iain robert smith

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MediaMediaiain robert smith

Abstract

This chapter reviews eight publications in film and media studies from 2017,focusing in particular on texts that address genre and its relationship with theglobal. Examining both monographs and edited collections, the review de-scribes how media scholars have been interrogating the cultural politicsunderpinning the global circulation and adaptation of media texts within arange of specific cultural contexts. From studies of particular iterations suchas Indian horror cinema or Mexican exploitation cinema through to broaderdiscussions of cosmopolitanism and transnational exchange, the chapter ex-plores the myriad ways in which these publications open up questionsaround the politics of media scholarship and the potential for interculturaldialogue.

In my review in YWCCT in 2017 of media scholarship published in 2016, Ihighlighted two overlapping strands of scholarly debate surrounding theconcepts of ‘cult’ and ‘transnational’ media. I investigated to what extentthese concepts are still productive in contemporary scholarship, and in whatways these new titles offered fresh approaches for scholars to adopt. Buildingon that earlier account, this chapter focuses its attention on eight bookspublished in 2017 that are engaging with another two interrelated strands ofmedia studies scholarship—‘genre’ and the ‘global’. There is some evidentoverlap with the concepts focused upon in my review from last year, so I willtherefore be returning to some of the debates and issues that I highlightedpreviously, but I will also be teasing out the particularities of this body ofscholarship—with topics ranging from the transnational reception of TVgenres such as Nordic Noir through to the interaction of local and globaltropes in Hindi-language ‘horror’ cinema—and the specific political ques-tions that these cultural phenomena raise.

The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, 26 � The English Association (2018)All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: [email protected]:10.1093/ywcct/mby021

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How, for example, do we conceptualize of genres such as ‘horror’ incontexts where that is not the term that is used to describe those texts? Canwe discuss the ‘Spanish Gothic’ or ‘Mexican exploitation cinema’ whenthose are not the terms that are predominantly used to discuss those culturaltraditions in those countries? To what extent is this an imposition of Anglo-American frameworks on the rest of the world? On the other hand, in whatways might the identification of similar strands of media production incountries around the world—even if framed under the banner of aWestern-derived concept—help us to identify shared practices and culturaltraditions? To what extent might this contribute to a more cosmopolitanoutlook on the international media landscape that could be used to combatthe rising tide of regressive nationalisms?

One of the most sophisticated responses to these questions comes inMeheli Sen’s Haunting Bollywood: Gender, Genre, and the Supernatural in HindiCommercial Cinema. Sen is building a reputation as a leading scholar on popu-lar Hindi cinema, and is in the vanguard of a move to engage in morerevisionist histories of Indian cinema by investigating the low-budget B-grade industry. While scholarship on Indian cinema has been flourishing inthe last decade, there has been a predominant emphasis upon the commercialmainstream, and this has meant that B-genres such as ghost films, snakefilms, and horror have been comparatively neglected. As Sen herselfnotes, ‘this is an exciting time for Indian horror studies [. . .] because schol-arly work on these films has begun in earnest in recent years’ (p. 170), andHaunting Bollywood, her first monograph, is very much at the forefront of thatdisciplinary shift.

The book opens with an account of Sen’s own introduction to Hindihorror cinema with an illicit VCR viewing of Veerana (Deserted, 1988) in thesummer of 1989 with a group of her teenage friends, noting that ‘the air wasthick with a heady sense of transgression’ (p. 1). From the start, therefore, itis clear that there is an affective relationship with the films that underpins herresearch in this area. Central to Sen’s approach is the idea that the super-natural in Indian cinema is ‘constantly in conversations with global cinematicforms’ (p. 1) and that it has ‘routinely pushed the Hindi film into new formaland stylistic territories’ (p. 2). Moreover, this relationship that the films havewith global cinematic forms is also reflected in her scholarly approach thatdraws upon Western cultural theory while being attuned to the limits in itsapplicability to South Asian cinema. For example, her discussion of‘haunting’ is framed partly in relation to Derrida’s Specters of Marx (1993),and Sen is particularly interested in the historical mutability of this conceptand the ways in which the legacy of colonialism in particular can be said to

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‘haunt’ these works. She also frames her critical approach in relationto scholarship on embodiment—from Linda Williams’s work on bodygenres through to Jack Halberstam’s work on the monstrous—yet she isalso sensitive to the potential limitations of applying this Western criticalwork:

While this large corpus of interdisciplinary scholarship on embodi-ment, corporeality, affect, monstrosity, and queerness informsHaunting Bollywood in productive and constitutive ways, it is alsocrucial to note that Western cultural theory can only have limitedpurchase when discussing such formations as the Hindi popular film.A considerable degree of retooling and repurposing is required inorder to do justice to the contextual valences of the films in question.(pp. 7–8)

The structure of the book is largely chronological—starting with the periodfollowing the release of Mahal (Palace, 1949) in post-independence India,with subsequent films, such as Woh Kaun Thi (Who Was She?, 1964), sym-bolizing the gradual emergence of the Gothic in Hindi cinema. Sen notes thatthe vexed relationship between Hindi cinema and modernity is particularlycomplicated in relation to the Gothic genre ‘because its basic material re-mains decidedly and recognisably Western’ (p. 24), and that this Hindivariant is ‘thus an appropriation and restructuring of an inherited colonialform’ (p. 24). Sen is therefore particularly attuned to the complex post-colonial politics of these forms of cross-cultural borrowing and exchange.

She then moves on to the B-grade horror films of the 1970s and 1980s—a phenomenon that became synonymous with the work of the RamsayBrothers, who were notorious for adapting various tropes from Westernhorror cinema into the Hindi masala form. Key to Sen’s approach is heremphasis on the specifically local ways in which international genre templateshave been adapted and reworked within the Indian context, noting thathorror titles like Veerana and Purana Mandir (Old Temple, 1984) ‘have asmuch to do with local political upheaval as with the international genre filmconventions that the Ramsays unembarassingly appropriated’ (p. 18).

