The Art of Fear and the Power of the Frame: Screaming Past The Barriers
The small screen hasn’t ever really been as comfortable with the horror genre as the big screen. In some part due to broadcast standards for network television, and then even cable, which could be pressured by advertisers. The invention of the subscription exclusive channels, like HBO, Showtime and the like, was a boon for the genre on the small screen. If your revenue comes from subscribers, you try to give them what they want, and without advertisers to pressure, controversy and angry campaigns about whatever you might be airing are just free publicity. Streaming has started to change all that though. A streamer isn’t relying solely on advertising for revenue (even as more of them are adopting models that include it).
This isn’t to say there wasn’t great horror television before streaming entered the entertainment landscape, but it is to say there was never so many horror series being made, and definitely never so many, so well made. Streaming has also allowed those of us who missed some of those great horror series to get a chance to see them, as was the case for me with Hannibal. I have to be honest that part of the reason I never bothered to catch the show when it was airing was that I was sure it would be closer to what the series Clarice ended up being, another boring procedural, than what Hannibal actually was. I’ve rewatched that series a few times, and each time, I’m astonished one of the big three tv networks was convinced to fund and air it. It seems like there had to be a glitch in the matrix, and then I remember it got three whole seasons. HBO’s Tales From The Crypt looms large in the landscape of horror fandom. Showtime’s Dexter had a strong impact in its few seasons, both in and out of the world of the dedicated horror audience.
But in the time since streaming because a major source of new storytelling on the small screen, the volume of horror television has increased exponentially. There’s just never been so much, and there certainly hasn’t been so much, so well made, and having some impact beyond the dedicated horror audience.
The Emmy 2026 Emmy nominations were announced this week. Horror focused or adjacent television shows gained a gob smacking eighty-five nominations, among them were nineteen nominations for Widow’s Bay, from Apple TV. If you haven’t been paying attention, Apple TV has been consistently producing high quality science fiction series for a few years now. They’ve demonstrated a commitment to the genre that is admirable, and it’s been paying off for viewers. For All Mankind, Foundation, Invasion, See, Silo, Sugar, and the most popular and well received of their sci-fi offerings, Pluribus and Severance. They’ve also been the streaming home for Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, a show based in the Godzilla/King Kong universe Warner Brothers has been building for over a decade. Apple TV hasn’t just been putting these into production, they’ve been funding them well enough for these shows to have the production value they need to compete with the “prestige” television of other streaming services and media companies, which in science fiction, is important. Science fiction fans have noticed, and their output has been recognized as among the best for the genre in the “streaming wars” we’re all currently witnessing.
Apple TV has treated a handful of horror series quite well. They’ve been has been willing to fund them enough to allow for high production value, which they’ve done more readily with science fiction. One of their early successes was with the M. Night Shymalan produced Servant. The Enflield Poltergeist came and went with little fanfare (if I’m honest, it was boring, despite good performances by the cast), but they did support it well. Cape Fear is a good example of what Apple TV has been doing with science fiction, being transferred to a horror adjacent series. It stars A list actors in Amy Adams, Javier Bardem and Patrick Wilson. If you’d be surprised I’m referring to Patrick Wilson as an A List actor, consider that he is the co-lead of a horror franchise (The Conjuring) which has grossed over a billion dollars, as well as being the co-star of DC’s Aquaman, which grossed over a billion dollars by itself. It’s been given a budget equal to its ambitions, and they’ve promoted it heavily. They also gave strong support to The Changeling, a modern update to the classic horror novel. Apple TV is getting behind these shows.
