Digital Horror: Haunted Technologies, Network Panic and the Found Footage Phenomenon [First ed.] 1784530255, 9781784530259

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Linnie would like to dedicate this book to The Mammy and The Girlz – Sheila Robinson, Ella and Freya Blake. Xavier would like to dedicate this book to his grandparents, Montserrat Bertol´ın Porcar and Enrique Reyes Sevilla. Amb molt de carinyo.

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Acknowledgements The editors would like to thank Anna Coatman and Lisa Goodrum at I.B.Tauris for their enthusiasm and assistance in the editorial process. They would also like to thank all the contributors for their patience and good will: working with them has been a very pleasant experience. Finally, they would like to thank Kathryn Stawpert at MMU’s Design Studio for her original ideas for the book cover.

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List of Contributors Mary J. Ainslie is based in Kuala Lumpur, where she is Head of Film and Television Programmes at the University of Nottingham Malaysia campus. She is co-editor of the forthcoming volume The Korean Wave in Southeast Asia: Consumption and Cultural Production and a contributor to Asian Cinema Journal. She is currently the Malaysia and Thailand regional president for the World Association of Hallyu Studies (WAHS) and a fellow of the Dynamics of Religion in South East Asia (DORISEA) network. Xavier Aldana Reyes is Senior Lecturer in English at Manchester Metropolitan University, where he teaches literature and film. He has written a first monograph, Body Gothic: Corporeal Transgression in Contemporary Literature and Horror Film and is working on a second, Horror Film and Affect: Towards a Corporeal Model of Viewership. His work has appeared in international peer-reviewed journals such as Horror Studies, Gothic Studies, The Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, Actual / Virtual and The Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory. James Aston is Subject Leader for Screen at the University of Hull and teaches extensively on the programme, including American Alternative Cinema, East Asian Cinema and Global Nightmares: Contemporary Horror from around the World. His principal research interests lie in the field of horror and apocalyptic cinema, especially post-9/11 texts. He has published numerous articles in both research areas and is co-editor of Small Screen Revelations: Apocalypse in Contemporary Television and To See the Saw Movies: Essays on Torture Porn and Post-9/11 Horror. Linnie Blake is Director of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies and Principal Lecturer in Film in the Department of English at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her work on literary, filmic and televisual texts ranges across genres, national cultures and historical periods. She has published widely on xi

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topics as various as seventeenth-century Puritanism and zombie apocalypticism, Edgar Allan Poe and the Situationist International, hillbilly horror and post-9/11 Republicanism, Japanese and Thai horror cinema and the contemporary Gothic box set. She is the author of The Wounds of Nations: Horror Cinema, Historical Trauma and National Identity and has started work on a second monograph on neoliberal Gothic TV for the University of Wales’ Gothic Studies Series. Steen Christiansen is Associate Professor of Literature, Culture and Media at Aalborg University, Denmark. His research focuses on embodiment and affect in film and media, as well as intermediality. His areas of study are uncanny media, the post-cinematic, horror and science fiction and he has recently published articles on topics such as zombie films, Chris Cunningham and Darren Aronofsky. Mark Freeman is Lecturer in the School of Film and Television at Swinburne University, Melbourne. He has published in Senses of Cinema, Metro and Screening the Past. His research focuses on national and postnational cinema, the exhibition communities of online portals and localised microcinemas. Steffen Hantke is Professor of English at Sogang University in South Korea. He has published Conspiracy and Paranoia in Contemporary American Literature: The Works of Don DeLillo and Joseph McElroy, and has edited two major collections on horror, Horror Cinema: Creating and Marketing Fear and American Horror Film: The Genre at the Turn of the Century. Steve Jones is Senior Lecturer in Media at Northumbria University, England. His research is principally focused on representations of sex and violence, the philosophy of self, gender politics and ethics. His recent work includes the monograph Torture Porn: Popular Horror after Saw and Necrosexuality: an anthology of essays on zombies, sex and sexuality (co-edited with Shaka McGlotten). Neal Kirk completed his BA at the University of Denver (cum laude) and his MSc at the University of Edinburgh. He is a PhD candidate at the University of Lancaster under the supervision of Dr Catherine Spooner. His doctoral thesis focuses on the contemporary experience of death, new media and hauntings, and his research interests span contemporary cultural studies, new media technologies and contemporary gothic fiction. Dejan Ognjanovi´c received his MA in 2009 (Gothic Motifs in the Works of E. A. Poe) and his PhD in 2012 (Historical Poetics of Horror Genre in Anglo-American Literature) at the University of Belgrade. He has written and edited six books in Serbian, devoted to horror literature and cinema. His essays in English can be found in books edited by Steven Jay Schneider: 100 European Horror Films, 501

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Zeynep Sahinturk is a Fulbright scholar who earned her MA degree from the State University of New York at Buffalo in June 2013. Her MA thesis was concerned with the representations of fear and Islam in post-2000 Turkish horror films. Sahinturk’s previous critical work includes an article on the treatment of the body in Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 (2009). Her primary research interests are film, critical theory and popular culture. She is currently finishing her MA in Bo˘gazic¸i University’s Critical and Cultural Studies Program.

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Movie Directors, 101 Horror Movies You Must See Before You Die. His essay on the post-modern slasher was published in the anthology Speaking of Monsters. He writes book and film reviews for Rue Morgue magazine.

Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet is Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Lausanne. Her books include The Poetics and Politics of the American Gothic and a co-edited volume titled The Gothic in Contemporary Literature and Popular Culture: Pop Goth. She has also published numerous articles on American literature and film, especially in relation to race, gender, queer theory and war literature.

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Introduction: Horror in the Digital Age Linnie Blake and Xavier Aldana Reyes

Since the turn of the century, a distinctive stylistic tendency has emerged in horror cinema that is a purposeful embodiment, at the level of both form and narrative, of the technological innovations of the digital age. As this collection attests, such an incorporation can either add a frisson of contemporaneity to stock generic narratives of possession and haunting, mutilation and mutation, the horrors of conflict and the terrors of war, or it may undertake more significant cultural work. It can, for example, interrogate the economic conditions under which such technologies first came into being and explore their ramifications for global social formations and identity descriptors like nationhood. Such films, in turn, may undertake analyses of the ways in which contemporary conceptions of human subjectivity have shifted. The essays in this volume address themselves to all of these concerns. Certainly, in recent years, the world has become increasingly ‘networked’ – its distant and diverse regions having been linked together into a constant flow of information exchange facilitated by the internet, GPS-enabled camera phones, camcorders, CCTV surveillance devices and new online shopping, banking and communications practices. Like the free market that has simultaneously come to dominate global economics, moreover, this network is far from free, being subject to ongoing monitoring by external agencies that range from invested individuals and private companies to national governments and global corporations. Whilst digital technologies have allowed individuals to connect more closely with each other than physical distance has hitherto allowed, these very connections are 1

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themselves subject to ongoing scrutiny from within and without the network. Thus, the twin forces of corporate capitalism and neoliberal governance can be seen to participate both in the wide-scale, and frequently covert, surveillance of the citizenry whilst undertaking themselves a paranoid concealment of data which they deem too sensitive for public consumption and protect with the full force of the law.1 It is hardly surprising, then, that a range of horror films have emerged that articulate generically our period’s core anxieties and most traumatic events, and incorporate the stylistic markers that most insistently signify the technological innovations of our globalised age. Most immediately striking about what this collection terms ‘digital horror’ is, then, its form. The predominance of hand-held and CCTV-based cinematography reflecting the increasing availability of digital recording technologies (from camcorders to camera-phones) have effectively democratised the film-making process, even as the World Wide Web has allowed for the instantaneous global transmission and manipulation of information and images, thus opening up a whole new source and site of horror. Ours is a world in which social media has enabled the emergence of new forms of online subjectivity, even as the proliferation of surveillance technologies position us as objects of an authoritarian gaze invested in tackling criminal activity and maintaining the civil order of the status quo. The films this volume collects under the umbrella term ‘digital horror’ both formally incorporate and conceptually explore these dynamics and, thereby, offer us a window on whom we have become as subjects of the contemporary biosphere.

Towards a Working Definition Numerous critics have argued that developments in digital technology have changed everything about films, from their look and feel to the ways in which they are conceived, made and consumed.2 Advances in sound and graphics, particularly in CGI (computer-generated imagery), have precipitated a cinema that is no longer reliant on the indexical representation of reality, but rather on a synthetic image more concerned with being photorealistic.3 For horror, this has meant, among other things, that it is possible to have fantastic or monstrous creatures populate the same space as humans convincingly through ‘digital mimicry’.4 CGI, which has made possible both the construction of digital space in 3D as well as the enhancement of ‘real’ settings, has similarly become an important pre and postproduction technique, supplementing and often replacing more traditional camera lens distortions or manipulations of film stock.5 It has also allowed for disembodied camera experiences that go beyond what is perceptually possible for humans by flowing through keyholes or traversing window panes.6 Thus, super-fast editing, alongside digital electronic noises, have been used in films such as Saw ( James 2

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Wan, 2004) to create a visceral sense of claustrophobia and tension.7 In a sense, then, most horror is now digital, since it is shot or manipulated digitally. Digital horror, as we understand it in this collection, however, is more than vaguely connected to the digital techniques inherent to its production and the stylistics commanding its look. In fact, digital horror often exploits its own framing and stylistic devices to offer reflections on contemporary fears, especially those regarding digital technologies themselves. This makes for an exceptionally anxious cinema, preoccupied with the dangers of digital technology, specifically its proliferation of mediated images of real-world violence, its capacity to bring surveillance societies into being, its exposure of the user to the uninvited attentions of strangers ‘from beyond’ and its impact on human identity, which, being transient and mutable, is consistently counterpoised to the virtual immanence of the digital. Certainly, digital horror is concerned with the disposability of recorded images, but it acknowledges that a form of haunting may also reside in those images’ ability, as Nick Rombes has argued, to be ‘easily archived and dispersed’.8 If a fear of technology and the machine has lurked in horror for a long time – even inflecting its presentation – then digital horror makes this terror explicit and turns it into both an aesthetic and a narrative preoccupation. The term ‘digital horror’ thus defines any type of horror that actively purports to explore the dark side of contemporary life in a digital age governed by informational flows, rhizomatic public networks, virtual simulation and visual hyper-stimulation. In the first ten years of the twenty-first century, a decade itself characterised by a certain formal freedom in terms of editing and cinematography, one of the most popular framing modes for horror has been that of ‘found footage’, brilliantly exemplified in the shaky-cam of films such as Paranormal Activity (Oren Peli, 2007), [ rREC] ( Jaume Balaguer´o and Paco Plaza, 2007) and Cloverfield (Matt Reeves, 2008). Although initially pioneered by Italian and French neo-realists from the 1940s, adopted by John Cassavetes in the 1950s and 1960s, and reiterated by the Dogme 95 movement in the 1990s, the use of hand-held cameras has, in fact, only become a core device of horror cinema in recent years. Challenging both the budgetary implications and ideological circumscriptions of classic Hollywood realism, hand-held cinematography has its origins in documentary stylistics and, like the documentary, attempts to convey the affective truth of that which it depicts. In the early years of the twenty-first century, this ‘will to truth’ is particularly pronounced, not least in the shadow of governmental lies regarding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq legitimated globally by the media’s reportage of the socalled War on Terror.9 It is no coincidence, in other words, that there has been an explosion of hand-held horror films, some of which are shot, like The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo S´anchez, 1999), exclusively in this format, whilst others, such as 28 Days Later (Danny Boyle, 2002) and Battle Royale / Batoru rowaiaru (Kinji Fukasaku, 2002), have used a combination of hand-held and

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classic cinematography. Some of these films rely, moreover, on the highly Gothic trope of the found manuscript, proclaiming that the footage they contain has been discovered by a third party and assembled for viewing without the involvement of the original protagonists. Many such films, it must be acknowledged, pay homage to earlier horror subgenres and update their cinematography through the incorporation of digital stylistics yet neglect any detailed metatextual consideration of digital technologies. Thus, films such as Paranormal Activity, Paranormal Activity 2 (Tod Williams, 2010), Paranormal Activity 3 (Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost, 2011) and Paranormal Activity 4 (Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost, 2012) incorporate CCTV, handheld and night vision cinematography in their retelling of classic haunted house tales. Films such as The Fourth Kind (Olatunde Osunsanmi, 2009) return to alien abduction scenarios with the use of dash-cam, faux documentary footage and hand-held cinematography, whilst, internationally, old-fashioned creature features become breathlessly exciting romps in films such as Norway’s Troll Hunter (Andr´e Øvredal, 2010) and Australia’s The Tunnel (Carlo Ledesma, 2011). What is more, some of these stylistically digital films appear reluctant to step outside the fictive worlds of horror cinema, foregrounding generic intertextuality at the expense of any deeper consideration of the digital technologies deployed. Thus, films like Evil Things (Dominic Perez, 2009) use first-person camerawork to pay homage to the killer’s point of view pioneered by early slashers such as Halloween ( John Carpenter, 1978) and Friday the 13th (Sean S. Cunningham, 1980). Others, such as the highly self-reflexive Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (Scott Glosserman, 2006), even incorporate cameos from well-known slasher actors such as Robert Englund and Kane Hodder (Freddie and Jason). But, even though films like Home Movie (Christopher Denham, 2008) return us to the trope of the possessed child, Grave Encounters (Colin Minihan and Stuart Ortiz, 2011) to the haunted asylum, and Lunopolis (Matthew Avant, 2009) and Chronicle ( Josh Trank, 2012) to science fiction, none of these can be said to make use of found footage to look very far beyond their own narrative or, indeed, the horror genre itself. This collection, accordingly, acknowledges the existence of such films but does not focus intensively upon them. For what also interests us are those films that evoke a range of contemporary anxieties specific to the time and place of their release in a manner that articulates a range of contemporary social, economic and philosophical concerns.

The Neoliberal Digital Age An example of this kind of film is the low-budget Zero Day (Ben Coccio, 2003), whose video diary format is well suited to its tale of two high school misfits. Recalling the events of the Columbine High School massacre of 1999, they record their motivations and plans on tape prior to murdering 12 students and 4

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killing themselves. In a period in which repeated incidents of school shootings has polarised US opinion and provoked heated debates on individual freedoms and the responsibilities of government (the President himself asking whether ‘such violence visited on our children year after year after year is somehow the price of our freedom?’), the film offers an engaging view both of alienated youth and the nature of American liberty.10 Echoing such concerns, the better-known Cloverfield undertakes a significant deployment of hand-held camera footage to capture the shock of the events of 9/11 and the significance we attach as a culture to the memorialisation of traumatic events through visual technologies. In so doing, of course, it depicts the fragility of the contemporary geopolitical order – the jumpy, disjunctive and repetitive cinematography both echoes the stylistics of traumatic memory itself and evokes the helplessness of participants and witnesses alike in the face of events that they may digitally record but cannot emotionally assimilate. Other films, such as The Last Exorcism (Daniel Stamm, 2010) can be seen to revisit the rather tired narrative of demonic possession for the purposes of offering an engaging take on the role of religious belief and demonic interference in an age of Tea Party politics where supernatural beliefs are seen as justification for the infringements of the rights of US citizens.11 In this, of course, digital horror has come to express some significant concerns regarding the radical changes to which human society and selfhood is subject at the hands of burgeoning information technologies. Both the style and substance of neoliberal models of economic and social organisation are repeatedly reflected in the form and content of digital horror narratives. Whether through disembodied images allegedly captured by CCTV cameras in films such as Look (Adam Rifkin, 2007), or through cameras planted in houses by deranged murderers, as in My Little Eye (Marc Evans, 2002) or House with 100 Eyes ( Jay Lee and Jim Roof, 2013), surveillance footage is now ubiquitous. For it is digital communications, alongside US militarism, that has underpinned free market corporatism. As the assets of the State have been marketised (as in sell-offs of national utilities), domestic policies have been market-driven (as in the removal of labour rights and welfare safeguards) and foreign policies have been subcontracted to private firms (the invasion of Iraq, for example, netting billions for private contractors such as Halliburton), an insistently neoliberal digital world has come into being. Here, a global flow of digital information promotes a culture of consumerist individualism that has refashioned global subjectivity itself – the neoliberal subject being presented as a fluid, motile and hybridised entity whose traditional markers of identity (class, ethnicity, region, gender or sexuality) have been deemed largely irrelevant. What matters is one’s relation to the global flow of capital which, in an era of deregulated financial speculation, is itself little more than a flow of information with a small relation to the real world human beings inhabit. Meanwhile, information technology has itself become widely monitored in the interests of maintaining the global hegemony of corporate capitalism. Ours is now a surveillance society in

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which information technologies – from the internet to mobile phones and CCTV cameras – have come not to serve our needs but to monitor and putatively shape our activities and sense of ourselves.12 Accordingly, some digital horrors can be seen to undertake a sustained engagement with broader questions regarding the socio-cultural function of technologies of witnessing. The Belgian film Man Bites Dog / C’est arriv´e pr`es de chez vous (Benoˆıt Poelvoorde, R´emy Belvaux and Andr´e Bonzel, 1992) could be said to have inaugurated this trend, depicting a camera crew that first follows, and then assists, a serial killer as he goes about his murderous business, raising in the process questions about the ethical responsibilities of filmmakers and the point at which witnessing topples over into a mediated participation in the orgy of violence characterising much contemporary entertainment. George A. Romero also engages with such questions in Diary of the Dead (2008), having a group of student filmmakers assembling a multimedia record of the zombie apocalypse as society crumbles about them and official news channels give way to the potentially dangerous participatory free-for-all of internet reportage. Here, hand-held stylistics and the inclusion of news footage and CCTV recordings allow for an interrogation of the function and responsibilities of the internet itself, which is revealed as an unregulated vehicle for information, misinformation and disinformation alike. For the internet itself has become both site and source of horror in a range of recent films, negotiating a number of concerns regarding the nature of contemporary subjectivity in the age of informational flows and the digital manipulation of individual identities. As early as 1998, The Last Broadcast (Lance Weiler and Stefan Avalos, 1998) had a killer use an internet chat room as a means of targeting victims, the murders themselves being filmed in first-person camera. FeardotCom (William Malone, 2002) posits a haunted internet, the ghost of a serial killer’s victim exacting her vengeance on those who log onto the eponymous torture-murder site. The game show horror My Little Eye uses CCTV footage to revivify the slasher genre whilst voicing grave concerns about the manipulability of the subject of surveillance culture. Pulse ( Jim Sonzero, 2006) has a computer virus allow the spirit world entry to our own, ending with an appropriately portentous coda: ‘[w]e can never go back. The cities are theirs. Our lives are different now. What was meant to connect us to one another instead connected us to forces that we could have never imagined. The world we knew is gone.’ The same is, of course true of ourselves. And it is for digital horror to articulate our discomfort.

The Chapters in This Collection Part One of the collection, ‘Haunted Technologies and Network Panic’, begins by establishing the pre-history of digital horror in the science fiction films of the American 1950s. In his historically wide-ranging and generically comprehensive chapter ‘Network Anxiety: Prefiguring Digital Anxieties in the American Horror 6

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Film’, Steffen Hantke traces the development of the network metaphor, from its military-industrial origins in the Cold War US to the digital horrors of the neoliberal present. For Hantke, contemporary techno-horror’s haunted television sets, cell phones and websites, its blurry footage of supernatural events or graphic cruelty and torture, undertakes a particular kind of cultural work. Specifically, it articulates, illustrates and dramatises a range of historical anxieties whilst feeding the larger debate on the uses and benefits of digital technology. Such labour, Hantke argues, can be traced to a cycle of horror and science fiction films produced in the US between the late 1940s and the mid-1960s. In embedding the metaphor of the network in the popular consciousness, Hantke argues, these films paved the way for contemporary digital horrors such as Drew Goddard’s The Cabin in the Woods (2012), a film deeply invested in the exploration of networks of surveillance, control, consumption and communication. For Hantke, the film illustrates the expansion of the Cold War paradigm into the present, our own world emerging as a more decentred global network than that of the 1950s, but one that still replicates the structural features initiated by World War II. If the network allows us to explore the tensions between the individual and a collective hive, the motif of the omnipresent CCTV camera captures the limits of our struggle for the survival of personal identity or subjectivity. Steve Jones’ chapter, ‘Torture Pornopticon: (In)security Cameras, Self-Governance and Autonomy’, analyses the relevance of CCTV aesthetics for torture porn, one of the most important and popular horror subgenres of the first decade of the twentyfirst century. Showing how a number of films that have been studied under this rubric rely on the presence of closed-circuit cameras, Jones argues that Foucault’s discussion of Bentham’s Panopticon can shed some light on our understanding of their value. Through a thorough reading of the implications of torture porn’s covert surveillance systems and the importance of self-regulation from the victims themselves, Jones offers a counter-reading which, instead of condemning displays of self-mutilation, understands them as negotiations of digital fear. The tension between obedience and autonomous self-governance is evinced in a will to selfpreserve that, as Jones suggests, speaks volumes of the ‘milieu of uncertainty that is collectivised under the banner “fear culture”’. Complementing Jones’ chapter and focusing on contemporary surveillance culture, Steen Christiansen’s ‘Uncanny Cameras and Network Subjects’ delves into the ways in which our very subjectivity has been altered by the recent proliferation of non-human perspectives and points of view embodied in surveillance technologies. Focusing on Carles Torrens’ 2012 film Apartment 143 (aka Emergo), Christiansen explores how the surveillance of an ostensibly haunted family illustrates a paradox of desire: the contemporary subject simultaneously desiring surveillance yet fearing the transformation of the self it entails. The technological Panopticon of surveillance cameras is thus said to teach us how to be subjects in a new world order.

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The last chapter in this first part, Neal Kirk’s ‘Networked Spectrality: In Memorium, Pulse and Beyond’, takes issue with the literal afterlife of death and the dead in the virtual world, especially as represented in horror cinema. Starting with the long-lasting connection between ghosts and visual technology in literature, Kirk makes a case for the gradual assimilation of spectral presences into new social media such as the internet or file-sharing platforms. Illustrating his points through horror films that have very specifically developed the figure of the ‘technoghost’, such as In Memorium (Amanda Gusack, 2005) and Pulse, Kirk shows that ghosts have moulded their appearance and their hauntings on the media that transmit them. Because we have largely left analogue behind, these apparitions now manifest in eminently different ways and constitute what Kirk terms a ‘networked spectrality’. This means, necessarily, both that the internet has become a site for haunting – a spectral conduit – and that ghosts have themselves adapted and become multinodal and distributive. Part Two of the collection, ‘Digital Horror and the Post/National’, turns to global perspectives on the digital horror phenomenon, focusing on a number of films from troubled regions that have deployed key stylistic and narrative markers to undertake an exploration of their own recent history. We focus on films from Thailand, Serbia and Turkey, each of which undertakes a politically significant questioning of film’s potential to both reflect and shape dominant discourses of identity. In each case, it is clear that the stylistics of digital horror both evoke and mirror the traumas of the recent past and present. Linnie Blake and Mary Ainsley’s essay ‘Digital Witnessing and Trauma Testimony in Ghost Game: Cambodian Genocide, Digital Horror and the Nationalism of New Thai Cinema’ explores the ways in which Sarawut Wichiensarn’s highly problematic film of 2006 exemplifies digital horror’s simultaneous investment in, and disavowal of, discourses of traumatic witness. The film traces the horror that befalls a group of middle class Thai youths as they take part in a game show set in a thinly veiled Khmer Rouge concentration camp. The subject of enormous political controversy on its release, Ghost Game both embodies Thai culture’s refusal to witness the horrors of the recent past in Cambodia and questions the refusal of global media to do anything other than manipulate personal tragedy and ethical outrage for ideologically-driven ends. Whilst the insistent gaze of CCTV footage and ‘reality’ stylistics may purport to capture the ‘truth’ of a historic situation, this is often no more than a profitable spectacularisation of horror that is both emotionally manipulative and politically dangerous. Dejan Ognjanovi´c’s chapter ‘“Welcome to the Reality Studio”: Serbian HandHeld Horrors’ echoes these concerns, exploring the documentary stylistics of the controversial metafilms The Life and Death of a Porno Gang / Zivot i smrt porno bande (Mladen Djordjevic, 2009) and A Serbian Film / Srpski Film (Srdjan Spasojevi´c, 2010). The digital stylistics deployed, he argues, offer not only a metaphorical

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reenactment of the horrors of the 1990s Balkans conflict but interrogate the claims to epistemological veracity made by Balkan filmmakers who work, predominantly, in the social realist tradition. For Ognjanovi´c, the video diary format of The Life and Death of a Porno Gang and the documentary stylistics of A Serbian Film therefore question the role of the Balkan filmmaker and the impact of their purportedly ‘true’ representations of national identity on the economically and morally devastated region they purport to depict. Both films can be seen to break into the Burroughsian ‘reality studio’, where ‘realism’ is constantly produced and manipulated as they attempt to provide an objective correlative of the truths and lies inherent in any kind of video footage, both edited and ‘raw’. In keeping with such concerns, Zeynep Sahinturk’s ‘Djinn in the Machine: Technology and Islam in Turkish Horror Film’ explores the ways in which digital technologies can both embody and articulate the contemporary conflict between secular and Islamic models of national identity in contemporary Turkey. For, whilst Turkish cinema has produced less than 20 horror films in the new millennium, those films are overwhelming characterised by the self-conscious interrogation of digital technologies. Thus, while films such as Hasan Karacada˘g’s D@bbe (2006) and D@bbe 2 (2009) focus on the internet as agent of horror, the found footage and pseudo-documentary techniques of The Karadedeler Case (Erdogan and Erkan Bagbakan, 2011) and the video diary horror of Paranormal I˙stanbul (Kemal Topuz, 2011) and D@bbe: A Djinn Case (Hasan Karacada˘g, 2012) offer a distinctively Islamic take on what is usually considered a very Western format. Such representational practices, Sahinturk argues, embody the disjunction between the nation’s culturally-grounded Islamic fears and the Western cultural norms transmitted by global digital technologies. In so doing, they articulate the deep divisions between Islamist and secularist Turks in the present. Mark Freeman’s ‘An Uploadable Cinema: Digital Horror and the Postnational Image’ acts as a bridge between Part Two’s national concerns and those of the digital aesthetics that constitute the focus of Part Three. For Freeman, the virtual world has shaped and denationalised horror. Arguing that horror has been influenced by the way in which images of violence are being consumed in a digital world of virtual communities, live feeds and direct uploading and sharing of images (especially videos) through platforms like YouTube, he proposes that national frameworks can only account for certain aspects of the films themselves. Using Brian De Palma’s Redacted (2007) and George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead (2007), Freeman shows that digital horror has both mediated 9/11 footage in a very explicit manner and alluded to the concept of the public archive as a repository for images of catastrophe. The found footage aesthetic allows for a type of engagement with the image that does not rely on national specificity and, instead, becomes increasingly dependent on the rhizomatic informational flows of the online spaces and networks that distribute and exhibit them.

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Part Three is entitled ‘Digital Stylistics’ and focuses on the techniques that digital horror, more specifically found footage horror, has resorted to in order to project its anxieties and convey a different, more contemporary and direct, form of fear. Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet’s essay ‘Night Vision in the Contemporary Horror Film’ explores the deployment of night vision as a quintessentially post-modern horror aesthetic for a neoliberal age. With reference to films such as 28 Weeks Later, (Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, 2007), World of the Dead: The Zombie Diaries 2 (Michael Bartlett, 2011), Entity (Steve Stone, 2012) and G.I. Jes´us (Carl Colpaert, 2006), she illustrates how the recent spate of found footage and mockumentary films represents a visual language for anxiety about the status of human agents in the new world economy. What is more, this resonates with a more specific anxiety born of the post-9/11 militarisation of the American gaze as it zeroes in on civilians and insurgents alike across the globe. Thus, she argues, as the American and British public grow increasingly uncomfortable with digital warfare and remote assassination, the contemporary horror film explores the politics and poetics of the new visual rhetoric of death. The subject of James Aston’s ‘Nightmares outside the Mainstream: August Underground and Real/Reel Horror’ is hardcore horror, a strand of very violent genre films that have found a following outside the more traditional markets and which share a ‘live’ found footage aesthetic. Aston centres on the issue of realism in Fred Vogel’s August Underground trilogy (2001–7) and its self-conscious negotiation of issues surrounding verisimilitude and simulation. Despite a failed attempt at passing for the ‘real thing’, the August Underground films managed to blur the boundaries between real and fake violence and generated what Aston sees as a ‘corrective’ to the more mainstream American horror film of the 1990s. Relying on Vogel’s own intentions to bring viewers experientially closer to the moment of torture and violence, Aston shows how his films can be seen as a type of more ‘authentic cinema’ that could have had real repercussions beyond the screen’s diegetic world. The films are, accordingly, celebrated for their capacity to shock, a quality that had been diluted by post-modern horror’s preference for pastiche and self-referentiality. The closing chapter, Xavier Aldana Reyes’ ‘The [ rREC] Films: Affective Possibilities and Stylistic Limitations of Found Footage’, starts by tracing the rise of found footage horror in the new millennium. Understanding found footage not as a genre, but as a framing device encouraging a very specific type of filmic stylistics, Aldana Reyes argues that horror has naturally gravitated towards techniques that promise a sense of immediacy. He focuses on the [ rREC] franchise, especially the first instalment, and its use of the startle effect, intradiegetic sound and point of view (POV) shots. His argument is that, generally speaking, the found footage premise allowed for a type of physical fear experience that helped the Spanish series achieve international success and recognition. Turning to the less critically and financially successful [ rREC]3 : Genesis / [ rREC]3 : G´enesis (Paco Plaza, 2012), Aldana Reyes concludes that the film’s abandonment of what had become a well-honed aesthetic

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trademark is one of the possible reasons for its lukewarm critical and fan reception. This case study allows Aldana Reyes to point out some of the limitations – related, for example, to space and time – of found footage. As the wide spectrum of these chapters attests, if it is anything, then, digital horror is a cinema of anxiety embodying, in its ‘shaky-cam’ cinematography, verisimilitudinous mise-en-sc`ene, paranoid narrative propensities and often startling visual imagery, a range of concerns regarding the technologically-mediated and globally capitalised subjectivity of the present. Across the globe, these concerns manifest themselves in a range of found footage, surveillance and haunted technology horrors. The essays in this collection show that digital horror is characterised by fear of the networks of information and power that enable yet, arguably, also dictate. This realisation entails a sense of loss of all we once were as human beings, as individuals, as members of a particular community, region or nation. It evokes, moreover, a sense of terror as to who we may become in a global society over which we have no perceptible means of control. As such, this collection presents digital horror as a diverse range of films with differing perspectives on the contemporary world but, in its more complex and engaging manifestations, unified by an interest in the impact of new technologies upon our diverse societies, our relation to the past and the present, and upon human subjectivity itself.

