn Manson and Lady Gaga in their portrayals of disability and freakishness. Through this book we learn that the visual culture that has emerged takes the place of the traditional freak show but opens new channels of interpretation and identification through its use of mediated images as well as the altered freak-norm relationship that it has fostered. In its illumination of the relationship between normal and freakish bodies through different media, this book will appeal to students and academics interested in disability studies, gender studies, film theory, critical race theory, and cultural studies.

"Tod Robbins, athlete, socialite and author of a brace of remarkable horror stories, was born Clarence Aaron Robbins in Brooklyn, New York, on 25 June 1888. His grandfather, Aaron Robbins, was a successful merchant; his parents, Clarence and Eloise, were prominent members of New York society. In 1923, Munsey's Magazine published 'Spurs', which Tod Browning used as the basis of his notorious 1932 quasi-horror film Freaks. Browning and his writers took the basic set-up of Robbins's story--a beautiful circus performer marries a dwarf for the money he has inherited--and made many changes to it, including giving it a new and notably gruesome ending."--Amazon.com.

Description: Title as per the New York World's Fair 1939 and 1940 Incorporated Records. Correspondence from individuals and organisations asking to show what they described as "freaks" at the fair, including freak cats, children missing limbs, a freak bull calf, and Siamese twins. Features letters back from the fair either saying no to their participation or passing them to the 'Strange as it Seems' concession who decided on their inclusion.

The host of "Way Too Early with Willie Geist" skewers America's ongoing parade of giant pop culture personalities, including Sarah Palin, Bernie Madoff, Rod Blagojevich, Miley Cyrus, Jon and Kate Gosselin, and the "Balloon Boy."

Analyzes the ascendancy of the cultural ideal of the "normal" in the aftermath of World War II.