Halloween season reached its apex Monday, on the holiday itself, and the sharp downslope toward Thanksgiving has commenced. Attentive suburbanites will be taking down their light-up skeletons and replacing fake cobwebs with baskets of decorative corncobs. Personally, I couldn’t be more relieved ― or at least most years, I would be.
Each year, October marks an unfortunate convergence of what I consider the best and worst of the calendar: crisp autumnal weather and horror-laden Halloween season. There’s hot cider to be sipped on long, blustery walks, but also billboards for unsettling haunted houses. Each cool evening spent cuddled under an afghan on the couch for a TV marathon is interrupted by jarring trailers for spooky or gory films. My motto has always been, Why ruin a perfect season with self-inflicted terror? Others, of course, disagree.
Well, happy gosh dang holidays, horror buffs ― I know you’re real, probably ― because Halloween apparently isn’t just a day or even a season anymore: it’s a cultural phenomenon. Horror films have been raking in cash at the box office all year (marking a comeback during a time of slow overall ticket sales, though the genre had been in a bit of a slump in the past few years). More notably, TV has become basically wall-to-blood-spattered-wall chills.
Horror didn’t just descend like a malevolent miasma on our TV networks one day. It’s been part of the landscape since the beginning: “The Twilight Zone,” “Tales From the Crypt,” and “Twin Peaks” stood elbow-to-elbow with “The Dick Van Dyke Show” and “Seinfeld.” In the past decade, it seems that network horror offerings actually dipped. In a 2012 Time piece, Graeme McMillan pondered, “Is horror too scary for broadcast TV?” He noted some horror-infused series, with more procedural and relational structures, like “Grimm” on NBC, yet no unadulterated chill-fests.
But that’s not to say we were going without ― this was the early heyday of “The Walking Dead” on AMC and “American Horror Story: Asylum” on FX. The trend only intensified. Premium and streaming channels soon exploded with still more offerings: “Penny Dreadful,” “The Strain,” “Hemlock Grove,” “Black Mirror,” “Scream,” “Bates Motel.” AMC created a prequel series to “Walking Dead” called “Fear the Walking Dead,” just to make the point of the original entirely clear. This year pretty much belonged to ‘80s nostalgia porn “Stranger Things,” a horror/sci-fi series.
Compared to decades like the ‘90s, dominated by family-friendly fare and procedurals, the aughts and 2010s have offered envelope-pushing darkness and graphic violence. Cable channels, free of the strict standards for appropriate content broadcast channels are held to, could entice audiences with any kind of guts and gore ― or sex, though it seems we prefer that as a side dish to brutality. Naturally, this has left broadcast channels scrambling to keep pace, and though sex and language guidelines from the FCC do apply, there aren’t any specific regulations for depictions of violence, so they’re free to ramp it up as they struggle to neither alienate more traditional viewers nor to seem like the stodgy uncle of cable TV.
These days, networks aren’t simply sitting demurely on the sidelines when it comes to horror. This year Fox premiered a series reboot of the classic film “The Exorcist,” the teasers for which caused me to jump out of my skin whenever I was enjoying a pleasant episode of “Brooklyn Nine-Nine.” Fox also offered us the gory comedy “Scream Queens,” which, with its sexy camp varnish, seems to be doing better than “The Exorcist” with audiences.
When combined with all the shows that aren’t strictly horror, but that make me lunge for the remote when they come on lest my squeamish stomach be upset (think “Gotham,” “Blindspot,” “Wayward Pines,” “Sleepy Hollow”) and the downright brutal prestige dramas that are all the rage lately, there’s a distinctly grim, sadistic tone to the scripted TV landscape these days, a sharp line between mostly horror-free comedies and just about everything else. A drama about presidential politics now must involve shocking murder; a romantic melodrama must revolve around ― you guessed it ― a shocking murder.
No wonder I’m actually getting excited for the “Gilmore Girls” reboot; I’m desperate to watch something where the most horrifying moment is Rory screwing her married ex-boyfriend.
Recent trend pieces about the violence onscreen have been compelled to zoom in on almost absurdly specific fads: When Variety targets “TV’s Terrifying Trend,” it turns out it’s talking about characters’ heads being bashed in, a stomach-turning scene found in episodes of not one, not two, but… well, three or more shows this season.
Sure, I’m a little bitter about all this. It’s annoying to be inundated with trailers that alone give me nightmares, to accidentally find myself watching a demonic possession in progress if I leave on “Hell’s Kitchen” a little too long on a Friday night. (Personally, I do think horror is too scary for broadcast TV. Forget the kids; some of us adults need to be protected!) It’s more annoying to be afraid to watch the prestige shows everyone else seems to be be watching and discussing. Nearly all of them lately are either horror shows, horror-infused, or filled up with enough graphic violence to compensate for the lack of unsettling fear.
The phenomenon, despite all the perfectly valid forces behind it (aside from what’s been mentioned, horror was certainly due for a resurgence after the sitcom glory days of the ‘90s and mid-aughts), still strikes me as insanely ill-timed. With such a stressful presidential election looming ahead, the last thing many of us require is an artificial jolt of terror ― and it’s not utterly without consequence politically, either. At least one study has suggested that watching violent programming can increase audience’s fear of crime, a fear that we’ve seen exploited in anti-immigrant and pro-”law-and-order” platforms that seem disconnected to the reality of undocumented immigration and crime in America today. (Net immigration from Mexico has dropped below zero in recent years, and violent crime has been falling steadily for decades.)
Is “The Walking Dead” really responsible for Trumpism, though? It’s obviously not so simple as that. And far be it from me to condemn anyone’s favorite cultural indulgences ― as long as we don’t let our pleasurable thrills fill us with actual terror that compels us to build a wall keeping out zombie immigrants. For those who find solace in escaping with gory entertainment, at least TV horror provides the comforting knowledge that the frights will end at an appointed hour. In its twisted way, as a Bitch Media article argued last year, it offers hope in a desolate, harrowing place.
So cheers to you, blood and guts fans. My pop culture world may have become a hellscape of your taste-driven design, but that’s my problem. Enjoy this transcendent time for horror. I’ll be hibernating in a cozy sweater with some cocoa, baking apple pies, until the romantic comedy comes back. Valentine’s Day all year round! It’s only a matter of time. Right?
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