Notes 1. The seriousness with which the US government takes any potential leaks to its own security is witnessed by the case of Chelsea Manning, a serving soldier stationed in Iraq, who was sentenced to 35 years in prison for passing ‘250,000 State Department cables and 470,000 Iraq and Afghanistan battlefield logs to WikiLeaks, as well as files pertaining to detainees held at Guant´anamo Bay, and video of a 2007 attack by a US helicopter gunship in Baghdad that killed a dozen people, including two Reuters journalists’. As Julian Assange of WikiLeaks remains in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, fighting charges of rape filed in Stockholm, the National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, who published significant disclosures regarding the surveillance tactics of the US National Security Agency, has been forced to flee the country in the belief that he would not receive a fair trial at home. See Paul Lewis, ‘Bradley Manning given 35-year prison term for passing files to WikiLeaks’, The Guardian (21 August 2013). Available at http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/21/bradley-manning35-years-prison-wikileaks-sentence (accessed 10 January 2014). 2. See, among many others, John Belton, ‘Digital cinema: a false revolution’, October c (2002), pp. 98–114, and Anne Friedberg, ‘The end of cinema: multimedia and technological change’, in Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams (eds), Reinventing Film Studies (London: Arnold; New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 438–52. The latter claims that the digital era has predicated a loss of medium specificities so that differences between, for example, television and film are quickly disappearing.

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3. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (London and Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001), p. 202. 4. Philip Rosen, Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), p. 309. This is not tantamount to arguing that absolutely anything may be artificially reproduced, however, as the sophistication of digital technology, although constantly improving, necessarily puts constraints on filmmakers’ ability to generate suspension of disbelief. Whilst it is technically possible to design new monsters that are not limited to concrete, model-based special effects like animatronics or prostheses, these need to appear convincing enough that the viewer will not actively challenge them. 5. For more on digital space, see Michael Allen, ‘The impact of digital technologies on film aesthetics’, in Dan Harries (ed.), The New Media Book (London: BFI, 2002), pp. 109–18. 6. For more on this type of ‘impossible’ shot that is not mapped onto the limitations of human perception, see William Brown, ‘Man without a movie camera – movies without men: towards a posthumanist cinema?’, in Warren Buckland (ed.), Film Theory and Contemporary Hollywood Movies (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), pp. 72–7. 7. As Jones has argued, the relation between form and content in the case of the Saw franchise (2004–10) goes beyond the affective so that editing and sequencing play an active role in conveying the meaning of the sequels. See Steve Jones, ‘“Time is wasting”: con/sequence and s/pace in the Saw series’, Horror Studies i/2 (2010), pp. 225–39. 8. Nicholas Rombes, Cinema in the Digital Age (Chichester and New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), p. 4. 9. Jonathan Owen, ‘Man whose lies about WMD led to 100,000 deaths confesses all’, The Independent (1 April 2012). Available at http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/ politics/man-whose-wmd-lies-led-to-100000-deaths-confesses-all-7606236.html (accessed 10 January 2014). 10. Anonymous, ‘Did the Sandy Hook shooting prove the need for more gun control?’, US News: Debate Club (undated). Available at http://www.usnews.com/debate-club/didthe-sandy-hook-shooting-prove-the-need-for-more-gun-control (accessed 10 January 2014). 11. The American Civil Liberties Union asserted, in 2011, that ‘[p]oliticians [have] waged the most serious and damaging attack on abortion access in decades’, detailing on a state-by-state basis the numerous ‘new laws taking away a woman’s ability to make her own best decision for her personal circumstances’. These range from Texas, where women seeking an abortion are forced to listen to a description of a foetal ultrasound, to Arizona, where services that refer a woman for an abortion are subject to legal sanction, and North Carolina, which has passed a law that withholds funds from Planned Parenthood for family planning and teen pregnancy reduction programmes. See Anonymous, ‘2011: abortion access under attack in state legislatures’, American Civil

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Liberties Union (2011). Available at https://www.aclu.org/maps/2011-abortion-accessunder-attack-state-legislatures (accessed 10 January 2014). 12. The British government’s information commissioner Richard Thomas proclaimed the United Kingdom a ‘surveillance society’ as early as 2006. The country, said Thomas, was increasingly monitoring the activities of its citizens, specifically through ‘dataveillance’: the collection of credit card and loyalty card data, mobile phone and internet information as well as the use of CCTV cameras in streets, shops and workplaces. By 2006, Thomas could confirm the presence of some 4.2 million CCTV cameras in the UK, one for every 14 people. According to the human rights group Privacy International, the situation is much the same across the world. Anonymous, ‘Britain is “surveillance society”’, BBC News Online (2 November 2006). Available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6108496.stm (accessed 10 January 2014).

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1 Network Anxiety: Prefiguring Digital Anxieties in the American Horror Film Steffen Hantke

The Ghost in the Machine: The Emblematic Scene Perhaps the most emblematic shot of the recent wave of horror films concerned with the menace of digital technologies is that of the female ghost in Ringu (Hideo Nakata, 1998) emerging from the television set and stepping, in all her dripping, gruesome glory, into the living room of whoever had the bad fortune of watching TV. This is the moment when technology comes alive, when the infrastructural networks of mass communication reveal that they are possessed, haunted, eerily and uncannily animate. The shot has been imitated countless times as a sign of earnest admiration and parodied as a sign of the moment’s rapid affective, generic and, ultimately, cultural exhaustion. Its origin, The Ring, spans the cultural divide between the Japanese market, where it originated, and the American one, where its remake kicked off a cinematic cycle of digital horror films in which so-called J-Horror, and to a lesser extent films from other Asian nations, and indigenous American products seemed to merge effortlessly. And, yet, the cultural life of this emblematic shot marks a period in which cultural unease with digital technology was, quite obviously, not the provenance of any particular nation and its idiosyncratic relationship toward digital technology but a general phenomenon closely linked to highly technological cultures around the globe and, thus, to modernity itself.

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The fact that the shot is hardly original detracts little from its startling power. Horror film fans might first think of the moment in David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983) in which Max Renn’s ( James Woods) television set, under the influence of a pirate signal from Pittsburgh, PA, or that of that signal’s ability to induce vivid hallucinations, suddenly begins to breathe, its surface bulging with pulsating veins as Renn gives in to a mouth beckoning him in extreme close-up and submerges his head beneath the flexible membrane of the screen. The comparison is intriguing, though Cronenberg has technology itself come alive, and, in The Ring, it serves as a conduit for malignant forces travelling along the network’s arteries. A more apt comparison, might be the similarly hallucinatory moment that occurs in a film less well remembered – John Flynn’s Brainscan (1994) – which nonetheless marks a cycle of horror films, the last one in sequence before that crucial moment in 1998 when The Ring’s ghost emerges from the screen. A mysterious computer game named Brainscan manifests its resident spirit, a Freddy Kruegeresque figure named Trickster (T. Ryder Smith), to its hapless player, a suburban teenager named Michael (Edward Furlong). Michael suspects that playing the game has had him sleepwalk into someone’s house and commit a murder. Four years before Samara (Daveigh Chase) crawls out of that television set in Japan for the first time, Trickster plays the same trick on Michael, peeling himself out of the television screen’s bulging protuberance and stepping, with malignant glee, into Michael’s bedroom. Trickster’s arrival foreshadows that of Samara, and, yet, Brainscan the film, as well as the cycle of techno-horror films in which it is embedded, has not registered as strongly on the public mind – or, for that matter, in the historiography of the horror film genre – as one might expect. Hence, it is the goal of this chapter to trace the development of techno-horror or, more specifically, the development of the network metaphor: those conduits that come alive or through which uncanny forces travel – from its origins to that final cycle of horror films overshadowed by what was to come only a few years later.

Introduction: Technophobia, Techno-horror and Network Anxiety To assert that recent horror films invested in the use, representation and criticism of digital technologies express a sense of unease and anxiety about just those technologies – that these films, in other words, are a prime cultural outlet of technophobic undercurrents in a culture largely comfortable with, or even enthusiastic about, technology in general – is something of a truism. Similarly, late capitalism’s invention and use of the digital has confirmed, with a vengeance, Marx’s famous observation about the curious lifelessness of human beings and animation of the inanimate under capitalism – an observation underlying countless horror films in which interchangeable characters are dispatched and, more importantly, inanimate objects come to life.1 From haunted television sets, cell phones and web sites, to blurry digital footage of supernatural events or graphic cruelty and 18

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torture circulating through the channels of social media, the techno-horror du jour happens to be digital. The digital in these films is simply the last in a long line of technologies that, ever since the Industrial Revolution, made technology an indispensable part of modernity and have caused nervousness and anxiety in equal measure, to technophilic celebration. Following technology to this current manifestation, techno-horror is performing the cultural labour of articulating, illustrating and dramatising these anxieties, and feeding the larger debate on the uses and benefits of digital technology. Holding together the historical progression of technologies arousing unease, each one, in turn, providing the focus of anxiety during its period in the cultural spotlight before being replaced by its successor, there is a larger paradigm at work. This makes such progression readable as a narrative of progress, or a narrative of the inevitable repetition of human folly, or a narrative of the bargain that forces us to accept the horrific side-effects with the benefits of new technologies, or any number of competing or supplementary narratives. In the context of the horror film, this crucial organising metaphor is that of the network. The metaphor is applied to logistical structures like those of global agents, from the integrated production and distribution of the Walmart chain to that of actual or imagined terrorist organisations like Al-Qaeda, just as it is evoked as a description of corporate-owned digital communication within what has come to be called social media. Similar to concepts like ‘information’ or ‘energy’, the metaphor of the network is so ubiquitous, so widely and casually (or even perhaps sloppily) used as to be lacking distinct shape, essence or significance.2 Enthralled by the metaphor of the network – either as a source of utopian promises of technological transcendence, of infinite reach and connectedness, or as a dystopian menace of technological entanglement and paranoid hyper-cognition – much contemporary discourse wields the metaphor of the network like the proverbial man with a hammer to whom everything is a nail. It is hardly surprising that a substantial cycle of the contemporary horror film focuses on the dystopian aspects of the network as it presents itself in its most recent technological manifestation, dramatising and extrapolating its inherent dangers, its power to destabilise and rewrite social protocols, and its complicated relationship to the bodies it organises. There is a long arc of historical iterations of the network metaphor that, somewhere in its early phase, includes the bodies of workers being fed into the Moloch Machine in the industrial netherworld of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) and, among its most recent images, the twisted female body extricating itself from a pixellated image to emerge from a television set into a suburban living room. The origins of this arc may go back as far as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), a novel that transformed an older mythology of misguided creation – from the myth of Prometheus in its extended title to that of Faustian hubris – into a more historically specific articulation of technophobia at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. But the specific roots of the network metaphor and its

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unique disposition toward the cinema of techno-horror can be found in the cycle of horror and science fiction films the American film industry produced and released between the late 1940s and the mid-1960s. It is with this cycle of films, their endlessly repeated and elaborated features and their historical context, with which I would like to start a discussion that will lead up, with some stops in subsequent decades along the way, to the most recent cycle of digital horror films.

Horror and Science Fiction Films in the 1950s: Cold War Networks The oddly anachronistic ‘European’ locations in the cycle of classic Universal horror films from the 1930s and 1940s had borne little resemblance to the world of their American audience, being set in a remote space from which the abject would erupt, intrude and impinge upon the familiar world. The postwar cycle of horror films, from the late 1940s to the 1960s, brought horror closer to home. From towns with burgomasters and horse and carriage travel, horror films moved to locations within the US, the modern world of automobiles and commercial air travel, making use of the nation’s natural landscapes, its cities, movie theatres and army bases, its suburban homes, their bedrooms, the bodies in those beds and that space underneath the bed. By re-imagining global and domestic space and their relationship and interaction with each other, 1950s horror films laid the groundwork for the emergence and elaboration of the network metaphor. Thus, in a key scene from It Came from Outer Space ( Jack Arnold, 1953), an amateur astronomer (Richard Carlson) and his fianc´ee (Barbara Rush) come across two telephone repairmen along the open road in the south-west desert who let them listen in to a strange humming in the wires. As they ponder the inexplicable sound, there is a strong suggestion that, somewhere down the line, someone is also listening in on them. Not only is the communication network haunted, it also produces, within the vast natural landscape, an alarming moment of reciprocity and proximity. For better or worse, information is flowing in both directions at once. As observers – or eavesdroppers, in this case – we are observed; someone is listening in on us. Acting upon others by way of the network, we are being acted upon. Vast as it may seem, the network still has its marginal zones. Washington D.C. may provide a centre; wherever danger rises, the bureaucratic, administrative and military apparatus mobilised to meet and contain it is organised in an office somewhere in the nation’s capital. At times, D.C. is also the location of the crisis; the alien visitor in Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) does land on the White House lawn. More frequently, though, it is New York or Los Angeles that bears the burden of providing the location for fantasies of national crisis. The mutated ants in Them! (Gordon Douglas, 1954) head for the storm drains underneath Los Angeles; the radioactive dinosaur in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (Eugene Lourie, 1953) heads straight for New York. Clearly, marginal geographic 20

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spaces like the Arctic or the desert along America’s southern border, where these monsters originate, are still part of the larger network along which monstrous bodies travel on their way to the culture’s central nervous system. Horizontal or vertical, the principle of reciprocity reigns supreme. Vertically speaking, as alien ships or alien seed pods come in from above, artillery fire rises up to meet them (as in Plan 9 from Outer Space (Edward Wood Jr., 1959)), missiles are fired at the intruder trying to make his escape (The Atomic Submarine (Spencer Gordon Bennet, 1959)) and fighter jets ascend toward the heavens (First Man Into Space (Robert Day, 1959)). Meanwhile, on the horizontal plane, the suburban home – annexe to, and metaphor for, the fallout shelter in its back yard or beneath its foundations – fails to prove an adequate defence against the horrific other. In The Twilight Zone, the monsters are, as an episode’s eponymous title has it, ‘due on Maple Street’ (ABC, 1960). In Invaders from Mars (William Cameron Menzies, 1953), they gain access to the suburban living room, turning good dads and loving moms into tyrannical Freudian nightmares. In I Married a Monster from Outer Space (Gene Fowler Jr., 1958), they even creep into the bedroom of that suburban home, presumably even into the marital bed and, in its final conclusion, into the bodies of blue-blooded virginal American women. Crucial to all these movements through the network is the military. On the most superficial level, it appears diegetically as setting (the military base in First Man into Space), as character (the circle of generals in the Washington office discussing the crisis in Them! ), as weapons technology (those ballistic missiles fired at the escaping alien craft in The Atomic Submarine), as the cause of crisis (atomic testing in the Arctic in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms) and as the solution to these crises (the fighter plane dropping napalm on the giant spider in Tarantula ( Jack Arnold, 1955). It is so ubiquitous that its absence from certain scenes – such as when the aliens in I Married a Monster from Outer Space are defeated by a civilian lynch mob rather than the Army or Air Force – registers on the viewer as an anomaly. Even in those few rare anomalies, the military still figures as an ideological subset of American values: courage, obedience, team spirit, self-sacrifice, discipline and patriotism. Even civilians, to the extent that they serve as vehicles for the promotion of social values within the cinematic text, adopt and embody them.3 More directly, American filmmaking and the Pentagon literally colluded in the making of films: the Film Liaison Office give the Pentagon script consulting and approval rights in exchange for access to military hardware and personnel in the making of films. The emergence of the network metaphor during the Cold War was also characterised by a perceptible self-awareness in those who were using that metaphor. Under the catchphrase of the ‘military industrial complex’, Eisenhower’s famous televised farewell address to the nation in 1961 remarked on the antagonistic relationship between desirable forms of network complexity (like those serving democracy) and dangerous deviations from those desirable forms by way of an excessive and uncontrollable reciprocal flow between private industry and the

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political apparatus.4 During the same period, John Kenneth Galbraith’s analysis of the gradual convergence of Big Business and Big Government transferred the network metaphor to economics.5 In the field of sociology, C. Wright Mills, in his 1956 study of American mass society The Power Elite, recognised the increasingly networked nature of postwar America, having evolved from an assemblage of local or regional administrative units to a national network controlled by national elites featuring corporate executives, the military, celebrities and the very rich.6 Regardless of the accuracy of Mills’ analysis, or the authorial intentions and responsibilities behind Eisenhower’s farewell address, contemporary analyses of 1950s American life provide telling illustrations both of the increasingly networked nature of American life and of the unease that seemed to come with the awareness that hitherto distinct conceptual categories were collapsing into a vast and complex network.

From the Network to Digital Infrastructure: After the 1950s If the Cold War had provided the larger historical framework for the emergence of modern techno-horror, then this framework was to remain firmly in place when new technologies began to call for modifications to the already existing forms of network anxiety. This was of particular relevance for films that were tracing the metaphor of the network in the context of military technologies and would come into full bloom with the computer – a technology that had experienced a particular boost in the course of World War II, from Bletchley Park to Westinghouse – entering public consciousness. ‘One of the world’s first electronic, digital computers’, Eric Schlosser points out, ‘had been assembled at Los Alamos to perform many of the necessary calculations [for operating the Teller-Ulam design for the Hydrogen Bomb]. The machine was called MANIAC.’7 As the immediate post-1950s horror films would shift back toward the Gothic tropes of the 1930s and 1940s, with the advent of the British Hammer film cycle and Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, the computer as the haunted technology of network anxiety would remain, for a while, the primary topical property of science fiction cinema. The year 1964 saw two seminal films, Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove and Sidney Lumet’s Fail Safe, explore the possibility of computerised military systems escaping their creators’ control and wreaking havoc upon the world. The two films are prime examples of a 1950s network anxiety updated to fit the new networked technology. However, neither one of them grants any representational space to the spectacle of abjection. Kubrick’s characters may be sexual grotesques, but their grotesqueness – from General Ripper’s (Sterling Hayden) fear of bodily pollution to Lt. Mandrake’s (Peter Sellers) ‘gammy leg’ – is expressed through monstrous preoccupations and failings rather than the spectacular visuals of bodily abjection. Even the eponymous 22

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Dr Strangelove (Peter Sellers), with his uncannily animate prosthesis, falls short of horror film’s more colourful extremities. Instead, the film revels in the cascading multiple network failures that lead to global annihilation, tracing the same vertical and horizontal trajectories we saw in 1950s horror cinema, at the end of which stands the point of impact of the nuclear device roped and steered so expertly by Major Kong (Slim Pickens). Ultimately, though, Dr. Strangelove withholds the bodily horrors framed within, and caused by, its networked technologies. The same holds true for Fail Safe, with its horrors of, first Moscow, then New York, being annihilated by nuclear bombs and remaining safely off-camera, both being suggested merely by the shrieking sound of the melted telephone of the doomed eyewitness at each respective Ground Zero.8 After Kubrick’s and Lumet’s erasure of physical abjection, a film like Demon Seed (Donald Cammell, 1977) would return visual and thematic attention to the abject body within the framework of network anxiety. Not only is that film’s female protagonist surrounded and ensnared by the computerised network, she is also bodily penetrated as the computer extends itself through the network into a technological body that is as abject as that of its victim in the throes of her monstrous pregnancy. Subsequent films were to remedy the conspicuous absence of abject bodies and, in the process, return the topic of the computerised network to the thematic and affective domain of the horror film. Notable in this context is, yet again, Cammell’s Demon Seed, which shifts network anxiety from the military to the civilian sphere. Here the computerised network in the film controls a suburban house focusing, in a manner analogous to the spatial logic of I Married a Monster from Outer Space, on, first, the kitchen, then, the bedroom and, ultimately, the procreative interior of the female body as associated with the domestic sphere. Whilst the computer, in films like Joseph Sargent’s Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970), was still associated with the 1950s military industrial complex, Demon Seed began its shift toward the domestic sphere. It was a larger shift that also expressed itself in 1970s and 1980s horror films’ investment in the suburbs (as in the slasher film cycle) or in remote rural locations (as in hillbilly horror films from the period). Despite its 1950s roots in the military-industrial complex, digital horror of this period began to abandon its explicit link to the military component of networked technology. While techno-thrillers like War Games ( John Badham, 1983) and science fiction films like Tron (Steven Lisberger, 1982) still sustained the thematic connection, the transfer of the computer from the corporate, state and military space into the private realm caused the network metaphor to meander back towards the supernatural. Freddy Krueger’s ability to travel with the same unlimited mobility as those aliens in It Came from Outer Space through the discrete spaces of 1980s suburbia in the Nightmare on Elm Street films foregrounded the supernatural as the dominant metaphor of the period, to which its technological equivalent – even in a blockbuster like Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist (1982) – remains a mere footnote.

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Eric Schlosser’s reminder that digital networked technologies in the private sector are inextricably intertwined with the military industrial complex remains a minor consideration throughout.9 While the idea that infrastructure had increasingly come to mean digital infrastructure may have entered the horror film in the 1970s, that digital infrastructure had not yet grown familiar and intimate enough to cause the unsettling interpenetration between the familiar and the strange that Freud sees at the heart of the uncanny. Not fully understood yet in its full potential and still seen, somewhat remotely, as ‘cutting edge’, the digital was strange but hardly familiar. By the late 1980s, however, that familiarity had been achieved, and not just for those few early adaptors. The computer had transformed itself from a rare piece of specialised high tech into a piece of consumer electronics, a home appliance like many others. While films like Brett Leonard’s The Lawnmower Man (1992) and Virtuosity (1995) still rested a little too snugly within the older paradigm – deploying spectacular CGI primarily to emphasise the novelty and unfamiliarity of the technology – Rachel Talalay’s Ghost in the Machine (1993) and John Flynn’s Brainscan marked, first, the advent of the computer in the home and, in a second move extending into the 1990s, the increasingly networked nature of home computing via the internet.10 Brainscan provides a revealing exemplification of this cycle. With its suburban setting, its teenage protagonist abandoned by his father after the accidental death of his mother and that protagonist’s deep embeddedness within the films, television, music and fashion of contemporary horror culture, Brainscan reaches back to 1950s ‘juvenile delinquency’ fears. The film comments ironically on this historical context by drawing attention to a film poster in the teenage bedroom for I Was a Teenage Frankenstein (Herbert L. Strock, 1957), though no one in Brainscan goes to the movies anymore; there is no theatre, as in The Tingler (William Castle, 1959) or The Blob (Irving S. Yeaworth Jr., 1958), that could be invaded. Stuffed with entertainment technology, the suburban bedroom is now the centre of the network, no longer a communal space but a personal and intimate one, registering the sense of violation triggered by reciprocal forces all the more traumatically.11 The film dramatises this reciprocity of movement, the sudden proximity of something assumed to be on the far end of the network, with the Trickster character entering the suburban bedroom through, first, the order passed on via the telephone, then the mailed delivery of the game, then the computer disk inserted into a customised game console, and finally, the screen of the television. Moreover, the world of the film is rife with digital technologies. Michael videotapes himself during the game sessions; what he takes to be his murders are being broadcast on the evening news. This incessant replication of reality by digital media is further linked to a network of surveillance, at times in service of social control (the constant presence of patrolling police after the murders, a neighbourhood watch combing

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the area), at times evading this function in pursuit of more personal goals (Michael’s spying on his female neighbour). The military is absent from the film, though the maker of the Brainscan game (Scientific Perception Laboratories) does evoke the liminal space marked by the hyphen in the military-industrial complex. Still, 1990s suburban life is infused with no less technophobic anxiety than its 1950s precursor. To the extent that the 1990s also marked the entry of computer-generated digital effects into the visual vocabulary of American cinema, horror films from the period availed themselves of this technology in order to visualise both the dizzyingly transcendent mobility of the cinematic apparatus and the diegetic world it would produce on-screen. Taking their cue from the so-called ‘slitscan’ sequences designed by Douglas Trumbull for the final segment of Kubrick’s 2001, films like Shocker (Wes Craven, 1989) and Ghost in the Machine would feature spectacular sequences of visual entry into, and transport throughout, the technological network – the reciprocal trope to that of a character emerging from the technology. Brainscan alone repeats such a spectacular entry sequence three times in the course of its narrative. Analogous to the sequences in It Came from Outer Space in which Douglas’ camera travelled along the power lines criss-crossing the desert to suggest the aliens’ mobility through the technological infrastructure of modern America, disembodied serial killers and mad scientists are now granted a subjective point of view. Assuming their position, an equally disembodied ‘camera’ evokes feelings of dread arising from the penetration of guarded, secured, private, personal or even bodily spaces and supplementing whatever utopian liberation and transcendence might be contained in such sequences. In order to highlight one preliminary endpoint for the development of the techno-horror film, with emphasis on what I have been calling network anxiety, I would like to omit the most recent cycle of ‘digital horror’ films because other chapters in this book will comment extensively on it. I focus instead on Drew Goddard’s The Cabin in the Woods (2012), an entry into the techno-horror category which, for better or worse, reiterates many of the themes of network anxiety that reach all the way back to the paradigm’s formative period. To begin with, the film is an encyclopaedic collection of horror film tropes, from the 1950s to the most recent digital horror films of the post-millennial Asian horror cycle. Like 1950s films about the need for watching the skies in the face of alien invasion, The Cabin in the Woods is deeply invested in the exploration of networks of surveillance and communication. Like The Tingler and The Blob, it is interested in the complicity between horror film and those networks of social control. Like the countless scientists and research facilities that mixed and matched civilian science with military imperatives and discipline in 1950s films, the nameless organisation in The Cabin in the Woods is uncomfortably situated between the transnational corporate hive, the 24-hour news network’s preposterously hyper-inflated ‘situation room’,

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and the military command-and-control centre, this being a highly apt concept in an age when military and private contractors are functionally indistinguishable. Given the film’s attempt at metacommentary, the two script writers, Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon, have also added a mythical Lovecraftian subtext, legitimising the ritual slaughter of teenagers in horror films, that conceptualises the genre as a cultural software installed upon the networked hardware of cinema technology and global capitalist production and distribution. As did its many predecessors, The Cabin in the Woods exploits its audience’s unease about technologies harnessed to various networks of surveillance, control and consumption. Though its release predates the revelations launched by the whistle-blower Edward Snowden in 2013 about the US intelligence apparatus’ penetration of global communication networks, the technological and institutional surveillance the film imagines seems uncannily attuned to the realisation that Eisenhower’s military industrial complex has not merely dug in its heels after the end of the Cold War but, rather, has expanded its range. In other words, digital horror films of the last decade operate within the same paradigm as 1950s horror films. Despite all technological modifications, that paradigm has not changed. Together with Eisenhower, C. Wright Mills and other 1950s figures concerned about the networking of America, contemporary horror film audiences find themselves confronted with a more amorphous, and thus perhaps more pervasive, military tenor to all other available networks. It is hardly far-fetched to conclude that today’s social media, as much as the networked technology of the emergent military industrial complex in the 1950s, is merely a surface manifestation of something deeper, something beyond the passing moral panic about computers, video games, cyberspace or the digital per se. After all, when measured with hindsight against the standard of technological accuracy, or even just the ability to capture the essence of the emergent technology they render uncanny, many of the films listed above have fallen woefully short of ‘getting it’ or even just ‘getting it right’. What they do articulate with striking accuracy today is still what was at the heart of the 1950s horror films: that sense of the world as a densely interlinked network in which every player, moving or listening or watching or lurking, is subject to reciprocal forces. The canvas might have been enlarged, however, since the ‘American Century’, with the US appearing to yield to a larger, global set of networks. For, whilst, in the 1950s, Them! could confidently place the architectural landmarks of Washington D.C. outside the windows of the boardrooms where scientists and generals would plot the defence of the network, contemporary films would be hard-pressed to find a suitable substitute that would signal global centrality with equal assurance. To the degree, however, that new global networks at the end of the American Century still replicate the structural features initiated by World War II and entrenched by the Cold War in the US, 1950s horror films remain indebted to the metaphor of the network as a source and locus of a lasting modern anxiety.

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1. Concentrating less on the modernity of the phenomenon and more on the residually primitive within modern culture, Freud made a similar observation in his essay ‘The Uncanny’ (1919). 2. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999). Discussing the emergence of what she has called ‘the informational paradigm’, Hayles has suggested that a direct relationship exists between the understanding and use of concepts like ‘information’ and ‘network’, a relationship in which abstraction demands the indiscriminate rendering of dissimilar objects as ‘information’ before their arrangement can be understood as that of a ‘network’. Triggered by the enormous success of Donna Haraway’s ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ (1985), Hayles’ work belongs to an upsurge of discourse on cybernetics and the posthuman, the most enthusiastic and utopian of which is perhaps the work of Ray Kurzweil (The Age of Intelligent Machines (1990)). 3. Discussing the increasing influence and centrality of the military in post-World War II America, Mills uses the term ‘military metaphysics’ to describe ‘a nation whose elite and whose underlying population have accepted what can only be called a military definition of reality’. See C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 202, 198. 4. Historian James Ledbetter points out that ‘it is either ironic or contradictory or hypocritical that the man who first sounded a warning against a “military-industrial complex” was, by any definition, a leading figure in that complex’. James Ledbetter, Unwarranted Influence: Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Military Industrial Complex (London and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), p. 4. 5. Ledbetter, Unwarranted Influence, p. 179. 6. Wright Mills, The Power Elite, pp. 30–46. 7. Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety (New York: Random House, 2013), p. 129. Schlosser goes on to argue that ‘[t]he computerization of society’, the technology writer Frank Rose later observed, was essentially ‘a side effect of the computerization of war. [ . . . ] Driven by the needs of weapons designers and other military planners, the U.S. Department of Defence was soon responsible for most of the world’s investment in electronic computing’ (p. 152). 8. A similar elision of visual evidence also occurs in Stanley Kramer’s On the Beach (1959) and in Kubrick’s own 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), a film that, despite its canonical status within the science fiction genre, provides both striking iconography for technohorror and anticipates the visual representation of digital technology in later cinematic cycles with Douglas Trumbull’s groundbreaking slit-scan sequences. 9. One might wonder, however, if the revelations in the spring and summer of 2013, triggered by Edward Snowden’s information published in The Guardian and other mass media, about the ubiquity of US intelligence gathering, all in the context of a vastly expanded military industrial complex, will inspire a new cycle within horror film in which, analogous to 1950s horror films, the military will resurface

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Notes

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as an integral art of the paranoid anxieties about interconnectedness and digital mobility. 10. In the degree of social panic about teenagers’ computer use and the dangers lurking for them online, both films are highly reminiscent of 1950s horror films capitalising on anxieties about ‘juvenile delinquency’ like The Blob or Teenagers from Outer Space (Tom Graeff, 1959). 11. It is important to note that Brainscan does not turn against these genre precursors, or use them to launch a historical critique of the 1950s (as does, for example, Gary Ross’s Pleasantville (1998)), but insists on a continuity of the genre, which, in the context of my argument, I read as a gloss on the continuity of key elements in an otherwise changing historical context.