Importantly, this narrative of cross-cultural adaptation and appropriationis not framed as a simple one-way process. As Sen explains, much of herbook ‘focuses on the particular ways in which Hindi commercial cinema hasinscribed the supernatural over the last seven decades’, but it has ‘also tracedhow the formation has imbibed, engaged with, and spoken back to globalcinemas (p. 133). This becomes particularly clear in her final chapter, whereshe describes the post-millennial supernatural cinema—a form that she

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defines as the ‘planetary paranormal’—as the ‘kind of Hindi film that seeksto be anything but’ (p. 135). There is a concerted attempt in this period toshift away from the predominant masala form and for Hindi film to ‘renego-tiate its relationship with globally circulating genres (p. 135). Sen argues thatBollywood zombie films such as Rise of the Zombie (2013) and Go Goa Gone(2013) reflect a ‘current bid for globality’ in which the millennial supernat-ural film is Hindi film ‘only insofar as its immediate context determines, andthat, too, with a degree of sheepishness and reluctance that is unmistakable’(p. 136). Sen therefore teases out the productive tensions between the globaland the local that these texts reveal, and shows how these relationships havean impact upon the kinds of engagements with the horror genre that takeplace in popular Hindi cinema.

In its insightful and perceptive analysis of the supernatural in popularHindi cinema, Meheli Sen’s Haunting Bollywood is therefore a pioneeringstudy of the global circulation of cinematic genres that emphasizes themyriad ways in which Bombay cinema has functioned in dialogue withother global forms. It is also wonderfully written. As Sen herself reflects,‘I have [. . .] refused to relinquish my cinephiliac pleasure in writing thisbook’ (p. 170), and this passion for her material is one that is evident onevery page.

A similarly affective relationship between the author and her material isat the forefront of Seraina Rohrer’s La India Marıa: Mexploitation and the Filmsof Marıa Elena Velasco. The book provides an authoritative overview of thework of actress, director, and producer Marıa Elena Velasco and situates herbody of work in relation to prevailing trends within the Mexican film in-dustry. Velasco starred as the character La India Marıa (Maria the Indian) insixteen feature films, alongside numerous TV shows and theatre appearances,and even directed five of her own films at a time when female directors inMexican cinema were remarkably rare. The book is therefore an account ofone of Mexico’s most prolific female director-producers with a focus on thecontroversies surrounding her hugely popular character La India Marıa, but itis also an account of Swiss-born Rohrer’s own interactions with Mexicancinema. The book opens with Rohrer’s first encounter with the character LaIndia Marıa in Mexico’s vibrant street markets. As a Swiss Ph.D. student anda visiting fellow in Chicano studies at UCLA, she soon became fascinated by‘the garish covers on a series of Mexican films featuring a clownish indigen-ous woman’ (p. 1), and eventually sat down in 2005 to watch one of thebest-known India Marıa films, Okey, Mister Pancho (1981) for the first time.She describes how viewing ‘the naıve yet stubborn Marıa character depictedas an over-the-top ethnic stereotype’ startled her, and that she found herself

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‘irritated by the stereotyping—but at the same time cracking up with uneasylaughter’ (p. 1).

This tension around her own response to the character then carriesthrough the rest of the study as she explores the tensions between readingsof La India Marıa that position her as a subversive character who uses slap-stick humour to critique the powerful, and readings that see her as a raciststereotype that mocks indigenous women. As Rohrer notes, ‘some criticsview La India Marıa as a racist depiction of a negative stereotype of anindigenous woman, while others see the widely beloved character as a sly,transgressive critique of discrimination and the powerful political elite’(p. 3). The book is therefore an attempt to understand the enduringappeal of this controversial character:

The ultimate aim of this book became interpreting responses fromviewers of India Marıa films, Marıa Elena Velasco and her children,other Mexploitation producers, and industry sources in order tounderstand the enduring appeal of the ethnically marked comiccharacter of India Marıa, the films in which she appears, and Mexico’slow-budget film industry. (p. 6)

Importantly, Rohrer does not position herself as the all-knowing expert onthe topic but frames this as a self-reflective narrative of acquiring knowledgeabout this woman and the various traditions within popular Mexican cinema.Rohrer is aware of the potential criticisms of a European scholar who ‘dis-covers’ Mexican culture, and her reflections about her own position make itclear that she does not take this lightly. Nevertheless, her extensive re-search—drawing on substantial archival material alongside interviews withMarıa Elena Velasco herself and numerous figures from the Mexican filmindustry—means that this is still the most authoritative account to date ofVelasco’s remarkable career. Over the course of six chapters, Rohrer situatesVelasco’s work in relation to prevailing Mexploitation genres (such aslow-budget comedies, wrestling films, sexy movies, and border action-adventures) and investigates her career from a holistic perspective, coveringeverything from production and distribution through to exhibition andreception.

Rohrer is sensitive to the critics who accuse Velasco of presenting anoverly simplified stereotype of an indigenous woman, but she situatesVelasco’s India Marıa in relation to Charlie Chaplin’s tramp, arguing thatthe characters ‘both represent marginal figures who suffer from social andeconomic exclusion’ (p. 25) and that, like Chaplin, ‘India Marıa’s physicalpratfalls are an intrinsic part of her social commentary’ (p. 26). In other

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words, her slapstick comedy is utilized as a vehicle to criticize the powerful,and Rohrer argues that the ‘fantasies of empowerment that thecharacter elicits transgress typical representations of indigenous womenand undercut ethnic stereotypes and social hierarchies’ (p. 26). One ofthe most fascinating sections of the book discusses how Rohrer positionsVelasco’s career in relation to the concept of ‘Mexploitation cinema’. As sheexplains:

Spanish speakers commonly use the terms cine popular [popularcinema] or churro [literally, a deep-fried pastry] to describe the IndiaMarıa films [. . .] as well as other low-budget Mexican movies,including wrestling films starring famous luchadores [wrestlers] such asEl Santo, sexy films featuring scantily clad women, and violentborder stories of migrants crossing to the United States and drugtrafficking. (p. 28)

The term churro functions both to imply that the films all look and taste thesame, and also that they have little cultural value—thereby deriding thepopular cinema consumed by the lower classes in Mexico. As Rohrer ex-plains, there are many parallels with the term ‘exploitation cinema’ used inthe Anglo-American context to describe low-budget films that are marked byminimal production values and exploit prevailing generic trends. When sheuses the term ‘Mexploitation’, therefore, she is not using it to diminish thefilms but instead to draw parallels with classic American exploitation films,and the book is part of a broader academic attempt to re-evaluate the low-budget genre films produced in Latin America by drawing on scholarship onUS exploitation cinema (see, for example, Latsploitation, Exploitation Cinemas,and Latin America [2009], edited by Victoria Ruetalo and Dolores Tierney).However, Rohrer notes, it is important to remember that these are stilldistinct phenomena, given that, ‘unlike ‘‘exploitation’’ cinema in the UnitedStates, ‘‘Mexploitation’’ is not a category of film production that existedwithin the Mexican film industry’ (p. 32). Indeed, rather than a division intoa mainstream and an exploitation industry as in the US, the ‘system ofdistribution and exhibition of Mexploitation films was not opposed to thedominant system but integrated into it’ (p. 80). Rohrer is therefore sensitiveto the challenges in applying a generic marker from one context to another,but argues that applying the framework of US exploitation cinema to theMexican cinema industry can nevertheless help in identifying parallels be-tween these two contexts. Taking this further, she concludes the book bynoting that the trends she was identifying in Mexican cinema were notunique to that national context, and that it ‘would be interesting to research

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parallels between films with similar aesthetic features from different coun-tries’ such as the exploitation films of Nollywood cinema or Brazil’s sexcomedies of the 1970s.

