Horror Framing and the General Election: Ghosts and Ghouls in Twenty-First-Century Presidential Campaign Advertisements

In Horror Framing and the General Election: Ghosts and Ghouls in Twenty-First Century Presidential Campaign Advertisements, Fielding Montgomery reveals a pattern of increasing horror framing implemented across presidential elections from 2000 through 2020. By analyzing the two most common frameworks of horror within United States popular culture (classic and conflicted), he demonstrates how such frameworks are deployed by twenty-first century U.S. presidential campaign advertisements. Televised advertisements are analyzed to illustrate a clearer picture of how horror frameworks have been utilized, the intensity of their usage, and how self-positive appeals to audience efficacy help bolster these rhetorical attempts at persuasion. Seven implications of campaign horror framing are uncovered: horror frames as omnipresent, normative, polarizing, demonic, invasive, insidious, and nihilistic. Horror Framing and the General Election shows readers how the extensionally constitutive ripples of horrific campaign rhetoric are felt in contemporary political unrest and provides a potential path forward. Scholars of communication, political science, film, and rhetoric will find this book particularly interesting.