Now seems like an appropriate moment to acknowledge that we’re currently in the middle of not just a “Golden Age of Television”, but specifically of horror television. When American Horror Story’s third season finished in January, it picked up 4.24m viewers, while The Walking Dead’s most recent season finale drew a staggering 15.7m viewers, the highest ratings of any cable show. Hannibal, which follows the early career of serial killer Hannibal Lecter, and Bates Motel, a prequel to the events of the classic 1960 film Psycho, have both been renewed for a third season. Sam Raimi announced at Comic Con that he is working on a television adaptation of The Evil Dead. Yes, American horror TV is certainly having a moment.

America’s first “Golden Age” of horror took place in the 1930s, when Depression-era audiences were drawn to films such as Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Mystery of the Wax Museum, The Invisible Man, and, of course, Dracula. The current trend for television horror, however, seems to owe more to small-screen series of the late 1980s and 90s, such as The Twilight Zone, The X-Files, and Twin Peaks. The impact of that groundbreaking mystery series has far outlived its two seasons, effectively changing the entire landscape of television with its unique blend of drama, humour, horror and the supernatural. David Lynch and Mark Frost’s hauntingly brilliant show followed the investigation into the murder of Laura Palmer in the fictional small town of Twin Peaks, exploring the divide between the veneer of small town American respectability and neighborliness, and the violence and perversity seething underneath — a theme that runs through almost all of today’s most popular horror shows. Carlton Cuse, executive producer of Bates Motel, has confessed to “pretty much ripping off Twin Peaks”, while Bryan Fuller, creator of Hannibal, recalled his thought process when beginning the series, “I literally sat down with a blank page and said, ‘What would David Lynch do with Hannibal Lecter?’”.

The cultural model of “small town America” is an indispensable part of the international appeal of these shows. Dr. Bernice Murphy, a Trinity lecturer specialising in gothic and horror studies, spoke to tn2 about the position the American small town occupies in the popular imagination: “Ingrained in the global pop culture consciousness there’s a fascination with the idea of the idyllic, idealised, American small town, in part because it’s a trope that has been replicated so many times in the films and television shows we’ve all imbibed over the years (think of the likes of The Gilmore Girls, or Pleasantville, for instance).The small town is often used as a stand-in for America itself, with all that this concept entails, which is also why it so readily lends itself to sinister and uncanny complications — we’re always suspicious of something that seems too good to be true.” Since the mid-20th century, the small town has been frequently set up in popular media as the perfect place to raise a family, away from the crime, noise and pollution of big cities. Dara Downey, co-editor of The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies (IJGHS), explained to tn2, “To see such an idyll destroyed (or even better, to be shown that it has always already been hiding the very darkness it ostensibly defines itself against) is both horrifying and sort of oddly satisfying — a kind of geographical schadenfreude.” She went on to suggest, “I guess there’s also a certain satisfaction to be had from seeing somewhere so apparently insignificant as a small town being treated as somewhere important, a place where things actually happen.”

Jenny McDonnell, co-editor of the IJGHS, pointed out that as non-Americans (and probably for a lot of Americans too), our cultural understanding of small-town America is largely informed by the carefully crafted images we encounter in film, television and fiction: “I think this inherently constructed nature of the image has a lot to do with its effectiveness as a site for gothic and horror stories. A lot of these onscreen small towns tend to look quite similar to one another, and that kind of uniformity can be inherently creepy and uncanny, in particular in a modern world that is often characterised by anxieties about conformity. […] This kind of paranoia about what your neighbour might be up to unbeknownst to you is one that really registers in an information age where knowledge itself is such a valuable commodity.”

