What makes television scary?

Three Boar writers present their view on what makes TV scary…

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Psychological Horror

Doctor Who’s ‘Behind the sofa viewing’ mantra has definitely been deserved of late. With the snarling miser of the Twelfth Doctor aboard the TARDIS the scares are well and truly coming from within.

Throughout it’s (nearly) 51 year run-time Doctor Who has often been billed as a children’s television programme but “family drama” better serves the show. The programme has often dealt with some very scary concepts in a manner which foregoes the traditional gore-fest scares. The Timelord’s  enemies often take the form of everyday things and the show’s writers and producers take great pleasure in subverting the normal into the fantastically creepy.

Just this series for example, we’ve been scared through our own psychology – what exactly was under those bedcovers? – in Steven Moffat’s eerie chamber-piece ‘Listen’ and faced the possibility of monsters that lurk in the walls in Jamie Mathieson’s ‘Flatline’. What the shows does so well is to take such basic instincts such as blinking or breathing and using them as the Achilles’ heel for the monster’s victim. The now infamous Weeping Angels are a prime example of this; with the phrase “Don’t blink” now iconic to Doctor Who’s mythos. Alongside the angels we have the desperate pleas of a child “Are you mummy?” inducing the fear of children in gasmasks and the Silence, Edvard Much ‘Scream’ inspired monsters, who you forget as soon as you look away from them.

Doctor Who’s horror is tasteful because it remains (for the most part) conceptually scary. The sadistic gore of some television programmes, whilst disturbing, can hardly be deemed scary in the sense of keeping you up at night. It is ideas that are scary because ideas are impossible to kill when they are planted. Who doesn’t shiver at the implication that the Twelfth Doctor might just have left some of the passengers on the orient express to die in Mummy on the Orient Express? Failing that, you cannot deny the chills that the Tenth Doctor supplied when he claimed himself the “ Timelord Victorious”. The questions of dubious morality in the face in the danger are what have made this series and others of Doctor Who so enduringly creepy. Scares can creep from the monstrous to the changes in a character’s morality. This conceptual and clever approach to horror is what will make Doctor Who endure in the nightmares of children and maybe, just maybe, adults too. Sleep tight.

Daniel Cope

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Body Horror

Horror holds a particularly relevant position in the genre television of today, rejuvenated in recent years by the rise of AMC’s The Walking Dead in particular. The societal anxieties and fears it plays upon are often of a more cerebral kind than one might first expect from a typical zombie show. In many ways, its approach reflects our own ever-increasing desensitisation to gore and more conventional forms of body horror. A recent trend in horror television then has been to situate the body within a more intimate, personal context in order to better ingrain itself within both our nightmares and wider pop culture.

Helix and The Strain are two shows from the last year that have adopted this approach, attempting to reinvigorate tired genre tropes by providing new interpretations of old supernatural archetypes such as the Vampire and the Zombie. Whereas mainstream examples of vampires are largely defined by their sex appeal, The Strain’s vampires constitute much the opposite. They are less human, more parasitic, organisms that invade our bodies and change us at a genetic level. Helix enacts an even more insidious kind of transformation by having its zombie-approximations; known as ‘vectors’, transfer the infection through a kind of venereal contact – namely kissing. It plays to common anxieties surrounding not only our sexual selves but also illness more generally as a source of much stigmatisation and confusion. The Alien movie franchise is perhaps the key progenitor of this sort of body horror, with H. R. Giger’s design of the titular character very consciously based on the form of bioorganic, erotic matter and its reproductive function.

Penny Dreadful is another show that is deeply rooted in the sexual, albeit at a less visceral, more subconscious level. Set in the 1890s, its events are entirely contemporary with the birth of Psychoanalysis, dealing heavily with Victorian notions of propriety and the sublimation of that which hides beneath the surface. Eva Green brings an incredible physicality to her portrayal of Vanessa Ives as a woman host to demonic possession, brought about by the sexual trauma of female desires too long repressed.

It is this subversion of our private, libidinal desires into something overwhelmingly alien and intrusive that scares us most, because it convinces us that our own senses are capable of contradiction and falsehood, a thought that remains even after the images have faded from the screen.

Lewis Reynolds

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Sociopath Horror

Cut off one head and more will come to life. By the end of Showtime’s Dexter back in 2013 no one was expecting the rise of two new psychological horror TV series: Hannibal and Bates Motel. Horror has finally proved to be a profitable market on TV but is this just because everybody is secretly plotting to kill someone? When is our Dark Passenger going to take over then and in what ways?

The question rises though: what is so interesting about these types of characters? Is it their sense of truthfulness? Robert Hare in his book Without Conscience clearly states that the psychopaths portrayed on television are not completely accurate, especially since it is almost impossible for a human being to consider the possibility of another human being living without any kind of emotion. Consider Dexter Morgan (Michael C. Hall) for example, his origins as a psychopaths go back to his mother being slaughtered in front of him and him lying in a pool of blood for several days. While a story like this might give to the audience a reason for his madness it has been proved that it is not necessarily true and that most psychopaths do not have horrendous histories in their past that made them what they are.

This idea was suggested with Hannibal Lecter (Madds Mikkelsen) who does not seem to be a psychopath since he feels regret and has empathy towards characters such as Will (Hugh Dancy) and still kills and eats people. In this particular case it is his uniqueness that draws us towards our TV sets since we fear most what we cannot understand and feel. The brilliantly designed Hannibal does anything in its power to confuse its audience. While Dexter or even Bates Motel want us to sympathise with their characters, Hannibal, is a sick representation of the uncomfortable fear of mental illness.

When people claim that these particular shows are ‘an useless and dangerous portrayal of madness that may actually lead others in the same path’ I argue in the contrary that it is about catharsis and purging our inner demons. Beside, these shows can teach us how powerful and successful these individuals really are but not only as murderers but especially as CEOs of multinational companies and politicians as many psychiatrists claim. Next Halloween do not fear the demons behind the screen but those who hide among us.

Patrick Sambiasi