Given that exploitation cinema has predominantly been theorized inrelation to the US context, this book therefore points to productive waysin which we can use a phenomenon such as Mexploitation to interrogate thedynamic relationship between globally circulating genres and local nationalspecificity. Rohrer’s book is at the forefront of a scholarly push to chart andanalyse numerous exploitation cinemas from around the globe and to makethese kinds of transnational connections visible. As with the Bloomsburybook series Global Exploitation Cinemas, which I discussed in my reviewof 2016 publications in YWCCT last year, Seraina Rohrer’s La India Marıa

represents a significant move forward in exploitation cinema studies.Drawing on extensive research into the production, marketing, and exhib-ition of Velasco’s films, alongside a carefully nuanced account of the cross-cultural implications of the India Marıa phenomenon, Rohrer has produced agenuinely ground-breaking account of popular Mexican cinema through theprism of this specific director-producer-star.

In his book Spanish Gothic: National Identity, Collaboration, and Cultural

Adaptation, Xavier Aldana Reyes undertakes a similar intellectual manoeuvrein defining and delimiting the ‘Spanish Gothic’ in relation to the widercirculation of the Gothic mode. Aldana Reyes is a founding member ofthe Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies and is becoming increasinglyprominent within the burgeoning field of Gothic studies, and this bookmarks a significant new intervention within debates on the ‘globalGothic’. Covering an impressively broad range of material fromRomanticism through to contemporary post-millennial Gothic cinema,Spanish Gothic charts the history of the Gothic mode in Spanish literatureand cinema. While the majority of the book is focused on literature, andtherefore isn’t strictly relevant to a review of media publications, AldanaReyes’s grappling with the relationship between distinctive national identitiesand globally circulating genres is a noteworthy contribution to the debatesthat I have been mapping.

Sketching his own intervention in the field, he explains that the ‘notionthat Spain never nurtured a Gothic tradition was, until the late noughties,widespread’ and relied on the idea that the Gothic derived from Protestantcountries during the Enlightenment, and that when the Gothic novel madeits way to Spain, it was assumed to have ‘done so in an ‘‘inauthentic’’ form’(p. 3). Like Seraina Rohrer’s discussion of Mexican exploitation cinema and

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Meheli Sen’s analysis of Hindi horror cinema, Aldana Reyes’s text is sensitiveto the need to use appropriate terminology, noting that:

One of the main difficulties attending anyone aiming to explore thehistory of the Spanish Gothic is the country’s reluctance to use thisword to describe national outputs that would, if considered under theparameters by which the Gothic is measured in Anglophone coun-tries, be found to be part of the canon in either content or intent.(p. 9)

Explaining that Spain has tended to favour other words—such as ‘fantastic’or ‘macabre’—to describe these literary and cinematic genres, Aldana Reyesreflects that readers ‘may naturally ask why I would want to rescue a termthat appears to [be] of little use to the critics and writers of Spain’ (p. 10). Itsoon becomes clear, however, that his use of the term Spanish Gothic allowshim to analyse the manner in which these Spanish texts draw from foreignmodels while developing them in nationally specific ways, thereby position-ing the Gothic ‘as the truly transnational mode it has become’ (p. 10).

In his overview of Spanish Gothic cinema, Aldana Reyes starts with thepioneering trick-films of silent film director Segundo de Chomon and takesus all the way up to the post-millennial Spanish horror revival with directorslike Guillermo Del Toro and Jose Luis Aleman. His primary focus, however,is on the period 1968–80, when Spain was one of the foremost producers ofGothic cinema globally, with figures such as Paul Naschy and Jesus Francoleading the way. Sympathetic to the nuances of generic categorization,Aldana Reyes explains that even a film such as Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror

(1968)—which clearly draws upon iconic Gothic characters and tropes suchas the werewolf and the vampire—would be ‘more readily defined in Spainas ‘fantaterror’ or ‘fantaterrorifico’ cinema [. . .] than as Gothic horror’(p. 15). Nevertheless, contra scholars such as David Roas, who positionthe Gothic as ‘a historically contingent literary phase superseded by thefantastic tale’ (p. 232), Aldana Reyes argues for an understanding of theGothic as a ‘transhistorical, transmedia and transnational artistic mode’(p. 232). One of the clear values of this manoeuvre is that it allows himto challenge prevailing notions about the Spanish Gothic—especially its rela-tive worth. For Aldana Reyes, the Spanish Gothic ‘cannot be reduced to anational mode that imported the British and French Gothic late and badly’(p. 28), and his study is therefore designed to ‘challenge the misconceptionthat the Spanish Gothic is somehow less interesting than its Anglo-Americancousins’ (p. 29).

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Ultimately, therefore Aldana Reyes makes the case for understanding theGothic as ‘no longer the remit of a specific country’ (p. 232) but instead a‘glocal mode, a product of collaboration between countries’ (p. 232).Mapping out the ways in which the local intersects with the global in theGothic mode, this is an essential book on the transnational dynamics of theGothic that should be used as a model for future scholarship investigating itsglobal influence, and the transnational circulation of literary and cinematicgenres more broadly.

While Aldana Reyes is focused on a specific national incarnation of theGothic, Dale Hudson’s Vampires, Race, and Transnational Hollywoods takes amore global approach—discussing vampire film and television in relation to‘Hollywood’ as a transnational industry and therefore incorporating discus-sion of vampire media produced everywhere from Mexico to the Philippines.Charting the history of vampire cinema through the lens of transnationalism,Hudson therefore draws parallels between the life cycle of vampires, whorenew themselves through drinking their victims’ blood, and Hollywood’sprocess of renewing itself by bringing in ‘new blood’ in the shape of filmsand filmmakers taken from other industries around the world.

