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

Abstract

Derek Johnston, Haunted Seasons: Television Ghost Stories for Christmas and Horror for Halloween (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) Derek Johnston's Haunted Seasons, which comes as a welcome, if narrowly focused, addition to the literature on the gothic, the supernatural, and our media landscape, starts by posing a question about the venerable annual UK series A Ghost Story for Christmas: namely, why? The final chapter of Haunted Seasons takes on two, rather oddly matched case studies: A Ghost Story for Christmas (both its initial run from 1971 to 1978, and the revival starting in 2005); and The Simpsons' s annual 'Treehouse of Horror' Halloween episodes, starting in 1990.

Derek Johnston, Haunted Seasons: Television Ghost Stories for Christmas and Horror for Halloween (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015)

Derek Johnston's Haunted Seasons, which comes as a welcome, if narrowly focused, addition to the literature on the gothic, the supernatural, and our media landscape, starts by posing a question about the venerable annual UK series A Ghost Story for Christmas: namely, why? Why ghosts at Christmas? Of course, Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol (1843) is a major part of that answer, but that novella was far from the original Yuletide ghost story. Johnston's work excavates a fascinating history of these seasonal hauntings, locating them within the role that seasonal days like Christmas and Halloween play in the lived experience of communities on both sides of the Atlantic.

While the central focus here is on television, the book begins by exploring historical connections between ghost stories and the holidays of Christmas and Halloween. Johnston's inquiries begin back in the Middle Ages and indeed earlier, and then move on to the Victorian revival of Christmas, and to the immediate context of Dickens's famous Christmas stories and the legacy of such tales. More briefly, Johnston also chronicles the largely North American rise of Halloween as a major cultural event and its increasing affiliation with horror themes, over the course of the twentieth century.

The second chapter is called 'A Broadcast Tradition' and explores how these holiday spooks have taken up residence on radio and television. It hits high points like the 1938 broadcast of The War of the Worlds by Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater on the Air and Ghostwatch (1992), but locates them within a much more elaborate history of such programming. It is a welcome and informative chapter. Johnston goes on to offer some critical frameworks for understanding these seasonal traditions. The third chapter, entitled 'Irruptions of the Abnormal', concerns the intrusion of the abnormal into the normal as 'central to the conceptions of the weird tale in general and the Gothic in particular' (p. 94) and, by extension, to the seasonal horror story. Johnston also notes here that both Christmas and Halloween offer opportunities for television programmes to feature episodes that go against the shows' usual formats, such as the 1967 Star Trek episode 'Catspaw'. The 1973 Halloween episode of Star Trek: The Animated Series, 'The Magicks of Megas-tu', would also have fit Johnston's formulation nicely, staging as it does a surprising 'irruption of the abnormal'. It takes the Enterprise to a universe where magic works and science doesn't, and even has Spock drawing pentagrams, in a break from the usual routine of the show that would have contributed significantly to the argument of Haunted Seasons.

The fourth chapter, 'Seasonality, Nostalgia, Heritage and History', takes on a set of issues about the temporality of the gothic and its denaturalising of the relationship between past and present. Television is a liminal form, Johnston notes, and its status as simultaneously a part of everyday life and removed from it, 'allow[s] for the presentation of and engagement with ritualized narratives, which come with a sense of being heightened and significant, urging us to connect them with our lives' (p. 119). Many seasonal ghost stories consequently adopt a Victorian or Edwardian setting, which remain stock eras for British 'heritage' entertainment; Johnson argues that the presence of ghosts and hauntings can work to deflate and expose the nostalgia for tradition and empire upon which these seasonal settings often rely.

The final chapter of Haunted Seasons takes on two, rather oddly matched case studies: A Ghost Story for Christmas (both its initial run from 1971 to 1978, and the revival starting in 2005); and The Simpsons' s annual 'Treehouse of Horror' Halloween episodes, starting in 1990. The treatment of A Ghost Story for Christmas is very thorough and often fascinating, even for a reader who has seen only a few examples of the series, which was largely composed of adaptations of that quintessentially English author of ghostly short stories, M. R. James. It is clear that Johnston has established himself as a key writer on this series. The same cannot quite be said of The Simpsons and its Halloween episodes, which only gets about three pages, and these contain disappointingly few specific actual examples from the series. Johnston builds on a claim by Steve Jones that, '[i]n breaking from the comparatively realistic social-satire that characterizes the series as a whole, the Halloween specials cast a reflexive gaze back onto "The Simpsons" itself' (qtd. p. 174). This much is true, but The Simpsons is a highly reflexive (and continuity-light) series to begin with, and more could have been done to demonstrate specifically how Halloween enables the show to do something special and different. Johnston mentions that the segment 'Life's a Glitch, Then You Die' from 1999's 'Treehouse of Horror' episode shows Homer's usual incompetence leading to a global apocalypse, something no 'standard' Simpsons episode could depict. The off-format seasonal nature of the episode allows it to pursue a long-standing character trait to its logically disastrous conclusion. This is good point; however, it is confined to a single sentence - rather amazingly, the only specific reference to any 'Treehouse of Horror' segment that Johnston provides. Stations syndicating The Simpsons often show old Halloween episodes (some of them now more than twenty-five years old) in October, and it would be interested to explore the role that this seasonal tradition plays in the lives of the viewing public. Overall, and in addition to these omissions, the connections drawn between A Ghost Story for Christmas and The Simpsons are slight enough that separate chapters might have better served these two case studies.

The frustratingly vague treatment of The Simpsons spotlights a weakness running throughout the book: Johnston seems more interested in and knowledgeable about UK phenomena of seasonal horror than its North American equivalents. Perhaps Haunted Seasons should have been solely about British broadcasting and jettisoned any broader international claims; it could have done so, in fact, without losing too much material. It seems odd to ask that a book so narrowly focused be narrower still, but Johnston's own strong interventions might have been more in the foreground had the book maintained an exclusively British focus. Also, Haunted Seasons is arguably somewhat heavy on literature review throughout, especially of the scholarship on the gothic. This material is welcome in its own way, especially for an uninitiated reader, but the sheer volume of it often works to obscure Johnston's original contributions.

'The Abominable Bride', the 2015 Christmas special of Sherlock (2010-present), is introduced in a postscript to Johnston's Haunted Seasons. The programme consciously places itself within the lengthy British tradition of UK ghost stories at Christmas, especially on television, and its neo-Victorian recasting (inverting the updated format of the rest of the series) takes that tradition back to its nineteenth-century roots. The propinquity of the book's release and that of 'The Abominable Bride' serves as a kind of retroactive endorsement of the value of the issues Johnston has raised, yet raises questions of its own as to the currency of the seasonal ghost story. Johnston's postscript also discusses the relative failure of the revived version of A Ghost Story for Christmas, which he connects to the Americaninfluenced migration of ghost stories to Halloween (p. 173). So one wonders, what remains of the British tradition of Christmas ghosts? On the evidence of 'The Abominable Bride', it may be doomed to clever but empty pastiche.

Murray Leeder