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Transmedia Terrors in Post-TV Horror Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 February 2024
Abstract
This chapter explores tactile transmedia as a significant aspect of official TV horror content and fan-made transtexts, arguing abject spectrums shape audiences’ crafted content. The chapter analyses official TV horror cookbooks as tentpole texts, unofficial cookbooks bestowed with creative freedom, and fan-authored comestibles that employ the abject gaze where food is both disgusting and delicious. The chapter then locates horror TV soundtracks within the twenty-first century boom in vinyl collecting, engendering audio-centric quality TV discourse. Furthermore, transmedia fosters co-branding between portals making TV horror and record labels distributing soundtracks via shifting configurations of textual clustering. Finally, the chapter examines fans’ mockup designs of TV horror soundtracks, employing what I term ‘paratextural poaching’, adopting aesthetic congruity between transtexts and official media.
Keywords: abject spectrum, tactile transmedia, fan crafting, cook books, vinyl, paratextural poaching
Thus far, the monograph has predominantly framed post-TV's transmediality in digital and/or online forms. But while such cross-media networks are paramount to horror television and twenty-first century TV in general, Freeman and Gambarato assert that ‘beyond the digital domain, transmediality can and should involve a variety of alternative combinations between online and offline platforms’ (2019, p. 4). This is because ‘the possibilities to enrich the audience experience via offline activities, live events, and analogue initiatives, are immense because they can dramatically contribute to (1) the feeling of immersion, (2) the sense of belonging, and (3) the emotional response of audiences’ (ibid.). The offline and analogue are equally as significant to post-TV horror transmedia as digital new media, yet the former is often neglected in favour of stressing the latter. Addressing this oversight, Chapter 6 focuses on physical real world transmedia.
Relatedly, while Chapter 5 located audiences’ image transtexts within online media's visual turn, Fan Studies has often ‘privilege[d] textual over tactile engagement’ (Rehak, 2014), neglecting more craft-based practices (Hills, 2009) and ‘object-oriented’ fans (Santo, 2018). Dovetailing these two points, this chapter explores two instances of offline material transmediality that cultivates a more holistic understanding of the post-TV horror (trans) media landscape, introduces novel fan practices and creativity, and further develops notions of horror audience affect understood through the abject spectrum model: the continuum of emotional/corporeal, ideological, and aesthetic affective responses to screen media horror.
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