Hudson is building a reputation as a leading scholar on culture andglobalization, and he here uses the figure of the vampire to explore issuesof postcolonialism, migratory movements, and social difference. Arguingthat a film like the Iranian-American A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night(2014) ‘exemplifies how vampire stories migrate and mutate to conveyever-shifting identities and orientations’ (p. 5), Hudson shows that vampiresmay have derived from east European folklore but that they have been takenup in a multitude of different cultural and historical contexts. The bookproposes three central contributions to scholarship:

(1) reconfiguring Hollywood historiography and traditions as trans-national in terms of film, television, and web production, distribu-tion, and exhibition/transmission; (2) offering fresh interpretationsof vampire film and television as a transgenre and transmedia site forpolitical contestation; and (3) situating constructions of race in/andthe United States as constitutive of nation. (p. 9)

As Hudson explains, Hollywood’s vampire films have always been trans-national, from Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi and Spanish actor CarlosVillarıas playing Hollywood’s first English-language and Spanish-languageDraculas, respectively, through to more recent Hollywood vampire filmsthat draw ‘upon the racial/ ethnic identities of actors cast as vampires,who appear African American, Mexican American, or Chinese American’

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(p. 13). This reconfiguration of Hollywood as explicitly transnational makesthis book an especially interesting fit for the new Edinburgh University Pressseries on Traditions in American Cinema. Rather than relying on a limitedmodel of Hollywood historiography that focuses entirely on films producedin America by American studios, Hudson instead shows the ways in whichthis particular ‘tradition in American cinema’ goes beyond national borders.For him, this is one of the values of focusing on vampire film and televisionseries, as they ‘allow us to refocus on Hollywood as plural, US history astransnational, and race as having afterlives’ (p. 2). We are therefore offered aninvaluable transnational perspective on this particular American cinematictradition, and Hudson’s book clearly fits with a recent trend within schol-arship to discuss these transnational dimensions of the mutating and migrat-ing vampire figure—as exemplified by collections such as Tabish Khair andJohan Hoglund’s Transnational and Postcolonial Vampires (2013) and DorotheaFischer-Hornung and Monika Mueller’s Vampires and Zombies: TransculturalMigrations and Transnational Interpretations (2016).

This transnational focus is one of the real strengths of the book, as someof the most invaluable contributions to debates on vampire media come inthe chapter that is least obviously about ‘American cinema’, where Hudsondiscusses:

Hollywood’s production of—and presence in—a category of foreignmovies that includes Hammer’s lavish studio productions shot inBritain, parodies of vampire films shot in Europe by rebellious au-teurs such as Roman Polanski and Paul Morrissey, Mexican vampireand luche libre (wrestling) films dubbed for television, and Philippinefilms re-edited into vampire films for drive-ins. (p. 102)

From this transnational perspective, Hudson tracks the ways in whichHollywood was financing runaway productions shot in Italy and dubbingfilms produced in Mexico and the Philippines, meaning that ‘Hollywoodwas less a producer of original content than a trader in acquired and appro-priated content’ (p. 103). Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of this chapteris when Hudson then discusses how ‘foreign movies’ come to be produced asa category through the various Hollywood practices in this period. As heexplains, ‘Dubbing, subtitling, and re-editing practices along with margin-alized exhibition venues produce foreign movies—literally, in terms of distri-bution; figuratively, in terms of contextualization—as cheap copies of ‘‘real’’Hollywood’ (p. 116). The treatment of Mexican films such El Vampiro (TheVampire, 1957) and Santo y Blue Demon contra Dracula y el Hombre Lobo (Santoand Blue Demon vs Dracula and the Wolf Man, 1972) by US distributors

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‘leaves traces in dubbing and subtitling of the historical conditions of politicaleconomies rife with uneven and unequal exchange that are based on thelegacies of colonial and imperial exchanges’ (p. 131). Hudson is particularlycritical of the ways in which such films were presented to be laughed at as‘cheap and cheesy foreign movies’ (p. 131) by audiences in the US—aresponse later represented by TV shows such as Mystery Science Theatre3000 (1988–99). By tracing the ways in which these vampire texts adaptand change as they circulate across different national contexts, and by inter-rogating the cultural politics of these kinds of movements, Hudson demon-strates the clear benefits that come from taking a transnational perspective onhorror cinema.

Interestingly, however, Hudson wants to discuss vampire film and tele-vision without focusing this on the horror genre specifically, arguing for a‘reading strategy that releases vampires from the detention center of ahorror genre’ (p. 8). While this is partly positioned as a desire to framevampire film and television as a transgenre phenomenon that moves acrosscomedy, horror, melodrama, and science fiction, there is nevertheless someindication that this is also a strategy of legitimization. As he explains,

The book reconsiders Hollywood vampires for the intellectual andpolitical pleasures that they offer rather than confining them to therealm of so-called guilty pleasures. It focuses on films and series forthe unresolved questions that they raise rather than celebrating films andseries for self-affirming answers they offer within the (privileged andself-infantilizing) rebellion of so-called fanboys and girl power.(p. 13)

By releasing the vampire from the ‘detention center of a horror genre’, heseems to be attempting to somewhat legitimize the figure of the vampire bydissociating it (and, by association, his own scholarship) from the horrorgenre and its associated fandom. Given the diverse ways in which the horrorgenre has been theorized in the texts I have discussed elsewhere in thisreview essay, it is a little disappointing to see horror being framed in thismore limited manner here. Nevertheless, his emphasis on the vampire figureas a ‘transgenre’ phenomenon does allow Hudson to deal with an admirablebreadth of case studies, ranging from the classic Universal Dracula seriesthrough to the viral online video Barackula: The Musical (2008), and fromlow-budget exploitation films like Blacula (1972) through to long-runningTV series like Sesame Street (1969– ). Moreover, his decision to focus hisattention on the ‘intellectual and political pleasures’ of these texts clearlypays off in his rigorous and critically informed writing. Hudson makes an

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impassioned case for seeing how vampires can ‘help us to unsettle discoursesof blood, bodies, and borders that foment the unnatural whiteness ofAmerica’ (p. 237), and Vampires, Race, and Transnational Hollywoods is there-fore suffused with contemporary political resonance. While there is already asignificant body of work on vampires in cinema, Hudson has produced a freshand original contribution to scholarship that should be of great interest toscholars interested in vampire media, transnational approaches toHollywood, and the politics of race representation.