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2 Torture Pornopticon: (In)security Cameras, Self-Governance and Autonomy Steve Jones

‘Torture porn’ films are characterised by shared narrative themes: abduction, imprisonment and suffering.1 In this subgenre, individual hostages provide narrative focus and dominate the screen time. The subgenre’s prevalent visual tropes confirm that attention is squarely fixated on torture porn’s abductees rather than its abductors. This chapter examines one such set of motifs. More than 45 torture porn films feature CCTV (including Captivity (Roland Joff´e, 2007), Invitation Only / Jue ming pai dui (Kevin Ko, 2009) and Torture Room (Eric Forsberg, 2007). Photographic cameras, photographs, camcorders, super-8 cine-cameras and footage made to appear as if shot via those cameras feature just as heavily (see, for instance, Frontier(s) (Xavier Gens, 2007), I Spit on Your Grave (Steven R. Monroe, 2010), Penance ( Jake Kennedy, 2009) and Wolf Creek (Greg Mclean, 2005)). As the onscreen presence of cameras underlines, prisoners are constantly overseen by their jailors. In these films, closed-circuit cameras signify the looming threat posed by antagonists. Resultantly, the presence of cameras amplifies the protagonists’ fear and paranoia. Security cameras signify a bridging point between the jailors’ ability to observe and propensity to control their prey. Power is skewed in the all-seeing abductors’ favour, since they can monitor and counter any attempts to resist their oppressive rule. In these regards, torture porn’s prison-spaces are panoptical. Despite failing to encapsulate contemporary surveillance’s complexities, the Panopticon paradigm remains influential within surveillance studies because it captures essential truths 29

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about the psychologies of self-governance and intersubjectivity.2 Following Foucault’s influential appraisal, the Panopticon is synonymous with power-relations that are underpinned by sinister intent and the anxiety disempowerment causes.3 Accordingly, the Panopticon lends itself to understanding how surveillance operates in horror fiction’s fear-fuelled contexts. The Panopticon elucidates how and why terror is augmented by the presence of ‘all seeing’ cameras within torture porn’s diegetic prisons. This chapter will use torture porn’s panoptical spaces and captor-captive relationships as a springboard into examining how self-preservation, self-governance and self-centredness manifest in torture porn. The CCTV motif illuminates the relationship between two conflicting impulses: interdependence and independence. The former is inherent to socially situated selfhood and is epitomised by the compulsion to preserve social cohesion even when the result impinges on the agent’s individual inclinations and prospects. Independence, in contrast, is epitomised by the will to autonomy and the desire to entirely govern oneself. Since interdependence compels one to act primarily for and with others (rather than for oneself ), the ideals of autonomy and interdependence are divergent. Consequently, intersubjective beings are torn between these two sets of conflicting impulses. In torture porn’s panoptical settings, such inner struggles are exposed in an exaggerated fashion. This chapter begins by outlining what the Panopticon is and how it manifests in torture porn. The chapter’s second section will focus on self-governance and fear, delineating complications that arise within the Panopticon paradigm. The concluding section will develop that commentary by reflecting on broader concerns evoked by torture porn’s rendition of surveillance: namely, that constant supervision may stimulate self-invested paranoia and so could have a deleterious effect on social bonds. Beyond the realm of fiction films, digital surveillance operates on such an enormous scale that it appears to be elusive and indefatigable. The extent to which digital surveillance impacts on individuals’ lives and behaviours remains unclear to the vast majority of the populace, and this is one reason that surveillance evokes trepidation. Contemporary horror reifies this nebulous fear, offering microcosms in which individual fear and concrete harm are actualised. Thus, torture porn’s rendition of surveillance offers insights into how power operates in contemporary digital horror more broadly; such anxieties abound in horror texts set against the context of ‘fear culture’.

‘Someone is watching’:4 The Panopticon The Panopticon is a form of penal architecture designed to make prisoners permanently visible to guard staff. Foucault’s influential essay on the Panopticon highlights the powerful dynamic that underpins Bentham’s design. For Foucault, the inmate’s ‘permanent visibility assures the automatic functioning of power’.5 The threat of being viewed is a potent deterrent to wrongdoing: the inmate 30

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understands that they are likely to be caught if they engage in prohibited activity. Concurrently, the guard-station is hidden behind meshwork in Bentham’s design, meaning detainees cannot tell when they are being watched or by whom. Despite temporal and technological distance from the seventeenth-century leper colonies to which Foucault refers, his description of ‘strict spatial partitioning’, whereby individuals are ‘placed under the authority of a syndic’ and ‘forbidden to leave on pain of death’, is uncannily echoed in torture porn’s ‘locked box’ environments.6 The bathroom in which Adam (Leigh Whannell) and Lawrence (Cary Elwes) are imprisoned in Saw ( James Wan, 2004) is an archetypal example: the hostages are detained in a single room that is surveyed by CCTV, and they are punished (electrocuted) when they deviate from stipulated ‘rules’. This ethos is augmented in various subsequent torture porn films. In Coffin (Kipp Tribble and Derik Wingo, 2011) and Meadowoods (Scott Phillips, 2010), captives are studied via closed-circuit cameras fitted within burial caskets. In these intensified ‘locked box’ circumstances, protagonists are unable to hide even the smallest indiscretions. In House with 100 Eyes ( Jay Lee and Jim Roof, 2011) the ‘locked box’ space is larger (an entire residence), but the quantity of cameras is amplified: the locale is a ‘soundproof, escape-proof [ . . . ] cage’, which is monitored from ‘all angles’. Indeed, numerous torture porn films use surveillance motifs to confirm that the antagonists could be anywhere and can see everything. For example, Vacancy 2: The Final Cut (Eric Bross, 2008) centres on motel owners who make snuff films in which the guests ‘star’ as victims. The stalking sequences are interpolated by numerous shots recorded via CCTV cameras and the murderers’ camcorder. These shots are marked by shifts in aesthetic: green-filtered shots and lightly distorted, treble-heavy audio are used to denote the switch to camcorder footage, for instance. Yet, that literal surveillance infects the film’s aesthetic approach more generally. Even when no camcorders or CCTV cameras are present in the diegetic space, the film-camera adopts the free-roaming hand-held shots and unsteady crash zooms that characterise the killers’ unprofessional camcorder footage. Emulating their viewpoint in this way implies that the killers’ sovereignty is totalising, since it pervades Vacancy 2’s form. Surveillance is rarely covert in torture porn: hostage-takers actively foster the impression that they see all. Early in Breathing Room (John Suits and Gabriel Cowan, 2008), a jailor disguised as an abductee feigns electrocution after he breaks one of the arbitrary rules imposed upon the captives (crossing a line on the ground). Unaware of the deceit, the prisoners believe they are under unerring surveillance and modify their behaviour accordingly. Thus, when attempting to remove their ‘electrified’ neck collars, they cower in one corner of the cell waiting for the CCTV camera to momentarily pan away. In these moments, over half the frame is dominated by the rotating surveillance camera, underscoring its symbolic supremacy. The detainees’ adaptation to circumstance is indicative of how the Panopticon operates. Once established in concept, the hostages maintain the

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power-skew that disadvantages them: their modified behaviour confers power onto the jailor. As Jackson, Gharavi and Klobas observe, the panoptical arrangement is designed to ensure that ‘surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action’.7 Ergo, it matters little if the abductor is able to see all. In Death Factory: Bloodletting (Sean Tretta, 2008), lead captor Denny (Noah Todd) proclaims that ‘there are cameras everywhere, we see everything’. Despite being known as ‘Big Brother’, Denny’s claim is exaggerated: audio is not monitored and one camera ceases to function. Ignorant of such failures, captives such as RubberLover (David C. Hayes) corroborate Denny’s supremacy by affirming that they are trapped by ‘men who like control’. His assessment is immediately followed by a shot of Denny watching the CCTV displays, which underscores the connection between RubberLover’s estimation and Denny’s authority. Being seen to be omnipresent conveys that resistance is impossible. Cameras manifest the hostage-taker’s apparent omnipresence and confirm their ostensible omniscience. Yet, the abductees cannot verify when, or even if, they are being watched. The knowledge-bias confers power onto the jailor. Since the jailor already has physical rule over the prisoner – having captured them – the abductor’s apparent omniscience-qua-sovereignty is translated into potential omnipotence. Because they internalise their captors’ presumed and unerring judgement, hostages are ‘caught up in a power situation of which they themselves are the bearers’.8 The Panopticon functions in lieu of the oppressors’ continuous, explicit presence because captives auto-regulate their behaviours. This principle is evident in 99 Pieces (Anthony Falcon, 2007), for instance. After his wife is abducted by an unknown assailant, Joshua (Anthony Falcon) is told he must complete a puzzle in order to save her. At the hostage-taker’s bidding, and out of fear of potential ramifications, Joshua turns his own home into a prison, boarding up his doors and windows. The jailor assures Joshua that his every move is being examined and failure to obey his rules will result in a loss of ‘points’: an arbitrary currency Joshua must use to purchase survival essentials (food, water or electricity). Joshua adheres to the system, self-regulating by deciding how to spend his points-currency. This regime of internalised management illustrates the pernicious power-relations the Panopticon instils. Joshua’s submission illustrates that, once established in the concrete of one’s immediate environment, power-biases are compelling. As Foucault has it, once the power-dynamic has been established, it requires minimal enforcing because visibility itself ‘is a trap’.9 Even in torture porn’s explicitly trap-like environs, minimal enforcement is required to maintain authority. For example, Hunger’s (Steven Hentges, 2009) nameless jailor has no direct contact with the abductees. The prisoners have no means of comprehending who is tormenting them or why. The hostages compensate by internalising their abductor’s authority, anticipating his desires. After receiving a carving knife and a note stating that ‘the average

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human body cannot last for more than thirty days without food’, they secondguess what the captor requires of them. Lead protagonist Jordan (Lori Heuring) assumes that ‘he wants’ them to eat each other: ‘you know that’s why he has us down here’.10 Luke’s ( Joe Egender) response – ‘what other choice do we have?’ – conveys his adherence to that presumed desire, even though no direct command has been stipulated. Once imprisoned, the hostage-taker does little to coerce the hostages: they become co-authors of their own oppression.

‘You may not see any threat, but there are threats all around you’:11 Fear and Self-Governance Irrespective of how clear-cut torture porn’s panoptical power-dynamics are (at least initially), the implications that follow are murkier. Two paradoxes stem from panoptical dominion as it is established in torture porn. The first relates to the level of attention paid to the abductees. Imprisoned protagonists are inspected in detail via the jailor’s surveillance set-up. In many cases, torture is also designed specifically for each abductee. For example, the prisoners in Are You Scared? (Andy Hurst, 2006) are subjected to their ‘innermost fears’, meaning that elaborate torture devices are manufactured exclusively for each detainee. So, Brandon (Brad Ashten), who is achluophobic (afraid of the dark), is forced to traverse a pitch black room rigged with tripwires that will trigger numerous assault rifles. In such cases, the jailor’s exaggerated interest in the hostages is perversely flattering: prisoners are connoted to be worthy of the abductor’s maniacal scrutiny, which is reified by the CCTV cameras. The abductor’s transfixion on individual abductees might seem like the stuff of egoistic fantasy – of adoration and worship – were it not for the fact that victims are destroyed by their captor’s fascination. Such a threatening, yet devoted, focus is evoked in Saw when John (Tobin Bell) asks Paul (Mike Butters) whether his suicide attempt was genuine or whether he just wanted ‘some attention’. The attention Paul consequently receives entails his entrapment in John’s lethal barbed wire snare. In torture porn’s panoptical spaces, imprisonment simultaneously bolsters and damages the detainee. These forms of emphasis imply that hostages stimulate their own victimisation. Although they face death, then, the captives’ survival is also required to sustain the hostage-taker’s agenda. Moreover, abductees are required to damage themselves on the jailor’s behalf. The second paradox arises out of that conflict. The Panopticon model requires the prisoner to entirely submit to their jailor’s ostensible omnipotence, relinquishing autonomous control. Simultaneously, the Panopticon foists maintenance of that subordination onto the detainee, who is required to self-govern. In many instances, torture porn’s abductees are unable to fulfil the tasks set for them; where this is the case, the captive’s powerlessness affirms the captor’s absolute control.12 33

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Hostages are not only coerced into self-oppression but are also expected to internalise culpability for their suffering, regardless of the degree to which they can shape their circumstances. In Senseless (Simon Hynd, 2008), Eliott ( Jason Behr) is captured and tortured because his lifestyle epitomises affluence, freedom and indulgence. As his abductor, Blackbeard ( Joe Ferrara), has it, they make ‘an example of ’ Eliott, broadcasting the torture Eliott undergoes. Blackbeard refers to Eliott’s ‘punishment’ as a process of ‘collaboration’, asking Eliott to ‘work a little more closely with’ his captors; ‘practice your screaming, please’ (emphasis in original). Despite frequently trying to fight against his hostage-takers, flashbacks reveal that Eliott comprehends his imprisonment as karmic punishment for events unconnected to his torture. For example, Eliott recollects that as a boy, he stole money from a blind youth. The gap between Eliott’s personal guilt and the torture he undergoes is bridged in Senseless. Just before he is deafened, Eliott recalls confessing his offence against the blind boy to the local community. Blackbeard’s subsequent pronouncement – ‘[n]ever forget what you have done [ . . . ] [Y]ou are not innocent’ – appears to refer to Eliott’s minor childhood infringement because the flashback is interjected during the torture sequence. Eliott uses his unrelated wrongdoing to comprehend the ‘senseless’ punishment he is subjected to. In this regard, Eliott does indeed become a ‘collaborator’ in his own punishment. In the subgenre’s scenarios, then, it is not entirely clear who has greater control over the captive: the jailor or the abductee themselves. In Hunger, that conflict is explicitly articulated by one prisoner, Anna (Lea Kohl): ‘I decide who lives or dies, so who’s controlling who[m]?’ The paradoxes are unsettling, not least since fear is underscored and simplistic resolutions are debunked in torture porn films. Although torture motivates the subgenre’s characters insofar as threat creates urgent circumstances and requires immediate action, the subgenre’s protagonists are also impelled by two competing practices: obedience (bowing to or internalising another’s will) and independent, autonomous self-governance. Although we perceive ourselves as autonomous individuals, we are prone to complying with forces that persuade us to act in ways that we otherwise would not independently choose to. When asserted with enough power, seemingly independent beings can be convinced to behave in ways that augment their own disempowerment. By regularly engaging with this theme, torture porn dramatises a set of ideas akin to Lusztig’s concern that self-governing citizens ‘are vulnerable to the despotic impulses’ of authority figures, and ‘are susceptible [ . . . ] to socially akratic preferences’.13 Indeed, torture porn’s protagonists frequently relinquish ‘higher’ moral values in favour of immediately pressing short-term goals: survival and escape. Doing so routinely entails abductees turning on one another, sacrificing fellow captives in order to preserve their own safety. In torture porn’s threat-laden panoptical contexts, the ability to self-govern commonly manifests via the will to self-preserve. Where captives are forced to choose whether to save themselves or

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their fellow captives, interdependency typically buckles to self-invested paranoia in these narratives. Detainees are often strangers to one another and frequently cannot apprehend why they have been abducted. Faced with such uncertainty, it is unsurprising that captives should be impelled by what they can apprehend: the pressing (presumed) danger they face. For example, despite being told that their objective is to ‘heighten [their] loyalty and cooperativeness’, the abductees in Death Tube: Broadcast Murder Show / Satsujin Dousa Site (Yohei Fukuda, 2010) prioritise their own survival. As one protagonist observes, ‘competition inevitably makes winners and losers’: had they all refused to compete in the life-and-death games laid before them, they would all have survived. Such an agreement would require collective solidarity and mutual trust. As soon as one prisoner breaks rank, the group bond dissolves. Indeed, as Death Tube progresses, the detainees increasingly seek to ensure their survival by deceiving and outright attacking one another. Death Tube’s surveillance-based ‘broadcast murder show’ relies on, and relishes in, their back-stabbing. Death Tube’s closed community of self-effacing strangers echoes the visions of fracture found in recent scholarship regarding surveillance and autonomy, including Oliver’s description of a ‘paranoid culture where power is both everywhere and nowhere oppressing us’, which leads individuals to ‘exclude others’, and Elmer and Opel’s account of ‘inevitable [ . . . ] invisible’ attack waged on a ‘survivor society’, in which ‘each individual’s responsibility’ is to ‘ignor[e] their ‘erroneous’ instinct to help others’.14 One Death Tube hostage is the mouthpiece for this mindset, flatly declaring, ‘I want to survive, I don’t care about others’. The logical conclusion of that impetus is even more disquieting. Many captives do not just subjugate themselves or fail to help others: they also harm fellow abductees on their jailors’ behalf. The abductor in Panic Button (Chris Crow, 2011) makes no direct physical contact with the prisoners and even his verbal exchanges are mediated via a computer-animated alligator. The captor’s supremacy is expressed via seemingly boundless knowledge about the detainees’ personal lives, gleaned by data-mining ‘readouts of every website [they] have visited’. This bank of prior surveillance-based knowledge is inextricable from visual scrutiny the hostages face in the narrative present. For example, lead protagonist Jo (Scarlett Alice Johnson) pleads with fellow captives to follow the hostage-taker’s instructions because ‘[he] can see us’. The abductees relinquish to the jailor’s authority, asserting that ‘he’s in control here, there’s nothing we can do’. The protagonists are not simply passive self-subjugators, however. The prisoners confirm the jailor’s sovereignty by undertaking some agency in their oppression. When the abductor threatens to kill individuals from each detainee’s social networking ‘friends’ list, the hostages agree to attack one another. The move demands that the captives choose between their established ‘real-world’ community bonds and their immediate grouping (the community of abductees). By framing these as mutually exclusive,

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the captor ensures that the prisoners do not pool their collective might to facilitate their escape. Although they seek to defend their ties to existent communities, conspiring with their hostage-taker is a self-effacing gesture. The compliant detainees fail to apprehend why communities are worth defending. Abduction enervates the hostage by extracting them from their communal support systems, in which power is (relatively) evenly distributed. Creating an environment in which distrust is rife further enfeebles the isolated captives. By distancing themselves from the other abductees, the prisoners focus power onto the jailor and away from the trapped group. The surveillance apparatus signals that the jailor has the capacity to focus on the hostage’s movements in minute detail. The abductor’s attention is physically manifested via CCTV cameras, the obviousness and tangibility of which distract from what is not subject to scrutiny within the panoptical setting. If the captives studied themselves in as much detail as the captor does, the protagonists would attain greater control over their situation. The abductees do not simply suffer because they are oppressed, but because they forsake self-control by opting to engage in violent, contra-social behaviours out of fear. Torture porn’s principal source of horror stems from instances of torture. Even so, torture is facilitated by group fracture and the self-invested paranoia that a panoptical dynamic inculcates.

‘We’re on our own’:15 Fear and Communal Decline For Foucault, the Panopticon was a metaphor for how society is shaped by disciplinary structures. In torture porn, panoptical prison-spaces also underscore the relationships between the individual, power and community. These films typically represent self-castigation as inseparable from the punishment of others. Indeed, the subgenre’s surveillance motifs code even the most private, surreptitious, individualised wrongdoing as having a ‘public’ dimension. Torture may occur in closed-off spaces in Are You Scared?, Panic Button, Senseless, Untraceable (Gregory Hoblit, 2008), and Death Tube, but the surveillance footage is also broadcasted. In the latter three films, the public interact with, and spur on, the prisoners’ torture. Pace Taskale’s vision of ‘the new terror’, which is ‘highly invisible, offscene’, torture porn frequently reifies detainees’ anguish as public spectacle: the ‘new terror’ is decidedly visible.16 Although the subgenre’s exhibitions of agony signal an increased public interest in spectacle, the torture is imbued with a regulatory character. Cruelty is certainly displayed, yet the subgenre is concerned with unpicking the effects discipline has on the diegetic populace. In torture porn, forcible castigation is less impactful than coercive terror. The latter is augmented by the panoptical regime, which obfuscates sources of hazard. Torture porn’s self-empowered, anti-communal, all-pervasive hostage-takers are veiled not only by their irrational, even incomprehensible, motives, but also by their anonymity. From the hostage’s perspective, the jailor is unknowable because 36

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he or she is represented by the cold, erring gaze of CCTV cameras. This apparatus reveals nothing of the jailor’s location or objectives. Moreover, the captives commonly face unexpected danger from within the prison-space because fellow abductees are coerced into enacting violence on the abductor’s behalf. This trait is magnified in films such as Saw II (Darren Lynn Bousman, 2005), The 7th Hunt ( Jon Cohen, 2009) and Captivity, where torturers present themselves as fellow prisoners. Such deception fosters paranoia. Being unable to apprehend where threats might arise from, everything becomes a potential stimulus for anxiety for the detainees trapped in torture porn’s panoptical spaces. In this regard, torture porn feeds from the notion that we are currently living in a ‘culture of fear’: a shared milieu of terror that has no single, identifiable cause.17 Notwithstanding the impetus to curb or at least discourage immoral behaviours via widespread CCTV, surveillance intensifies the kind of anxiety ‘fear culture’ refers to; as Fox contends, ‘[r]outine surveillance creates an abiding sense of communal unease’.18 There are four reasons why surveillance inspires such trepidation. First, surveillance is indiscriminate. The security camera captures footage of anyone who falls before its lens. Greater coverage (more cameras) increases one’s chance of exposure. Surveillance treats all persons as equals, albeit in the punitive sense: the entire populace is placed under suspicion. Second, constant supervision encourages self-consciousness rather than social awareness. There is no need to monitor the behaviour of others if their behaviours are being overseen via surveillance, while there is every need to continually ensure that one’s own indiscretions are not caught on camera. Although everyone is treated as a suspect under the CCTV camera’s non-selective purview, those individuals who intentionally infringe established social rules already know that they do so. In contrast, one cannot necessarily identify if anyone else is covertly misbehaving, especially if one is encouraged to favour selfexamination. Since everyone is treated as a suspect and each individual is cognisant of their own guilt-status, one may presume that other members of the populace are the ‘real’ infringers who should be watched. Third, then, continual monitoring fosters wariness of others. Fourth, because one cannot know who is lurking behind the surveillance lens, their motives are also likely to garner mistrust. The cumulative result is that one can only know oneself, and so no one else can be fully trusted. A further cause for anxiety stems from the as yet uncertain repercussions of such supervision; as Werth postulates, ‘how individuals respond to the State’s efforts to regulate their conduct and govern their personhood remains undertheorised’.19 Where theorisation has been advanced, it adds to fear culture’s overarching unease. Several scholars have suggested that continual monitoring is likely to erode fundamental values, including privacy, dignity and liberty.20 These concerns are articulated in torture porn’s scripts. For instance, in Senseless, Eliott’s request for ‘privacy’ is refuted by Blackbeard’s declaration that they ‘are broadcasting [Eliott] to the world’. For Hunger’s Jordan, the other hostages lose their dignity when

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they engage in ‘savage’ acts of cannibalism. Attacks on the protagonists’ liberty are foregrounded by the subgenre’s characteristic focus on imprisonment. Even more disconcerting is the possibility that panoptical surveillance might erode autonomy. As Epright posits, autonomy is inextricable from the ability to govern one’s values and having to take responsibility for one’s choices.21 Comprehensive surveillance implies that the individuals surveyed (that is, all individuals) are incapable of governing their decisions. Subsequently, governance is taken out of the individual’s hands. Torture porn demonstrates why such powershifts matter by depicting monitored individuals engaging in torture and even murder. Since those individuals are torn between the self-preservation instinct, their moral principles and the coercive power-structure to which they submit, the captives are neither fully oppressed nor fully autonomous. By muddying autonomy in this way, these films underline that it is not clear whether abductees are responsible for any cruelty they enact. Thus, rather than valorising brutality, torture porn offers a warning about the potentially damaging repercussions of ‘fear culture’. As I have proposed above, torture porn’s narratological focus is squarely centred on individual abductees; their torturers are relatively anonymous in comparison. In this regard, the filmperspective is typically aligned with the captor’s point-of-view, but only insofar as the captives are continually monitored. This is not to suggest that the captives are objectified. Indeed, this perspective underlines the hostages’ fear as they are subjected to the whims of a seemingly omnipotent, unidentifiable jailor. This perceived power-bias is reified by the panoptical apparatus that renders the protagonists visible and vulnerable. However, danger frequently stems from within the community of prisoners rather than from without. This arrangement is ubiquitous in torture porn films, which fast became one of the prevailing forms of horror fiction in the 2000s. There are clear reasons why this particular set of tropes became so popular during this period. These films resonate with the kinds of fear that contemporary digital surveillance instils. The latter is encapsulated in, for example, the outrage that followed the discovery in 2013 that the US National Security Agency has been engaged in mass surveillance on a global scale, accessing communication data via its PRISM programme.22 The programme epitomises panoptical power-bias inasmuch as those collecting data and the purposes of data gathering are inaccessible to anyone who is subject to surveillance: while the PRISM programme was classified ‘top secret’ (ultra-private), individual privacy is infringed by its operation. This incident characterises a broader uncertainty caused by digital surveillance and the extent to which individual liberty and security might be threatened by surveillance techniques. Such anxieties are themselves part of a broader milieu of uncertainty that is collectivised under the banner ‘fear culture’. As thinkers such as Furedi and Gardner have proposed, widespread fear can erode one’s ability to rationally assess the consequences of one’s actions.23 Ergo, by skewing one’s ability to gauge risk, fear culture may increase the populace’s

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propensity for engaging in risk activities. In torture porn, such activities include unthinkable acts of violence. This literal aggression has a further symbolic function. Bloodshed signifies the damage done to communal ties, which are ripped apart by self-motivated violence and the ruination of concepts such as autonomy, liberty and equality, each of which are pre-requisites for functional intersubjectivity. This is not simply to say that torture porn promotes communal decline by depicting it. In these films, infringements on autonomy, liberty and equality are sources of horror. Torture porn’s exaggerated representations of insecurity imply that stability is rooted in two elements that are lost in the panoptical system. First, the conditions allowing individuals to make free choices and take full responsibility for their actions must be defended, because autonomy is dependent on such circumstances. Second, individuals should reflect on their position relative to the powered-structures that situate them. Greater awareness regarding both one’s dependency on the surrounding community and the limits of one’s ability to selfgovern are crucial in developing intersubjectivity. In short, being aware of what is at stake in relinquishing to reactionary impulses is a form of self-defence (in both senses), since it means upholding the conditions that undergird autonomy. Given that the bedrock of stable sociality is interdependent communality rooted in a robust conception of self-ownership, torture porn’s panoptical cameras do not just capture individuals fighting for survival; they also capture struggles for the survival of individuality. This is not to say that torture porn roots for solipsistic nominalism. As Killmister notes, nominalists present ‘group membership [as] a handicap we should [ . . . ] shed’ in favour of ‘pure’ (autonomous) selfhood.24 Missing from this formulation is the recognition that autonomous selfhood is not possible without intersubjectivity because we are social beings. Under pressure, torture porn’s protagonists typically undertake a nominalist attitude, yet their actions are the product of reactionary paranoia and result in destructive violence. In conclusion, by accentuating the impact such power might have on autonomy, torture porn offers warnings about where contemporary fear culture and surveillance cultures could lead. In these films, imperilled prisoners are focal points for diegetic CCTV cameras and extradiegetic film cameras alike. However, that does not mean torture porn contributes to communal decline by inviting ‘the audience to take a voyeuristic, sadistic and quasi-sexual delight in violence and mutilation’ or encouraging audiences to engage in behaviours that contribute to ‘the coarsening of society’, as critics have variously proposed.25 By concentrating attention on individuals in peril, torture porn spotlights that power originates at the micro-level, thereby contesting the vast, indeterminate nature of force in ‘fear culture’. Since panoptical supremacy requires internalisation, the power-structure begins with (and within) each detainee. Torture porn underlines that internalisation necessitates self-subjugation. Ultimately, the subgenre warns that individual complicity and weakness are more terrifying than outright oppression, since the latter is facilitated by the former.

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Notes 1. For a full dissection of torture porn and related issues, see Steve Jones, Torture Porn: Popular Horror after Saw (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 2. See Kevin D. Haggerty, ‘Tear down the walls: on demolishing the Panopticon’, in David Lyon (ed.), Theorizing Surveillance: the Panopticon and Beyond (New York: Routledge, 2011), pp. 23–45; Stephen Graham and David Wood, ‘Digitizing surveillance: categorization, space, inequality’, Critical Social Policy xxiii/2 (2003), pp. 227–48; Jan Kietzmann and Ian Angell, ‘Panopticon revisited’, Communications of the ACM liii/6 (2010), pp. 135–8. 3. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1995). 4. Kelly (Alethea Kutscher) in Are You Scared? 5. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 201. 6. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 195. 7. Paul Jackson, Hosein Gharavi and Jane Klobas, ‘Technologies of the self: virtual work and the inner Panopticon’, Information Technology & People xix/3 (2006), pp. 219–43 (pp. 221–2). 8. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 201. 9. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 200. See also Michel Foucault, ‘The eye of power’, in Colin Gordon (ed.), Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972– 1977 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), pp. 146–65 (pp. 152–7). Here, Foucault makes the distinction that Bentham ‘thinks of a visibility organised entirely around a dominating, overseeing gaze’. Foucault shares the view that the gaze replaces the need for physical violence but conceives of the panoptical system as ‘a machine in which everyone [observer and observed] is caught’. 10. Emphasis in original. 11. John to Jeff (Angus Macfadyen) in Saw III (Darren Lynn Bousman, 2006). 12. This is a recurring trope in the Saw series. On this trait, see Steve Jones, ‘Twisted pictures: morality, nihilism and symbolic suicide’, in John Wallis and James Aston (eds), To See the Saw Movies: Essays on Torture Porn and Post-9/11 Horror ( Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013), pp. 105–22. 13. Michael Lusztig, ‘Charter creep: creeping precommitment and the threat to liberal republicanism’, Canadian Journal of Political Science xlii/3 (2010), pp. 689–709 (pp. 689– 90). 14. Kelly Oliver, ‘Bodies against the law: Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror’, Continental Philosophy Review xlii/1 (2009), pp. 63–80 (p. 68); Greg Elmer and Andy Opel, ‘Preempting panoptic surveillance: surviving the inevitable War on Terror’, in Lyon (ed.), Theorizing Surveillance, pp. 139–60 (pp. 145–9). 15. Luke in Hunger. 16. Ali Riza Taskale, ‘Clash of nihilisms’, in Mikko Canini (ed.), Domination of Fear (New York: Rodopi, 2010), pp. 79–103 (p. 84). 17. Mikko Canini, ‘Introduction’, in Canini (ed.), Domination of Fear, pp. vii–xiv. Canini borrows the term from Frank Furedi. See endnote 23 in this chapter.

