Features

Is this the golden age of TV horror?

With Hemlock Grove, Penny Dreadful, Hannibal, The Walking Dead & more, Ron suggests this is a golden age in the history of US TV horror…

By Ron Hogan | July 7, 2014 | | 0

On April 30th 1954, a Finnish-American actress, showgirl and pin-up named Maila Nurmi sashayed down a dark corridor fogged with dry ice, stopped on cue and unleashed a bloodcurdling scream. She was sporting her best faux-Morticia Addams dress, vampy fingernails, long black hair and an imperious expression. After the introductory trance and shriek that began every episode of KABC TV’s The Vampira Show, the host would recline on a skull-decorated Victorian couch and mockingly introduce one of any number of low-budget and no-budget horror films for her late-night television audience. Vampira was the first horror host in American television, appearing on the air only five short years after the station first signed on in Los Angeles.

“Screaming relaxes me so”

Though Vampira’s reign as the first queen of late night would last less than a year, she was groundbreaking in more ways than one. She appeared on all the popular shows of the day, including Ed Sullivan’s Toast Of The Town and The Red Skelton Show, and her photo shoots graced the pages of Newsweek, Life, and TV Guide. Though a dispute with ABC over the rights to the character would scuttle her nascent empire, the incredible ratings her show achieved would kick-start a wave across the United States, as every city began popping up with a horror host of their own. John Zacherle’s Roland haunted the airwaves of Philadelphia in 1957. Ray Sparenberg’s Selwin kicked off in 1958 in Indianapolis, Indiana. Sid Noel’s Morgus the Magnificent began practicing his mad science in 1959 in New Orleans, Louisiana.

With horror-thirsty audiences and air time to fill, local stations have long had to get creative with their content, and one of the biggest boons to the local television station was Shock! or Shock Theater, a block of 52 horror and science fiction movies from the 30s through the 50s made available cheaply by Screen Gems in 1957 that was quickly supplemented by Son Of Shock!, another 20-picture block of syndicated programming that proved to be wildly successful at both filling time and at employing goofy local horror hosts. Campy or not, networks took notice that home audiences seemed to have a hunger for horror and continued to stock their schedules with scares, such as television adaptations of long-running radio programs like Suspense, Lights Out, and Appointment With Fear.

“You are about to enter another dimension”

It seems as long as there has been a public entertainment medium, from the Grand Guignol theater of Paris to Orson Welles’ bowel-loosening War Of The Worlds, people have wanted to be petrified by the gristly, the gory, the suspenseful, and the macabre. No medium took to that quite like television, and no television show took to that quite like The Twilight Zone.

A critical and ratings success, the show survived many of the earlier bumps of television – the swap from film to video, changing from 25 to 51 minutes, and so on – and spawned a glut of great imitators in what was perhaps the first golden age of TV horror thanks to competitor programme The Outer Limits being a genre classic in its own right. Following up The Twilight Zone would be Gothic soap opera Dark Shadows, Serling’s horror anthology series The Night Gallery, and television series Kolchak: The Night Stalker (and its preceding television movies, The Night Stalker and The Night Strangler). The returning Twilight Zone in 1985 found a place alongside George A. Romero’s Twilight Zone-inspired Tales From The Darkside. However, aside from Dark Shadows and Kolchak, most of the horror shows to make their mark on television have been anthology series (like the awesome Tales From The Crypt) or excuses to show old movies of varying quality (Cassandra Peterson’s Elvira was a direct descendant of Vampira with an 80s personality slant; Mystery Science Theater 3000 took the horror host concept to its logical conclusion of making fun of the same old B movies during the films with delightfully cheesy sci-fi trappings).

For the staggering run of quality scares that filled the airwaves, both locally and nationally – the horror hosts didn’t begin to wane until well into the 1980s – there were rarely more than one or two good genre programmes on at the same time, and most of what made the airwaves was in an anthology format. More successful creepy projects from the 90s, such as Twin Peaks, couldn’t sustain the energy and ratings needed to survive, while the genre-bending mythological sci-fi alien horror show The X-Files carried the Twilight Zone torch while still having an overarching mythology to drive the car powered by the ‘monster of the week’ format engine. However, by and large, horror series made it a few years at best, then limped off into the sunset.

Not so these days.

