This thesis focuses on the rise in graphic TV horror in the twenty-first century. Locating it within wider cultural contexts, shifting TV industries and digital technologies, and online transcultural audiences, I analyse this mode of genre television hitherto unseen on this domestic media platform. The thesis draws upon and revises Julia Kristeva’s abjection theory (1982) as a means of constructing an analytical framework that allows me to explore the cultural and subtextual meaning of TV horror, evidencing how graphic horror is implemented as a discursive marker of quality TV aesthetics within specific production and (trans)national contexts. These are British public service television, US basic cable, and US/Japanese premium cable co-productions, providing both domestic and transcultural foci. I also explore how the formatting and media ecologies of TV horror can shape meaning (Lobato and Thomas 2015), and how screen abjection is affectively engaged with in an on-going and gradational manner via what I am conceptualising as ‘abject spectrums’. This involves considering how the phenomenological, psychological, and cultural components of abjection can intersect, serving to better account for audience-horror text relationships at pre-textual, paratextual and extra-textual levels, as well as in relation to diegetic, transmedial, and post-object audience readings. In order to do this, I employ textual analysis and netnography to provide in-depth examination of my case studies: BBC3’s youth TV horror In the Flesh, AMC’s basic cable transmedia franchise The Walking Dead, and Showtime’s premium cable Masters Of Horror, specifically its American/Japanese co-produced episodes ‘Imprint’ and ‘Dream Cruise’, analysing the online fans and anti-fans who responded to these texts. In my effort to offer much needed attention to this form of television, I build on the work of Lorna Jowett and Stacey Abbott (2013) and offer two interlinking sections that critically unpack graphic twenty-first century TV horror. Beginning from a textualist point of view in Part I, each Chapter analyses a specific case study’s abject attributes as diegetic horror, and considers how abjection is used within bids for an elevated cultural status in TV industry contexts. In Part II, all three case studies are analysed together, with each Chapter structured thematically to develop my abject spectrum model – a gradational conceptualisation that situates abjection between aesthetic, affective, and/or ideological reactions/readings. This begins by considering how Web 2.0 has shaped the formatting, circulation, and consumption of twenty-first century TV horror, particularly on an international scale. I therefore offer ‘Only-Click TV’ (see also Gillan 2011) as a model that addresses the situation when textual content is solely available online for certain audiences,and how this can shape meaning and value for these viewers. I then turn to how audiences’ responded to the on-screen abjection of the case studies. Using my abject spectrum model I account for polysemic readings, how self-identity can anchor readings, and how the cultural construction of abjection is negotiated via ‘third space’ transcultural translations (Bhabha 1994). Finally, building on the traditional analysis of audiences’ written logos (Postill 2010:648, Gillan 2016:21), I extend my analysis to online image culture as a salient user practice and a valuable data type in evidencing abject spectrums. Such work complements the mixed method approaches of TV Studies (Geraghty and Lusted 1998, Geraghty 2003, Creeber 2006a, Casey et al 2008) better serves the understanding of audiences in Horror Studies (Cheery 20020, Hills 2005a, 2014a, Hanich 2010, Barker et al 2016) and triangulates these approaches with the focus on active participation that has been characteristic of Fan Studies (Hills 2002a, Jenkins 2010a, Booth 2015b, Gillan 2016). The thesis concludes by highlighting how graphic and ‘cinematic’ TV horror has become far more common. Thus, the Conclusion discusses potential future research into other forms of TV horror present in the twenty-first century that experiment with more ‘ordinary’ forms of television, such as reality TV, and how ‘post-TV’ that disrupts TV’s ontology also opens up new areas of research in terms of content and audience engagement. Furthermore, in noting the limitations of netnography to develop and demonstrate abject spectrums, I suggest interviewing as a research method that could better serve the phenomenological aspects of the model involving individuals’ histories and experiences of texts. Resultantly, the thesis’ main original contribution is the abject spectrum; this is an on-going and gradational concept that can account for the range of ways audiences encounter a text; the myriad readings and responses to TV horror texts that involve a much more expansive affective field than simply being scared; and the longitudinal perspective where new experiences and repeat consumption can shift and change audience-text relationships.

