Haunted Seasons: Television Ghost Stories for Christmas and Horror for Halloween

Palgrave Gothic

by Derek Johnston

This book explores the literary and cultural history behind certain Christmas and Halloween traditions, and examines the way that they have moved into broadcasting. It demonstrates how these horror traditions have become more domestic and personal, and how they provide a necessary seasonal pause for reflection on our fears.

Genres: Nonfiction, Horror

198 pages, Paperback

First published August 26, 2015

About the author

Derek Johnston is an academic based in the School of Arts, English and Languages at Queen's University, Belfast, where he heads the MA in Media and Broadcast Production and teaches on the BA Broadcast Production. His research is focused on popular genres, particularly science fiction and horror, as expressed through television, film and literature.

More information can be found at http://go.qub.ac.uk/DerekJohnston

Reviews

[Steve Wiggins · Rating 4 out of 5]

Holidays are fascinating. For many of us in the workaday world, they are the oases of the desert of the year. For many people in the western world the big holiday, the one that gives the holiday season it’s name, is Christmas. Like many winter solstice holidays it occurs during the long nights of winter and the natural break of semesters (in the northern hemisphere, at least). And many of its rituals reflect that. In Britain, one of those rituals is the Christmas ghost story. For some reason that never really translated to America and here Halloween grew into the scary holiday.

Derek Johnston, in this revised dissertation, addresses that dynamic in the context of television. Even for those of us who read a lot about horror, this book is very insightful. You have to get beyond the academese, but once you do there’s a lot of rewarding stuff here. As I discuss on my blog (Sects and Violence in the Ancient World) there is a perception that Britain’s Christmas ghosts are the invention of Charles Dickens. Johnston demonstrates that it has a longer history than that and he attempts to answer why. Along the way he explores how Celtic influence made its way to America, giving us Halloween programing.

Meanwhile, back in Britain, there has been pushback against Halloween since it’s seen as too American. This is an interesting cultural dynamic and it raises the related question of why Americans have so latched onto Halloween as a scary holiday. It has become the most commercial holiday after Christmas, and has converted October into a scary month. This is sometimes a tricky book to read since it follows academic conventions, but it is well worth keeping with. There’s a lot of good information here on ghosts, Christmas, Halloween, and seasonal television.