Fielding Montgomery’s Horror Framing and the General Election: Ghosts and Ghouls in Twenty-First Century Presidential Campaign Advertisements offers the best theoretical analysis and most comprehensive survey of twenty-first century presidential campaign advertisements I have encountered. Drawing on a thorough and precise account of the European and American theories of the horror film, the manuscript explains how evil unfolds out of two orientations: classic and conflicted. These two orientations are used as frames that explain how presidential campaign advertisements attempt to persuade. Montgomery calls us to consider a third category – justified horror. This category allows candidates and critics to acknowledge the existence of real as opposed to constructed horror. The manuscript is an important addition to the scholarly literature.

David A. Frank, University of Oregon

How does a country endure factions utterly horrified with each other? That’s the challenge arising from Fielding Montgomery’s analysis of this century’s presidential ads on American TV. In Horror Framing and the General Election, Montgomery shows how the ads use tropes from familiar horror films to configure a great range of subjects: immigrants, demonstrators, pollutants, budgets, terrorists, viruses, and more — but especially opponents. He explains how the resulting frames and strategies steer presidential campaigning in alarmingly fearful directions.

John S. Nelson, University of Iowa

Fielding Montgomery’s book presents a persuasive case for using the horror genre to study the narrative of presidential campaigns, a whole-campaign approach to examine “predominant strategies and rhetorical coherence.” In a clear, well-focused style, with exhaustive research, he studies the political advertisements of general election campaigns from 2000 through 2020. Well versed on the horror genre in films, he finds heavy use of the same kinds of threats and fear in negative campaign advertising. The book is especially strong in its cross-media approach, including audio, visual, and text elements of the specific presidential ads. Over the twenty years studied, campaigns increasingly used horror framing, both explicit and implicit types. The author raises intriguing questions about links between horror framing and voter nihilism, especially in 2016.

Kathleen E. Kendall, University of Maryland