This focus on the transnational dimensions of the horror genre is con-tinued in the collection Transnational Horror Cinema: Bodies of Excess and theGlobal Grotesque, edited by Sophia Siddique and Raphael Raphael, whichparticularly emphasizes the role of the body within transnational horrorcinema. As the editors explain in their introduction, ‘Bakhtin’s concept ofthe grotesque body, which articulates [the] mapping of the body to thepolitical and the social, haunts each chapter in this volume’ (p. 5) Thereis therefore a twin focus within the collection on the transnational and thegrotesque body, with the editors arguing that ‘there has been a dearth ofscholarship addressing the transnational character of horror and the excessivebodies that populate this global genre’ (p. 1), and, by drawing on an appro-priately macabre metaphor, they explain that the collection highlights theways in which horror films ‘stitch together the flesh of various national andgeneric texts’ (p. 2).

Many of the contributors are up-and-coming early-career scholars, andthere are exciting new insights on the transnational dimensions of the horrorgenre peppered throughout the book. Part I focuses on ‘Questions ofGenre’, opening with Mike Dillon’s chapter ‘Butchered in Translation: ATransnational Grotesuqe [sic]’, which discusses the Japanese film Grotesque(2009) and its release in the West. Dillon argues that the film was marketedinternationally through an attempt to associate it with the ‘torture porn’genre exemplified by American films like Saw (2004) and Hostel (2005).Through a close comparison of the Japanese and UK marketing forGrotesque, Dillon provides a compelling case study of the ways in whichhorror films circulate transnationally and become framed by distinct agendasin different national contexts. This attention to transnational distribution andmarketing is then complemented by subsequent chapters that focus moreupon the transnational dimensions of production and textuality, such asSangjoon Lee’s chapter, ‘Dracula, Vampires, and Kung Fu Fighters: TheLegend of the Seven Golden Vampires and Transnational Horror Co-Productionin 1970s Hong Kong’. Lee argues that analysing a film like The Legend of theSeven Golden Vampires (1974) ‘entails that we should situate the film in terms

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of its geopolitical and generic positions’ (p. 66) in the Hong Kong and UKfilm industries. Demonstrating that this is a ‘hybrid genre film incorporatingthe conventions of kung fu and those associated with Dracula’ (p. 66), Leemakes the case for locating this film specifically in relation to the interactionsbetween the production practices of Hammer in the UK and the ShawBrothers in Hong Kong.

For me, however, the two contributions that were particularly invaluablein terms of contributing to debates on genre and the global were the chaptersfrom Raphael Raphael and Mary J. Ainslie. Firstly, Raphael’s chapter on‘Planet Kong: Transnational Flows of King Kong (1933) in Japan and EastAsia’ provides a fascinating account of the movement of King Kong acrossAsia—focusing on a series of what he terms ‘Bad Kongs, [the] unofficialknock-off movies released in 1976 and 1977’ (p. 206) that attempted tocapitalize on the international interest in the Dino De Laurentiis-producedKing Kong (1976). His primary case study is the Hong Kong Shaw Brothers’production The Mighty Peking Man (1977), although he also references otherexamples, such as the South Korean–American production A�P�E (1976).Arguing that the chronotope of King Kong is used in these films as a figuresymbolizing (the possibility of) resistance against power, Raphael suggeststhat ‘to understand the transcultural work of King Kong it is essential werecognise it both as cultural product export and as fluid body of resistancethat, despite its famous death(s), has been extremely difficult to contain’(p. 217).

Secondly, perhaps the most thought-provoking essay in the collection,Mary J. Ainslie’s ‘Towards a Southeast Asian Model of Horror: Thai HorrorCinema in Malaysia, Urbanization, and Cultural Proximity’, attempts totheorize a specifically Southeast Asian form of horror cinema. Taking aposition on genre definition reminiscent of the monographs discussed earlierin this review, Ainslie notes that:

Defining Thai and other Southeast Asian films as ‘horror’ is certainlydifficult given the European origins of the term itself and the variouswords used to describe such films in both Thai and Malay. In order todeploy this term, we must move beyond traditional understandings ofthe term and recognise the fluidity of genre as a concept. (p. 181)

Through an account of the rise of Thai horror cinema internationally, Ainslieanalyses various strategies that have contributed to its successful export, andnotes the degree of ‘cultural proximity’ that helped facilitate its success inMalaysia. The chapter therefore draws attention to an under-researched areaof inter-Asian cultural flow, and makes a number of insightful observations

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about the reasons that certain films are able to travel internationally, positingthat it is ‘the pan-Asian urban depictions common to internationally success-ful Korean, Japanese, and now Thai horror films which enable them to travelacross boundaries which are not usually breached by other cultural products’(p. 199). Moreover, given the significant changes that the ASEAN(Association of Southeast Asian Nations) region is currently undergoing,Ainslie shows that the ‘uneven flow of the horror genre may be a particularlyvaluable window into this process’ (p. 200). In this collection, therefore,Siddique and Raphael have brought together some outstanding chapters fromemerging scholars who are carving out innovative approaches and pushingthe field in new directions. Putting particular emphasis on the ways in whichhorror cinema travels transnationally, this book points to a vibrant future forthe kinds of horror scholarship that engages with these broader cross-culturalissues.

These exciting new developments in horror scholarship are not limitedto work on cinema, however. The collection Horror Television in the Age ofConsumption: Binging on Fear, edited by Kimberly Jackson and Linda Belau,points to the ways in which horror television is a similarly fertile area ofscholarly endeavour, with perhaps even more room for novel insights andapproaches. The book builds on the pioneering work in the field of horrortelevision studies by scholars like Stacey Abbott and Lorna Jowett, and,while it makes no claims to being a study of ‘transnational’ or ‘global’television—for that we will have to wait for the forthcoming collectionGlobal TV Horror from Abbott and Jowett—it nevertheless contains muchinvaluable work on the nature of the horror genre on the small screen andthe ways it has evolved from the 1950s anthology shows through to the post-millennial horror series available on streaming services like Netflix andAmazon Prime. Noting the growing popularity of horror series such asThe Walking Dead (2010– ), Supernatural (2005– ), and Hannibal (2013–15), Belau and Jackson argue that an examination of this sub-genre is‘triply essential, as its success in recent years provides important commen-tary on the evolution of the horror genre, the nature of the televisual, andthe culture of the twenty-first century’ (p. 1).