Since streaming services started producing their own series, Netflix has been the behemoth in terms of horror television. Stranger Things was a bonafide culture phenomenon, on the level of Game of Thrones. Slightly less, but still significantly impactful, they also gave Mike Flanagan, now recognized as a modern Master of Horror, his shot at a series with a production budget that could match its ambition, and The Haunting of Hill House paid off big. Their partnership with Flanagan fed horror fans well. From it came the slightly less well received The Haunting of Bly Manor, the critically and audience acclaimed Midnight Mass, and the gleefully over the top social satire he welded onto reimagining classic Edgar Allan Poe stories with The Fall of the House of Usher. Brand New Cherry Flavor didn’t get the recognition it deserved, but as limited series in the genre go, it was a creative, interesting mash up of sub genres, with a great central performance by Rosa Salazar. This year, one of the people who directed some of Brand New Cherry Flavor’s episodes, Haley Z. Boston, partnered with Netflix to give us, Something Very Bad Is Going To Happen which along with Widow’s Bay is one of the best horror television offerings to debut this year. Boston got her start on Channel Zero, a horror television show created and run by Nick Antosca. Antosca also gave the director of one of the surprise hits of 2024, Arkasha Stevenson (The First Omen) her professional start in the industry on Channel Zero too. Though it can’t be considered a series, the Fear Street Trilogy directed by Leigh Janiak, with the three films being released over three weeks, also demonstrated how streaming can allow for creative distribution and release strategies that can help boost the footprint of something like a trilogy or cinematic universe and keep it in the public conversation. It helps considerably that the Fear Street Trilogy was playing in different sub genres of horror, giving different parts of the audience the things they most enjoy, and delivered in terms being a genuine trilogy, by being conceived and written as a trilogy from the beginning.
The amount of film press and fan generated content dedicated to horror being the current reigning reliable box office success and the film culture behemoth, in terms of generating a zeitgeist the general movie audiences are interested in, has been overwhelming. It’s been deafening, and a bit disappointing as a dedicated horror obsessive. I love seeing the genre get the recognition I couldn’t have dreamed of when I was a kid and a teenager, developing and cementing horror as the foundation of my love for storytelling in general. The disappointment comes, as I mentioned in a video I posted a little while back, from the fact that nationally distributed, major legacy press have clearly been assigning people to write about this who are not very familiar with the creative and business history of horror, despite the number of excellent writers in the horror focused press they could turn to.
I started this piece the day after watching the final episode of Widow’s Bay, intending to write it as the kind of recap and celebration of the series which has become part of the bread and butter of film and television coverage in the digital age. I sidelined it because I was quickly reminded this isn’t what I do well.
The announcement of the Emmy nominations, with eighty-five for horror series and Widow’s Bay, not just a horror series, but a horror comedy series being recognized with nineteen nominations, crystallized what I was struggling to say.
How does all of this tie together and why am I pointing specifically at Widow’s Bay being a horror comedy?
The focus on horror’s success at the box office has been partially incomplete because streaming has blurred the lines between movies and television, considerably. The “prestige” television show wasn’t born in the streaming era, but it certainly has come of age and come to dominate the landscape of what we now think of as a television series in the streaming era. Horror has been mixed in with all of the other genres in that evolution. It hasn’t been some separate, sidelined, niche genre, that has been operating almost as its own industry. Streaming has also made it possible for the small, low budget horror films to have access to an audience equal in size to the audience that wouldn’t have sought them out in theaters or even in the era when physical media was the best way to see them. There has been a degree of democratization, in terms of genre, as a result. As that’s been happening, series like Stranger Things and The Haunting of Hill House have been as impactful a part of the television landscape as say, Game of Thrones (which, if we’re honest, has a heavy dose of horror mixed in) or The Pitt. The television show which may have rivaled the sheer cultural impact, the sense of phenomenon surrounding it, that was equal to, but prior to Game of Thrones, is The Walking Dead. Part of that shows success was the result of previous seasons appearing on Netflix, while new seasons were airing on AMC. In just the last few months, House of the Dragon (a Game of Thrones prequel series), Widow’s Bay and The Vampire Lestat/Interview with the Vampire have been generating a flood of reaction online. It’s nearly impossible to get hard viewership numbers in the streaming era, because all of the streamings services horde that information like dragons sitting on gold, but if social media is any indicator at all (and I think it is, though again, it’s hard to measure how accurate), they’ve been generating as much fan response as Apple TV’s other recent mammoth success, Shrinking, and that show stars Harrison Ford, who is one of the most beloved actors in the world.