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18. Richard Fox, ‘Someone to watch over us?: back to the Panopticon’, Criminal Justice i/3 (2001), pp. 251–76 (p. 261). 19. Robert Werth, ‘I do what I’m told, sort of: reformed subjects, unruly citizens, and parole’, Theoretical Criminology xvi/3 (2012), pp. 329–46 (p. 329). 20. Ibid., p. 330; Fox, ‘Someone to watch over us?’, p. 260; Suzy Killmister, ‘Why group membership matters: a critical typology’, Ethnicities xii/3 (2012), pp. 251–69 (p. 258); Josiah Ober, ‘Democracy’s dignity’, American Political Science Review cvi/4 (2012), pp. 827–46 (p. 827). 21. M. Carmela Epright, ‘Coercing future freedom: consent and capacities for autonomous choice’, Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics xxxviii/4 (2010), pp. 799–806 (p. 801). 22. For information on the incident, see Christopher Kuner, Fred H. Cate, Christopher Millard and Dan Jerker B. Svantesso, ‘PRISM and privacy: will this change everything?’, International Data Privacy Law iii/4 (2013), pp. 217–9; The Guardian’s ‘NSA Files’ sub-site. Available at http://www.theguardian.com/world/the-nsa-files (accessed 10 January 2014). See also NSA’s statement to the press about its activities, published on 31 October 2013. Available at http://www.nsa.gov/public info/ press room/2013/NSA Activities Valid FI Targets.pdf (accessed 10 January 2014). 23. Frank Furedi, Culture of Fear Revisited (London: Continuum, 2007), p. xviii; Dan Gardner, The Science of Fear (London: Dutton, 2008). 24. Killmister, ‘Why group membership matters’, p. 255. 25. Chris Tookey, ‘Antichrist: the man who made this horrible, misogynistic film needs to see a shrink’, Daily Mail (24 July 2009); Amanda Platell, ‘A punch in the face of decency’, Daily Mail (17 July 2008), p. 15.

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3 Uncanny Cameras and Network Subjects Steen Christiansen

Horror films have consistently interrogated the emergence of new media technologies and, in the past two decades, digital technologies have been the locus of a different range of terrors.1 One recent example, Apartment 143 (Carles Torrens 2012), is a found footage ghost film which employs a wide variety of image technologies throughout the investigation, allowing for two primary insights. Firstly, the materiality of media matters, as these materialities impinge on human being and subjectivity. Secondly, surveillance technologies have become an integral part of contemporary culture. In this chapter, I will propose the concept of uncanny cameras as a way of understanding changes in cinematic embodiment, namely, the way that our sense perceptions are entangled with media technologies. With the ubiquity of surveillance cameras and the proliferation of non-human perspectives and points of view, we have come upon a new and different relation to how our perception is structured. Such changes in cinematic embodiment are having further consequences in terms of human subjectivities. As network technologies take on prominence, we find a transformation of contemporary subjectivity which challenges the sense of bodily unity we have often assumed we have. Instead, it becomes more evident that our perception is distributed across network technologies rather than through a centred bodily perception. This distribution of sense perceptions is what produces the network subject, a subject which is plural and heterogeneous. I have chosen Apartment 143 as my case study, since this film enacts the changing relation between humans and media technologies, and it suggests that the distribution of our senses across the network inevitably creates a different form 42

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of self and subjectivity. As network media reconfigure human subjectivity, the clearest shift comes in the fracturing of what has, for centuries, been a sense of a unified self. What Apartment 143 and other surveillance horror films do is to recast this unified self and point out that we are undergoing a cultural shift from serial media to networked media, one which, in turn, institutes a networked self. This is the digital nightmare of these films: human subjectivities are dispersed across media technologies, entangling the sense of self with those same technologies. The surveillance horror genre explores the structure of feeling of network surveillance, where the only option is to submit oneself to ‘sousveillance’ – the act of selfsurveillance. Apartment 143 reveals self-surveillance as a process of becomingmultiple from the inside. Apartment 143 sets up sousveillance as the needed response to a haunted home; the film is the story of a family haunted by a ghost. The father Alan White (Kai Lennox) and his two children Caitlin (Gia Mantegna) and Benjamin (Damian Roman) experienced odd events at their old house after the death of their mother. In order to get away from these occurrences and lead a normal family life, Alan decides to move away, but the strange events keep occurring. A parapsychological team is called in to help, sets up cameras and other surveillance equipment, and begins conducting interviews and tests. The film consists of these interviews, tests and discussions between the team members Dr Helzer (Michael O’Keefe), Ellen (Fiona Glascott) and Heseltine (Francesc Garrido). The supernatural episodes become more and more intense, climaxing in an Exorcist-like scene where Caitlin levitates above her bed while objects and people are thrown about her room. Before that, we have learned that the mother was unstable, that Alan resents her mental illness and that the mother died in a car crash while trying to find her children, something for which Caitlin resents her father. Dr Helzer concludes that there is, in fact, no haunting but poltergeist activity due to the daughter’s developing schizophrenia. As the investigation concludes and the team packs their gear, a single camera is left on for the police to use in their investigation. The film ends with the sudden appearance of the mother’s ghost crawling across the ceiling towards the camera, revealing that Dr Helzer is wrong and the family is, in fact, being haunted by the vengeful mother. In order to unpack how sousveillance reconfigures our relation to media technologies, I will first draw on the work of Jeffrey Sconce and Tom Gunning, who both suggest that the uncanny clings to emerging media. Then, I will argue that the surveillance cameras of Apartment 143 discorrelate our sense of cinematic embodiment. This argument develops from Shane Denson’s work on digital cameras’ ability to transform human-technology relations, a concept Denson takes from Don Ihde, a prominent philosopher of technology. Taken together, these arguments reveal how contemporary horror films underline anxieties around digital media and their effects, revealing in Apartment 143 a deep-seated concern for how media technologies impact our sense perceptions.

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Jeffrey Sconce, in his book Haunted Media (2000), points out that occult discourses have always proliferated around media technologies and that subjectivities are rewritten in this discursive space.2 While ‘virtual’ and ‘fragmentation’ were the watchwords of the late 1990s and early 2000s, those reconfigurations have, by now, been superseded by the watchwords ‘connections’ and ‘networked selves’. Sconce’s haunted media thesis is that, when our perceptions are extended by media technologies, this extension inevitably brings with it aspects of the occult and supernatural. Tom Gunning sees a similar connection between media technologies and the uncanny when he points out that, when technologies are new, they are first perceived with a sense of wonder due to their unfamiliarity. This sense of wonder is overcome through exposure, but a trace of the uncanny remains attached to these new technologies.3 Gunning emphasises how our relation to media technologies necessarily changes over time, as we develop strategies for integrating them into our being-in-the-world. Yet, the wonder of these new technologies is inherently fused with that of the uncanny. Following the same phenomenological track, Shane Denson argues that we are currently undergoing a shift in the relation between cinema and viewer, primarily in the move away from a correlation between the cinematic body and the viewer’s body – digital images can do things we could never do and see things we could never see.4 Denson’s conception of cinematic relations originates in Don Ihde’s general concept of human-technology relations, which Ihde discusses at length in his book Technology and the Lifeworld (1990). Here, Ihde proposes three basic human-technology relations: embodiment relations, hermeneutic relations and alterity relations. Embodiment relations occur when we employ a technology whose mediation is entirely transparent, like, for example, glasses.5 Hermeneutic relations depend on learning cultural codes and conventions in order to see through them to the world of the text, like reading.6 Alterity relations, which is what concerns me the most here, occurs when humans ‘relate positively or presententially to technologies’.7 In other words, an alterity relation occurs when technology becomes the object of fascination in itself, such as in the case of toys or automata. For Ihde, alterity relations turn the media technology into an other, thereby obscuring its artificial status through fascination.8 We find here the process that Bolter and Grusin call immediacy and hypermediacy, where media deny their presence and the act of mediation.9 While Ihde only briefly acknowledges that we have to learn how to use media, this historical dimension is laid out in Bolter and Grusin’s work, where remediation becomes the central function of all media. As we learn to use media, they fade into the background, but, as Gunning pointed out, there is always a sense of the uncanny lurking behind their transparent immediacy. For Denson, the arrival of digital cameras means that mediation is no longer a matter of a subject perceiving an object but, instead, a process which ‘swells with processual affectivity to engulf both’.10 This is very close to Ihde’s embodiment

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relation fantasy (the magical transformation of a media technology into me) and it is also reminiscent of Gunning’s sense of wonder at a new media technology, even if that wonder may, at times, become annoyance and frustration. Denson moves beyond a strict phenomenological approach in his emphasis on discorrelation, since bodily correlation is broken with the use of crazy cameras which can occupy embodied positions which the human body cannot. Instead, in the case of Apartment 143, viewers have to embrace a certain non-human embodiment, since the surveillance cameras are located in places that are impossible for a human to occupy. Similarly, the cameras’ lenses distort perspective, thus skewing the way we see. It is my argument that Denson’s crazy cameras become uncanny cameras in Apartment 143, not because they whirl, tilt or otherwise move in extrahuman ways, but because they see things we cannot and cannot see things we can.

Uncanny Relations The shifting boundaries between visibility and invisibility take on a sense of the uncanny in Apartment 143, with its diversity of visual textures from the different cameras employed. As a found footage film, all these shifts of aspect ratio are diegetic yet remain unsettling for the viewer, adjusting to constant shifts in frame aspect, colour tone and resolution. Hand-held cameras and fixed set-ups slowly give way to several surveillance cameras installed in the living room, den and kitchen. Placed in the ceiling corners of the rooms, the cameras are fixed with wide angle lenses that slightly distort our field of vision. While the parapsychological team sets up their equipment, the young boy of the family asks what the infrared detector is for, and the technician, Ellen (Fiona Glascott), reveals one of the fundamental truths of the film: ‘[i]t sees things we can’t see’. A theme running through the entire film, the tension between human and technological vision, is constantly enacted. As is conventional for the genre, media technologies are able to pick up presences beyond human perception. Yet, Apartment 143 takes this idea further by keeping objects in the frame that are pixellated into a boxy blur. We, as viewers, cannot see what this object is, although the characters do not realise that the object is hidden from technological perception. Human vision is thus both superior and inferior to technological vision, while we, as viewers, come to recognise that human vision (and our entire sensorial spectrum) is, in fact, mediated. The most immediate way in which we recognise this are the non-human points of view created by the surveillance cameras. The cameras’ wide angle lenses are ambiguous with regard to human vision so that these cameras already discorrelate from human embodiment. This discorrelation is pushed even further in terms of the location under the ceiling. The non-human embodiment opens up a visual space inaccessible to human beings and, thus, makes the cameras correlate more with the ghost haunting the family than with the family itself or the parapsychological team. 45

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Our viewing experience of Apartment 143 is therefore radically different, and we have to learn to see differently: the cultural habituation has not yet fully set in, so these films are only slowly moving to a background relation, defined by Ihde as ‘not usually occupying focal attention but nevertheless conditioning the context’.11 Since Ihde has no historical dimension to his human-technology relations, we should simply argue that we are currently experiencing a shift in terms of relations to new media technologies, but that this shift incurs the retrieving of earlier aspects of cinematic culture. We will never be able to correlate our human embodiment to the embodiment of surveillance cameras, but we will be able to ‘see through’ them in the same way that we see through a crane shot or an aerial tracking shot. Apartment 143, alongside other found footage surveillance horror films, instates a different optic regime that teaches us new modes of embodied vision.

Distributed Perception The major effect of the shift our culture is undergoing comes from the reconfiguration of our embodied perception, where our senses are dispersed across the contemporary network. Particularly evident is the stitching together of footage from multiple cameras recording at the same time, accentuating the fact that events often unfold simultaneously yet are not visible at the same time from the central position of Renaissance perspective. While surveillance technologies allow for a mediated Panopticon, as Steve Jones argues in this collection, the film strangely remains within the traditional continuity system of interrupting events with other unexpected ones, rather than showing them simultaneously in a spatial montage. Such strategies of simultaneity would arguably disrupt our perception more radically yet would also complicate the startle effects on which the film is contingent. The film keeps us in suspense by not giving us access to the startling occurrence. Intensifying the frights in the film, however, is the fact that the ghost is only visible through technological means, indicating that technology gives us access to a realm beyond human perception. An early scene is only slightly unsettling but provides a good foray into the strategies of Apartment 143. As Ellen and Heseltine look through the photographs they have taken of the entire apartment, Ellen discovers what looks like the silhouette of a human figure behind Caitlin. They zoom in on the background of the photo, but, in order to see the blur properly, Heseltine first increases the contrast of the photograph and then inverts the colours, thereby making the silhouette of the mother appear clearly. However, these operations are only available due to the imaging technologies of the computer software. No human vision could ever pick out with such clarity the ghostly figure. This turns a seemingly rather conventional scene into a paradigmatic example of the shifting relations we have with imaging media today. With the greatest ease, we are used to going beyond human vision and into whole spectrums otherwise 46

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invisible to us and, yet, as Sconce and Gunning insist, the uncanniness of something lurking beyond our immediate perception remains. Horror films work through this uncanny relation in order to push it into the background so that we no longer think about its presence. To follow Ihde, such a technique constitutes a withdrawal to the side, a lateral move in terms of transparency and opacity.12 Such imaging technologies are governed by a hermeneutic relation and turn transparent as we learn to understand their interference and strange vision. We accommodate these imaging technologies and ignore the odd image quality of a high-contrast, inverted image. Image inversion is not transformed into an immersive immediacy, nor into a spectacular hypermediacy, but is simply a peculiar image quality that we accept in order to obtain the results we want from the technology. In this way, our senses are laterally distributed across the media technology of image inversion, becoming immediate and transparent. However, Apartment 143 insists that there is something beyond the transparency which remains uncanny. The connection between media technologies and ghosts is made explicit when Dr Helzer explains to Benjamin that, just as a TV screen consists of flickering images that appear stable, so do ghosts. By setting up an electromagnetic charge alongside strobe lights, they therefore hope to be able to register the ghost. The setup involves a camera panning slowly to the right, returning to its original position and panning right again, all while a stroboscopic light is fired. The camera keeps panning across the empty room and nothing happens until the fourth pass, when suddenly the ghost of the mother hovers in the middle of the room, causing panic in the team. The scene manages to shock, not through the grotesque appearance of the ghost (the ghost’s physical appearance is not horrifying), but through lulling the viewer into a calm state by the uneventful, repetitive motion of the camera. When we finally begin to accept that the ghost might not appear, that is when it shows up and startles us. The technological equipment makes the ghost appear, correlating the supernatural with technology in the way proposed by Sconce. Both ghosts and technologies flicker, yet are stable, indicating that their ontology is similar. Just as the appearances of ghosts are unsettling, so too are new media technologies filled, first, with wonder and, then, with the lingering trace of the uncanny. Only through technology can we encounter the ghost. The startle effect of the ghost appearing on the fourth pan comes as part of the static surveillance shot: the fixed movement along the camera’s own axis is slow enough to make it feel static. For Nicolas Rombes, [t]he static surveillance shots are the ultimate expression of mise-en-sc`ene, inviting viewers to scan the screen for information, for clues, for the slightest of movements. We become complicit in the visual interrogation of domestic space: the banality of hallways, kitchen cabinets, family room sofas, closet doors.13

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Due to the static cameras and fixed framing, there are none of the usual cinematic devices (close-ups or tracking shots) to guide our attention towards the most pertinent elements. Instead, the frame is overloaded with significance, since any element can change at any moment. The framing is overdetermined in this way, at the same time that it is underdetermined because it is empty; there is nothing of relevance to see. The repetitive sameness shown over and over again paradoxically both lulls us to sleep, since nothing engages us, and, at the same time, deeply engages us in wishing for difference. Many shots in Apartment 143 are similar, showing banal, unchanging images of the den, kitchen and hallway. Both across these static surveillance shots and within their repetitive structure, we wish for a change, yet are startled when it occurs. In many ways, the static framing remains a peculiarly avant-garde element in what is clearly a mainstream genre film. A natural explanation for this is that, in a culture where CCTV cameras are omnipresent and the news is filled with surveillance footage of criminal acts, we have grown ever more accustomed to looking at surveillance feed. Grainy, static images no longer hold the strangeness that they previously had, slowly receding into the background of our media relations as simply one mode of image presentation. The hermeneutic relation of reading these images presents no real challenge anymore. It has achieved transparency through pervasiveness. The final example of how media technologies extend our senses into a realm we do not otherwise have access to comes at the very end of the film, when the investigation has concluded. Dr Helzer and Heseltine discuss the end of the case, as Heseltine takes down all the cameras. They leave one camera running and, after they leave, we get another static shot of an empty living room. Due to its motion sensor, the camera suddenly tracks up towards the ceiling, but the ceiling is empty. Suddenly, the ghost flickers into view and crawls quickly towards the camera, ending the film in a fizz of static followed by a black screen. Meant as the final shock of the film, indicating that Dr Helzer is wrong in his assessment of the supernatural events and as confirmation that evil remains uncontained and is ready for a sequel, the scene also reveals that the cameras are the only access to the realm of the undead. That we are shocked and startled by the ghost’s assault on the camera reveals how much we have adapted to the non-human embodiment of the surveillance cameras, how fluid human subjectivity is, as it can be aligned with that embodiment for the duration of a film. The idea of the ghost remaining hidden brings up the amputation of our vision created by these cameras, because it is evident throughout the film that there are things we cannot see because we see them only thanks to the cameras. The first example comes early in the film, when a bench in the hallway begins to move. The bench slowly drags across the floor and when the camera pans to follow the motion, we see that there is no one there. Such an unsettling sight creates a tension between technologically mediated vision and non-technologically mediated vision, or what Ihde refers to as ‘direct bodily-perceptual contact with an environment’.14

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The moment in the film is brief and does not seriously constitute a challenge to our embodiment, although it increases the unsettling nature of the apartment. What is far more uncanny in terms of our perception comes later in the film, when an object within the frame remains blurry and pixellated, regardless of which camera films it. None of the characters react to this object, making it evident that it is trivial and everyday. Nor do we get any reaction later on, as the team never gets to investigate this footage. As viewers, we are deeply interested in what is kept hidden from us, the significance of the object and even what the object is. Such pixellation is a glaring breach of the transparency we expect from cinema and other visual media, as their foundation is that of indexical realism or, at most, what Stephen Prince termed ‘perceptual realism’, that is, the use of digital effects to create what appears to be indexical realism.15 With the introduction of the pixellated object, we come across the reverse of Prince’s argument regarding ‘digital irrealism’. Our vision is blocked for no apparent reason other than faulty equipment or, more likely, the intervention of a ghost. In Apartment 143, the ghost is literally in the machine, preventing a hermeneutic relation to the object, even moving beyond the alterity relation Ihde posited, since we are not fascinated with the pixellation of the object but frustrated with the camera’s mediation and its irruption of our vision. Blocking off our vision is shocking, and, while it is the opposite of the extended vision the surveillance cameras otherwise give us (in their location and wide angle capabilities), we encounter the paradox of our desire for transformative media technologies. For, whilst they extend our senses and give us access to something we cannot otherwise see, they also evoke an anxiety over the reconfiguration of human subjectivity. We come to learn that we, as humans, have become ‘thingly’ in our perception because we absorb, accommodate and assimilate new media technologies into our sensorium as a natural state of affairs. Closed-circuit home surveillance images may be briefly wondrous and disruptive, but they soon become just another mode of vision for us, offering easy access to our home and the safety of knowing no one is there. Yet, horror films are where this desire is exposed as also being an anxiety, and this is why McLuhan points out that any extension of our senses through media technologies inevitably comes with self-amputation.16 There are things we no longer see because machines see them for us, and the things we do see are no longer the same. As Rombes noted about the camera in Paranormal Activity 2 (Tod Williams, 2002), it becomes detached from its sensible moorings in the same way that Denson argues in the context of the discorrelated camera. In Apartment 143, the camera becomes uncanny rather than crazy. It does not tilt and whirl, nor does it simply present us with a view from nowhere. Instead, it introduces an unfamiliar element into what is otherwise utterly familiar to us. The pixellation becomes the equivalent of the ghost, the intrusion from another realm, which should not be possible. Although we are familiar with obscene gestures and exposed body parts being

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censored in our visual culture, such blurring is normally a post-production decision which we know to be deliberate. Here, it is a non-human entity that interferes with our transparent access to the mediated world and reveals how much we take visual media technologies for granted. This habituation is the reason why Ihde is wrong to argue for direct bodilyperceptual access to our environments. Our vision is always remediated by the media ecology through which we move and act. Cinematic, televisual and video images have become so pervasive in our culture that we cannot imagine them as mediated but, instead, take their mediation completely for granted. When a form of media technology moves to the foreground, we are stunned and its uncanniness reawakens and questions the boundary between human and technology. That is the truly terrifying thing in Apartment 143 – that our media technologies suddenly do the bidding of others instead of us. This is not tantamount to Ihde’s alterity relation, where the media technology is a fascinating other, such as a toy or spirited car (his examples), but an uncanny relation, where something non-human emerges from the human-technology relation.

Networked Subjects When there is no longer a clear distinction between what is human and what is technology, we also cannot view human experience as the centre of the world. We have come to accept that multiple points of view are a good thing, since multiplicity is seen as dissolving imperialism, domination and exploitation. We also want to benefit from network media, and, yet, the loss of control inherent in a self which becomes contingent on connections and dispenses with concepts such as ‘core’ and ‘centre’ unsettles us both literally and figurally. Nicolas Mirzoeff points out how the blinking of our eyes indicates that we are distinct and separate from other subjects and objects, thus establishing a sense of self and self-presence at the limits of one’s skin.17 Yet, with the unblinking eye of surveillance cameras, how do we establish a sense of self any longer? At least cinematic and televisual images had the decency to employ editing, which is their version of blinking. These digital surveillance cameras need never blink, which is simply one more way in which their images are discorrelated from our embodiment. Their presence is ubiquitous and constant. When we give ourselves over to these networking technologies in the act of sousveillance, as the father of Apartment 143 does in the hope of ending the hauntings, we enter the network. As Bolter and Grusin argue, new technologies create new forms of self-presence through the mobilisation of new points of view. These new points of view are explicit in Apartment 143, extending from the ceiling cameras to all the other different kinds of imaging technologies employed. Network media create a subject who understands itself from without, through the perceptions of others, and regards this condition as a positive state. Apartment 50

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143 takes these views from the outside and makes them uncanny and unsettling. These views unsettle our subjectivity into a weave of media. It has become commonplace to argue that no one watches in the case of self-surveillance, such as Nicholas Mirzoeff ’s argument in his article ‘Network Subjects’: ‘[t]he networked subject is everywhere on screen but no one is watching, least of all herself ’.18 Tom Gunning, discussing new media and their obsessive recording of the ephemeral, similarly asserts that ‘[e]ven in the midst of familiarity, within the practices of everyday life, fissures open and the forgotten future reemerges, with uncanny effect. The question is, simply, is anyone watching or listening?’19 It seems evident to me that the network itself is watching, that being under surveillance, even voluntary self-surveillance, places the subject in a certain position which is distinct from other positions. As Bolter and Grusin emphasise, the mediation of media technologies is as real and material as the devices themselves. The space between a camera and its subject is policed in a certain manner.20 Similarly, we police ourselves when we know we are surveilled. This is how the network watches and obtains agency, by altering behaviour and, thus, subjectivity. In Apartment 143, the network even exhibits this uncanny agency through interactions with the ghost of the mother. The uncanny cameras and our distributed senses are the spaces through which the ghost moves and reveal the disturbing presence of these network media technologies, as well as the challenge they present to our residual belief in a unified self. As Brian Rotman insists, a network subject is ‘plural and distributed’, which makes it ‘internally heterogeneous and multiple’ while ‘governed by parallel protocols and rhythms’.21 This is precisely the role of the ghost mother in the film, since she is present in all places of the apartment at the same time. The connection between being internally heterogeneous and multiple also emerges from hints that the mother suffered from schizophrenia, a condition explored through the multiple viewpoints of the film. Much like earlier technologies created alternate zones such as void, ether and static, so network technologies create their own alternate zones of haunted media, represented in Apartment 143 by the mother’s ghost. Mirzoeff himself plays on the ghostly nature of the network in the subtitle to his piece ‘Network subjects: the ghost is the message’, while Rotman argues that the creation of a subject through media technologies is always a ghost effect.22 It is not that we end up being the ghosts in the machine, however alluringly banal this may seem, but rather that we are dispersed and distributed across a different and new range of technologies, and, hence, our ‘direct-bodily perception’ of the environment is once again remediated. Our relation to these new media technologies discorrelate the sense of embodiment we have traditionally had with film and television, challenging the sense of bodily unity we assume we have. Such remediation of our sensorium always establishes itself as wondrous at first, but eventually this state of affairs comes to be recognised as natural. This is why media technologies erupt from within; we come to realise that they were

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always there, waiting latently for us. Yet, this shift relation should not be seen as a teleological progression towards a more proper humanity but as a lateral move from one media ecology to another. As our environment alters, so we adapt to it in a complex relation, which is not simple, linear or unproblematic. Instead, we find that we were always different from what we thought we were. Found footage horror becomes one way of thinking through these shifting relations because it is able to articulate the unsettling underpinnings of our current moment, which now takes the form of digital horror. As I have shown with Apartment 143, the tension between the technological senses of wonder and uncanniness becomes the primary way contemporary found footage films engage us at a bodily level, questioning a unified sense of bodily experience.

Notes 1. There are countless examples, from the early virtual horror films such as Lawnmower Man (Brett Leonard, 1992) and Shocker (Wes Craven, 1989) to haunted websites in, for instance, My Little Eye (Marc Evans, 2002). 2. Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). 3. Tom Gunning, ‘Re-newing old technologies: astonishment, second nature, and the uncanny in technology from the previous turn-of-the-century’, in David Thor and Henry Jenkins (eds), Rethinking Media Change: the Aesthetics of Transition (London and Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003), pp. 39–60. 4. Shane Denson, ‘Crazy cameras, discorrelated images, and the post-perceptual mediation of post-cinematic affect’, Medieninitiative (7 March 2013). Available at http://medieninitiative.wordpress.com/2013/01/18/shane-denson-crazy-camerasdiscorrelated-images (accessed 15 October 2013). 5. Don Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld: from Garden to Earth (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 73. 6. Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld, p. 83. 7. Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld, p. 107. 8. Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld, p. 106. 9. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (London and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), p. 11. 10. Denson, ‘Crazy Cameras’. 11. Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld, p. 110. 12. Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld, p. 109. 13. Nicolas Rombes, ‘Six asides on Paranormal Activity 2’, FilmmakerMagazine.com (10 May 2011). Available at http://filmmakermagazine.com/23766-six-asides-on-paranormalactivity-2 (accessed 16 October 2013). 14. Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld, p. 17. 15. Stephen Prince, ‘True lies: perceptual realism, digital images, and film theory’, Film Quarterly xlix/3 (1996), pp. 27–37 (p. 28).

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16. Marshall McLuhan and W. Terrence Gordon, Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man (Berkeley, CA: Gingko Press, 2003), p. 67. 17. Nicholas Mirzoeff, ‘Ghostwriting: working out visual culture’, Journal of Visual Culture i/2 (2002), pp. 239–54. 18. Ibid. 19. Gunning, ‘Re-newing old technologies’, p. 56. 20. Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, p. 59. 21. Brian Rotman, Becoming beside Ourselves: the Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), p. 8. 22. Rotman, Becoming beside Ourselves, p. 8.

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4 Networked Spectrality: In Memorium, Pulse and Beyond Neal Kirk

New technological developments have characteristically been bound up with haunting throughout the history of the ghost story. With a credible setting disrupted by the supernatural at the foundation of the ghost story form, the inclusion of the latest technologies can act as an identifier of continuity between the fictitious, naturalistic setting and the reader’s assumed reality. In addition to heightening a sense of supernatural unease, Rudyard Kipling uses the Kodak camera in such a way in ‘The End of the Passage’ (1890). Because emergent technologies are often surrounded by a cultural tension that oscillates between utopic possibility and the outright corruption of the moral and social order, the technologies themselves are frequently depicted in intimate, enabling relationships with the supernatural. In Barry Pain’s ‘The Case of Vincent Pyrwhit’ (1901), for example, the telephone is a conduit of ghostly communication. As ghost stories migrate from literary to audio/visual media, they become more self-conscious of how to represent the spectral in those new media environments.1 The television crew that draws out the ghost in the TV film The Stone Tape (Peter Sasdy, 1972), the television in Poltergeist (Tobe Hooper, 1982), the ‘live’ broadcast in Ghostwatch (Lesley Manning, 1992) and the videotape in Ringu (Hideo Nakata, 1998) and The Ring (Gore Verbinski, 2002) are all examples of the ghost story’s concurrent relationship with technological advance. Following this trend, recent ghost stories are depicting the internet as the latest site of haunting. 54

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Because of the ambiguous promise and/or challenge that emergent technologies represent for society, and because ghost stories also trade in the ambiguous themes of life and death, the past and present, and guilt and innocence, there is an opportunity for ghost stories to draw in, and draw on, contemporary social fears. Although cultural researcher danah boyd (sic) works to dispel the moral panic generated about aspects of the internet like cyberbullying, she identifies a ‘culture of fear’ surrounding the attention economies of new media networked publics.2 Ghost films like Pulse ( Jim Sonzero, 2006), which represent the internet as a source of fear and haunting, can encourage readings that primarily focus on the social anxieties associated with technological advance. Such readings can obscure important technological processes that enrich the relationship between ghosts and social use of new media technology. As a response, this chapter proposes and develops the concept of ‘networked spectrality’.

The Mechanics of Networks and Spectres Networked spectrality takes into consideration relevant developmental, technical, social and political dynamics of digital networks and dependent technologies as they relate to conceptions of haunting. It is the beginning of a theoretical framework through which to read a current of cultural productions that construct the internet and other digital devices as sources of fear and potential haunting. My analysis draws on the films Pulse, the American remake of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s original film Kairo (2001), and In Memorium (Amanda Gusack, 2005). Other examples of this current include the Paranormal Activity films (2007–present), Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror television series (2011–present) and the participatory internet haunting of the ‘Slender Man’.3 The terms ‘spectral’ and ‘spectrality’ are used broadly to suggest the wide range of cultural productions, theories and scholastic paradigms that address ghosts and hauntings. I use ‘spectral mechanics’ to mean the social, literary and theoretical concepts that structure how the figure of the ghost and conceptions of haunting are articulated and understood. Thus, networked spectrality aims to account for representations of ghosts that are transitioning from the singular, linear, personal and analogue to ghosts that are digital, multiple, nodular and distributive. It also considers how haunting becomes more interactive through new media technologies. Since emergent technologies feature prominently in our social lives and cultural productions, networked spectrality addresses why such technologies are often identified and articulated as spectral. I view the application of this theory widely, perhaps providing a framework to understand some of the cultural attitudes surrounding how new media technologies are mediating death and the role haunting might play in that overlap. Although this chapter focuses on fictitious contemporary films, from streaming video of executions and violence, real-time suicide footage and other virtual memorials, death is circulating increasingly more 55

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visibly online. In fiction and in social use, new media technologies have become participatory, multidirectional portals connecting the living and the mediated, spectral dead. I use the term ‘multidirectional’ to indicate the massive scope of the internet and its multitude of users. Indeed, there are many technical aspects of the internet including its network structure and the end-to-end principle that strengthens associations with the spectral.