In the chapter from Peter Hutchings (who, sadly, passed away earlier thisyear), ‘Pigeons from Hell: Anthology Horror on American Television in the1950s and 1960s’, he focuses his attention on the Boris Karloff-hosted seriesThriller (1960–62) alongside other horror anthology series such as AlfredHitchcock Presents (1955–65) and The Twilight Zone (1959–64). Part of whatis particularly valuable about his chapter is the way in which he discusses thecontribution of these series ‘to the formation of a television genre that

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simply did not exist at that time’ (p. 27). Reminiscent of the works reviewedearlier in this chapter, where scholars discuss horror cinema in contextswhere ‘horror’ is not the prevailing term used in that industry, Hutchingstherefore points to the ways in which the ‘origins of television horror weremessy, contingent, and compromised’ (p. 27) and were not limited by ourown current ideas about what constitutes horror as a genre. Mark Jancovichbuilds on this in his following chapter, ‘Where It Belongs: Television Horror,Domesticity, and Alfred Hitchcock Presents’, by focusing particular attention onthe Hitchcock series and the role of producer Joan Harrison in bridging thecinematic and televisual worlds of horror. Utilizing this case study, Jancovichis able to argue that ‘television horror has long proved far more influential oncinematic horror than is acknowledged, and—crucially—that the domesticcontext need not be seen as being in tension with horror, but exactly ‘‘whereit belongs’’’ (p. 30).

Taking us into the contemporary era of horror television production,Lorna Jowett discusses the classed representation of werewolves in seriessuch as True Blood (2008–14), The Vampire Diaries (2009–17), and HemlockGrove (2013–15) in her chapter ‘White Trash in Wife-Beaters? U.S.Television Werewolves, Gender, and Class’. Providing a close analysis ofthe ways in which werewolves are often depicted as lower-class in contrastto the aristocratic connotations of the vampire, Jowett argues that the cur-rent ‘vogue for white trash werewolves may simply be a result of the pol-itical, social, and national conditions impacting on early-twenty-first-centuryU.S. television’, but that these recent manifestations demonstrate that ‘thewerewolf, as much as the vampire or—currently—the zombie, is a malleabletrope that adapts itself particularly well to serialized television’ (p. 88).Stacey Abbott similarly draws attention to the aesthetics of what sheterms the new ‘Golden Age of TV Horror’ by focusing on one of themost ground-breaking examples, Hannibal. Abbott argues that, ‘whilemany of the series that make up this golden age are, in their own ways,innovative and transgressive’, it is Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal that ‘pushes theboundaries of what is stylistically and narratively acceptable on television’(p. 121). Noting the ways in which the series ‘problematizes generic bound-aries by overtly blurring lines between suggestion and gore, art and exploit-ation, gothic and horror’ (p. 121), Abbott argues that Hannibal has redefinedthe expectations of horror television and thereby helped demonstrate whathorror television within the contemporary media landscape can achieve.

Given that many of the contributors focus on contemporary horrorseries, it is interesting to note just how many of these shows refer back toearlier modes of horror through the prism of nostalgia. In his chapter,

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‘Resurrection: Ash vs Evil Dead, Network Television, and the Cult HorrorFilm Revival’, for example, Ian Conrich discusses the Starz network’s revivalof the Evil Dead franchise as a form of ‘nostalgia horror [. . .] that resurrectspopular and cult horror film narratives and characters from the golden age ofpostclassical horror’ (p. 176). The notion of cult is key here as the Evil Deadtrilogy was a central text within 1980s and 1990s cult fandom, and itsresurrection by Starz as the television series Ash vs Evil Dead (2015–18)reflects a wider cultural nostalgia for that period within contemporarymedia production. Indeed, in the final chapter in the collection,‘Welcome to the Upside Down: Nostalgia and Cultural Fears in StrangerThings’, Rose Butler discusses the pre-eminent example of this form ofcultural nostalgia for the 1980s: the Netflix series Stranger Things (2016–).Investigating the ways in which the show utilizes the 1980s setting to com-ment on contemporary American politics, Butler argues that the choice ofperiod setting does more than simply encourage its audience to feel nostalgicabout 1980s music and fashions and outmoded technologies such as walkie-talkies and VCRs. Instead, she argues, Stranger Things should be read as ‘ascathing comment on the damaging ideologies of the decade and an explor-ation of how these anxieties have continued relevance today in the wake ofthe Great Recession, the War on Terror, and the rise of the alt-right’(p. 188). With contributions such as this, Jackson and Belau’s HorrorTelevision in the Age of Consumption demonstrates that horror television ismore than a mere escapist guilty pleasure but is instead a medium throughwhich audiences and creators can deal with particularly resonant political andcultural issues.

This relationship between television and our contemporary political situ-ation is even more acute in Transnational European Television Drama: Production,Genres and Audiences, co-authored by Ib Bondebjerg, Eva Novrup Redvall,Rasmus Helles, Signe Sophus Lai, Henrik Søndergaard, and CecilieAstrupgaard. Coming out of the European research project ‘MediatingCultural Encounters Through European Screens’ (MeCETES), this bookhas been published at a particularly anxious time for discussions of trans-national European collaboration. As the authors explain in the introduction,the 2016 UK vote to leave the EU and a parallel rise in nationalism else-where in many other EU countries is a concern for those who value inter-cultural dialogue and exchange. While they are careful to note that this bookis not a political work, they nevertheless argue that their ‘research clearlyshows that the European Union has been a very important influence on bothcultural integration and the possibilities of collaborating transnationallywithin Europe’ (p. 3).

