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