Beyond the Traditional Many of the nuances of networked spectrality are based on the traditional spectral mechanics of the ghost story form. In her pioneering work on the subject, Julia Briggs identifies what she calls an ‘illogical logic’ that structures the formulaic elements of the ghost story: a spectral return to set right the ill that the ghost took to the grave.4 ‘If a ghost walks’, she writes, ‘it is because its owner has not been buried with due ceremony, because he has to atone for some great sin or perhaps to warn or provide information concealed during life’.5 But the traditional ghost and ghost story are also fundamentally about revenge and the illogical logic usually sees the ghost avenge itself on the guilty culprits in a manner appropriate to their death. According to Briggs, [g]host stories commonly provide an alternative structure of cause and effect, in which the supernatural is not explained away but offers its own pseudoexplanation according to some kind of spiritual law of action and reaction: an unburied corpse, a murder victim, or some other secret apparently buried safely in the past returns to haunt the perpetrator.6

It is this highly personal supernatural cause and effect that governs the traditional ghost story. Traditional spectral mechanics therefore tend to include ghosts haunting specific people, places or things. Briggs identifies the ghost story as a form that rewards skilful innovation but that ultimately remains identifiable. She also considers the ghost story a direct and satisfactory form that can incorporate relevant, important concerns of the age.7 Although Baldick and Mighall have problematised the ‘social anxiety model’ in Gothic fictions, this sort of analysis continues to circulate in contemporary ghost stories incorporating new technologies.8 Kevin J. Wetmore Jr., for example, sees a challenge to the traditional ghost story coming from the mingling of technology and spectrality especially evident in recent Japanese horror films such as Ringu and Kairo and their respective remakes.9 However, Wetmore problematically reads these films according to the social anxieties they might suggest and address. Due in part to an iconic scene featuring a plane crashing into the urban setting, he reads Pulse in the context of the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. Wetmore determines that, in such a context, the relationship 56

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between the ghosts and the technology in Pulse is ‘most concerned with how our communicative technology can also be used to hurt us: cyber stalking, identity theft, and illegally downloading music’.10 He goes on to argue that, ‘[i]n Pulse, the dead are foreign invaders, using our own technology to kill us, not unlike the hijackers of American planes on 9/11’.11 Although I reject Wetmore’s ‘us versus them’ reliance on the anxiety model, his observation of the trend in contemporary ghost stories for the ghost and the haunting to perpetuate beyond traditional spectral mechanics informs a similar concern of networked spectrality. There is quite a lot of data with which to measure the effect new technologies have on haunting. Emergent technologies have a long cultural history and are frequently associated with haunting, which Jeffrey Sconce traces to telegraphy.12 Networked spectrality expands Sconce’s concept of the inherent ‘liveliness’ of electronic technologies that he articulates as media’s haunting ‘electronic presence’.13 What Wetmore is problematically trying to articulate, and what Sconce stops short of, is a change from ghosts that manifest in, through and with, the aid of analogue ‘broadcast’ media to new digitally-manifesting media spectres. When ghosts are coupled with new media technologies, haunting is not merely a singular, personal, temporary occurrence of the supernatural but an endemic threat to an increasingly networked and globalised contemporary society. Today’s phantoms take on the unbounded, multiple, distributive and participatory qualities of our digital networks.

‘They have already crawled the entire regional network’ Perhaps the most evident recent challenge to traditional spectral mechanics can be seen in The Ring when, despite excavating Samara’s (Daveigh Chase) corpse from the well, her supernatural vengeance continues. The actual conditions of release from the spectral, more evident in Ringu, are a matter of recirculation: the tape must be shown to another victim. I would argue that some of the relatable fear of the frame narrative of Ringu / The Ring is lost when viewed on a DVD, live stream or as a digital video file, because the film works to make video tapes, telephones and televisions sites of fear and haunting. Making a copy of the VHS tape and showing it to another person suggests that the only means of surviving the haunting is to potentially condemn another. This process is an analogue, point-to-point distribution method but one that ostensibly still grows at an exponential rate. As the next technological evolution, Pulse explores the internet and other digitally networked devices as the means of distribution and haunting. Similarly, In Memorium relates the spectral to the internet and emergent digital technologies, making its online only distribution more significant. The internet rapidly distributes information across vast networks and, when combined with spectrality, increases audience/user interactivity and the scope of the depicted hauntings. 57

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Pulse is a deliberate cautionary tale about the dangers of technological progress as indicated by the film’s tagline: ‘[t]here are some frequencies we were never meant to find’. The film opens with Josh ( Jonathan Tucker) having his will to live drained by an unknown digital phantom, but this encounter does not kill him. Instead, he commits suicide in front of his girlfriend, Mattie (Kristen Bell), by hanging himself with a CAT5 Ethernet cable. This reinforces the film’s joint concerns with technology, death and spectrality: after killing himself with a network cable Josh becomes a digital phantom. The first instance of Josh as a ghostly presence is when Mattie and her friends collectively mourn in a digital chatroom. This seemingly normative, technologically-aided social outpouring of grief is interrupted when Josh’s screen name begins spamming the words ‘help me’. For Mattie and her friends, Josh’s mediated spectral return is a deeply personal haunting. But this is just the beginning. When the friends meet in person to discuss the troubling event, the film draws a clear parallel to computer viruses and exponential distribution: ‘[i]t has to be a virus, I mean his computer [is] probably still logged on. It’s just hitting his address book.’ Haunting in Pulse is endemic, spreading through all aspects of the digital network. New media technologies are hyper-present in the film, from the cacophony of digital communication transmissions that punctuate the opening credits to gratuitous shots of young people indulging in the latest new media technologies. The ‘[d]o you want to meet a ghost?’ interface is also stylised to look like footage from an internet streaming site, and Josh’s plot line is delivered through video messages reminiscent of YouTube posts or a video blog. By depicting new media technologies as a site of horror, Pulse indicates not only how they fascinate and frighten us but also how technology, death and spectrality are becoming increasingly interwoven themes. This focus is at the heart of networked spectrality. The conceit in Pulse of ghosts manifesting through the internet can be read as an extension of Sconce’s conception of ‘electronic presence’. Sconce identifies three aspects of communications technologies that suggest a spectral electronic ‘liveness’: profound disembodiment, the ‘elsewhere’ of the sovereign electronic world and the anthropomorphising of media technologies.14 The electronic presence of the internet incorporates all three of these recurring historic fictions, accompanied by both utopian and dystopian attitudes. Sconce gestures towards the impact of computers, the internet and new media but generally focuses on television. To differentiate my use of Sconce’s concept in applying it to the internet, like electronic mail is truncated as e-mail, I truncate electronic presence as e-presence. E-presence is an important concept to help understand the spectral mechanics at work in Pulse. Pulse masquerades as an innovative ghost story, replacing the singular and personal spectres of the traditional ghost story with phantoms that are multiple and nodular: untethered from a specific site to, as Douglas Zeiglar (Kel O’Neill) exclaims, ‘crawl’ entire communication networks. In other words, ghosts have,

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in internet parlance, ‘gone viral’ as haunting becomes conflated with endemic, apocalyptic contagion.15 As representative of contemporary cultural productions that depict the internet and new media as a source of fear, Pulse is significant because, in the language of the film, it ‘opens the door’ for society to be digitally haunted by new media e-presence and ghosts supposedly ungoverned by traditional spectral mechanics. Digital ghosts take on the qualities of digital networks: they are multiple, enduring and seemingly omnipresent. These qualities relate to two significant technical aspects of a distributive network like the internet: its nodular structure and the unseen workings of the ‘middle’ of the network. Although it is not immediately evident or tangible, the internet has a structure and even the most seemingly straightforward task, such as sending an e-mail, follows specific rules and protocols. Numerous people from a wide range of disciplines and backgrounds built the early backbone of the network, working with certain social aims in mind. Jonathan Zittrain simplifies two of these important principals as the ‘procrastination principle’ and the ‘trust-your-neighbour approach’.16 The procrastination principle was the widely shared belief of the internet founders, dating back to as early as the 1960s, that if the system could be initially designed simply, then solutions for potential problems could be solved at a later date. This helped establish the social ideals of openness and trust that surround the internet. What Zittrain means by trust as an approach is that the internet was built on the premise that it would be open, that there would be no specific technological restraints on the flow of information. This has led to the internet being called a ‘dumb pipe’: a system that does not check content and whose sole purpose is to transmit information. In Pulse, the malicious ghosts take advantage of the openness of the system and enjoy unchecked transmission. The end-to-end principle is the idea that the information circulating on the internet can only be manipulated at the end points of the transmission. When an e-mail is sent, the end-to-end principle is in place to ensure that nothing happens to the information while it is bouncing around the various nodes that structure the internet. This creates a distinct but intangible, technical ‘middle’ of the network that the ghosts in Pulse colonise as their definitive electronic elsewhere. When Mattie is in danger of having her essence drained, she catches a glimpse of the totality of the spectral network, depicted as a writhing mass of arms. The arms combine to reveal a living landscape and make up the composite of a screaming ghost that resembles the phantom attacking her. This is suggestive of another facet of the end-to-end principle, which adds a granular element to the transmission of information. To travel along the ‘dump pipe’, information is duplicated, then broken up into bits and packets before being sent, reassembled and reduplicated at its destination. As Mattie’s essence is being drained, the action is rendered as a particulate exchange. Drained victims are referred to as a ‘shell’ of their former

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selves, who also disperse into a particulate cloud of ash. Some digital phantoms appear as duplicates and can jump from one technology on the network to another, as if from node to digital node. For Sconce, the unseen workings and flow of electricity establish the first (and all) subsequent cultural constructions of haunted media. While this holds true for e-presence, there is one relevant caveat. The early development of the internet was made possible by military defence funds, propagating the myth that a founding goal was to create a network of communication channels that could continue to operate if one strategic node was crippled. A continuing effect of this myth is the belief that the internet, in its very structure, resists repression.17 This belief has some significant implications for the development of the network and the social attitudes surrounding it, for it is a potential challenge to the totality of the haunting presence Sconce reads in electricity. Of course, the internet depends on electricity, but considering the prevalence of the belief in the internet as resistant, e-presence facilitates haunting on an enduring, network-wide scope. As long as part of the network has electricity, the information can still circulate just as potently as if sections of the network were incapacitated. This technical reality is constructed as a source of endemic horror in Pulse through the depiction of haunting as both a biological and technical virus and through a failed attempt to use a counter-virus to shut down the system responsible for letting the ghosts through in the first place. Progressing from Mattie’s personal contact with the spectral Josh, the eerie ‘[d]o you want to meet a ghost?’ interface is the film’s next step toward haunting as an apocalyptic digital contagion. This is the film’s portal to the supernatural and clicking assures an encounter with the spectral in numerous mediated ways. As a node that connects to the internet network, the computer becomes a multidirectional portal that connects to others but also allows the spectral to come through. In the cautionary rhetoric of Pulse, Mattie’s concluding narration highlights this link: ‘[w]hat was meant to connect us to one another, instead connected us to forces we could have never imagined’. The concern of multiplicity is reflected in the presentation of the ghosts: hordes of omnipresent, exponential, digital phantoms. Pulse depicts several means of infection, transmission and haunting beginning with personal, point-to-point contact, then ‘going viral’ through the ‘[d]o you want to meet a ghost?’ interface, concluding in true apocalyptic fashion as the ghosts have ‘crawled the entire regional network’. Mattie eventually realises that ‘they are the system’ and that the only means of survival is to flee to where there are no communications signals: the wireless ‘dead zone’ is inverted and becomes the only liveable zone left. In Pulse, the depiction of networked spectrality and haunting-as-contagion go hand in hand in a progressive widening of scope, until finally ghosts and epresence are synonymous with technology and cities are all but lost. The result is a strong appeal to contemporary culture for the normalisation of the internet and digital new media technologies as multidirectional portals for the transmission of

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‘I don’t think it really matters where’

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the mediated dead. The film, however, concludes with Josh becoming a digital phantom and inexplicably returning to a room that looks strikingly like that of his apartment. This suggests not an innovation but a regression to Briggs’ illogical logic and traditional interpretations of personal ghosts bound to specific conditions and places.

According to traditional spectral mechanics, it is easy to read Amanda Gusack’s obscure ghost film, In Memorium, as a stock ghost-as-return-of-the-repressed narrative. One reason for its obscurity is that it never had a theatrical release and is currently only available online. At the very start of the film, a message directs viewers toward legitimate purchase options available at www.inmemoriumthemovie.com, but this is now a dead link (the URL hosting fees have likely not been paid). A fledgling Facebook page directs people to rent or purchase the film from streaming video site Vudo.com, but digitally pirated versions also circulate on free streaming sites. Because the frame narrative stylistically courts curious, savvy internet users and because of the film’s general portrayal of media as interactive, participatory and readily available, there is an uneasy parallel with distributive networks and the easy digital transfer of copyrighted intellectual property. Again, I use ‘distributive network’ to suggest the proliferation of digital copies and the incremental division of information for transmission across the network. As with Pulse, adding haunting to the concept of proliferating digital information and the breakdown and rapid transfer of information allows haunting to proliferate in a similar manner. The premise of In Memorium is that a young independent filmmaker, Dennis Wade (Eric McDowell), has been diagnosed with stage four bone cancer and wants to document the remainder of his life. Together with his girlfriend, Lilly ( Johanna Watts), he rents a furnished home that he outfits with security cameras and microphones. As the film progresses, the cameras capture many supernatural events and a spectral figure that is revealed to be his mother, Rose (Mary Portser). The relationship between Dennis, his brother, Frank (Levi Powell) and Rose set the conditions of the haunting, and information about that relationship is revealed through the incursion of the spectral. Dennis hardly ever speaks directly about his relationship with his mother, and Frank is not being honest about supporting Rose when she died. This adds to the depiction of both brothers’ familial guilt as they are forced to own up to the past when Dennis appears to be dying of the same illness as his mother. The ghost of Rose inflicts Dennis with the circumstances of her own death, avenging the fact that neither of her sons comforted her through her traumatic end. The film appears to be a highly formulaic ghost story, full of stock scares, repressed guilt and a vengeful ghost. The producers may have intentionally opted for ‘internet only’ distribution as a means of reinforcing the haunting effect and to 61

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be in keeping with the film’s frame narrative. It is evident this did not have the desired Blair Witch financial return on comparatively low production costs.18 Also, as nearly every horror blog review mentions, despite being made a year before its release, In Memorium ‘lost out’ to Paranormal Activity (Oren Peli, 2007) as the spectral found footage success story of the mid-2000s.19 Leaving aside its thematic ‘docu-horror’ similarities with the latter, there are a few important aspects of In Memorium that challenge the formulaic traditional ghost story, such as the 1.33:1 aspect ratio, the implications of mediating one’s own death and the strange house that prevents its inhabitants from leaving. The title of the film is telling. ‘In Memorium’ suggests, but does not mean, ‘in memoriam’: in memory of (a dead person).20 The misspelling helps reveal some of the unsettling implications of Dennis’ decision to document his illness. Whose memory does the film express? To help explain the found footage narrative frame, Dennis addresses his technical production choices, which incorporate a computer into the entirety of the recording and viewing process. Here the computer is set up as an objective recorder but ends up as a multidirectional harbinger of the supernatural, as happens in Pulse. Dennis’ imminent mediated death is both something he is hyperconscious of and something of which he fails to understand the full implications. At one point, he is concerned that he might return as a similar malign spirit to that which haunts the house. But the fact that he was unable to watch his mother die, yet has decided to make his own death public, enduring and rewatchable, is lost on him. Still, there is an evident concern about watching, as when Dennis begins to retch blood at the moment their mother’s death rapidly approaches and Frank exits the room saying ‘I can’t watch this again’. Frank was not actually with his mother when she died, but his sentiment lingers as a question about the desire to watch or rewatch someone die. This question applies to the audience also participating in the watching, especially since the found footage and internet distribution elements stage a simulation of ‘real’ events. Because of the found footage narrative frame, this is slightly different from the ‘[d]o you want to meet a ghost?’ sequence in Pulse that also stylistically evokes a streaming video site. Both films are fictionalising the dangers of the technical reality that content including violence, pornography and graphic death frequently circulates on the internet, despite regulations and preventative efforts. In In Memorium, the emphasis on watching is related to how the footage is recorded and presented. The events of the film are captured on several strategically placed security cameras. This limits the screen size and sets the film’s unusual aspect ratio. The constrained viewing space is deliberately suggestive of webcams and internet viewing environments of the mid-2000s. This association invites user participation and tacit complicity in the haunting. Indeed, throughout the film Dennis, Lilly and Frank consult the footage, which helps confirm the spectral presence but also has implications for the viewer. Because of the film’s unique

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online distribution and ‘docuhorror’ frame, there is also the suggestion that, similar to the viral spread of haunting in Pulse, the haunting is perpetuated through its distribution across the internet network. Ringu and The Ring are early predecessors of networked spectrality because of their focus on an analogue distribution method. In fact, producer Bob Weinstein initially halted the production of Pulse because he considered it too similar to The Ring. But the emphasis on a digital means of distribution is highly significant. The supernatural events of In Memorium are rendered conceivable and are perpetuated by their digital mediation. Not only is the ghost inexplicably linked with the mediating technology, but the mediating technology is also the means through which the haunting takes place. There is no reason, according to the illogical logic of the traditional ghost story, for Rose’s vengeance to be associated with media technologies (other than as a means to represent the spectral in a film). Although the ghost in In Memorium is personal and singular, networked spectrality helps show how the implications are multiple and endemic. At Lilly’s insistence the couple decide to abandon the haunted house. But each time Dennis attempts to leave, his symptoms drastically worsen to the point that he must remain. The film distinguishes between the mediated spectral presence of Rose and the location in which the haunting takes place. ‘She wants me to know what I put her through. She wants me to die like she did’, Dennis concludes. When Lilly wonders about the happenstance location, the response is significant: ‘I don’t think it really matters where. She died in a strange place. She died afraid.’ There is an illogical logic at work here, but mediation is also specifically tied to Dennis’ spectral visitation. Rather than the ghost being tied to a specific location, as Pulse seems to finally suggest, In Memorium inverts the haunting paradigm by depicting the spectral operating through media technologies to locate and contain its victims in a random location. In Memorium depicts the ghost of Rose Wade travelling across a technological network similar to the internet to locate, contain and exact vengeance on her sons. As a final example of the untethering of the ghost from a specific site, the film places an emphasis on the multiple, distributive, nodular nature of the internet. After Rose has reaped her vengeance on Frank and Dennis, Lilly is at a total loss and heroically, or foolishly, says ‘[t]ake me! I’ll go with him. I’ll go wherever he is. Just get it over with.’ Moments later, Lilly’s nose begins to bleed as she looks up into the security camera and then the image cuts to static. What becomes of Lilly is ambiguous – it is unclear whether she dies or instead begins her own year-long affliction with bone cancer. Whatever happens to Lilly, for the frame narrative to be credible, someone evidently has had to find, edit and distribute the footage online. Despite the fact that the found footage framing narrative has its obvious limitations, it does allow the film to linger on the overarching question of the effects of the mediation of death. To this end, the film’s tag line, ‘[w]hat’s scarier than dying?’, indicates that participating in a multiple, unbounded haunting is a terrifying prospect.

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Networked Spectrality As a cautionary tale, Pulse emphasises the more frightening aspects of mediated cries for help, real-time suicides, piracy and the liquid transfer of information, and the intangibility of information. All of these genuine social concerns are depicted as sources or fear, death and haunting lending credibility to a social anxiety reading, but a networked spectrality reading also reveals significant implications for contemporary figurations of the ghost and ghost story that mix emergent technologies with the spectral. For example, the conclusion of In Memorium indicates that the relationship between the technical and the spectral has little regard for the illogical logic of the traditional ghost story that might see the ghost pacified and put to rest at the conclusion of the narrative. Rather, as in Pulse, the spectral is now synonymous with the network. My title includes the significant word: ‘beyond’. This chapter poses networked spectrality as a context through which to begin understanding the complexities of the relationship between technology, death and spectrality; a relationship that is producing conceptions of ghosts and haunting impregnated with the characteristics of digital networks. As emissaries of digital horror, networked spectrality ghosts are particulate, distributive, multiple, exponentially endemic and as omnipresent as the use of the internet and new media technologies and devices. I have only included a fraction of the relevant social, political, technical and developmental factors that enrich the cultural constructions of haunting surrounding emergent technologies. Many significant questions remain unanswered, especially regarding how unseen technological protocols can structure and use human behaviour or how emergent technologies influence experiences of death and remembrance. Cultural productions that feature the internet and social use of emergent digital technologies are comparatively novel phenomena and the full implications of networked spectrality ghosts remain to be seen. Pulse and In Memorium depict the horror of digital ghosts, but other digital nightmares awake as technological development continues to proliferate.

Notes 1. Linda Badley argues that advancements in special effects technologies helped enable the representation of ghost characters and ghost subjectivities in an assortment of American ghost films from the 1980s. See Linda Badley, Film, Horror and the Body Fantastic (London and Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995), pp. 39–63. 2. danah boyd, ‘The power of fear in networked publics’, paper presented at SXSW conference, Austin, TX, 10 March 2012. Available at http://www.danah.org/papers/ talks/2012/SXSW2012.html (3 February 2014). 3. Networked spectrality can also be a critical tool in understanding efforts like ‘creepypasta’ and user-generated interpretations of Victor Surge’s character ‘the Slender Man’

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5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19.

20.

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4.

that utilise the internet and participatory social media as the medium of haunting. In works of this emerging genre, there is an incursion of the spectral in online images, videos, posts and, sometimes, entire threads and forums. One convention is that the process is self-perpetuating: each mention of the spectral invites more haunting. Julia Briggs, Night Visitors: the Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story (London: Faber, 1977), p. 16. Briggs, Night Visitors, pp. 15–6. Julia Briggs, ‘The ghost story’, in David Punter (ed.), A Companion to the Gothic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), pp. 121–31 (p. 123). Briggs, Night Visitors, p. 15. Chris Baldick and Robert Mighall, ‘Gothic Criticism’, in David Punter (ed.), A Companion to the Gothic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), pp. 209–28. Kevin J. Wetmore Jr., ‘Technoghosts and culture shocks: sociocultural shifts in American remakes of J-horror’, Post Script xxviii (2009). Available at http://www.free patentson-line.com/article/Post-Script/200723442.html (accessed 3 February 2014). Wetmore Jr., ‘Technoghosts’. Ibid. Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). Sconce, Haunted Media, p. 3. Sconce, Haunted Media, pp. 8–9. Something that ‘goes viral’, like a YouTube video or meme, travels rapidly through the internet and achieves a vast cultural awareness among users. Jonathan Zittrain, The Future of the Internet: and How to Stop It (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 31. Christopher Kelty, ‘Geeks, social imaginaries, and recursive publics’, Cultural Anthropology xx/2 (2000), pp. 185–218 (pp. 193–199). The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo S´anchez, 1999) is a hugely financially successful independent film that was produced for an estimated $60,000 but earned a distribution deal that netted a considerable profit ($29,207,381 in the US opening weekend). Paranormal Activity is considered to have replicated the success of The Blair Witch Project, meeting with similar financial success compared to production costs. See the ‘Related News’ section of the Imdb.com entry for In Memorium for a collection of reviews. Available at http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0491777/news?ref =tt nwr sm (accessed 3 February 2014). ‘In memoriam’, British Oxford Dictionary Online. Available at http://www.oxford dictionaries.com/definition/english/in-memoriam?q=in+memoriam (accessed 3 February 2014).

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5 Digital Witnessing and Trauma Testimony in Ghost Game: Cambodian Genocide, Digital Horror and the Nationalism of New Thai Cinema Linnie Blake and Mary Ainslie

As communications technologies have spread their reach and influence across the globe throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, they have witnessed a bewildering array of horrific historical events – from genocidal and nuclear holocausts to ideologically driven neo-colonialist wars, to spectacular terrorist outrages. As such events have occurred, and have been relayed from nation to nation and self to self, a range of theorists have sought to explore and explain both their traumatic impact on the individuals who survived them and the ways in which their experience may be represented to those who did not. Through such theorisation, the meaning of the term ‘trauma’ has both entered the popular imagination and shifted in meaning. Originally signifying exogamous injury wrought to the corporeal self, it has come to mean the psychological damage, inflicted either by real-world events or endogenous fantasy, which generates a range of symptoms in the traumatised that may, in turn, be read and interpreted by a skilled observer. At the hands of critics such as Dominic LaCapra, the therapeutic language of early theorists of trauma such as Freud has been incorporated into the critical lexicon, enabling the reader to explore the very representability of trauma by reading its ‘symptoms’ in those post-traumatic literary, filmic or artistic texts that 69

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seek to render it as text.1 Since Cathy Caruth’s theorisation of the inscription of trauma on the very form of cultural texts, moreover, it has become commonplace to taxonomise the ways in which literary, artistic and filmic texts engage with the trauma that lies, uneasily housed, in their own textual unconscious.2 Thus, it is argued, cinematic texts can take a variety of approaches to the subject of trauma. They can deny its existence, in the manner of postwar German cinema that displaced the subject of the Holocaust almost entirely. They can act it out in narrative form, as the US revisionist western did in relocating the horrors of Vietnam to the nineteenth-century frontier. Or, in the manner of horror cinema, they can work through the trauma in a number of generically specific ways. The ‘expressly repulsive’ genre of horror, as Blake has argued elsewhere, is ideally constituted to expose and explore the cultural legacy of trauma, being the most self-consciously disturbed and disturbing of filmic forms.3 Digital horror, this chapter argues, is the apotheosis of horror’s concern with traumatic witness, its preoccupation with looking and communicating that which is seen being recurrently problematised in the predominance of first-person camerawork, the motif of surveillance and the self-reflexive foregrounding of the mechanisms whereby information may be disseminated across the globe. Digital horror’s investment in, and disavowal of, discourses of traumatic witness is clearly seen in Ghost Game / La-Tha-Pii (Sarawut Wichiensarn, 2006), a highly problematic work of New Thai Cinema. Tracing the fatal misadventures of a group of urban middle-class youths as they participate in a game show set in what is clearly a former Khmer Rouge concentration camp, the film stretched Thai-Cambodian relations to breaking point on its release. Condemned by the Cambodian culture minister Kong Kendara as a grave affront to the historic suffering of his people, the film was the subject of a formal apology from the film’s producers to the Cambodian ambassador in Bangkok and indeed to all Cambodians. At issue was the Thai people’s refusal to bear witness to the Khmer genocide, to assimilate the testimony of its survivors and to represent it in a way that engaged with the trauma caused both to Cambodia and to the region. Made in a period itself traumatised by the cataclysmic collapse of the neoliberal economic experiment in the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997, the film thus adopts the stylistics of digital horror to participate in a range of traumatic discourses that interrogate mass cultural witnessing of trauma in the digital age. For as the boom-years’ dreams of turning Thailand into another Singapore or Hong Kong foundered, the national mood had turned nostalgic.4 The pre-modern rural village, populated by hard-working and instinctively self-sacrificing peasants, was fetishised and the boom itself was reconceptualised.5 The neo-colonialism of globalised, Westernised consumerism was rejected as King Bhumibol advocated a return to the lifestyles and selfimage of the past, affirming in his Birthday Speech of December 1997: ‘[w]e need to move backwards in order to move forwards’.6 Thus, in the shadow of economic cataclysm, Thai selfhood had come to be predicated on a disavowal of

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the recent past and a concomitant fetishisation of the folk values lodged in the land itself. This will to evade the seismic trauma of economic collapse through the promulgation of a nostalgic romanticism was unsurprisingly reflected in Thai cinema as a range of heritage productions both lionised the peasant farmer and affirmed national cohesion, strength and purpose through the evocation of longstanding nationalist conflicts in the region.7 Significant here is the fact that Thailand itself had never been formally colonised (unlike Laos and Cambodia that had been occupied by the French and Burma by the British). It had, instead, negotiated its position as a neutral buffer zone between competing colonial interests whilst subsuming regional, ethnic and cultural difference to a unified conception of ‘Thainess’. It was to this that the Thai culture industry appealed in the years after the crisis. Surrounded on all sides by enemies, it was argued, Thailand would only survive if it remained true to distinctively Thai models of identity – as it had done in the past.8 Thus, as the economy collapsed and the government ploughed scarce resources into the military, heritage productions such as The Legend of Suriyothai / Suriyothai (Chatrichalerm Yukol, 2001) and Bang Rajan (Thanit Jitnukul, 2004) foregrounded the historical threat posed by the Burmese. Meanwhile, jeeringly racist productions like Lucky Loser / Mak Tae (Adisorn Tresirikasem, 2006) poked fun at less powerful states in the region, prompting such expressions of concern from the Laotian embassy that the film was substantially reedited with all mention of Laos expunged.9 Of all neighbouring nations, though, it was Cambodia that fared the worst, specifically in the form of cinematic horror, a genre that had traditionally appealed to a lowbrow provincial audience but, in New Thai Cinema, took up residence in the bourgeois urban multiplex. From here, Thai horror set about reaffirming Thai selfhood through a demonisation of the abject Cambodian other and a concomitant denial of the pain engendered by the Khmer Rouge’s genocide of between 21 and 24 per cent of the Cambodian population.10 This refusal to witness the genocide in Cambodia thus echoed a refusal to ameliorate the cataclysmic impact of failed neoliberal economic policies at home, particularly on the poor, rural hinterland most fetishised by dominant ideologies of identity. So, if the Burmese were cinematically associated with military threat and the Laotians ridiculed as idiotic country bumpkins, the ethnically inferior and culturally debased Cambodians (locked in ongoing border disputes with Thailand) were said to ‘have access to powerful techniques of magic’.11 Thus, in films such as Art of the Devil 2 / Long Khong (The Ronin Team, 2005), the infernal machinations of spell-casting Khmer shaman pose a direct threat to the innocent population of Thailand. At no point are the atrocities perpetrated as a product of shamanic interference read as the product of trauma or as symbolic analogues for the sufferings of the Khmer people. Instead, they are spectacularised for the viewing pleasure of an urban middle-class Thai audience accustomed to believe that the Cambodians had brought all genocide upon themselves. Ghost Game

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reaffirms such a perspective, but its surveillance horror stylistics interestingly actualise the Thai refusal to bear witness to the region’s trauma in the form of ghosts that Thailand’s screen culture is literally unable to record. Ghost Game is prefaced by a sternly worded disclaimer the insincerity of which becomes apparent the moment the film begins with a montage of sepia photographs and grainy documentary footage that itself evokes the prison camps of the Khmer Rouge and the atrocities of the killing fields. ‘The Producers of Ghost Game’, affirms the title card, hereby state that all names, characters, places and incidents portrayed in this production are fictitious and should not be identified with actual persons, places, history and events. The Producers also state that no reference is intended, should be made or inferred regarding persons, places or events in this film.