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The book draws on extensive original research, including ‘structural dataon more long-term developments, national surveys, focus groups, interviewswith creative teams behind television drama, and media texts from differentcountries documenting reception and transnational cultural encounters’(p. 2). Combining qualitative and quantitative analysis, the book exploresvarious kinds of transnational relationships within European television,including the impact of specific cultural policies, co-production arrange-ments between networks, creative encounters by media professionals, andthe cross-cultural reception of television series. Underpinning their analysisare the following core research questions:

What are the main forces behind television drama production, dis-tribution and reception at the national, European and the globallevels? Why do some stories and drama formats travel widely andothers not so much? [. . .] To what degree do we get our knowledgeof other Europeans and other cultures through television drama (andfilm), and how does this influence our identity and feeling of beingboth of a specific nationality and European? (p. 2)

The co-authors focus on three main genres of television drama production—crime drama, contemporary drama, and historical drama—with the analysisof crime drama being particularly pertinent to the questions of genre and theglobal that I’ve been exploring throughout this review essay. This is becausethe chapter on crime drama deals with the transnational success of NordicNoir (with series such as The Killing [2007–12], Wallander [2005–13] and TheBridge [2011–18]), which, they argue, ‘has shown that audiences can grad-ually grow accustomed to watching foreign fare on national screens and thatpart of the fascination of these series can be the ‘‘exotic’’ element of learningmore about another country and culture’ (p. 251). Importantly, they don’tsimply position this as a one-way process but place the transnational impactof Nordic Noir into dialogue with the Danish reception of UK crime seriessuch as Midsomer Murders (1997– ), Happy Valley (2014– ), Broadchurch(2013–17) and Hinterland (2013– ). Part of the value of this research istherefore comparative, and it produces some surprising insights. We dis-cover, for example, that the average audience share in Denmark for MidsomerMurders is 37%, whereas in the UK it is 24% (p. 240), suggesting that thesekinds of crime drama often have significant international appeal, even eclip-sing that in the domestic market.

Drawing all of this together, the co-authors argue that, while ‘our cul-tural identity and consumption of television [are] primarily connected to ournational, local and regional reality and culture’, we are increasingly seeing

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that ‘TV series from small countries and in their own original language canactually make it to screens all over Europe’ (p. 297). Ib Bondebjerg and hiscolleagues are therefore interested in the ways in which these new forms ofmediatized cultural encounters might inform a wider intercultural Europeandialogue. The book is haunted by the spectre of Brexit and a concern for howa subsequent collapse of the EU could have an impact upon the kinds ofintercultural dialogue facilitated by these networks and collaborations. Asthey explain, ‘It is possible that Brexit [. . .] is a sign of a broader decline inEuropean cooperation and integration. If so, this could have serious conse-quences for the new cultural dynamic and the transnational trends we de-scribe in this book’ (p. 19). Underpinning this thorough and rigorousacademic study of transnational European television, therefore, is a concernabout the consequences of these rising nationalisms and what might happen ifthe kinds of intercultural dialogue exemplified by a transnational phenom-enon such as Nordic Noir were to come to an end.

A similar sentiment, albeit approached from a significantly differentperspective, is expressed by Felicia Chan in her monograph CosmopolitanCinema: Cross-Cultural Encounters in East Asian Film. In a theoretically astutestudy of the cosmopolitan possibilities of cross-cultural encounters, Chanargues for a ‘critical cosmopolitanism’ that she frames as ‘learning to livewith paradox’ (p. 142). Attuned to the complexities of cosmopolitan theoryand the problematic ways in which it can sometimes be framed, Chan utilizesa range of case studies in East Asian cinema to outline a nuanced andreinvigorated approach to cosmopolitan cinema that points to a productiveway forward for scholarship in this area.

In her foreword, Jackie Stacey highlights the wider political context inwhich the current scholarly attention to cosmopolitanism takes place.Observing that a ‘renewed interest in looking to theories of cosmopolitan-ism’ emerged in the post-9/11 Western context, she notes that, fifteen yearslater, ‘there continues to be a pressing need to find new languages to chal-lenge xenophobia, racism and nostalgic monocultural nationalisms’ (p. ix).Felicia Chan’s book therefore responds to the need for an understanding ofcosmopolitanism that acknowledges its potential failings in terms of elitismand Western bias, while still pushing for a remodelled form of cross-culturalengagement that can be used to combat these rising tides of regressivenationalism.

This is an issue that is particularly acute in relation to cinema, andespecially world cinema. As she explains, ‘cosmopolitanism is especiallyattractive to those constitutive of a class which prides itself on its mobilityand adaptability to new cultures’ (p. 2), and ‘one could easily include within

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this class the cine-literate, the self-professed cultural consumers of ‘worldcinema’ (p. 3). This form of cosmopolitanism is clearly tainted with accus-ations of elitism and privilege, although, despite numerous reservationsabout certain manifestations, Chan nevertheless argues that ‘cosmopolitan-ism remains attractive as an aspiration, both consumptive and critical (p. 3).Chan makes it clear that her approach to ‘cosmopolitan’ cinema is notintended to be a semantic substitute for ‘transnational’, ‘world’, or‘global’ cinemas but is instead intended as ‘one which enables an articulationof encounters with difference that simultaneously resist fragmentation (intoendless proliferations of difference) and coalescence (eradicating differencealtogether)’ (p. 6).

In terms of methodology, therefore, Chan is particularly focused on thetextual traces of this cosmopolitanism through the cinematic language ofmultilingualism, translation, and self-reflexivity, and this analysis functionsin tandem with close attention to the specific contexts in which cinema isexhibited and received. As she explains, ‘cosmopolitanism is not to be foundnecessarily in the content of the films, but rather read through the dynamicsof film form and context’ (p. 119). Issues of cultural translation are thereforeat the core of her attempts to conceptualize cosmopolitan cinema, and shefocuses on a range of forms of translation throughout the book, with chap-ters framed by four types of interaction between cosmopolitanism and thecinema—multilingualism, self-reflexivity, affect, and embodiment—andcovering topics as diverse as the practice of live narrators (benshi) forsilent Japanese cinema through to the dubbing and subtitling of anime forWestern audiences.

Much of this book was shaped by Chan’s experiences as an RCUK Fellowin Film, Media and Transnational Cultures while at the University ofManchester. Indeed, this is a book that has been long in development.Building on work pursued in the early 2000s as part of her Ph.D. researchon transnational Chinese cinemas, and subsequently during her period asRCUK Fellow from 2008–13, Chan’s ideas have clearly had substantial timeto develop and crystallize, and this—her first monograph—makes a consid-erable contribution to the discipline.

As she explains in the postscript, the challenge of cosmopolitanism ‘isnot so much to theorise difference as it is to posit the problem of univer-sality’ (p. 141). Drawing on Gerard Delanty’s conception of a ‘criticalcosmopolitanism’, Chan suggests a way forward in which we can avoid fallinginto the trap of universalism when thinking about cosmopolitanism. Centralto this intervention is the emphasis on ‘learning’ as a political act. As sheexplains, ‘learning to live with the paradoxes of cosmopolitanism is to

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grapple with the process of making ethical choices in the encounter withdifference, to test the limits of one’s knowledge, familiarity and tolerance,and to be prepared to confront them’ (p. 142). Felicia Chan’s Cosmopolitan

Cinema is therefore a vital and timely intervention in debates on the role ofcinema in shaping our encounters with cultural difference.