“The monster is within”

Television has entered what may be the true golden age of small-screen horror. With the massive proliferation of broadcast channels (5 networks up from 3 in 1984), cable channels (in the hundreds), and internet TV networks like Netflix and Amazon Prime, this is a glorious time to be a horror fan. Hemlock Grove is a great source of intriguing weirdness in the vein of Twin Peaks, with more sex and monsters. If you like psychological horror mixed with small town politics and drug cartel wars, there’s AMC’s Bates Motel. If you prefer your psychological horror mixed with some of the best practical make-up effects on television, NBC’s Hannibal is a great option. From the high camp of American Horror Story to the bloody, supernatural sleaze of From Dusk Til Dawn: The Series, to the comic book action of The Walking Dead, every channel has its horror offering of note, and that seems to be by design. Much as The Twilight Zone and The X-Files spawned imitators and spin-offs, so too is the current success of television horror reproducing across the spectrum.

AMC’s shambling zombie phenomenon The Walking Dead proves the appeal of horror to modern television networks, and is the progenitor of a new golden age of television scares. Upon its debut in 2010, The Walking Dead was the most-watched premiere in AMC history. Its premiere in the fourth season was the most-watched cable programme in history with 16.11 million people tuning in, besting even the Breaking Bad finale. Indeed, The Walking Dead is the most-watched non-sports cable drama in history and the fourth-season premiere was the highest-rated programme of the week, across broadcast and cable networks in the lucrative 18-49 demographic. Following suit, Hemlock Grove garnered more new Netflix subscribers in its first couple of days than its Emmy-winning political drama House Of Cards, without the name draws of Kevin Spacey and David Fincher (though Hemlock Grove does have gore-meister Eli Roth pulling the strings and squirting the corn syrup). Robert Rodriguez’s From Dusk Til Dawn: The Series, a Netflix original outside of the US and Latin America, performed similiarly well for the online TV network. Showtime’s Penny Dreadful outdrew the debuts of both Homeland and Masters Of Sex, and was the youngest-skewing drama for Showtime since Dexter chopped up ne’er-do-wells in Florida. Supernatural and The Vampire Diaries currently prop up the CW, with Supernatural outlasting its original corporate parent, The WB Network.

“Feed your fear”

The wide variety of horror options – with something for every taste and scare level – is the reason horror programming has taken off in the fractured television landscape. With audiences increasingly turning to non-traditional delivery systems like Netflix and DVRs for their television consumption, the key to a profitable programme is attracting a devoted group in a particular demographic. Roth’s Hemlock Grove, one of Netflix’s first original series, was an apt match of context and content, helping it form part of today’s TV horror vanguard. The very thing that is killing the traditional sitcom and drama format is proving to be a boon to the discerning niche consumer.

Horror fans are far from a specific demographic, but there is a broad spectrum of people on whom shows can focus to find an audience. If you want to cater to heart-throb seeking teens and still have decent scares, that’s easy to pull off if your leads are Sam and Dean Winchester. If you’re looking to pull in a slightly older audience looking for a gorgeously violent folie a deux, then you turn to Hugh Dancy, Mads Mikkelsen, and Bryan Fuller. Vera Farmiga and Freddie Highmore power the audience-pleasing black comedy of a particular motel with a very famous name. If you want a little supernatural romance, a little high-school drama, and a little bit of surprisingly stylish violence, Russell Mulcahy and Jeff Davis’s Teen Wolf is a great choice – and surprisingly capable of bringing scares to MTV.

“Everyone is entitled to one good scare”

In this case, the various horror programmes all reach different audiences and have different groups in mind. The days of drawing 30 or 40 million eyeballs is a thing of the past; the goal is drawing the right 4 or 5 million eyeballs that will tune in or to add a couple of million more subscribing customers. Horror has proven to be exceedingly good at this, and if viewers want to avoid spoilers, they have to tune into the broadcast or devour the show in big gulps of binge-watching. The growing after-show industry is proof that horror television is still capable of filling programming blocks and keeping viewers sticking around after the episode is over to hear show staff, genre experts, and celebrity fans discuss the televised madness.

In the new world of television, obsession counts almost as much as ratings. If Twitter buzzes with comments, shippers take to Tumblr in droves, and gifs of the bloodiest, funniest moments pop up within hours of air, that’s a sign that a show is going to be a success. Horror is a naturally cult phenomenon, but once viewers drink the Kool-Aid and get sucked in, they typically don’t leave until a show leaves them. In the new entertainment landscape, that’s more valuable than ever.