A voiceover then spells out the story of Jium, a fictional military commander who, in the 1980s, perpetrated his own atrocity: torturing and slaughtering ten thousand innocent civilians in a prison camp on the fictional Krujaba Island in the fictional country of Jedah. For all the subtitles’ pretensions to locate the reader within a geopolitically and historico-culturally fictive locale, however, it is notable that the disclaimer was only inserted after protests from the Cambodian authorities. The images that accompany it, moreover, leave no doubt whatsoever that Jedah is Cambodia and Jium was a Khmer Rouge commander. From the outset, then, we are regaled by the film’s digital recreation of grainy stills and jumpy 16mm footage of tortured bodies, murdered civilians and armed camp guards that are unmistakable in their evocation of the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Cambodia. This former school in the centre of Phnom Penh was turned into a torture camp in which an estimated twenty thousand people, many of them women and children, were tortured and killed by the Khmer Rouge. It is entirely symptomatic of the cultural insensitivity of Ghost Game’s producers that they actually sought to shoot the movie at Tuol Sleng, their requests to do so being met with an angry rejection by the Cambodian authorities. The film’s timeframe then shifts from the pre-digital 1970s to more recent times, and this is echoed in the film’s form: a 16mm panning shot transitions into a hand-held video sequence, itself shot in the 1980s on the day a memorial museum was opened in the camp. The death camp may have become a museum and 16mm may have been superseded by video, but the spirit of former Camp Commandant Jium is still up to his murderous antics, possessing the museum’s curator who kills the cameraman sent to film the opening. Thus, the first-person ‘shaky cam’ means by which the horrific action is recorded evokes both the transition of time and the ongoing implication of the audience with the acts of atrocity perpetrated in the past. It does not, however, witness very much at all; the action is confused and the point of view obscured by electronic interference. This failure to witness is emphasised by 72

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the camera panning once more, now from the image of the dead cameraman to a group of young people watching the scene we have just seen on a television screen erected in a Bangkok temple, the source of the voiceover being revealed as a bespectacled middle-aged producer of the TV show ‘Ghost Game’. Until this point, then, the film has aligned our perspective with that of the programme’s contestants, a common digital horror technique designed to build identification with, and investment in, the film’s future victims. Only now does the camera dally around the group as they sit, paying rapt attention to the TV show’s producer as he outlines where they have to go and what they have to do in order to win the programme’s five million baht prize. Their destination is, of course, Camp S-17: now transparently evoking Tuol Sleng, which was known as Camp S-21 to the Khmer Rouge. But if we, the film’s audience, are shaken by the footage we have seen and struck by the setting’s supposed similarity to Tuol Sleng, the same cannot be said for the TV show’s self-regarding contestants. The television producer’s voiceover may have exposed the abuses to which the victims of Camp S-17 (and by extrapolation the Cambodian people) were subject. But, although the tortured, hidden and silenced bodies of Jium’s victims have been brought to light in the film’s opening moments (as Tuol Sleng was brought to light by the invading Vietnamese in 1979), the young Thai contestants have little interest in looking beyond their own publicity-seeking present and none whatsoever in considering the silent exile of torture victims in the historic past and outdated filmic technologies. In setting their tacky game show in a former torture camp, then, the TV programme’s producers act in a manner strikingly similar to that of Thai elite culture, which itself occludes the historic experience of Cambodian genocide. In becoming complicit with the occlusion, the contestants come to symbolise the stance of the Thai middle classes of the boom years: self-interested, blinkered and driven by a desire for money and personal success. Accordingly, the victims of the Khmer atrocity must somehow find a way to testify their experience if their very existence is to be acknowledged. This they do by appearing benignly, if rather scarily, to the contestants, whom they attempt to warn about the dangers they face. Despite such breathtaking supernatural interventions, however, the knuckleheaded Thai contestants continue to look away. So self-involved are they, that they are unable to empathise with the people whose clothes they wear, whose beds they sleep in and whose very bones have become props in the debasing spectacle that is ‘Ghost Game’. As they keep reminding each other, what happened here is none of their business. What matters is the contemporary will to win. Middle class Thai youth do not, to say the very least, appear sympathetically to an observer from outside that cultural group. What is clear, however, is that Ghost Game’s entirely unabashed depiction of Khmer culture as an intrinsically demonic and essentially inferior entity that proffers a direct threat to contemporary Thai society is the product of both longstanding social attitudes and contemporary social needs. Unlike the real Tuol Sleng, which

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now sits in the middle of a residential area on the outskirts of Phnom Penh and draws a steady stream of tourists every day, the contestants must travel to their camp by riverboat through the savage Cambodian jungle. This is iconographically, and ideologically, a million miles away from the high-rise buildings and dual carriageways of downtown Bangkok, with its sepia-toned temples, where saffronrobed Thai monks chant harmonious prayers for the contestants’ well-being. The water is full of dangerous wildlife and trees gradually close in on the boat as it sails into its own heart of darkness. As if to emphasise the disjunction, great emphasis is placed upon the contestants entering the camp: with hand-held close-up shots of the rusty turnstile that admits them (and, ultimately, will prevent one of the last surviving heroes from leaving) and long shots of them dwarfed by the decrepit, yet still terrifying, camp entrance. That said, there is little acknowledgement of what has gone on here by individual competitors, for despite the producer’s insincere warnings to respect the spirits of the dead, the competitors themselves show little interest in doing so. It is not for Thai people to witness the site of Cambodian horror, the film affirms. Nonetheless, it is clear that the spectacularisation of that horror in the form of a low-rent game show may prove profitable on the domestic market. In order to do this, of course, the camp itself must receive a physical and conceptual makeover. While Tuol Sleng now exists as a well-maintained and ordered open air museum, the neglected and demonic torture camp of Ghost Game exists to transmit the thrills and spills of the game show contestants to a mass audience. Accordingly, it has been filled with observational devices that would put the Benthamite Panopticon to shame: cameras have been mounted above the central courtyard, in all the cells and communal rooms and in the ‘Excruciation Hall’, ‘Forest of Death’ and ‘Skull Lake’.12 In these horrific settings, the post-Enlightenment rationality of Thai modernity comes face to face with all that Thai mass culture has chosen to ignore, omit and repress: specifically, the horror of genocidal torture unto death. With a breathtaking lack of sensitivity, then, the producers have the contestants face challenges that echo the torture of the camp’s original victims, whose very skulls become gruesome props in this most tasteless of television shows. This spectacularisation of the mise-en-sc`ene of atrocity is clearly designed to titillate the fictional televisual audience: the TV crew act as camp guards in a mildly fetishistic way and the banks of television monitors visually echo the Khmer Rouge photographs of torture victims that opened the film. But far from drawing parallels between the sufferings of the contestants and those of the torture victims as a means of bringing to light the traumas of the past, the film repeatedly affirms the common Thai conception that it was the retrograde stupidity, savagery and supernatural affinities of the Cambodians that led them to an essentially inevitable slaughter. ‘You deserved your ugly death and your foul infamy’, the contestants chant in a prayer to the restless spirits that surround them. It is an impression heightened by the intermittent cutaways to the TV audience watching the programme at home

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in Thailand from the communal safety of roadside caf´es and shops. When they do come, then, the ghosts function as an entirely timely eruption of trauma into the quotidian world, bringing the absent past into the unheeding present, disrupting linear temporality and causing us to question what is, exactly, real. It is, then, of crucial importance that the ghosts at no point register on the myriad television monitors that line the ad hoc production studio but on the ‘realist’ footage that comprises the majority of the film. The Thai television audience, it seems, are so closed to the trauma of the Cambodian people that its images will not transmit onto Thai television screens. Only on Cambodian soil, once they have been inculcated into Cambodian culture, can individual Thais bear witness to Cambodian trauma. That said, of course, the ritual undertaken to inculcate the young contestants into Cambodian culture panders to every racist Khmer stereotype known to Thais, being performed by a decidedly demonic shaman who encapsulates all the retrograde primitivism the Thai see as symptomatic of his race. Again, the mise-ensc`ene of atrocity plays a prominent role, specifically in the skull-filled memorial that is very similar to that which exists at the Choeung Ek killing fields and is now iconic of the genocide of the 1970s. In laboured contrast to the chanting Buddhist monks depicted earlier in Thailand, this ritual involves screaming and dancing while the near-naked shaman slaughters a chicken and rubs its blood on the memorial. There is no lengthy explanation of the ritual, but it does appear to raise the spectre of the foreign past that inevitably punches through to the present as a wind rises to blow through the camp. Captured on film by one of the TV show’s crew, the shaman’s warnings to leave this terrible place nonetheless go unheeded. The contestants enter the camp, bringing with them the digital microphones of the Thai present. They use the blankets, uniforms and prison numbers of the Cambodian past. They carry magical amulets that straddle both periods. But in denying all they see, they deprive themselves of a future by dying within its walls. In a manner that echoes the unseeing wall-mounted cameras that surround them, many of the candidates continue to deny the supernatural and decry the recognisable victims of Khmer Rouge atrocity who visit them from the start. With breathtaking insensitivity, they allow themselves to be chained to a torture table, immersed in a water torture device and locked in giant boxes filled with human skulls. The last is filmed using night vision technology, but this too fails to capture the spirits that emerge to cling to a hysterical contestant. It is not, however, such cavalier disregard for the sufferings of the dead that brings about the competitors’ untimely ends. The dead do not appear to avenge themselves upon the living but to be seen and acknowledged, and tacitly to warn the competitors to leave and save themselves, as they did previously through the shaman. The spirits of the victims are not dangerous, quite the contrary. It is the demonic energy of Commandant Jium, returning on the anniversary of the atrocity to continue where he left off, that destroys them. In this, of course, he becomes totemic of that alien threat that gave life to a unified conception of ‘Thainess’ itself. And this is where the film’s unusual

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take on the ‘game show horror’ subgenre allows for an interesting engagement with the traumatic context of the film’s production and the historic trauma of the Khmer genocide. Game show horror is, of course, a highly self-reflexive variant of the massacre or slasher movie, in which contestants are picked off in a variety of gruesome ways until only one survives, whilst a number of surveillance techniques are deployed to record the process. It is distinctive, however, in two ways. Firstly, it is overtly engaged with the socio-cultural concerns of the moment of production. Secondly, it affirms that the ‘survival of the fittest’ ethos underscoring capitalist individualism is not an inherent part of human subjectivity, as individuals will frequently opt to sacrifice themselves in order to preserve the lives of others. In game show horror, in other words, the truisms of conservative ideologies of identity are consistently called into question. The first significant example of the subgenre was the Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle, Running Man (Paul Michael Glaser, 1987). Based on a Stephen King novel and set in a dystopian US where a totalitarian regime forces convicted criminals to flee hit men out to kill them, the film established the key thematics of the subgenre. Civil society has broken down, a totalitarian government has come to power and extreme forms of popular entertainment exist to placate the masses. A more recent American example was Series 7: The Contenders (Daniel Minahan, 2001), which has six contestants chosen by lottery, issued with a handgun and let loose in an urban environment where they must kill each other to survive: refusal to do so results in violent audience retribution. The Japanese films Battle Royale / Batoru rowaiaru (Kinji Fukasaku, 2000) and Battle Royale II: The Requiem / Batoru rowaiaru II: Chinkonka (Kenta and Kinji Fukasaku, 2003) cover similar ground (though without a foregrounding of surveillance technology) with a class of disruptive teens being exiled to an island against a background of youth crime and social meltdown. There they are issued with weapons and forced to fight each other to death. Most recently, The Hunger Games (Gary Ross, 2012) has brought the genre to a new and youthful audience, loaning a futuristic edge to the digital surveillance of the dystopian action. Clearly, Ghost Game works rather differently to these ideologically engaged films in that the socio-economic crisis that characterised the moment of its production is erased by the film, which depicts contemporary Thailand as a haven of social order and civil calm whilst omitting altogether any overt critique of the potentially invidious effects of mass culture. Also erased, of course, is the significant trauma wrought on the region by the Cambodian genocide, and both are formally encapsulated in the film’s deployment of game show surveillance footage that fails to see the inevitable revisitation of the past upon the present. In this, Ghost Game subverts both the socially progressive agenda of the game show subgenre and the haunted screen convention of surveillance horror to undertake a reactionary reaffirmation of Thai nationalism and the politically expedient racism that underscores it. In fact, the film’s graphic depiction of the contestants being

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crushed, drowned and mutilating themselves in a hollow mockery of acts of torture perpetrated on the inmates of the camp is a rankly exploitative reenactment of the body in pain for the pleasure of a paying audience. This is not an attempt to remember the victims of genocide in a respectful manner or to raise audience consciousness of it in Thailand. In this, it betrays a far more conservative ideological agenda than many game show horror films. What is genuinely interesting about Ghost Game, then, is the way in which, almost to spite itself, it can nonetheless be seen to engage with the concept of witnessing trauma in the light of multimedia global communications. The Nazi Holocaust was trauma studies’ originary genocide. Its mode of witnessing was the first-person testimony of survivors, witnesses and perpetrators, contemporary photography and newsreel footage.13 Coinciding with a proliferation of digital media that record, transmit and transmute events more or less as they happen, however, subsequent genocides, such as that in Kurdistan in the 1980s and those in Bosnia and Rwanda in the 1990s, have changed our conception of witnessing quite markedly. Due to the existence of global news media and the ready availability of affordable means of recording events and uploading them to transnational viewing platforms such as YouTube, it is now possible for every member of an audience numbering billions to become bystander witnesses to horrific events far from their sphere of personal experience. The concept of trauma, formerly a ‘speciality of physical and psychiatric medicine’, has thus become, since the 1990s, ‘a cornerstone in the discourse of historical memory and social representation’.14 Such multi-perspectival representational practices are, of course, echoed in Ghost Game. The film incorporates still photographs of genocide victims, digital mock-ups of both 16mm film and videotape, digital film recordings of the competitors’ ghostly ordeals and grainy fly-on-the-wall footage shot for live transmission on the TV show. During the final credit sequence, moreover, we see the competitors’ studio-shot audition tapes, in which they outline their desire to not only survive a scary experience intact but win the competition. The film thus conflates a number of distinctive technologies of witnessing, each evoking a particular period, and all cut together into a narrative that repudiates linear temporality. In personifying trauma itself in the form of ghosts and demonic spirits, moreover, the film can itself be seen to function as a kind of testimony. The game show that emerges is, then, a trauma-denying text that undertakes, in Maurice Blanchot’s formulation, an ‘annihilation of the annihilation’ by denying the trauma of the Cambodian genocide whilst spectacularising the mise-en-sc`ene of atrocity.15 Ghost Game, the film’s metatextual commentary on ‘Ghost Game’ the show, nonetheless enables its audience to identify the ideology of representation at work in both. It is notable, for example, that the candidates are told to summon the spirits of the dead by using a mirror that is cracked. This becomes a metaphor for the entire film. In Ghost Game, the Khmer genocide is both refracted through digitised media culture (which turns atrocity into entertainment) and broken; what

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is seen on the television programme is a shattered rendering of the torment suffered by its victims. This is visually echoed in the crack in the floor in one of the cells, through which a ghostly hand reaches, and the crack in the skull-filled coffin, through which a spirit peers. They evoke, moreover, the fissure that runs between Cambodian and Thai perspectives on the horrors of the 1970s, bespeaking the cleft between traumatic reality as it is perceived by individuals who have experienced it and as it may be represented to those who have not. Ghost Game the film may not set out to produce a critique of the media in the manner of Running Man or Series 7: The Contenders. It may, indeed, proffer a demonic othering of Cambodia and its recent history as a means of promoting social cohesion at home in economically turbulent times. But in its deployment of the conventions of both supernatural and game show horror and its self-conscious preoccupation with digital technologies of representation, it offers an unintentional meditation on the cultural trauma it attempts to occlude. And this is, of course, one of the perpetually interesting things about horror cinema’s engagement with traumatic events, specifically their ability to carry out, despite their directors’ best intentions, what Freud would term Trauerarbeit or the work of mourning: exploring trauma by remembering it and repeating it in the form of diegetically mediated symbolisations of loss. Ghost Game the game show and Ghost Game the film may, therefore, attempt to erase the trauma of the Cambodian genocide. But for all their invisibility in ‘Ghost Game’, and indeed all aspects of the Thai media, the victims will not be so easily erased. Neither will the perpetrators slide into historic anonymity. They insistently return and we are enjoined to witness their suffering, even if the show’s contestants choose to ignore it. The restless spirits of Ghost Game thus exemplify the ways in which horror cinema both allows for a narrativised, symbolised or otherwise encoded articulation of hitherto repressed individual and national experiences of trauma, and demands that the audience respond to it, both emotionally and intellectually. In this, of course, they mount a metatextual challenge to the cohesive and homogenising narratives of Thai identity promulgated by the film text as a means of denying the common humanity of us all. For, as Cathy Caruth asserts, it is only through our awareness of the ways in which traumatic experience has disrupted and displaced our own identities that we may forge a transcultural commonality of experience that, in turn, may provide a much-needed ‘link between cultures’.16 It is this message that cries out to be heard in Ghost Game, for all the nationalistic insensitivity of the film text and for all the wilful blindness of the technologies of witnessing belonging to an already traumatised digital age.

Notes 1. Dominic LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998); Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca, NY: Cornell

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3.

4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9.

10.

11.

12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

University Press, 1994); Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). No¨el Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror: or, Paradoxes of the Heart (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), p. 158; Linnie Blake, The Wounds of Nations: Horror Cinema, Historical Trauma and National Identity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008). Kevin Hewison, After the Asian Crisis: Challenges to Globalization (Lebanon, NH: University of New England Press, 1999), p. 8. Pasuk Phongpaichit, ‘Developing social alternatives: walking backwards into a Khlong’, in Peter Warr (ed.), Thailand beyond the Crisis (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 161–83. Phongpaichit, ‘Developing social alternatives’, p. 161. Key productions include Daeng Birley and the Young Gangsters / 2499 Antapan Krong Muang (Nonzee Nimibutr, 1997), Nang Nak (Nonzee Nimibutr, 1999), Bang Rajan (Thanit Jitnukul, 2000), Behind the Painting / Khang Lang Phap (Cherd Songsri, 2001), The Overture / Hom Rong (Ittisoontorn Vichailak, 2004), Jan Dara (Nonzee Nimibutr, 2001) and My Girl / Fan Chan (Vitcha Gojiew et al., 2003). Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: a History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994), p. 167. Kriangsak Suwanpantakul, ‘Thai football comedy fails to score with Laos officials’, The Nation (16 May 2006). Available at http://nationmultimedia.com/2006/05/16/ national/national - 30004109.php (accessed 1 December 2013). Ben Kiernan, ‘The demography of genocide in South East Asia: the death tolls in Cambodia, 1975–79, and East Timor, 1975–80’, Critical Asian Studies xxxv/4 (2003), pp. 585–97. Pasuk Phongpaichit and Chris Baker, The Spirits, the Stars, and Thai Politics, Siam Society (2 December 2008). Available at http://pioneer.netserv.chula.ac.th/∼ppasuk/ spiritsstarspolitics.pdf (accessed 1 December 2013). Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1977). This is evinced in the documentary Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1985), which collects and collates these testimonies, survivor visits to sites of trauma and historical archive footage into a ten-hour film. Joshua Hirsch, After Image: Film, Trauma and the Holocaust (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2004), p. 7. Maurice Blanchot, ‘N’oubliez pas!’, La Quinzaine litteraire cdlix (1986), p. 12. Cathy Caruth, ‘Trauma and experience’, in Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg (eds), The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003), pp. 192–9 (p. 197).

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6 ‘Welcome to the Reality Studio’: Serbian Hand-Held Horrors Dejan Ognjanovi´c

This chapter investigates two recent Serbian films, The Life and Death of a Porno Gang (Mladen Djordjevi´c, 2009) and A Serbian Film (Srdjan Spasojevi´c, 2010), which caused a stir internationally with their confrontational use of explicit imagery related to pornography, bloody violence and snuff. Both achieve their effect through the use of a pseudo-documentary style: Porno Gang throughout, A Serbian Film occasionally. They also share the motif of sexual video footage turning into snuff and are very consciously construed as metafilms: their protagonists are an actor (in A Serbian Film) and a director (in Porno Gang), and the morality behind the process of filmmaking is essential to their respective plots. This chapter deals with the application of new digital media to narrative structures and their implications in modern horror by comparing and contrasting the questions which rise from their films-within-the-films: ‘what are the films about?’, ‘who is making them? And with what purpose?’ But, in order to understand the specific approaches of these two Serbian titles, distinct from Western mock-documentaries, found footage, torture porn and snuff-themed films, there is one further issue to be considered: the specificity of their cultural background as it reflected upon their use of motifs and themes characteristic of Western (genre) cinema.

The Cinema of Victimisation By 2010, when A Serbian Film was released, the epithet ‘Serbian’ became a brand name, carrying with it a set of built-in expectations for foreign audiences. This film came almost two decades after the beginning of civil wars in 1991 that had torn 80

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[w]ritten between quotes and with a lowercase initial letter, the noun defining the largest Balkan nation demotes ‘the Serbs’ from a proper name to the media incarnation of evil. This vampire-inspired collective entered the new millennium led by international war crimes suspects, its castle ruined by NATO bombs and missiles.1

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apart what used to be Yugoslavia. Two decades of Western media propaganda have created a new and pejorative entity called ‘the Serbs’. As Longinovi´c explains,

The entire region was subjected to a set of clear-cut definitions so as to be easily digested by the consumers of Western media: the complex history of the region was reduced to a simple interplay between ‘victims’ and ‘villains’, its people subjected to one typology to fit them all. This was ‘Balkanism’, a process similar to that of ‘Orientalism’, as defined by Edward Said in his classical study Orientalism (1978). As Duˇsan Bjeli´c explains, like Orientalism, Balkanism had been organised around a sense of binaries (rational/irrational, centre/periphery, civilisation/barbarism) arranged hierarchically so that the first site (‘whiteness’ or ‘Europe’), is always primary and definitional of the second (‘Blackness’ or ‘Balkans’), and so that the second is always a grammatical, internal effect of the first.2

One sad result of these processes is the ‘Cinema of Self-Balkanisation’, which could also be called a ‘Cinema of Victimisation’, in which both the alleged ‘victims’ (Bosnian Muslims) and the alleged ‘villains’ (the Serbs) eagerly participated, each incorporating the foreign perception of themselves. Croatian film critic Jurica Paviˇci´c is among those who have noticed the tendency in post-Yugoslav art house hits of the 1990s to exploit an exaggerated, grotesque and intentionally stereotyped representation of the Balkans. In his words: Films like Pretty Village, Pretty Flame; Wounds; or Underground present the Balkans and its inhabitants as a sort of filmically attractive, cinematic ‘freak’. They all emphasise the violence and ‘untamed,’ ‘savage’ nature of the Balkans by staging stories full of unmotivated violence, hatred, betrayal and cruel vengeance.3

This tendency could be condemned as folklorist and exoticising, but it did not prevent many films, both Serbian and Bosnian, from perpetuating the image of ‘the Balkan wild man’ defined by Longinovi´c as a ‘global example of volatile masculinity gone mad’.4 According to this stereotype, ‘the Balkan wild man is a slave of his irrational passions, violent, drunk, misogynist, unable to control his violent impulses, and – as the ultimate consequence – arsonist, rapist and murderer’.5 The notion of ‘the Balkan wild man’ is directly questioned in A Serbian Film through 81

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its protagonist, porn actor Miloˇs (Srdjan Todorovi´c), labelled in the film as ‘the Balkan stud’. The processes of self-exoticism and self-victimisation described above have built a market niche for the films that so readily incorporated the external look. That market worked, and works, on the same principle as a market of exotic souvenirs. People buy an imperfect, ‘authentic’ local product believing that some humble ‘savages’ make it, without realising that these products are industrial products designed for a niche market. At the same time, consumers – for example, in big festivals – buy allegedly ‘authentic’ films that fit into their presumed notions of a ‘local style’.6 It is necessary to understand this background in order to situate the role of digital footage in A Serbian Film and Porno Gang properly. Both debuts come from directors who grew up in the 1990s watching the brutal imagery from the war-torn Balkans in the evening news. Especially notorious were those shown in prime time. For several years, the audience that tuned to Channel 1 of the state television around 8pm was treated to a programme called The News Addendum, comprised of footage of the latest atrocities committed against Serbian civilians in Croatia and Bosnia and where the audience could see appalling images of entire families being slaughtered. However, these images were abused and falsified both by domestic and foreign media for their own propaganda purposes so that their documentary nature is highly compromised. The young people could perceive the disparity between their immediate reality and the one mediated and constructed by the media. The situation became more complex when a number of new films attempted to depict Serbia’s grim reality, which often led to different types of compromised or questionable ‘truths’. The Life and Death of a Porno Gang and A Serbian Film are fuelled by the frustration and anger caused by the everyday reality of a transitional country devastated by wars, sanctions, NATO bombings and corruption, which was striving to join the European Union. Recent Serbian films are evidence of a national identity that has become especially unstable after President Miloˇsevi´c was sent to the Hague’s International War Crimes Tribunal in 2001. They are characterised by antiheroes torn between the projected Western image of the evil, criminal ‘Serbs’ and their own feelings of being victimised, abused and manipulated. Their protagonists are lost between guilt, self-pity and violent attempts at working out their own – as opposed to prefabricated – identity. During Miloˇsevi´c’s reign, but especially afterwards, reality was revealed as easily manipulated, edited and falsified, an aspect that manifested not only in the TV news but also in domestic movies. The supposedly higher, ‘artistic reality’ offered by the new Balkan Cinema of Victimisation, especially by the titles laurelled at foreign festivals (for instance, Ordinary People (Vladimir Periˇsi´c, 2009)), seemed false, shaped to conform to the foreign expectations of ‘the Serbs’. That is why the films of Srdjan Spasojevi´c (A Serbian Film) and Mladen Djordjevi´c (Porno Gang) embody

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vivid confrontations between fiction (narrative cinema) and reality (documentary). In their hands, the video camera becomes a mirror whose distorted images are used to question filmmaking itself. The camera serves to investigate the meaning of one’s own role as a filmmaker and the effects that film and video have had in mediating and shaping reality. Both films push boundaries not only of ‘good taste’ but also of the cinematic medium and its ability to document and indeed shape reality, whether that is the ‘consensus reality’ of TV news or the ambiguous artistic reality of the new Serbian cinema. Porno Gang and A Serbian Film attempt to break into the Burroughsian ‘reality studio’, where reality is constantly produced and manipulated. Their use of grainy VHS and digital videos, both of real news and of fabricated and/or acted footage, aims to complicate and investigate truths and lies inherent to any type of video footage, whether ‘raw’, edited or entirely fictional.

The Revenge of A Serbian (Meta)Film A Serbian Film is commonly defended as a political allegory, but the nuances of what it is really about are commonly lost on the foreign critics who lack sufficient insight into the complexities of Serbia’s recent history. One key aspect of the film’s strategy, attendant to the notion of revenge, has been practically invisible to foreign audiences. Admittedly, A Serbian Film can be viewed as, simply, a revenge tragedy in which an ex-porn actor, manipulated into participating in violent porn and snuff, avenges his own and his family’s humiliation and abuse before committing suicide. However, there is another vengeance at play, which, aimed at the recent Serbian cinema in general, has a strong metacinematic aspect that should be obvious from the very opening credits. The film starts with the title, in a gilded and old-fashioned lettering reminiscent of a silent cinema title card, accompanied by mock-folk music. This would suggest a tasteful family entertainment, the kind of domestic film that Serbian audiences love – say, the highly successful romantic comedy and local hit Zona Zamfirova ˇ (Zdravko Sotra, 2002). But, then, this finely decorated inscription is smashed by another title in a larger font, with letters scratched and dotted and which suggest a rougher product. This opening sketches the intention of decimating the common expectations of a product calling itself ‘a Serbian film’ and announces a violent redefinition of the term. It also exemplifies a genuine frustration and anger with the escapist fantasies made for the local market that perpetuate the status quo, either by nostalgia for an idealised past or by the falsified, manipulative, insincere Balkanised Cinema of Victimisation of their peers. A Serbian Film is clearly a metafilm, and its screenwriter Aleksandar Radivojevi´c stresses that his script can be read not only as a political but also an artistic allegory: It is about the twists and turns in art from these regions. On the one side, we have Vukmir (Sergej Trifunovi´c), the main villain opposed to our protagonist, played 83

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by Srdjan Todorovi´c. Vukmir represents the new kind of political correctness, the kind of film forcefully promoted in Europe as artistic filmmaking and whose main tool is manipulation of victims. So, in order to make a film with the help from a foreign fund, one must manipulate one’s victims, must have certificates that they’d been raped, tortured, abused in any way, and with that one gets millions from the funds. The final results are films of victimisation which look as if they were shot on a mobile phone.7

This statement suggests a new reading of the motifs of pornography and snuff used in this film and the notorious ‘newborn porn’ scene. To understand the scene properly, one has to go beyond the taboo-shattering tastelessness of its concept and see it within the context of the film’s carefully built structure. For, as noted by Serbian film theoretician Vladimir Kolari´c, pornography in A Serbian Film ‘represents a metaphorical replacement of the pseudo-documentary form which dominates European film festivals and crucially shapes today’s notion of film as art and medium’.8 The ‘newborn porn’ is a metaphorical nadir of what pornography stands for in this film, namely, a morally and aesthetically bankrupt idea of pseudodocumentary and pseudo-realist ‘art-cinema’ exploiting real-life suffering through the process of Balkanism as described above. One only needs to understand the equation ‘Vukmir’s pornography = pseudo-documentary art-film’ to see the real, metafilm implication of the ‘newborn porn’ scene. In the film, it is immediately preceded by Vukmir’s rant: ‘[w]ould you believe me if I told you that this wonderful family, which you are so anxious to leave, is the only warrant of this nation’s survival? We are the backbone of this country’s economy. Only we can prove that this nation is alive and useful for anything.’ In this speech, ‘this wonderful family’ can be understood to mean the Serbian film industry. ‘This nation’s survival’ would imply its international presence at film festivals. ‘[T]he backbone of this country’s economy’ refers to these films’ capacity to attract foreign funding, while the final line implies how useful Balkanism is to the Serbian film industry – reshaping it into a temporary cinematic fashion designed to please a jaded Western audience. When Miloˇs rightly wonders ‘how [ . . . ] it all connect[s] to pornography’, Vukmir’s response is illuminating: No, Miloˇs, no, no! Not pornography, but life itself! That’s life of a victim. Love, art, flesh, blood, soul of a victim. Transmitted live to the world which has lost all that and is now paying to watch that from the comfort of an armchair. Victim sells, Miloˇs. Victim is the priciest sell in this world. The victim feels the most and suffers the best. You, me, all of us, Miloˇs, this whole nation is a victim. That’s why we sell ourselves.9

‘Life of a victim’ is a suitable label for the pseudo-documentarism of recent self-pitying films from the Balkans. Vukmir’s rant, as a matter of fact, attempts 84