Horror may initially seem like a hard genre to capture effectively on TV, what with the pressure to deliver fresh scares every week and to sustain the suspense and the storyline over ten or thirteen hours, rather than a mere ninety minutes. However, Downey argued, television series “do a good job of teasing out the social complexities and hidden darknesses of somewhere small and apparently ‘ordinary’ — and in far more detail and depth than might be possible on the big screen”. In addition to enabling a more nuanced exploration of small town America, the medium allows showrunners to advance more ambitious visual styles and to develop complex characters over time. Murphy explained, “Due to the wider (and widely acknowledged) advent of a Golden Age of TV, individual show creators are being given much more leeway to bring their visions to the small screen — and in many cases, they actually have more creative freedom than they would have if they were making a film. So, the likes of Bryan Fuller … can work with high-quality actors, and intelligent and genuinely disturbing concepts, and also, crucially, have the time to develop his characters and his storylines in a way that would have been impossible were he just to have done a filmic reboot.” While in the past, networks may have pressured showrunners to tone down the horror under the belief that although audiences will happily flock to cinemas to endure all manner of violence, blood and gore, they won’t tune in each week to see characters they’ve become attached to get brutally killed off, television is now at a place where they can tell darker, more adult horror stories.

But why are these horror stories so popular, and so popular right now in particular? Downey and McDonnell recalled how difficult it was to solicit coverage of television shows for their journal only a few years ago: “Gothic/horror programming simply didn’t exist in the mainstream to the extent that it now does, and shows often got cancelled quickly.” Speaking to tn2, Eli Roth, the “godfather of torture porn” and creator of Netflix horror series Hemlock Grove, argued, “People will look back years from now, I believe, and say that this is the Golden Age of horror television. Shows like The Walking Dead, Hannibal, Penny Dreadful, The Strain, American Horror Story — it’s great! I think part of the reason [the genre is thriving] is that the networks have gotten a lot more lenient about the violence we can show. We also have places like HBO and Netflix now, and what’s terrific is that if the adults are gonna have sex, then they have sex, if people are gonna get killed, then they get killed, and that’s what people want.” Indeed, horror shows are pushing the boundaries of what can be shown on network television more than any other programming on air today — and none more forcefully or more successfully than American Horror Story. In season two of the anthology series, which airs in America on FX (an offshoot of FOX, considered one of the most conservative channels on US television), one of the characters performed a coat hanger abortion on herself — and that’s just one example from a series that has shown bleach enemas, Anne Frank getting a frontal lobotomy, zombie incest, a Voodoo Queen playing iPad solitaire, mid-blowjob castration, and a Franken-baby built from a mélange of other dead babies’ remains.

An interesting aspect of the new wave of horror is that it is almost entirely fan-driven. With the exception of Hannibal, most of the current crop of horror shows have been widely knocked by critics — despite being ruthlessly picked apart every week since its third season, True Blood has enjoyed seven years on air, The Walking Dead remains a ratings monster hit while continually underwhelming reviewers, and although exact figures are unavailable, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings revealed that critically-panned Hemlock Grove brought in far more subscribers than the critically-acclaimed House of Cards. Horror, more than any other genre, is a curiously cult phenomenon, and the horror fandom is arguably the most devout. Netflix, DVD box sets and online streaming enable fans to become more invested in horror shows as they can binge watch series in their entirety, and social media sites such as Tumblr and Twitter have allowed fans to become even more involved in their favourite shows. In the modern television landscape, obsession is almost as important as ratings. From the infinitely Tumblr-able American Horror Story to enthusiastic ’shippers who fantasise with gifs, fan art and fanfiction about “Hannigram” (Hannibal and Will Graham), “Romancek” (Hemlock Grove’s Roman Godfrey and Peter Rumancek) and the veritable pick’n’mix of True Blood pairings, horror television is becoming more and more interactive through social media engagement.

As television evolves, mainstream gothic and horror film lags behind. Roth sounded off on the state of current cinema: “So much of the best dramatic storytelling that was in movies has moved over to television and I think the audiences in movies now are in the big action event movies. Comic book movies feel like the norm, and getting some incredible drama feels like a one-of-a-kind thing, when in the past there was a lot of drama and every now and again there was an event movie. Now every movie feels like an event movie!”. Murphy agreed, saying, “Mainstream American film horror is in a major rut at the moment. It’s all boring found footage stuff and classy-looking but predictable haunted house flicks that are really just updated versions of 1970s classics (case in point: The Conjuring). Something like American Horror Story may be really inconsistent, and on occasion, genuinely bonkers, but it’s seldom dull.” Although it may be a genre filled with the dead, the undead and the dying, horror television has never felt more alive.