5 - Spreadable Splatter: TV Horror’s Online Fans’ Image Textuality

Summary

Abstract

This chapter further applies the abject spectrum model, examining viewers’ creative output whereby social media imagery evidence affective responses to TV horror. This examines shifting In the Flesh fans’ images relative to the status of the show. Visual verif iers to Black audiences’ ideological readings of The Walking Dead, memes remix textual content that centres on Black male characters. Making aesthetic connections between diegetic imagery and fine art, fans’ Tumblr GIFs of Hannibal provide what I term ‘intertextural poaching’. Other imagery reifies queer subtext by remixing scenes, creating GIF fic, and original fanart. The latter, presents aesthetic incongruity that makes the horrifying comedic. Finally, fans of Miike Takashi's ‘Imprint’ curate screengrabs that indicate affective responses, positioning the episode as quality TV.

Keywords: abject spectrum, fandom, pictures, textural poaching, curation, anti-fandom

The previous chapter examined audiences’ engagement with TV horror, verbalized on social media, illustrating various aspects of the abject spectrum that pendulate between emotional and somatic, ideological, and aesthetic affect. Alongside consuming screen media, audiences, particularly fans and anti-fans, delight in producing their own content pertaining to, affirming, and/or transforming extant genre objects that they subsequently share with other like-minded individuals. Therefore, further conceptualizing abject spectrums beyond watching horror television as a sealed-off experience, we can analyse these ‘prosumers’ – a hybridization of media producer and consumer – and the work they create as affective meaning-making practices, ‘as a form of interpretation and reception’ (Pavličkova and Kleut, 2016, p. 351). In doing so, the chapter better accounts for fandom and anti-fandom within horror scholarship (Booth, 2012a, p. 70).

Moreover, considering the techno-spatial facilitation of horror participatory cultures, digital media scholarship and Fan Studies have largely examined social media sites’ written posts, tweets, and blogs (as Chapter 4 attests to), as well as transformative work such as literary fan fiction. Whilst such written logos remains fundamental to the ontologies and textualities of social media, there has also been a salient visual turn online. As Gillan remarks, the ‘web interfaces of Tumblr, Pinterest, and YouTube, among others, not only allow, but also encourage visual commentary’ (2016, p. 13).