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to rationalise the sell-out filmmaking of self-victimisation through projected sublimation of the nation’s own masochism and interiorised feeling of guilt about being ‘Serbs’. It is selfish and cynical because, according to this view, the nation’s success in the foreign market relies on the exploitation of its people, portrayed as either the ‘Serbs’ (villains) or as victims whose on-screen suffering should evoke pity – and compassion. As Vukmir comments: ‘[a]llow your guide to show you the power of a real victim’. The footage which follows, projected on the screen above them, exemplifies a new kind of pornography – pornography of the soul, the ultimate degradation of the born and unborn, the curse upon generations created by the unscrupulous or unthinking peddlers of worthless festival fare.10 It is exploitation of self-victimising clich´es, a spiritual prostitution of directors seeking to attract foreign funds (‘victim sells!’). A Serbian Film accuses them with its angry metaphor of a child raped the very minute it is born – while the mother observes, smiling, complicit in its defilement and probably satisfied with the lucrative payment. Such prostitution leads to a devaluation of Serbian films and of cinematic truth. A Serbian Film is as concerned with the horrors of everyday reality as it is with the modes of its cinematic representation in recent Serbian cinema, and its use of found footage tropes, as well as motifs like pornography and snuff, is therefore highly metaphorical. The sentiment of revolt quite understandably leads to the aesthetics of hyperbole permeating this metafilm about post-2000 Serbian cinema. The snuff footage of ‘newborn porn’ is the literal breaking point in the film’s narrative: for Spasojevi´c and Radivojevi´c, it is the primal scene of horror that divides their film in two. The first half is linear, deliberately paced, with warm colours, situated in clean, respectable settings. The second half is disjointed, episodic, nonlinear, characterised by quick cutting, brief, subliminal shots, loud music and sound, dark and disreputable settings and, of course, lots of blood. If A Serbian Film is a revenge film, then the ‘newborn porn’ is the metaphorical cause of the vengeance that follows, whilst, on the level of plot, the actual causes are revealed through the found footage discovered in Vukmir’s stash. Those images serve to recover Miloˇs’ temporarily lost memory: the amnesia of a personal degradation is so strong that it can only be annulled by film. Only by watching the recordings from Vukmir’s cameras can Miloˇs find the missing pieces of the puzzle of his own and his family’s fate. His ultimate horror is caused by the realisation that he was not only a victim but also a victimiser, a vicious beast complicit with his own doom. A Serbian Film undermines the notion of the ‘Balkan wild man’, the ambivalent fantasy character who populates so many recent films from, and outside, the Balkans. Not much more than a wish-fulfilment fantasy, Miloˇs is the ‘Balkan Stud’ or the ‘Balkan Sex God’, the ‘Nikola Tesla of world pornography’, as Vukmir calls him.11 The irony of the phrase is that the great Serbian inventor was known for his ascetic and probably asexual life. Miloˇs is also called ‘the artist of fuck’ and ‘the living proof that there is art in pornography’. His wife does not mind her

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seven-year-old son finding his dad’s porn video; after all, she admires him as ‘the only porn star with a university diploma’. His ego, however, is cruelly deflated in the film’s second half. Miloˇs’ hubris constitutes his belief in the hype surrounding his uniqueness, which allows him to be drugged and manipulated. He awakens from the stupor when it is already too late. The decision to take a belated stand and become a man of morals leads to his downfall when he is undermined as an ‘artist’, reduced to a zombie puppet, shown to be ineffective as the food provider and protector and, ultimately, as a father duped into raping his own son. The stud with almost superhuman phallic properties is, in the end, turned inside-out, unable to do anything of his own volition except kill himself. Incapable of protecting his family, all he can do is arrange a group suicide. The video footage seen, or implied, serves to outline the trajectory of his fate. The opening scene’s film-within-thefilm therefore shows the ‘Balkan Stud’ in action in the back alley of the club, the mid-point ‘newborn porn’ scene, ‘Filth’, involves him as a disgusted spectator and the final scene, in which a new film crew enters his home littered with his family’s corpses, implies that our ‘stud’ will remain a star even after death, albeit a passive one, in a necro-snuff video. The ‘Balkan stud’ is thus deconstructed: from an active agent (the one who ‘fucks’), via his position as begrudging spectator, and down to a passive victim (the one who is ‘fucked’) whose post-mortem rape will be sold for entertainment purposes. Video footage has several predominant functions in A Serbian Film. First, it is a vital means of characterisation and motivation. The excerpts from Miloˇs’ porn films do not only serve to illustrate his ‘stud’ status but also to portray the family dynamics through the reactions they provoke. After the initial scene, where his son is taken out of the room, Miloˇs turns the video on again and watches it with obvious nostalgia. His wife Marija ( Jelena Gavrilovi´c) is not really angered by this; soon afterwards she compares herself to the porn actresses (‘[a]ll those poor girls you threw away like condoms . . . How come you’ve never done me like them?’) and seems to enjoy the brutal sex she is practically asking for. Also, a crucial piece of characterisation for Miloˇs’ brother Marko (Slobodan Beˇsti´c) comes through the home video of his nephew’s birthday party: unable to get an erection, he is watching it instead of a porn film while receiving oral sex from a prostitute. The scene in which an innocent home movie replaces pornography makes it patently obvious that what Marko is craving for is family life, which he sees as an idyllic soap opera where one’s wife is both property and a symbol of social status. Marija is an object of his sexual desire: he masturbates immediately after talking to her and later hires a prostitute as a compensation. Even then, he uses his brother’s home video as a depiction of that which he envies, a ‘normal’ family with a smiling, obedient, forgiving wife and a son. Video footage is also the driving force of the plot, especially that belonging to Vukmir’s film, which involves orphaned children of war heroes – a clear parody

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ˇ of the usual plots of new Balkan cinema (for example, Grbavica ( Jasmila Zbani´ c, 2006)). The gradation of degradation in the films-within-the-film leads Miloˇs to make the crucial decision of abandoning the shooting. When the narrative ‘snaps’, together with its drugged protagonist, three days are lost to amnesia, and he has to go back to the ‘reality studio’ of his puppet master, Vukmir. The found footage here serves as substitute/alternative to flashbacks: these brief videos are essential in his facing of reality. Tellingly, the shots from video cameras and Miloˇs’ point of view (flashback) shots are edited in such a way as to make the distinction immaterial: the dichotomy of life against film is exploded: his life has already become a film. And then, in the final revelation-through-video, the heart of Vukmir’s reality studio is presented as the stylised ‘Bedroom from Hell’ where Miloˇs has to confront the painful truth of what Vukmir calls ‘the real Serbian family’ and of ‘real cinema’. Ultimately, video footage is the key metaphor of the film, central to its theme of the clash of ‘realist’, quasi-documentary, highly mimetic, mobile phone/YouTube level of ‘low-key’ filmmaking versus ‘cinematic’ erudite intertextual genre cinema with an ‘intensified continuity’ of directorial style (in David Bordwell’s sense).12 Video, in A Serbian Film, equals a pornography of the real: the prosaic, banal, crude Balkanism of quasi-naturalistic films calculated to please foreign funders. If this sort of ‘slice of life’ filmmaking is the equivalent of ‘plain bread’, then A Serbian Film clearly stands on the side of the Hitchcockian ‘slice of cake’ cinema.13

The Black Wave of Porno Gang The Life and Death of a Porno Gang shares some dominant motifs with A Serbian Film: filmmaking, pornography, snuff, bloodshed produced with the antihero’s complicity and foreign market guidance. It also draws from found footage horror and torture porn. However, the story and theme are different. Director Mladen Djordjevi´c describes it thus: ‘[t]his film is actually a story about the conflict between rural and urban Serbia, Eros and Thanatos, a film on the Balkans where death wins over Eros’.14 While A Serbian Film discards the tradition of Serbian cinema altogether and leans heavily on the Western model of genre filmmaking, Porno Gang’s eclectic mixture includes a vital influence from the local tradition: the ˇ ‘Black Wave’ aesthetics of Serbian directors Joca Jovanovi´c, Zivorad Pavlovi´c ˇ ˇ and Zelimir Zilnik. This work is combined with the brutal violence typical of modern Japanese film and American horror, plus elements of camp in the style of John Waters and Paul Morrissey. Of these, the dominant influence is that of the Yugoslav ‘Black Wave’, a series of mostly Serbian films made in the 1960s and early 1970s, which playfully mixed the styles of Italian neo-realism and the French New Wave with Surrealism, cin´ema v´erit´e and documentary filmmaking techniques. They were radical in content (polemical tone, social concerns, critical of the dominant ideology and its aesthetics) and also in style (non-linear narration, disorienting 87

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editing, irony, dark humour, surreal imagery, pessimistic mood, fatalistic endings). Djordjevi´c’s work shows all of these characteristics but also several others which are central to his themes. The fact that ‘these films substitute an individual for collective mythology and counter a reactionary repressiveness with progressive liberalism’ is obvious from its central character.15 Marko (Mihajlo Z. Jovanovi´c) is a young film director whose individual mythology is expressed through his love of horror films, trash and eccentric art. It is this that shapes the progressive liberalism of his plan to organise a travelling cabaret in rural Serbia in order to question the peasants’ sexual, and other, mores and to educate and liberate them. As De Cuir Jr. claims, ‘Yugoslav Black Wave films often revealed a layer of society that remained buried from public view for the purposes of exposing faults’ and Djordjevi´c does the same, with his plot based entirely on the trials and tribulations of a group of outcasts including porn actors, homosexuals, transvestites and junkies.16 His plot, characters and ethical stance are clearly indebted to the Black Wave: The use of the marginal figure as a protagonist carried with it inherent critical views; and the humanism of the Black Wave films can be located in their siding with the downtrodden. These marginal figures were often wanderers and drifters shuttling between spaces in an existence lacking stability. Constantly in transition, they were restless travellers in their own country.17

Hence the road movie structure. The ‘overall critical approach focused directly on contemporary society’ permeates every second of Porno Gang.18 The film is situated in a transitional, post-Miloˇsevi´c Serbia still recovering from its wounds and searching for its identity, dragged down by the mass population’s ignorance and intolerance, as well as by corrupt institutions like the police. As De Cuir Jr. maintains, ‘[t]he most general distinguishing element of the Black Wave is an anti-traditional form – anti-traditional in relation to classical Yugoslav cinema, which appropriates the classical Hollywood cinema model of a self-effacing visual style and causal narrative structure that observes continuity’.19 Porno Gang is therefore at odds not only with the traditional or current Serbian cinema but also with the meagre local genre filmmaking. As Paviˇci´c notes, ‘in Djordjevi´c’s film there are no typical genre rhetoric strategies, nor visible desire to achieve a genre pleasure [ . . . ] [T]here is not a trace of desire towards genre effects of suspense or terror. Through a number of micro-stylistic and narrative devices Djordjevi´c’s film signals that it is linked to the tradition and culture of art-cinema.’20 This is a striking difference between Porno Gang and A Serbian Film but also between the former and the recent Serbian films indebted to the horror genre, such as T. T. ˇ Syndrome / T. T. sindrom (Dejan Zeˇcevi´c, 2002), Sheitan’s Warrior / Sejtanov ratnik (Stevan Filipovi´c, 2006) and Zone of the Dead / Zona Mrtvih (Milan Todorovi´c and Milan Konjevi´c, 2009). All of these films attempt a consistent approach to 88

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the genre, whereas Porno Gang is much more unorthodox, eclectic and playful. The director himself admitted that he ‘wanted to see how camp would work in the mud. I think it is a very interesting combination. I am very interested in this metafilm approach, the combination of various, seemingly incoherent styles. It’s more interesting than social and political engagement, although the Porno Gang has that layer also.’21 The key differences between the two topical films are apparent in their attitude towards ‘slice of life’ filmmaking. A Serbian Film stands on the side of polished production, ‘intensified continuity’ and intertextual genre allusions. Porno Gang is more ambivalent, since it accepts documentarism as a vital approach to penetrating the reality studio. Still, its desire to be more truthful (or at least truthlike) than the Cinema of Victimisation is filtered through other stylistic devices. The film opens with Marko’s video diary, in which he directly addresses the camera. A long shot of a family dinner is filmed from the side by a static camera. The walk through Belgrade’s busy areas is shot with a hand-held camera, its shaky movements rapidly edited to capture the life of the crowds in jagged cuts typical of Joca Jovanovi´c (Young and Healthy as a Rose / Mlad i zdrav kao ruˇza (1971)). However, once the ‘porno gang’ is gathered, the narrative flow is that of traditional storytelling. Still, the fresh faces of unknown actors and the raw, unstylised look of Serbian provincial towns, woods and glens shot in natural light continue to support the ‘slice of life’ impression, even when the plot takes extravagant turns more typical of genre films. Although Porno Gang shares the same director of photography (Nemanja Jovanov) with A Serbian Film, its overall style is strikingly different, in accordance with Djordjevi´c’s preferred aesthetics, themselves akin to the films of the Black Wave and of early Waters and Morrissey. The film’s look and approach also reflects the director’s roots in documentary films: his feature debut, Made in Serbia (2005), is an unflinching portrayal of the pathetic Serbian porn ‘industry’ and its mostly miserable participants, very different from the fantasy of superhuman studs in A Serbian Film. Made in Serbia’s documentarism has a semi-fictional framework, with the actor Nenad Bekvalac playing himself as he looks for his stripper girlfriend. Porno Gang, on the other hand, can be seen as its fictional continuation but shot in a semi-documentary style. Video footage of films-within-the-film is mostly used to enhance the verisimilitude. For example, actual news footage from the big protests which ended President Miloˇsevi´c’s career in October 2000 is incorporated within fictional reenactments of the political snuff typical of The News Addendum. The grainy VHS video of the four Mujahideen warriors playing soccer with a severed Serbian head made many viewers assume it was ‘the real thing’ (although it was staged, with special effects).22 The very graininess and rawness of the video makes it, by default, appear ‘more real’ than the polished footage reminiscent of Hollywood cinema. Other films-within-the-film have a similar function: brief excerpts from Marko’s short horror films, shown at the beginning, are actually taken from Mladen Djordjevi´c’s

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early works. Their inclusion serves to break down the barrier between truth and fiction, between the objective and the subjective, plot and autobiography. In its search for a higher artistic truth, Porno Gang softens the barriers between real and fake news footage, between actual and restaged or recontextualised short films, between documentary and fictional narrative. This strategy is based on the idea of destroying reality itself or, at least, of making its usual straightforward depiction in Serbian cinema obsolete: ‘[t]he violence in my film expresses a destructive attitude towards reality – to go so far in explicitness that reality is destroyed, fucked-out, so that the next step is for the celluloid to start burning’.23 The raw, documentary-like aesthetics is most obvious in the scenes in which Marko and his gang stage snuff set pieces to be sold to foreign buyers. After their plan to educate others fails, they are forced to do quite the opposite: to exploit and murder those same people for profit. As I have written elsewhere: [t]he motif of snuff metaphorically reveals a strong death-wish present among the disenchanted, disillusioned people for whom death is the only salvation. Thus, Djordjevi´c presents a line-up of voluntary victims of snuff films: a touching, melancholy cast of the ruined and forgotten ones. Unlike the victims in American torture-porns with a snuff motif, who are so full of life and courage to fight until their last gasp, the Serbian ones come to their executioners voluntarily, searching a means of sustaining their impoverished families or a quick escape from unbearable life.24

Djordjevi´c introduces a bold, inventive, typically Serbian slant on the snuff motif. Whereas in American and Japanese films murder is commonly depicted as an act of physical violence against unwilling victims who struggle for release, the snuff in Porno Gang is predominantly spiritual. That is to say, the actual bloodshed in front of the camera is not its worst aspect: the real horror in those well-staged scenes lies in their psychological and spiritual background. The pornography contained therein is that of a soul laid bare and open to be abused. The cultural and economic necessities are the driving forces which make the victims willingly come to the slaughter or, else, die by their own hands in front of the camera for someone else’s enjoyment. Furthermore, the killers from the ‘porno gang’ are also victims of the same process, forced to participate in this degrading and criminal behaviour. The snuff scenes are, therefore, poignant on at least two levels. Firstly, they evoke pity for the people whose heartfelt confessions of personal tragedy serve as a mere foreplay for the massacre. Secondly, and perhaps surprisingly, there is also pity for their executioners, whose strong reactions of shock and disgust at themselves evoke compassion. Unlike Miloˇs from A Serbian Film, Marko and his gang are neither duped nor deceived: they knowingly decide to enter the snuff business, although the freedom of their will in the given circumstances is highly questionable, considering that they 90

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are hungry, penniless, hounded by angry villagers, criminal porn-mongers and a brutal police force. Basically, they are forced to prostitute themselves in the worst possible manner for the sake of the entertainment of foreign buyers. In this respect, Porno Gang’s implications are strikingly similar to those of A Serbian Film. The activities of the ‘porn gang’ can therefore be seen as a metaphorical depiction of the fate of modern Serbian directors who are torn between two options: they can either please the limited, ever decreasing local market with populist comedies and ‘Balkan wild man’ fantasy dramas, or they can please the bigger, richer foreign market with its built-in expectations about the movies coming from this region – namely, that they should contain victims, misery and irrational violence, optionally with shades of reconciliation and hope. Thus, one is forced either to exploit ‘slice of life’ dramas steeped in self-Balkanisation and aimed at fund sourcing, festivals and potential awards or to critically depict this trend while also exploiting Western expectations through the use of genre. In the latter instance, gore, shock and controversy are selling points for an audience which otherwise would not be caught watching a Serbian film. A Serbian Film hinges on the exploitation and parodying of Western prejudices about ‘the Serbs’. As I have already written elsewhere: A Serbian Film should not be taken literally, like a ‘slice of life’ depiction of today’s Serbia. What it does is use strong and exaggerated metaphors to convey a certain feeling. If Martyrs and Irreversible, for example, portrayed sickening doings in France without making audiences believe it to be a nation of sick perverts and rapists, hopefully A Serbian Film, in a similar manner, won’t do much to hurt Serbia’s already not too good public image. As a matter of fact, it plays upon certain expectations (and prejudices) associated with how this locale is perceived in the West, and can be understood as a grotesque parody of Serbia’s current image in the eyes of foreigners. It seems to be saying: ‘you thought we were a nation of criminals and maniacs and ogres? You haven’t seen anything yet!’ This is just one of the ways that A Serbian Film implicates its audience into its cunning doings: it will involve you, whether you like it or not, and it will make you question not only your role as a spectator and voyeur of sexual and violent cinematic arousals, but will also shatter many other preconceptions you may bring with you to the film.25

It is precisely this interplay between self-Balkanisation and its critique which has mystified many viewers, making their conclusions uncertain. As Mark Featherstone suggests: A Serbian Film is not simply a critique of the Serbian death drive or an orientalist construction of the West that absolutely fictionalises the violence of the Balkans, but instead a combination of these two positions, which recognises both the 91

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violence of recent Serbian history and offers a critique of possible violence to come through its representation of the global market.26

Defining Serbia as ‘an excremental other in the new Europe’, Featherstone therefore argues that ‘A Serbian Film is a classic horror film that may be seen as both a traumatic symptom of the Milosevic and immediate post-Milosevic periods in Serbian history, and a science fiction commentary on the Serbs’ potential future in the neo-liberal world’.27 The Cinema of Self-Victimisation, epitomised by the snuff footage of ‘the newborn porn’, seems to be Serbian cinema’s potential future in a global market where the local ‘Art of Atrocity’ and ‘Tradition of Terror’, together with ‘Pain and Perversion from the Balkans’, will be saleable commodities for as long as Serbia is perceived as Europe’s excremental Other.28 In the current context, Serbian directors hoping for an international success seem to have two main options before them. One is to comply with the demands of the foreign market, like the makers of self-victimising festival fare do. The other is to grudgingly accept and subtly undermine foreign preconceptions while, at the same time, provide enough material for the genre audience’s sadistic pleasure. This is the case with the makers of A Serbian Film and The Life and Death of a Porno Gang. The difference may not be as significant as it would, at first, appear. Porno Gang clearly shows that ‘slice of life’ pseudo-documentary confessions epitomised by the Cinema of Victimisation and blood-soaked brutality of ‘Balkan Hardcore’ are two sides of the same snuff coin: the former is merely foreplay to the latter. First tears, then blood. And, so, after penetrating the reality studio and perceiving their true, prescribed role in the global market as excremental Others whose only use is to be mercilessly exploited, the protagonists of both of these films commit suicide. The only difference is that Porno Gang’s Marko attains a kind of integrity even in death, dying together with his girlfriend at the ancient Roman ruins in Serbia, symbolically reconnecting with the past, while A Serbian Film’s Miloˇs dies ashamed and degraded, disconnected from both past and future. His hopes of earning a better future in the ‘normal’, prosperous West are smashed by the very same Western market which is interested only in his tears, blood and dead flesh. As one of the taglines used for A Serbian Film’s distribution put it, ‘[n]ot all films have a happy ending’.

Notes 1. Tomislav Z. Longinovi´c, ‘Vampires like us: Gothic imaginary and “the Serbs”’, in Duˇsan I. Bjeli´c and Obrad Savi´c (eds), Balkan as Metaphor: between Globalization and Fragmentation (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002), pp. 39–60 (p. 48). 2. Duˇsan I. Bjeli´c, ‘Introduction: blowing up the “bridge”’, in Bjeli´c and Savi´c (eds), Balkan as Metaphor, pp. 1–22 (p. 3).

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3. Jurica Paviˇci´c, ‘Cinema of normalization: changes of stylistic model in post-Yugoslav Cinema after the 1990s’, Studies in Eastern European Cinema i/1 (2010), pp. 43–56 (p. 44). 4. Tomislav Z. Longinovi´c, ‘Playing the Western eye: Balkan masculinity and postYugoslav war cinema’, in Anik´o Imre (ed.), Eastern European Cinemas (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 35–47 (p. 38). 5. Paviˇci´c, ‘Cinema of normalization’, pp. 44–45. 6. Paviˇci´c, ‘Cinema of normalization’, pp. 46–47. 7. Aleksandar Radivojevi´c, ‘Srpski film – izmeąu druˇstvene kritike, kulturnog terorizma, radikalnih estetika, eksploatacije nasilja i politiˇcke korektnosti’, Filaˇz v (2011), p. 82. All translations in this chapter are my own. 8. Vladimir Kolari´c, ‘Odbrana umetnosti u Srpskom filmu Srąana Spasojevi´ca’, Kultura cxxvii (6 August 2010). Available at http://vladimirkolaric.blogspot.com/2010/08/ naucni-tekst-o-srpskom-filmu-srana.html (accessed 21 September 2011). 9. Emphasis in the original. 10. Titles usually associated with this trend are Goran Paskaljevi´c’s Midwinter Night’s Dream / San zimske no´ci (2004) and Honeymoons / Medeni mesec (2009), Stefan Arsenijevi´c’s short (A)Torzija (2003) and the feature Ljubav i drugi zloˇcini (2008), and Ordinary People (Vladimir Periˇsi´c, 2009). 11. The phrase must be ironic, since the great Serbian inventor was known for his ascetic, probably asexual life. 12. See David Bordwell, The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies (London and Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006), pp. 121–38. 13. Alfred Hitchcock is famously quoted saying: ‘[s]ome films are slices of life. Mine are slices of cake.’ See Franc¸ois Truffaut, Hitchcock (London and New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), p. 103. 14. Mladen Djordjevi´c, ‘Pain and perversion in the Balkans’, Rue Morgue cvii (2010), p. 19. 15. Greg De Cuir Jr., ‘The Yugoslav Black Wave: the history and poetics of polemical cinema in the 1960s and 1970s in Yugoslavia’, in Anik´o Imre (ed.), A Companion to Eastern European Cinemas (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), pp. 403–24 (p. 409). 16. Ibid., p. 409. 17. Ibid, p. 413. 18. Ibid., p. 410. 19. Ibid. 20. Jurica Paviˇci´c, Postjugoslavenski film: stil i ideologija (Zagreb: Hrvatski filmski savez, 2011), p. 226. 21. Djordjevi´c, ‘Pain and perversion’, p. 19. 22. Make-up effects by Miroslav Lakobrija are another asset that Porno Gang shares with A Serbian Film. 23. Mladen Djordjevi´c, ‘Poetika subverzije’, Filaˇz i (2009), p. 56. 24. Dejan Ognjanovi´c, ‘The Life and Death of a Porno Gang (2009)’, The Temple of Ghoul (12 February 2009). Available at http://templeofghoul.blogspot.com/2009/12/lifeand-death-of-porn-gang-2009.html (accessed 12 February 2009).

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25. Dejan Ognjanovi´c, ‘A Serbian Film (2010)’, Quiet Earth (15 March 2010). Available at http://www.quietearth.us/articles/2010/03/15/SXSW-2010-Review-of-ASerbian-Film-Srpski-Film. Italics in the original (accessed 15 March 2010). 26. Mark Featherstone, ‘Coito ergo sum: Serbian sadism and global capitalism in A Serbian Film’, Horror Studies iv/1 (2013), p. 139. 27. Featherstone, ‘Coito ergo sum’, p. 140. 28. These are the titles given by editors to articles devoted to the ‘subversive Serbia’ programme in Rue Morgue 107 (2010).

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7 Djinn in the Machine: Technology and Islam in Turkish Horror Film Zeynep Sahinturk

‘There is no difference between occult and technological media.’1

Described aptly as a ‘nascent’ genre by film critic Savas¸ Arslan, horror film has played a relatively minor role in Turkish film history and has long been overlooked by critics.2 In the early 2000s, however, the genre started to flourish and has since become popular in Turkey, spawning films that often have a common focus: Islamic myths as the generator of horror. As one of the most influential myths embedded in the imagination of the people living in an overwhelmingly Muslim country like Turkey, djinns have been portrayed as the most atrocious antagonists of post-millennial Turkish horror, as the Islamic monsters who, according to the Qur’an, live within the same dimension as human beings and have the ability to see, possess and sometimes kill people yet are invisible. While some of the djinn films depict belief in Allah as a safe shelter from malicious Islamic creatures, some have a blatantly nihilistic view about any sort of comfort one could find in believing in Him. Taking into consideration the fact that Turkey has been ruled by the proIslamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) since 2002, it seems unlikely that the Islamicisation of horror in Turkish cinema over the last decade is coincidental. When the Turkish Republic was first being founded in the early 1920s with Mustafa Kemal Atat¨urk’s leadership, secularism was the political view that characterised the new republic upon the dissolution of the Islam-oriented Ottoman Empire. AKP’s several regulations, such as imposing limits on alcohol consumption, restrictions on abortion and lifting the ban on wearing headscarves inside official buildings like schools and governmental offices (formerly prohibited to uphold 95

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secularism), have led many people, especially those affiliated with the secularist ideology, to fear that Turkey will become a theocratic country ruled by Islamic law. This fear seems to manifest itself within Islamic horror films in the form of narratives about djinns possessing people, secretly penetrating their world either invisibly or in the guise of other people – a metaphor for the gradual ideological spread of pro-Islamism in Turkey. A more ‘artistic’ reason for the choice of Islamic mythology as a source of fear is the need to add a local flavour to the horror genre, arguably rendering the plots more original than those of their antecedents. Djinn narratives, which are not only one of the most prevalent supernatural horrors that could threaten human beings according to the Qur’an but also part of the local folktales that are not necessarily religiously marked, are perfect expressions of ‘Turkish’ fear, both because of their Islamic origins and their deep-seated status as the defining monsters of Turkish folklore. Because early horror films in Turkey were largely based upon adaptations and remakes of Western horror films such as Dracula (Tod Browning, 1931), The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973), The Bad Seed (Mervyn LeRoy, 1956) and Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), which had already gained cult status in their source countries, it is striking that Turkish horror films made after the 2000s choose to create horror out of Islamic tales and thereby become popular. Since the horror genre did not have an established tradition in Turkish cinema, using material from other national horror film traditions, mainly Japan and the US, minimised the amount of risk for Turkish filmmakers and maximised the chances of commercially successful Turkish horror films. By employing antagonists such as techno-ghosts in D@bbe (Hasan Karacada˘g, 2006) and D@bbe 2 (Hasan Karacada˘g, 2009), found footage and pseudo-documentary techniques in Island: Wedding of the Zombies / Ada: Zombilerin D¨ug˘u¨ n¨u (Talip Ert¨urk and Murat Emir Eren, 2010), The Karadedeler Case / Karadedeler Olayı (Erdo˘gan Ba˘gbakan and Erkan Ba˘gbakan, 2011), D@bbe: A Djinn Case / D@bbe: Bir Cin Vakası (Hasan Karacada˘g, 2012), El-Cin (Hasan Karacada˘g, 2013), The Unseen / G¨or¨unmeyenler (Meliks¸ah Altuntas¸, 2012) and D@bbe: Possession / D@bbe: Cin C ¸ arpması (Hasan Karacada˘g, 2013), post-millennial Turkish horror films underline both the extent to which horror is a truly transnational genre and the dominant role played by US and Japanese films at the cutting edge of the medium.3 Hasan Karacada˘g, the only Turkish director to make horror films consistently and director of the ongoing D@bbe franchise, has argued that, whereas the origin of the being in the Paranormal Activity series (2009–present) cannot be explained, the djinn mythology in Turkish Islamic culture works perfectly with found footage for at least two reasons. First, directors can convey and contextualise what the invisible beings that terrorise the realities of protagonists actually are by giving (Islamic) origins to them.4 Secondly, thanks to this technique’s emphasis on unseen antagonists, the Turkish Islamic fear of djinns is thoroughly captured.5 Moreover, the claimed ‘reality’ status of the v´erit´e narratives in these films both

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localises the source of fear in the Turkish context and helps to market them to audiences by arousing curiosity. Karacada˘g stated that he chose to use the found footage technique in D@bbe: A Djinn Case because of the global popularity of the technique, whose roots can be traced back to the enormous success of The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo S´anchez, 1999). Likewise, in a very similar vein as Blair Witch, the filmmakers of The Karadedeler Case made statements to prove that they composed a documentary out of found footage and even included a serious notice on the film’s official website saying that, despite all the gossip about the fictional nature of the film, it is in fact a documentary in every respect.6 Thanks to globally popular film techniques such as the pseudodocumentary, these v´erit´e horrors can now be portrayed in horror film cheaply and effectively. Yet, the Islamicisation of content and technique that distinguishes many recent examples of Turkish horror film is not merely a matter of marketing or of maximising commercial success. In this chapter, I will be discussing how these films explain the popularisation of Islamic mythology as a source of horror in a Turkey ruled by the AKP for the last decade, as well as why these borrowed horror techniques are very effective in the telling of djinn tales. The most consistent Islamic horror films of the digital horror trend in Turkey are the various instalments in the ongoing D@bbe series. Starting with D@bbe, the first techno-horror of post-millennial Turkish cinema, the ‘virtual horrors’ of contemporary Turkish cinema have depicted Islamic mythology as an invasive force invisibly threatening people’s lives by associating it with the intrusion of technology into the most private aspects of our identities. What is interesting about the D@bbe series is that each film dwells on different aspects of media and technology as the generators and the mediators of horror, rendering technology an instrument of the djinns, Dabbe and the Deccal, that is, the Islamic Antichrist who will claim to be the prophet and manipulate people for his Satanic deeds near the apocalypse. According to D@bbe’s interpretation of the verses in the Qur’an, Deccal will destroy humankind by infecting the bodies and souls of people through the internet, television and phones, and, ultimately, possess them. The first part of the series, D@bbe is specifically based on the verse in the Qur’an which states that, on Judgment Day, the creature called Dabbe’t-¨ul Arz will summon all the djinns who worship him and will help bring about the apocalypse. In D@bbe, Hasan Karacada˘g borrows heavily from Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Kairo (2001). According to the plot, the viral suicide incidents that originated in Japan and the US with the deaths of over 1,300 people have now started to spread to the rest of the world, including Turkey. It is revealed later on that these uncanny suicides are caused by the internet, which Dabbe is using as a channel to reach people through the use of evil djinns. Initially conceived as a project to be shown only in Japan, where Karacada˘g studied cinema, D@bbe ultimately proved very successful at the Turkish box office, attracting 468,000 viewers within the first six weeks of its release.7

