View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by University of Birmingham Research Portal University of Birmingham ‘Viewer, beware! You’re in for a scare…’ Lester, Cat Document Version Peer reviewed version Citation for published version (Harvard): Lester, C 2019, ‘Viewer, beware! You’re in for a scare…’: Uncanny aesthetics, cyclic structures and anti- didacticism in the children’s horror anthology series. in Global TV Horror. Horror Studies, University of Wales Press. Link to publication on Research at Birmingham portal General rights Unless a licence is specified above, all rights (including copyright and moral rights) in this document are retained by the authors and/or the copyright holders. 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Most of the details are vague, but the conclusion of the episode has always remained with me: the boy goes outside of his house and looks up to see that his neighbourhood is inside of a huge glass dome, and outside of it, looming over the houses, are giant ants. This is a carnivalesque universe in which ants keep humans in glass cages, and the boy’s own keeping of ants was a dream. It is unsurprising that the only part of this episode, ‘Awesome Ants’ (3.15), that I can remember is the end. Goosebumps, an anthology horror series for children that tells an isolated scary story in each episode, is renowned for its twist endings. These twists either introduce a new threat at the last minute or, as with ‘Awesome Ants’, end with a shock revelation about the protagonist and/or the world they live in. Twist endings or open-ended narratives are not exclusive to children’s horror anthologies, or even anthologies for adults, as ‘many television formats lend themselves to a lack of resolution’ (Jowett and Abbott, 2013: 35). However, twist endings are a characteristic of children’s horror anthologies that is not as widely shared by other children’s horror audio- visual media. As I have noted about children’s horror films including Hocus Pocus (1993), Coraline (2009) and Frankenweenie (2012), they invariably conclude with a happy resolution that chimes with the dominant adult notion that children’s stories should end ‘happily ever 1 after’ in order to provide comfort and closure to the child audience (Lester, 2016: 30). Despite this, children’s horror anthology programmes with unresolved endings are common. Goosebumps and Are You Afraid of the Dark? (1990–2000), which are both Canadian, kick- started a cycle of North-American horror anthologies for children in the 1990s and 2000s. These include Canada’s Freaky Stories (1997–2000), New Zealand’s Freaky (2003), the US’s The Nightmare Room (2001–02) and Deadtime Stories (2012–14), and the US-Canadian co-productions Tales from the Cryptkeeper (1993–2000) and R. L. Stine’s The Haunting Hour (2010–14). In Britain, children’s horror anthologies have been popular since the 1970s with Shadows (1975–78), Dramarama: Spooky (1983), Grizzly Tales for Gruesome Kids (2000–) and most recently the Canadian-British co-production Creeped Out (2017–). The endurance of the children’s horror anthology through cultural and industrial changes and across national boundaries evidences this as a form that resonates deeply with child audiences, despite its defiance of conventional wisdom about what children’s (horror) media ‘should’ look like. My own lingering memory of Goosebumps also testifies to the way these narratives can haunt us into adulthood. Helen Wheatley classifies this half-remembering of children’s horror texts by adults as uncanny, in that it belongs to ‘that species of the frightening that goes back to what was once well known and had long been familiar’ (Wheatley, 2012: 384; Freud, 1919: 124–25). Concurrent to these ‘afterlives’, horror anthologies for adults have experienced a resurgence in production, popularity and critical acclaim, with prominent examples being Black Mirror (2011–), Inside No. 9 (2014–), American Horror Story (2011–) and a revival of The Twilight Zone (2019). Yet children’s television in Britain and Canada (the main producers of children’s horror anthologies) continues to face decreased financial investment and production (Anon., 2018: 3; Robertson, 2018). In this industrial context it is both timely and necessary to draw attention to the value 2 of children’s horror anthologies and the blend of fear and pleasure they offer to thrill-seeking child viewers. It is particularly significant that the children’s horror anthologies listed above represent an international (albeit Anglophone) scope, primarily but not exclusively outside of the US. Along with these programmes’ televisual status and open-ended narratives, this international context situates children’s horror anthologies as providing subversive alternatives to the Hollywood/cinematic ‘norm’ that conforms to traditional ideas of children’s horror fiction as needing to provide comfort and resolution.1 Children, horror and television: a triptych of devaluation Despite the ongoing endurance and popularity of children’s horror anthologies, they have been largely overlooked by scholarship in horror, television and children’s media studies. R. L. Stine’s Goosebumps novels (1992–97), the basis for the series, have received scholarly and media attention due to their popularity with children and moral concern from adults about their perceived effect on children’s literacy and wellbeing (Tanner, 2010). It is only recently that the television adaptation, and children’s horror television more broadly, have been the subject of scholarly analysis (Peirse, 2010; Wheatley, 2012; Balanzategui, 2018). That children’s horror anthologies have long been neglected by academia is unsurprising as children’s horror television occupies the bottom rung of a hierarchy of cultural value. The horror genre has historically been considered inferior to more ‘respectable’ genres (Wood, 2003: 69). This might be attributed to its association with teen and young adult audiences (Twitchell, 1985: 7), and yet horror made specifically for children is equally disparaged for being ‘safe’ and ‘unable to get seriously scary’ (Newman, 2011: 3 283). Television horror has similarly faced accusations of being hampered by its domestic viewing context that, for Gregory A. Waller, makes it cosy and reassuring rather than frightening, while advertisement breaks and televisual flow mean that ‘having been to hell and back, the viewer can proceed with life as normal’ (1987: 148, 159). Children’s media and television are therefore linked by the notion that they are both ‘space[s] where horror supposedly does not belong’ (Hills, 2005: 111), or downright ‘impossible’: not scary enough to be ‘true’ horror due to the limitations of their audience or medium (Lester, 2016; Waller, 1987: 159). Television horror’s affective ability has since been persuasively defended (Wheatley, 2006; Hills, 2005: 109–28; Jowett and Abbott, 2013) while Waller’s arguments are less applicable to television horror produced in the TVIII era due to looser content restrictions and the lack of advertising on premium cable networks (Jowett and Abbott, 2013: 11–12). These content restrictions still apply to children’s horror television in order to adhere to notions of ‘suitability’ for children, but criticisms of the quality of children’s horror television remain suspect. These are made by adult critics judging content made for viewers who do not have the same experience or tolerance for horror. When Newman derides what he derogatorily calls ‘kiddie horror’ for not being scary enough, he fails to consider that these texts might indeed be frightening for children (2011: 283). It is therefore important to acknowledge that children’s television horror serves a purpose for an audience with very specific needs and tolerances, and to treat it with the same level of scholarly rigour and respect as any adult text, regardless of genre or medium. Alison Peirse (2010), Helen Wheatley (2012) and Jessica Balanzategui (2018) have begun to remedy this gap in scholarship and value by addressing the ways that children’s horror television can offer narratives of empowerment to viewers through their focus on child protagonists experiencing pertinent adolescent hurdles, like puberty, through the generic lens 4 of horror. Moreover, they reveal children’s horror television to hold important and previously unacknowledged positions in the histories of television and children’s media in North America and Britain.