Special Dossier Introduction: Horror Fans and Audiences

This introduction to the New Review of Film and Television’s special dossier on horror fans and audiences discusses how the study of horror viewership has frequently been limited to certain US cultural contexts and twentieth-century historical periods that, in turn, reduce the genre within essentialised cult discourses. Concurrently, the introduction highlights how audiences’ affective responses and relationships to the genre have been routinely inferred, imagined, and, therefore, surmised from textual analysis methodologies that cannot account for myriad audiences’ heterogeneous engagement with horror media. Addressing these shortcomings, the introduction sets up the key critical contexts that inform the dossier’s four articles and how they provide contemporary case studies of horror audiences and fandom.