Streaming has helped erase the lines between television and film, and what we’re seeing now, is that this audience for horror was always there. The industries of television and film though, due to the necessities of marketing, haven’t always understood the overlaps in that audience with the rest of their general audiences. What’s being revealed, is something I’ve been championing since my fascination with, and love of horror, accompanied me into adulthood. The overwhelming majority of audiences who are interested in movies and television are as open to horror as they are any other genre. What they have been shy of, is the film industry’s tendency to treat horror as nothing more than a grounds for exploitation. I don’t mean that strictly in terms of “exploitation cinema” either. I mean it in conjunction with the way the general film industry, and even within the niche industry of horror, there’s been a tendency for one particular film to succeed, and there to then be eighteen thousand imitators in the next twenty-four or thirty-six months, sometimes as long as a decade if some of those imitators are financially successful. What has been happening with the “Marvelization” of movies, is a broader scale version of how studios have treated horror for decades.
Part of what we’re seeing is the result of the end of horror, as a genre, being perceived as not more than the many terrible slasher films that dominated the eighties and a good chunk of the nineties. Along with the fact that no sub genre has dominated horror since the early twenty-tens, streaming has made much more of what horror has to offer available to general audiences. A viewer logging onto Netflix or Apple TV is seeing The House on Haunted Hill and Widow’s Bay offered to them alongside the rest of their programming. They’re not being marketed only at the “horror audience.” In this way, horror has begun to be treated as just another part of the overall landscape of storytelling on screen, and it’s succeeding, because there has always been a large crossover audience for it, and there’s been an untapped segment of the general audience who hadn’t given it a chance, because of the segregation created by marketing and the way the academic and critical communities shaped the perspective on horror. Audiences who were affected by the reputation it was given by the critical, academic and morally self righteous, censorial minded aspects of our cultural press and cultural critics, have shed those associations with the genre they had gotten from those snobbish ingrates, and their extremely narrow perspective on what art can or should be, after clawing their way to prominence in or leadership of institutions and appointing themselves gatekeepers of the public’s conception of what art can or should be, instead of being advocates for what art is.
[A note to you, Dear Reader, a secret between you and I, so I might avoid being inundated with the flames born from the soul searing pain of seeing a cultural icon insulted. I may someday decide to get into my beef with Pauline Kael’s influence on film criticism, in mainstreaming this variety of criticism as gatekeeping, but today is not that day. Kael was one of the most talented writers to ever do it, but she was a terrible advocate for the arts, whose narrow perspective on the art of film hampered both criticism and the film industry.]
What resulted was a general population whose perception of horror was shaped by whatever the dominant sub genre was at a given time, as represented by those film critics and the various other people representing institutions who involve themselves in cultural criticism, because most of them are lazy, incurious, and their own interest in art is how their cultural criticism can grow their own status and the power of whatever institution they represent. They aren’t actually interested in what art is or what it does for human beings, social animals who evolved with the imperative to ask, “who, what, when, where, why and how?”
Those films critics and cultural critics would passed along the idea that there was little or nothing more to horror in the fifties than the cheapest, laziest cash grabs in the Atomic Age the fifties, the exploitation films of the seventies, the slasher films of the eighties or the glossy melodrama of pretty young things that dominated what is often referred to as the “CW horror” of the nineties, the “torture porn” of the aughts (itself an incurious, lazy moniker gifted by someone whose distaste for horror was already solidified) and so on.
What streaming has done, is make a whole lot of the rest of the history of the horror film available, in combination with the last fifteen or so years of horror not being dominated by a specific sub genre, and instead being dominated by a wide variety of films made be people taking the emotional lives of characters and audience seriously, is to break the long held sense that there was nothing for horror to offer but cheap, lazy films made with no ambition other than to line an unscrupulous producers pockets. If one didn’t already have an affinity for horror, they weren’t likely to understand that the number of those cheap, lazy exploitations of public fears didn’t represent the rest of what horror had to offer.
Why is there a particular importance to Widow’s Bay being a horror comedy, and why is it important a horror comedy is being recognized in both the zeitgeist and by an institution like The Emmys?
