Mourning in America

Mourning in America is a critical examination of what could be considered the midpoint (and perhaps high-point) in the prevalence of the horror anthology format on television: the 1980s. Anthology television series span through different genres, and present a different story and a different set of characters in each episode or season. Despite their 'lowbrow' pedigree as products of a maligned genre in an equally maligned medium, 80's anthology horror series drew equally upon the literary horror tale’s studies of psychological obsession and the vicious morality tales of 'Pulp' subgenres to reveal an American landscape of excessive greed, alienation, and antipathy.

Focusing on key programs of the era such as Cliffhangers (1979), Darkroom (1981-82), Tales from the Darkside (1983-88), The Ray Bradbury Theatre (1985-92), Friday the 13th: The Series (1987-90), and the reboots of The Twilight Zone (1985-87) and Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1985-89), Kristopher Woofter and Erin Giannini highlight the persistent subversive themes and production realities of American televisual horror during a period of extreme American exceptionalism, conservatism, xenophobia, and isolationism that parallels the current American political landscape. In doing so, they assert that the undervalued and under-studied Pulp tradition on TV subverted America’s sacrosanct vision of itself.

Erin Giannini is an independent scholar. She was editor and contributor for PopMatters. Her recent work has focused on corporate culture on television, including a monograph on corporatism in the works of Joss Whedon (2017). She has also published and presented work on religion, socioeconomics, production culture, and technology in series such as Supernatural, Dollhouse, iZombie, and Angel.

Kristopher Woofter is Researcher at Dawson College, Montréal, Québec, Canada. He teaches courses on horror, the American Gothic and the Weird tradition in literature and the moving image. He is co-editor of the peer-reviewed journal MONSTRUM, and of several edited collections including Joss Whedon vs. the Horror Tradition: The Production of Genre in Buffy and Beyond (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), Recovering 1940s Horror Cinema: Traces of a Lost Decade (2015), and the forthcoming American Twilight: The Cinema of Tobe Hooper (2021) and Shirley Jackson: A Companion (2021).