Throughout this review essay I have attempted to tease out the ways inwhich 2017’s scholarship on media genres and the global is grappling withsome of the most pressing issues facing our contemporary cultural moment.While ‘haunting’ was not a concept that I was deliberately seeking out inselecting these texts, it is interesting to note just how many texts deal withthis concept either explicitly or implicitly. From the legacy of colonialismthat haunts the Indian Gothic in Meheli Sen’s Haunting Bollywood through toBakhtin’s concept of the grotesque body that haunts the Siddique and Raphaelcollection on Transnational Horror Cinema, and from the spectre of Brexit thathaunts Ib Bondebjerg et al.’s Transnational European Television Drama to the riseof regressive nationalism that haunts Felicia Chan’s Cosmopolitan Cinema, it isclear that these publications are haunted by the ghosts of our past and thethreats of our present. Underpinning much of this body of work on genreand the global is an emphasis on the potential for media to facilitate deeperintercultural dialogue and understanding—a much-needed tonic in a worldhaunted by the rising tides of nationalism.

Books Reviewed

Aldana Reyes, Xavier, Spanish Gothic: National Identity, Collaboration, and Cultural

Adaptation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). ISBN 9 7811 3730 6005.

Bondebjerg, Ib, Eva Novrup Redvall, Rasmus Helles, Signe Sophus Lai, Henrik

Søndergaard, and Cecilie Astrupgaard, Transnational European Television Drama:

Production, Genres and Audiences (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

ISBN 9 7833 1962 8059.

Chan, Felicia, Cosmopolitan Cinema: Cross-Cultural Encounters in East Asian Film

(London: I .B. Tauris, 2017). ISBN 9 7817 8076 7222.

Hudson, Dale, Vampires, Race, and Transnational Hollywoods (Edinburgh:

Edinburgh University Press, 2017). ISBN 9 7814 7442 3083.

Jackson, Kimberly and Linda Belau, eds, Horror Television in the Age of Consumption:

Binging on Fear (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017). ISBN 9 7811 3889 5652.

Rohrer, Seraina, La India Marıa: Mexploitation and the Films of Marıa Elena Velasco

(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017). ISBN 9 7814 7731 3459.

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Sen, Meheli, Haunting Bollywood: Gender, Genre, and the Supernatural in Hindi

Commercial Cinema (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017). ISBN 9 7814 7731

1585.

Siddique, Sophia and Raphael Raphael, eds, Transnational Horror Cinema: Bodies of

Excess and the Global Grotesque (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). ISBN 9

7811 3758 4168.

References

Derrida, Jacques, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and

the New International, trans. by Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1993).

Fischer-Hornung, Dorothea, and Monika Mueller, eds, Vampires and Zombies:

Transcultural Migrations and Transnational Interpretations (Jackson: University

Press of Mississippi, 2016).

Khair, Tabish, and Johan Hoglund, eds, Transnational and Postcolonial Vampires—

Dark Blood (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

Ruetalo, Victoria, and Dolores Tierney, eds, Latsploitation, Exploitation Cinemas, and

Latin America (London: Routledge, 2009).

Films and Television Programmes Cited

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, dir. by Ana Lily Amirpour (Justin Begnaud, 2014).

A�P�E, dir. by Paul Leder (K. M. Yeung, 1976).

Alfred Hitchcock Presents (CBS, NBC, 1955–65).

Ash vs Evil Dead (Starz!, 2015–18).

Blacula, dir. by William Crain (Joseph T. Naar, 1972).

The Bridge (Filmlance International AB, 2011–18).

Broadchurch (ITV, 2013–17).

El Vampiro, dir. by Fernando Mendez (Abel Salazar, 1957).

Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror, dir. by Enrique Lopez Eguiluz (Maximiliano Perez-

Flores, 1968).

Go Goa Gone, dir. by Krishna D.K. and Raj Nidimoru (Sunil Lulla, 2013).

Grotesque, dir. by Koji Shiraishi (Kazue Udagawa, 2009).

Hannibal (NBC, 2013–15).

Happy Valley (BBC, 2014– ).

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Hemlock Grove (Netflix, 2013–15).

Hinterland (BBC, 2013– ).

Hostel, dir. by Eli Roth (Chris Briggs, 2005).

The Killing (DR, 2007–12).

King Kong, dir. by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack (David O. Selznick,

1933).

King Kong, dir. by John Guillermin (Dino De Laurentiis, 1976).

The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires, dir. by Roy Ward Baker (Don Houghton,

1974).

Mahal, dir. by Kamal Amrohi (Ashok Kumar, 1949).

Midsomer Murders (ITV, 1997– ).

The Mighty Peking Man, dir. by Meng Hua Ho (Runme Shaw, 1977).

Mystery Science Theatre 3000 (Comedy Central, The Sci-Fi Channel, 1988–99).

Okey, Mister Pancho, dir. by Gilberto Martınez Solares and Marıa Elena Velasco

(Fernando de Fuentes hijo, 1981).

Purana Mandir, dir. by Shyam Ramsay and Tulsi Ramsay (Kanta Ramsay, 1984).

Rise of the Zombie, dir. by Luke Kenny and Devaki Singh (BSI Entertainment, Kenny

Media, 2013).

Santo y Blue Demon contra Dracula y el Hombre Lobo, dir. by Miguel M. Delgado

(Guillermo Calderon, 1972).

Saw, dir. by James Wan (Mark Burg, 2004).

Sesame Street (CTW, 1969– ).

Stranger Things (Netflix, 2016– ).

Supernatural (The CW, 2005– ).

Thriller (NBC, 1960–62).

True Blood (HBO, 2008–14).

The Twilight Zone (CBS, 1959–64).

The Vampire Diaries (The CW, 2009–17).

Veerana, dir. by Shyam Ramsay and Tulsi Ramsay (Kanta Ramsay, 1988).

The Walking Dead (AMC, 2010– ).

Wallander (TV4 Sweden, 2005–13).

Woh Kaun Thi, dir. by Raj Khosla (N. N. Sippy, 1964).

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