Even within the somewhat niche industry of horror, the horror comedy has been among the hardest films to get financed and produced. They are perceived as having an increased risk. There is some truth to this, but like the audience perception of the genre, there’s a feedback loop involved. Some of the most popular horror films of all time are horror comedies. Whatever your feelings may be about Edgar Wright as a filmmaker, he became a known quantity in the film industry because of his ability to adeptly handle horror comedies. His Cornetto Trilogy (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and The World’s End) are all deeply intertwined with the tropes of the horror film. Shaun of the Dead is a comedic interpretation of the zombie genre George Romero and the Image Ten production company invented. Both Hot Fuzz and World’s End take a number of tropes from other horror genres and weave them into the mix Wright creates for them.
An American Werewolf in London is very likely the most popular werewolf film of all time, and it is as much a comedy as it is a horror film. They both exist side by side throughout the film. It isn’t more of one that it is the other. They share an equal portion of the intent in what the experience the film is attempting to give the audience.
Scream is one of the most popular horror films, and horror franchises in the contemporary landscape of the genre. I would go so far as to say there may not be a film as responsible for laying the groundwork for the mainstream legitimacy being afforded horror now. If you pay attention to the landscape of horror, today, the number of people who are creating horror, consuming horror, working in press dedicated to horror, every corner of the horror economy and landscape, who cite either the original film Scream or one of its sequels as formative in the development of their love for the genre is mind boggling. One of the central reasons for its success is the ability to both laugh at and examine the tropes and the relationship of the audience to horror in a comedic way, have been part of what makes a Scream film a Scream film. It’s essential to the sense of fun, the entertainment value, the films bring to the audience. The degree the Scream franchise expanded the audience willing to engage with the horror genre is rare. That expansion helped give way for a wider variety of perspectives people working in the genre have, which also creates a wider variation in the films being made, which again means they’re more likely to reach a wider audience.
Every time a horror comedy finds success financially, it’s followed by what amounts to cheap, lazy imitations. Though writers or directors may have larger ambitions, even love the genre, they’re often met with producers or studio executives whose response to those ambitions is, “Can’t you make it more like (insert what the latest exemplary title would be)?”
As I discussed in a recent piece, the latest in the runaway successes of low budget horror, Obsession, has humor (a very dark humor) stitched into its fabric and a significant part of its success with audiences is due to its creators understanding of the relationship between horror and comedy. It inverts the tropes and understanding of another comedic genre, the romantic comedy. In another way, the success of Obsession, and the fact that it’s derived from this inversion, also speaks to the reasons the romantic comedy is experiencing a lull, and having difficulty at the box office.
If we look at the landscape of the economy of storytelling, action comedy, romantic comedy, almost any other genre being mixed or mashed with comedy has had a significant impact. Horror comedy hasn’t been given the opportunity to have that impact, essentially because of the way the public, and in turn the industries, have perceived the horror part of that equation.
Widow’s Bay creating the kind of audience buzz it has, and now being nominated for nineteen Emmy awards suggests the sense of added risk to producing horror comedy is coming to an end. If we take in the fact that the various industries creating what we're calling television (streaming, network and cable) have been experiencing success with horror more broadly, it says the genre has been considered “mainstream” with television audiences already. Apple TV being willing to fund a horror comedy series well enough for it to have the excellent production value Widow’s Bay has, and it now being recognized by the Emmys, suggest the industry itself is now recognizing where the audience has been for a while.
The thing to remember about this, is that “television audiences” no longer see themselves as television audiences, if they ever did. There were certainly aspects of the audiences for television and movies that were separate. Not everyone was willing or could afford to pony up for the movies. There was certainly an audience that preferred movies to television, and even in their homes, were more likely to watch a movie being broadcast or on VHS/DVD/Blu ray, than a television show. I spent the majority of my life in that audience, until the streaming era really began. Episodic television rarely interested me. The advent of streaming, in combination with the rise of “prestige tv” has blurred all of those lines. I’m as excited about the next episode of Widow’s Bay or Interview with the Vampire as I am the next entry in the Evil Dead franchise hitting theaters. When I sit down and am attempting to decide what to watch, I have a choice in the latest series or films most recently making their way to the streaming environment. More than anything else, available time and mood are the deciding factors.
