I was happy to have been able to speak at the recent conference At Home With Horror?: Terror on the Small Screen held at the University of Kent, 27th-29th October, 2017. I spoke about late-night television, dream-states and nostalgia. The paper allowed me to outline some ideas I've had for a while, in particular material that was sparking by a productive trawl of you tube for liminal television clips and other bits of forgotten VHS footage. Abstract below. My thanks to Katerina Flint-Nicol and Ann-Marie Fleming for organising such an interesting event.
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Night Time: The Hauntological Horror of
Television After Dark
When the major channels would go off the air you could […] pick up
strange, other channels and you would see strange things […] That was really
the core, the crystal at the centre of this movie, my experience with that,
thinking: what if the images that you pulled up were really quite extreme,
disturbing, possibly illegal? What would you do, how would you respond to that?
---David
Cronenberg on the genesis of Videodrome
(1983).
In Haunted Media (2000), Jeffrey Sconce argued
that “the premise of the ‘haunted TV’” central to Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist
(1982) speaks of a residual fear; one that exceeds the boundaries of the cinema
because the television set continues to “loom as a gateway to oblivion” back in
the viewer’s domestic sphere. Much the same could be said of Paul Golding’s Pulse (1988), a suburban horror film
shown on Night Time in the mid-1990s.
Contemporary horror films maintain a televisual fixation but for the likes of
Peter Strickland (Berberian Sound Studio,
2012) and Panos Cosmatos (Beyond the
Black Rainbow,2012) the connection lies at the ambiguous level of tone,
ambience and influence rather than representation. When asked about their
references points neither cite a specific example but speak instead of a
nostalgic ambience of unseen films and half-remembered, late-night
television. With these and other
examples in mind, this paper will use the graphics, content and format of the Night Time strand to consider the
residual influence of horror cinema when consumed as post-midnight television.
It will attempt to outline a type of ‘hypnagogic’ horror spectatorship that can
be compared to the “hauntological confluence” recently mapped by Mark Fisher
(and others) in relation to contemporary electronic music.
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