Spectral thresholds and monstrous pedagogies: characterising and remembering millennial children’s horror television in Australia

Debates about horror and television in psychology and popular discourse have often focused on shielding young viewers from potentially harmful content, regarding children either as innocent victims in need of protection or as susceptible to copying violent behaviour. Yet during the 1990s and early 2000s, horror television made for children became prolific, including new anthology series such as Goosebumps (1995–1998) and Are You Afraid of the Dark? (1990–2000). The turn of the millennium was an experimental and increasingly competitive period in children’s television production. In the USA and Canada, children’s cable channels promoted unique brand identities, such as Nickelodeon’s “edgy” programming, to distinguish themselves from rival networks and in Australia, new commercial channel owners bolstered funding for children’s television. In this climate, series creators with greater creative freedom produced innovative, boundary-pushing children’s television that was neither patronising nor afraid to frighten young viewers. Despite this, children’s horror television remains underexamined, with children’s horror studies an emerging field predominantly focused on textual analyses of cinema and literature. Using children’s horror television broadcast in Australia between the 1990s and early 2000s as a case study, this thesis employs a combination of methods, including textual analysis of programs and paratexts, an online survey and focus groups, to elevate the voices of fans and former viewers. This audience-centred approach is used to explore the characteristics and meanings of children’s horror television during this period as remembered by people who grew up watching it. Focusing on this moment in Australian television, this study argues that children’s horror television is a liminal subgenre that is characterised by thresholds. Participants remember a diverse array of children’s horror programs. Through analysing patterns in responses, this thesis identifies two dominant trends: “playfully spooky” and “frightening anthology” series. Playfully spooky series are an older style of comedic children’s horror television, whereas frightening anthology series generally aim to produce fear via self-contained episodes with unresolved threats. Children’s horror television’s thresholds are textual, generic, spatial and temporal. These programs catered to a pre-teen demographic on the verge of adolescence, acted as a potential gateway into the broader horror genre and responded to industrial changes on the threshold of the digital age. On Australian public service television, children’s horror programs were often watched unsupervised at the end of the children’s programming block, at the thresholds between day and night and between child and family programming. Programs employ devices to blur the boundaries between the diegesis and the domestic viewing context, including: title sequences; hosts and narrators; unresolved or unhappy endings; and urban legends. Such devices render the boundaries between the child viewer’s reality and the supernatural permeable, revealing the weird among the ordinary in suburbia and the home, and inviting child viewers to cross into horror storyworlds. To counter its popular framing as potentially harmful, scholars have argued that children’s horror is subversive because it “is not associated with notions of education or quality” (Antunes 2020, p. 20) and unapologetically deploys “the horror genre to entertain and frighten children without an underlying didactic imperative” (Balanzategui 2018, p. 212). This thesis extends this argument by identifying the pedagogical utilities and enduring impacts of children’s horror television. Many participants recall these programs as having positive influences and formative impacts, such as: providing the “training wheels” for consumption of adult horror; daring children to prove their bravery; offering access to taboo or otherwise forbidden content; and promoting acceptance of difference. Childhood horror fandom is described as an important facet of personal identity for participants who remember feeling like they did not fit in. Despite these programs’ broad popularity even then, these participants value children’s horror programs as countercultural texts that were often dark or Gothic and challenged parental authority. This thesis argues that this was a rich cultural moment in Australian television and presents the lasting impacts of these programs. Its methodological approach could also be useful for studying the meanings and significance of children’s horror television, and the formative influences of the broader horror genre, for audiences in other national contexts.

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