All the questions about what has been happening with box office, and why horror has become the most reliable profit producing genre, can be answered and found in the degree to which the new media environment has broken down the walls that separated horror from the rest of the film industry, the sense of artistic merit of horror both the industry and the forces that define or bestow the sense of artistic merit or cultural legitimacy on anything for the audience, and the fact that marketing has attempting to divine the lines of segregation for an audiences far less segregated than it believed. What it suggests is that audiences are comfortable with television becoming more than movies, but they want movies to still be movies, and streaming has eroded the lines between the audiences for different genres.
[Note to readers: I'm doing something I have avoided in that past, but I'm going to be transparent about it here. There's an element to why horror is doing so well I hadn't thought of when I wrote this piece, so I'm adding it here, to make it more complete, and because it belongs here more than it does as it's own piece.]
The other part of this equation that has been left out is the sociopolitical circumstances, with the addition of COVID-19 with the lockdowns and death counts become a kind of perfect storm for horror to overcome the barriers that used to separate it from the more mainstream genres.
Horror has always experienced greater popularity in times of uncertainty. The thirties and forties saw the rise of the Universal Monsters to cultural prominence through The Great Depression and World War II. The next era of horror gaining the kind of prominence to have a significant effect on the broader culture is through the sixties and seventies, as the long held cultural institutions of Jim Crowe and patriarchy face the most persistent and forceful challenges in their existence, the Vietnam War begins being waged and economic insecurity grips a large portion of the country. Distrust of authority and institutions becomes big business for Hollywood in the form of the paranoid thrillers of the seventies. Horror experiences what's referred to as a Golden Age, due to these circumstances, and the end of the Hays Code, which has essentially neutered the contents, themes and ideas movies could work with in the previous thirty years.
There have been in the United States, a cascade of shocks that rise to being borderline persistent. 9/11, Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the horror of its aftermath, the economic crash of 2007, which leads to The Occupy Movement in competition with and concurrent to the mainstreaming of the far right beginning in earnest in 2008, mass shootings becoming an ever present part of news and culture, video of police shooting unarmed people being streamed to our phones which leads to the rise of the BLM movement, the first Trump administration, followed by (and partially as a response to Trump being an open misogynist and credibly accused rapist not being disqualifying factors) the #MeToo Movement rocks the world of business and commerce in much the same way the revelations of the epidemic of domestic and child abuse rocked the concept of the patriarchal nuclear family in the early sixties through the late seventies, campus protests of far right personalities being invited to speak turning into clashes between students and far right organizations. 2017 saw Unite The Right's open display of racism, xenophobia and the attendant misogyny turned into a murder, which is quickly followed by another emergence of significant BLM protests, that continue through the COVID-19 pandemic sweeping through the nation, replete with conflicts over masks and vaccines, and daily body counts on the news. Another Trump election, this time including a systemic assault on the institutional foundations of democracy, and overt authoritarian policies like ICE kidnapping or murdering people in the street and a slowly collapsing economy, conflict over the US continued support of Israel as it wages genocide against the Palestinian people, now also including a war being waged on Iran causing further economic disruption.
It's mind boggling that I'm sure I'm missing some other example, considering that list. There may not have ever been better conditions for horror to flourish in relation to the public appetite for it. Combine the technological changes that have made so much of the genre's history and offerings available at the click of a button and this sociopolitical environment, it's not at all shocking horror is showing dominance at the box office and across the culture more broadly. Technology has created conditions where real life horrors are being injected into our worlds with far more persistence and in many divergent narratives about those horrors, and we're using the same technology to attempt to deal with them in the ways storytelling has always helped us to do so. The lockdowns during the period when COVID-19 was so dominant could have been a kind of tipping point. With a large portion of the population spending far more time at home, indoors, under the overarching anxiety of the COVID-19, even people who may not have had a particular interest in the genre may have found themselves venturing into it, consciously or unconsciously, in search of what it provides.