Exploring abjection in twenty-first century ‘quality’ TV horror and the abject spectrums of its online fan audiences

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The Routledge Companion to World Cinema

Extreme art cinema, has, in recent film scholarship, become an important area of study. Many of the existing practices are motivated by a Franco-centric lens, which ultimately defines transgressive art cinema as a new phenomenon. The thesis argues that a study of extreme art cinema needs to consider filmic production both within and beyond France. It also argues that it requires an historical analysis, and I contest the notion that extreme art cinema is a recent mode of Film production. The study considers extreme art cinema as inhabiting a space between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art forms, noting the slippage between the two often polarised industries. The study has a focus on the paratext, with an analysis of DVD extras including ‘making ofs’ and documentary featurettes, interviews with directors, and cover sleeves. This will be used to examine audience engagement with the artefacts, and the films’ position within the film market. Through a detailed assessment of the visual symbols used throughout the films’ narrative images, the thesis observes the manner in which they engage with the taste structures and pictorial templates of art and exploitation cinema. Through this methodological direction, the thesis is able to assess how the films are sold to an audience, how this relates to the historical progression of extreme art cinema, and the way the entire practice is informed by an ongoing tradition of taste fluidity.

Extreme art film : text, paratext and DVD culture

The existence of any film genre depends on the effective operation of distribution networks. Contingencies of distribution play an important role in determining the content of individual texts and the characteristics of film genres; they enable new genres to emerge at the same time as they impose limits on generic change. This paper sets out an alternative way of doing genre studies, based on an analysis of distributive circuits rather than film texts or generic categories. Our objective is to provide a conceptual framework that can account for the multiple ways in which distribution networks leave their traces on film texts and audience expectations, with specific reference to international horror networks, and to offer some preliminary suggestions as to how distribution analysis can be integrated into existing genre studies methodologies.

RESEARCH ARTICLE Rethinking genre studies through distribution analysis: issues in international horror movie circuits

/pdf/rethinking-genre-studies-through-distribution-analysis-t29d64xkc9.pdf

Rethinking genre studies through distribution analysis: issues in international horror movie circuits

Can ‘hype’, used by Thomas Austin, Mark Jancovich and Barbara Klinger to describe Hollywood marketing strategies, also help us understand the promotional activities of independent British film distributors who have been promoting mainly Japanese and South Korean genre films under a variety of ‘Extreme Asia’ brands since 2001? This article will examine how these distributors and the print/broadcast media are involved in the process of discursively segmenting a variety of audience taste formations, and then recruiting these niche demographics to build an aggregate audience by generating multiple promises and invitationsto-view, or ‘hype’, around a film text. I will examine the various discourses used to constitute these niches, including those of ‘cult’ subcultural identity, auteurism and other notions of authorship, textual alienation effects and Orientalist cultural essentialism. I will focus on those exceptional texts in which this multiplying process has been particularly successful, in particular Miike Takashi’s Audition (1999). When is a film Japanese? ‘Hype’ is usually associated with the horizontally and vertically integrated transnational media conglomerates of which the Hollywood studios are part, and is defined as their ability to multiply satellite texts, merchandising and numerous other ‘invitations-to-view’ around their core cinematic product (Austin 2001). It is through this process that films can be constructed as ‘dispersible texts’: Products that can be sold to multiple audience niches. This is now a basic business imperative for Hollywood producers, retailers and exhibitors, as it is the primary means to manage the risk of launching a new title (Austin 2001; Hantke 2005: 55; Jancovich 2002: 315, 318; Ang 1995: 11). By contrast, the ability of small independent distributors to develop such textual polysemy has been presumed to be limited by the smaller number of media outlets that give space to products considered marginal, such as foreign-language cinema. However, in this essay I will argue that the proliferation of media space that the DVD format, digital television and the Internet have opened up in the UK since the end of the 1990s has allowed such companies to ape the majors in distributing films as dispersible texts (Austin 2001: 29; Klinger 1989: 10). Independent distributors have succeeded in doing this in part by building a brand or ‘habit’ of watching films to incorporate those titles with less potential for stand-alone, cross-over appeal, creating ‘a community of people who are 53 NCJCF 5 (1) 53–73 © Intellect Ltd 2007 Keywords

https://film110.pbworks.com/f/Asia+Extreme.pdf

Oliver Dew

Papers

Asia Extreme: Japanese cinema and British hype