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Although D@bbe is, in some respects, an unacknowledged remake of Kairo, ¨ D@bbe differs from the original story in several ways. Firstly, as Ozkaracalar notes, the reason for the rash of suicides in D@bbe is directly related to its founding Islamic story, whereas Kairo is less generous in giving the audience details about the origin of the so-called suicide outbreak.8 Many themes are commonly employed in both films, such as the belief that red (in D@bbe, black) tape will block these djinns, or ghosts in Kairo, from entering the rooms and that these otherworldly creatures are using the internet, phones and television to spread around the world. D@bbe, however, repositions the original story within a specifically Islamic framework, attributing the source of the evil technology directly to the Islamic creature Dabbet’¨ul Arz. While keeping the existentialist core of Kairo, D@bbe ends with a very nihilistic finale in which all the protagonists have been immortally captured in a dark cave full of lost souls and where they become the shadows of their identities in this world. In D@bbe, the protagonist Hande’s (Ebru Aykac¸) exposure to evil forces starts with television. While she is watching the news, the reporter starts talking about a ‘viral’ suicide trend significantly originating in the ‘super power America’ that specifically affects the younger generation. The scientist interviewed on the news says that even the US, with its reputation for scientific developments, cannot solve the mystery of the viral suicides and calls for alternative ways of approaching this now worldwide problem. He further claims that the common denominator of these suicides is the internet – not because of the global access it provides to certain religious cults, but because of the metaphysical forces that have been activated through it. This news is reported as the biggest source of chaos since 9/11. It seems striking here that the Islamic apocalypse first targets American users of technology, almost echoing the Islamophobic dread that radical Muslims are waging a war against scientifically developed countries and beginning with the technologically advanced US. It seems far more plausible, in the Turkish context, however, that Karacada˘g wanted rather to underline that D@bbe is so omnipotent that even the globally dominant US technology has no agency against D@bbe’s mysterious digital existence. Following D@bbe and Semum (2008), Karacada˘g made his third horror feature, D@bbe 2, which reimagines the ‘technology-as-horror’ subject by means of a more overtly post-apocalyptic plot than that of its antecedent. While D@bbe 2 starts on a more microcosmic scale than D@bbe (with its focused representation of a nuclear family under the immediate threat of Dabbe’t¨ul Arz technologically invading their house) this film reveals that the beginning of the end of the world implied in D@bbe has now reached its climax, presumably destroying the whole of Istanbul. This the characters learn via the technological means of television broadcasting. At the very beginning of the film, we are told that this film is, once again, inspired by an actual event and that it is Karacada˘g’s interpretation of the events. The film opens with the acousmatic voice of a man who identifies him as ‘D¨uceyye

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El Arabi, the son of Nusred bin Zahir, and a descendant of the Kufas’, as he reads from an ancient manuscript written by himself. It warns us, in a sophisticated language, that the time has come for the D@bbe to entangle people in his ‘net’ and that we have acquired forbidden information by reading this manuscript. The film then cuts into the house of a distinctly secular and upper-middle class married couple who are starting to experience the presence of D@bbe’s ‘techno-ghosts’. The entire film takes place in the couple’s house and is organised around the unending assault of the demonic entities (djinns) who infiltrate the house, firstly via I˙lhan’s cell phone and laptop computer and, then, the home phone, the television and the radio, terrifying his wife Melis (I˙ncinur Das¸demir) when I˙lhan (Sefa Zengin) is outside. I˙lhan’s bewildered response to the uncanny moment when his computer shows flickering images of the code ‘388@0’ (the reversed version of the word ‘D@BBE’) is met with scepticism by Melis, who blames I˙lhan for the incident and suggests it may have been caused by the ‘strange’ websites he may have been browsing. After a climactic crisis in this house, where the couple, Funda (Deniz Olgac¸) and her friends experience terrorising encounters with black smoke, they all find out from the television that the entire city of Istanbul has been destroyed by the Islamic apocalypse. Successive iconic images of the city are juxtaposed, and the audience sees that Istanbul has been reduced to chaos, death and a fire in a nightmarish grey sky. Significantly, the first post-apocalyptic image of Istanbul is a burning mosque. While accentuating the religious nature of the apocalypse, this mosque seems to be the famous Blue Mosque, which is also of great historical importance to Turkish people and, more specifically, to Islamic Ottoman culture. In the background, we hear a horrifyingly distorted ezan, the Islamic call to prayer. Despite the group’s attempts to survive, the djinns eventually destroy all the family members, Funda being the first victim. With his daughter dying in his arms in agony, I˙lhan prays to Allah for help and, then blasphemously shouts at the sky: ‘[w]hy have you put us through so much pain?! I don’t believe in you! I don’t believe in you! My God, why have you forsaken us?’ After this scene, the last survivors of the film, I˙lhan and his wife, are also engulfed by the black smoke carrying the djinns. In addition to the theme of faith, the anxiety of being monitored by a superior force is an inherent theme to the D@bbe series, with the statement borrowed from the Qur’an that ‘the djinns see us from a place where we cannot see them’. D@bbe 2 refers to such exposure with the ending intertitles: ‘[t]he bar has been collapsed. The Antichrist sees you.’ This paranoia of being constantly watched by a powerful source could be traced back to a contemporary Turkish fear of omnipresent surveillance. For not only, as Barry Keith Grant observes of the ‘horror v´erit´e’ genre, does ‘the realist aesthetic of these films, in combination with their fantastic and frightening elements, reveal a post-modern anxiety about the indexical truthfulness of the image that has been exacerbated by the ubiquity of

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digital technology’, such concerns also echo the contemporary Turkish context.9 As regulations on internet access have grown increasingly restrictive, the idea of being controlled politically through digital media has become very prominent in the popular imagination. Along with their interaction with technology, it is interesting to note that in D@bbe and D@bbe 2, just as in Kairo and its American remake Pulse ( Jim Sonzero, 2006), the most shocking moments for the characters are those in which they see their doppelg¨anger from the dimension occupied by otherworldly creatures. These moments are generally followed by a scene where the people die at the hands of dark forces. Correspondingly, in D@bbe, djinns are described as ‘those who exist in the mirror against us’, something which, again, accentuates the idea of doubles or alternative identities staring back at us from our reflection. Adding to the gothic atmosphere of the film, this emphasis on the existence of doubles and mirror images simultaneously highlights the notion of cyber avatars used by many people in the twenty-first century. In both D@bbe and Kairo, as well as in Pulse, the problem is generated by computers, with their protagonists discovering that their friends have been growing more and more introverted because of a computer they recently bought. It is therefore significant to note that D@bbe opens with a stabilised image of the horrified face of a man standing in a room containing only a phone and monitor, and with the windows taped. In the subsequent shot, this man suddenly becomes trapped inside the computer monitor. It seems that these characters’ interactions with the internet is indicative of an anxiety about the potential compromise of one’s identity as it starts to associate reality with one’s virtual identity. For these directors, technology contains an element of threat. The success of Islamic-themed ‘techno-horror’ films like the first two D@bbe films led to The Karadedeler Case, which was conceived in the context of an already established horror filmmaking scene but adopted a format never before used in horror productions in Turkey: found footage/v´erit´e horror. Drawing upon the hand-held horror technique, the directors of The Karadedeler Case capitalise on the pseudo-documentary genre by claiming to portray a rural djinn case. Moreover, the film’s directors made a press announcement on their website, claiming that, despite the statements of some people who think that it is a fictional film, Karadedeler is a ‘documentary’ and that the relatives of those involved in the footage have been kept anonymous upon their request.10 Karadedeler is composed of the VHS recordings made by the journalist H. B., who went to a village to investigate the djinn incidents that the villagers claim to have witnessed. Staying true to the documentary genre, and giving the date of each of the events, the film’s trailer recounts the entire framework of the story as follows: In January 1989, the newspapers wrote about the villagers of the D . . . village, in the K . . . province, who could not go out during the night because they saw

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mysterious creatures after dark. The gendarmerie could not trace any unusual activity during the investigation. Journalist H. B. came to the village for research. Having stayed in the village for eleven days, the young journalist came back to Istanbul, leaving his camera to fourteen-year-old E. C. upon the insistence of villagers. A total of seven villagers in three houses were found murdered. Among the victims was fourteen-year-old E. C. and his camera was still recording. The incident was not released to the press. Journalist H. B. was taken to the District Gendarmerie Headquarters by four civilian gendarme soldiers and interrogated by Lieutenant A. S. This interrogation was recorded. Journalist H. B. was released. All the clothes, backpack and notepad belonging to journalist H. B. were found in the woods around the D . . . village.11

The film ultimately remains loyal to this factual account and, rather than resorting to major plot twists, manages to create suspense and horror through its format and skilled performances. A good example is the moment of possession. It happens off-screen but is revealed through the movements of the camera and the assumed reaction of the person behind the lens. In this scene, Erdinc¸, or ‘E. C.’ (actor uncredited), is walking in the woods with a hand-held camera from whose perspective we witness the events. Suddenly, Erdinc¸ falls on the ground and is dragged back by some ‘thing’. The scene fades out after the dragging stops and is followed by a sequence in which the ‘person’ wielding the camera gets up, rushes into the woods and suddenly stops at the sound of the ezan. Throughout, E. C. hides behind a tree and, as soon as the ezan stops, resumes his rushing out of the woods. This is the most striking scene of the film, in which the viewer’s fear that the child Erdinc¸ has been possessed by a karadede, or djinn, is confirmed when the camera suddenly stops moving and is blocked by a close-up shot of a tree trunk, thus implying that the karadede has shrunk back from the sound of an Islamic practice and is hiding from sight whilst the ezan is being delivered. As such, our affective identification with the karadede, who has usurped an innocent character’s point of view, becomes a terrifying experience. It ends with his placing the camera on a sofa and, in Erdinc¸’s form, killing all of Erdinc¸’s family members off-screen – a very interesting visual choice. Grant argues that ‘[t]o encourage the viewer’s epistephilic desire, v´erit´e horror and sf films tend to diegetically emphasise the importance of the visual documentation we are seeing as evidence of truth’.12 Therefore, it is significant that, whilst we expect to see a supernatural being in Karadedeler, we never do, save for a few crouching dark shadows. What is more, the images fall more into the category of ‘things that we think we see rather’ than ‘actual’ entities seen by the characters within the diegesis. The affect of Karadedeler is, thus, born out of its claim to be a documentary, the ‘less is more’ aesthetic of which appeals strongly to the audience. The film, however, attracted a flood of adverse criticism due to its pseudo-documentary format, which reminded some Turkish viewers of foreign productions and, more specifically, The Blair Witch Project. 101

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Apart from the scene with the possessed Erdinc¸ hiding in the woods, another early indication of the djinn’s fear of prayers is the scene in which Hakkı (actor uncredited) is visiting Uncle Mehmet’s (actor uncredited) house, looking for him. While he is walking inside the living room, Hakkı senses a supernatural presence in the house, with strange phenomena taking place, such as glass breaking or the ground shaking. Meanwhile, Hakkı is filming the wall and we see that two of the three frames hanging on it are turned to face the wall. The third one, however, is a framed picture of a prayer and it is not turned backwards. As he is trying to find Uncle Mehmet, Hakkı films other parts of the house and, when he looks back on the wall, he sees that the other two frames are turned back to how they should be and that the third frame is still stable. Thus, we realise that the djinns cannot touch or approach holy Islamic scripture in any way, giving the viewer a sense of hope that the characters might be saved. This ending does not, unfortunately, take place. One wonders whether these characters might have been saved, had they stayed physically close to Islamic objects or undertaken religious practices such as prayer. We have no way of knowing. What we do know, however, is the fact that despite the prayer hanging on his wall, Uncle Mehmet is not spared by the djinns. What is more, Erdinc¸’s seemingly pious family are all taken, one by one, by the possessed Erdinc¸. There is a certain scepticism towards the agency of Islam here that epitomises the diversity of the religious perspectives Turkish horror directors have, as well as the complex and overdetermined ways in which these horror films treat Islam. Hot on the heels of Karadedeler came Karacada˘g’s third D@bbe film, D@bbe: A Djinn Case, a found footage horror film in the form of a video diary kept by a young couple, on the suggestion of psychiatrists, to record the sleepwalking episodes of Ceyda T. (Nihan Aypolat). It is soon revealed that the protagonist, who is based, Karacada˘g claims, on a genuine psychiatric case study, has been possessed by a djinn after a spell was put on her by her evil-minded maid. The film is the second found footage horror in Turkish cinema and, in this case, the technological horror of D@bbe does not come from a transmission or frequency but rather from the form of the film. After Bir Cin Vakası, Karadaca˘g used the found footage technique again in El-Cin but, this time, as a secondary narrative to recount the disappearance and ultimate death of four teenagers in the dark realm of djinns. Karacada˘g continued with this technique in the fourth D@bbe film: D@bbe: Possession, premised on the found footage video diary kept by psychiatrist Ebru Karaduman (Irmak ¨ Ornek) to record the exorcism promised to her by the hodja Faruk (A. Murat ¨ Ozgen). In this film, Ebru is looking for a way to cure her ‘schizophrenic’ childhood friend K¨ubra (Cansu Kurgun), who murdered her husband on her wedding night. A very matter-of-fact young woman, Ebru is quite cynical about a religious remedy. Throughout the film, her camera records all the events taking place at the house of K¨ubra, as well as the various practices of Hodja Faruk, to

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exorcise the djinn that has possessed K¨ubra. Ebru’s camera serves both as witness and mediator of all the horrors these characters experience. Ultimately, it becomes police evidence when the protagonists eventually perish at the end. This, in turn, reveals that a worse spell was cast on Ebru, the most pragmatic and agnostic character in the film. Bearing in mind the fact that Turkish horror film is still in its early days, it is no surprise that its popularity at the moment is largely limited to Turkey, but there are some encouraging signs of the international impact of these films. D@bbe, D@bbe: A Djinn Case, El-Cin and D@bbe: Possession were all released on DVD with English subtitles, attracting the attention of global audiences and some positive reviews. D@bbe: A Djinn Case was also shown in some European and Asian countries, having been distributed internationally by UIP. Having sold copies of his demonpossession film Semum to 24 countries, Karacada˘g has stated that he wants the djinn mythology to spread around the world and claims to use trademark horror images from other countries’ cinemas in his djinn films in order to make his films more familiar to a global market.13 Having received critical acclaim for Semum in Spain and Japan, Karacada˘g has also predicted that Hollywood companies like DreamWorks and Warner Bros. will use the djinn myths in their own films as soon as they discover them, just as happened with Japanese folklore.14 The implications of the potential American remakes of Turkish Islamic horror films, however, may prove to be problematic, as the reimagination of Islamic materials in these films may cause a stereotyping of Turkish culture as primarily Islamic and may, therefore, be associated with terrorism, particularly since 9/11. Such an association would be highly undesirable for the majority of Turkish people, from those who represent the secularists to those affiliated with pro-Islamism, who would potentially be offended by a demonised representation of Turkish Islamic culture. The recent popularity of digital horror stories in Turkish cinema is ultimately striking given how few horror films have been made in Turkey. Considering the fact that the genre has been very prolific thanks to such formats as found footage, it seems that Turkish horror will continue to address in more detail the ambivalent feelings about Islam that Turkey is currently experiencing. Bryan Stone states that ‘[t]he mere fact that horror films rely heavily on religious symbols and stories as mere conventions to scare the hell out of us does not make a case for religious vitality in our culture’.15 He also adds that ‘[we] should [not] conclude that because horror film is preoccupied with visions of evil, it is therefore nihilistic or anti-religious’.16 In post-millennial Turkish horror films, however, even if the use of Islam is not indicative of religious vitality or represented with a nihilistic sentiment, it certainly seems to be a manifestation of the anxieties caused by Turkey’s decade-long rule by the pro-Islamist AKP government. Although it is very exciting to see the Islamic turn in Turkish horror cinema, with its utilisation of local mythologies, the misgivings these films have about Islamic authority, embodied by either hodjas or scriptures hanging on walls, cannot be ignored. As

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one of the characters in The Karadedeler Case says, we should not ‘forget that dark things are seen, feed on and create fears in dark places’. The ultimate question is how much light can these horror films shed on that darkness, if any? The few critics that discuss the depiction of the Islamic faith in Turkish horror films disagree in their views: while Savas¸ Arslan discusses the trend of using Islamic elements in horror films as a manifestation of the secularist directors’ fears of Turkey’s Islamicisation, Mesut Uc¸akan, a conservative film director, complains in an interview that recent Islamic-themed Turkish horror productions are not really concerned with Islam but, instead, use religion as a marker of social context. He further argues that these filmmakers are not dedicated to Islam in practical life and criticises new horror directors for their favouring of secularisation and the marginalisation of conservative filmmakers such as himself.17 This divide in critical approaches to Turkish Islamic horror film is representative of the two ideologies currently juxtaposed in the contemporary political climate: secularism, on the one hand, and mild Islamism, on the other. With its increasingly conservative policies, the AKP government continues to cause a great deal of controversy in a Turkey, where a large number of people feel that their rights are under threat and digital technology has been employed as a means of governmental control on several occasions. After the internationally noted Gezi protests in the summer of 2013, for instance, the number of CCTV surveillance systems in public spaces has increased, and some protesters have even reported that they have been refused jobs because they were ‘seen’ protesting against the government. Another point of discussion in Turkey lately is the government’s recent internet censorship legislation. Before the local elections on 30 March 2014, Prime Minister Erdo˘gan vowed to ‘eradicate’ Twitter, after which the social website was banned in Turkey. The ban was lifted after the local elections only to be followed by another one: this time of YouTube, as an alleged attempt to contain the leakage of tapes on which government officials discuss plans such as waging war on Syria.18 Following legal actions, the ban on YouTube was also lifted. Although, during this time, people in Turkey found ways of accessing these websites in various ways, the limitations on free access to information stirred a remarkable counter-reaction, and people started protesting against the government. Several months before these internet bans, moreover, Prime Minister Erdo˘gan had stated that the government would start working on separating cohabitated housing shared by female and male students.19 The police have been reported to raid private student houses since Erdo˘gan’s statement. Such an invasive policy, coupled with its aggressive and separatist policing, has only aggravated the anxiety in Turkey about being monitored by a Big Brother government. With these political developments in mind, it seems that the metaphorical djinns deeply-rooted in the practices of the Turkish government will be here to terrorise more and more people in the future, and it is doubtful whether any black or red tape will be able to keep them out.

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1. Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer with Chris Cullens (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), p. 229. 2. Savas¸ Arslan, Cinema in Turkey: a New Critical History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 258. 3. Except for the ‘haunted house’ film The Unseen / G¨or¨unmeyenler, and the ‘zomedy’ Island: Wedding of the Zombies / Ada: Zombilerin D¨ug˘u¨ n¨u, all of the films are concerned with djinns. The found footage horror Paranormal I˙stanbul (Kemal Topuz, 2011) was also announced for release in 2014. 4. Hasan Karacada˘g, interview in ‘Cin korkusu T¨urkiye’den yayılsın istiyorum’, PopularSinema.com (1 August 2012). Available at http://www.popularsinema.com/ roportaj/cin-korkusu-turkiyeden-yayilsin-istiyorum-10900.htm (accessed 2 February 2014). 5. According to the Qur’an, djinns are creatures who were created like human beings but made of fire instead of earth. They live in the same world as people but are invisible to them. Just like human beings, djinns have a gender, can get married and reproduce. The Qur’an also mentions that there are djinns that believe in Allah and those who do not and are evil. Djinn folktales are so indispensable to the Turkish imagination that people refer to these creatures as ‘the three letters’ instead of the word ‘cin’ (djinn) for fear that this might invoke them. 6. See Karadedeler Olayı Hakkında. Available at http://karadedelerolayi.net/files/ karadedeler olayi hakkinda.pdf (accessed 2 February 2014). 7. Anonymous, ‘Yapımcıların kafasını karıs¸tıran film: D@bbe’, Sabah.com (24 March 2006). Available at http://arsiv.sabah.com.tr/2006/03/24/gny/gny125-20060324200.html (accessed 2 February 2014). ¨ 8. Kaya Ozkaracalar, ‘Horror films in Turkish cinema: to use or not to use local cultural motifs, that is not the question’, in Patricia Allmer, Emily Brick and David Huxley (eds), European Nightmares: Horror Cinema in Europe since 1945 (London and New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), pp. 249–60 (p. 257). 9. Barry Keith Grant, ‘Digital anxiety and the new verit´e horror and SF film’, Science Fiction Film and Television vi/2 (2013), pp. 153–75 (p. 153). 10. Karadedeler Olayı Hakkında. 11. Karadedeler Olayı Official Website. Available at http://karadedelerolayi.net (accessed 2 February 2014). Translation is my own. 12. Grant, ‘Digital anxiety’, p. 168. 13. Karacada˘g, ‘Cin korkusu T¨urkiye’den yayılsın istiyorum’. 14. Hasan Karacada˘g, interview in TVNet (1 June 2012). Available at http://www.you tube.com/watch?v=bvjB9o74Fi0 (accessed 2 February 2014). 15. Bryan Stone, ‘The sanctification of fear: images of the religious in horror films’, The Journal of Religion and Film v/2 (2001). Available at http://www.unomaha.edu/ jrf/sanctifi.htm (accessed 2 February 2014). 16. Ibid.

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Notes

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17. Mesut Uc¸akan, T¨urk Sinemasında I˙deoloji (Istanbul: Sepya Publishing, 2010), pp. 244–5, 271. 18. Alev Scott, ‘Turkey’s YouTube and Twitter bans show a government in serious trouble’, The Guardian (28 March 2014). Available at http://www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/2014/mar/28/turkey-youtube-twitter-ban-government-trouble (accessed 28 March 2014). 19. Nick Tatterstall, ‘Mixed-sex student housing becomes Turkish PM’s latest bugbear’, Reuters.com (5 November 2013). Available at http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/ 11/05/us-turkey-erdogan-students-idUSBRE9A410N20131105 (accessed 5 November 2013).

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8 An Uploadable Cinema: Digital Horror and the Postnational Image Mark Freeman

Technology and the construction of community have a history. Benedict Anderson famously declared that nationhood was formed as an imagined community, a process catalysed through the invention of the printing press. The move away from dynastic rule towards secular national government came through the development of this connectivity, one which Anderson proposed was recognised as both ‘limited and sovereign’.1 The mass production of the newspaper, he argued, forged a national identity for consumers through an awareness that the action of reading was ‘being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he [was] confident, yet of whose identity he ha[d] not the slightest notion’.2 This connection between Anderson’s imagined community in the postEnlightenment era and its construction through technology poses provocative implications for the contemporary intersection of the digital hand-held camera, the virtual, uploadable exhibition space and traditional configurations of nationhood. Digital horror cinema frequently foregrounds the use of technology through its hand-held aesthetic and integrates recognition of the site for the film’s exhibition within the narrative itself as ‘found footage’ or as an uploadable document. Led by technological change over the last several decades, the emergence of the borderless virtual community of the online world suggests a transition from Anderson’s demarcation of the national and its construction through physical proximity, towards a new virtual postnational space, where media such as film may exist as part of an ‘imagined community’ both within and beyond the nation of its production. 107

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Advancements in delivery systems, access nodes and the transformation of exhibition and reception processes now transcend the sovereign and limited nature of the nation state. With physical distance increasingly retracted through new technologies and culture, identity and communication increasingly moving online, it is worth remembering it was Anderson himself who suggested that ‘[c]ommunities are [distinguished] by the style in which they are imagined’.3 Where that imagined nation once formed within geographical parameters, now the imagined nation may be a delimited virtual space that transcends geography, ideology and state control. The postnational proposes a reimagining of community along a proliferation of multidirectional and multinodal lines, including those that inhabit the online landscape. Communities still function as they did under Anderson’s original configuration, yet now this can exist concurrently with a postnational virtuality which may similarly be both imagined and manifest. This online world operates simultaneously within and beyond the borders of the State, as may the cinema which targets this borderless, stateless community. It is a postnational space where readers, viewers and communicants construct their own imagined community through the uploadable portals to the virtual world. This postnational landscape of the virtual community aligns with the Castellian notion of the network society. With its lattice-like mosaic of connections, the network society moves away from the Westphalian model of territoriality and top-down administrative power and towards an interwoven series of connections that may take any form: from controlled to informal, strong or weak, permanent and temporary, single and multiple. This is distinct from the concept of pure globalisation, which we might think of as primarily concerned with the procedural flows of product between bordered nations – the manifest, trackable interaction of economies, trade, people and ideas. The framework for globalisation is very much one of process and procedure, emphasising the capacity to move people and products with great ease from nation to nation in a ‘real’ sense. The postnational is messier and less readily quantifiable in its elision of geography and our seamless virtual position within what is increasingly referred to as ‘the cloud’. It suggests a functional yet decentralised community where global movement is unhindered by state control, geographic border or ideological imperatives. It erases what Franco Moretti has described as ‘the phenomenology of the border’ and may instead create a network of borderless connections within the imagined community of the online world.4 This suggests Anderson’s concept of the nation as sovereign, contained and controlled through government may be experiencing a process of transformation by recent technology into a postnational space of multidirectional communicative networks.5 The development and functionality of community within this virtual landscape by no means erases the nation itself. Instead, the nation becomes one in a multitude of community allegiances that may be mobilised at any given time, whether the community itself is proximal, distal, virtual, real or imagined, suggesting a postnational identity that both fractures and coheres dependent on

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circumstance. James Rosenau describes this experience as one of ‘fragmegration’, a discordant amalgam of both integration and fragmentation where the postnational agent is both absent and present, splintered and whole, existent within sovereign borders as well as beyond them.6 The media and its reception has increasingly shifted beyond the borders Anderson envisioned and now may operate in a virtual space where communities engage with cultural production such as cinema as an uploadable artefact, existing with the borderless landscape of the postnational ‘cloud’. If the printing press was the signifier for the national epoch, then the immediacy of the hand-held image and the virtual portals which host them serve as emblematic of the emergence of the postnational age. Viewed through the aperture of this virtual lens, the contemporary horror film reveals a burgeoning engagement with borderless online communities and an increasingly distinctive aesthetic paradigm tied to both the technology of production and the exhibition space utilised by its audience. The horror genre is now operative in an era where democratising technological innovations of the late twentieth century have facilitated a world in which both the banal and the extraordinary events in human experience can be captured on film with great ease. Confronting the capacity of contemporary horror cinema to generate genuine shock and terror demands recognition of the impact of this technology, including the visual style motivated by diegetic imperatives. Through the accessibility and relative affordability of the digitised, hand-held camera, users have explored the possibilities of constructing films of their own lives or to attempt their own fiction. The ubiquity of the camera as part of the experience has positioned people and events as recordable items for posterity, either as holders of the camera, as conscious participants in the image or as unwitting players in a drama not of their own devising. The concept of the home movie is hardly a new phenomenon, but in the digital age, the image itself no longer remains purely within the domestic space; now this footage is to be shared in a vast public arena, where it may be discussed, derided, ‘liked’ or upvoted. The spectatorial locus for these artefacts of the quotidian centres on sites such as YouTube and similar file-sharing content hubs, which have served as a borderless, postnational landscape housing a thriving virtual community. These are hubs for the identification, sharing, interaction and gifting of footage that presents both carefully staged sequences, moments of unexpected surprise and compelling public events captured by observers as they unfold. Henry Jenkins’ valuable research into cultures of convergence and participation identifies YouTube’s influence as ‘a key site for the production and distribution of grassroots media – ground zero, as it were, in the disruption in the operations of commercial mass media brought about by the emergence of new forms of participatory culture’.7 Jenkins locates YouTube as the hub for defiance of traditional media as the way to expose a truth that traditional forms of national media may obfuscate or ignore. These portals function as a space for social and cultural mobilisation, for declarations of ‘truth’ in its capacity as an apparently

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uncensored public forum for the airing of that which state-controlled media may restrict. Human rights protests across the globe, executions in the Middle East, rioting in Europe: images of public protest or catastrophe or criminality find their ‘freedom’ within the confines of sharing communities online through uploadable access nodes such as YouTube or social networking portals such as Facebook or Twitter. These images of digitised ‘true’ horror transform into an uploadable item for public perusal beyond the bounds of state censorship and propose the development of the new postnational order: digital footage of horror and catastrophe as a borderless, viral, shareable truth. Despite its capacity for remediation through countless other outlets, the style of this uploaded digital footage retains the appearance, at least, of its essential immediacy, which serves to amplify the potency of digital hand-held aesthetics as a powerful mode of horror cinema. Much like the cin´ema v´erit´e and direct cinema documentary movements of the 1960s, the portability and accessibility resultant from technological change speaks – for good or ill – to this transparent authenticity of the image. Shooting digitally, for example, allows for absolute manoeuvrability of the camera, and shots are free, as Geoff King has noted, to ‘run for long and possibly unproductive periods’ which can be edited – or not – at a later stage.8 The rawness of the image and its capacity to be sustained for extended periods or to zoom in and out of focus, or from person to person, as events unfold without the conventions of classical editing, encourage the sense of ‘being there’. The foregrounding of aesthetic imperfection has, by its very difference, come to suggest concepts of immediacy, verisimilitude, truth. Amy West describes this specific visual aesthetic evident in the hand-held YouTube style clip as ‘the aesthetics of amateurism’.9 She claims that the low-tech visual aesthetic that prevails in the ‘caught-on-tape’ clips that proliferate on YouTube serve to underscore the appearance of their authenticity. The amateurism of the image is foregrounded as an assertion of ‘truth’ since the evident non-professionalism of footage screened under the caught-on-tape banner certifies that the represented event is not staged, much because the technology utilised and the operator controlling it lack the sophistication to fake. Thus amateur image production is coded as transparent.10

The foregrounding of an amateur aesthetic which relies on error and slippage as the result of human ineptness acts in clear contrast with the composed visual aesthetic of the fixed camera. West describes the handycam image as ‘the embodiment of human point of view image capture, resonating as it so often does with the physiological responses of the operator’ and thereby reinforcing the affective impact of the unseen presence behind the camera.11 This uploadable ‘YouTube aesthetic’ is a central visual trope in much contemporary horror cinema. Footage increasingly 110

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positions itself within a virtual space, connecting to a community beyond nationhood by mobilising a series of visual tropes and narrative conventions associated in replication of this online experience. The emphasis of this aesthetic switches from placing the spectator within the action, to positioning the audience beyond the action within the narrative’s actual exhibition space – the community of an online virtual theatre.

The Amateur Aesthetic of Real Horror: Footage from 9/11 Perhaps no other event has shaped the contemporary horror aesthetic more than the images of the attacks on the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001. Footage from that day has become the touchstone for the uploaded aesthetic in its dramatic transition from the mundane and quotidian. Filmed sequences which, by sheer happenstance, captured the events of 9/11 depict people talking on the streets of New York, firemen dealing with a localised issue and, then, the unthinkable, the inexplicable, the image of a plane flying into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. This extreme transition from the ordinary to the extraordinary within a matter of seconds has both become a visual trope in post9/11 cinema such as Cloverfield (Matt Reeves, 2008) and cemented an aesthetic within a specific exhibition outlet: the virtual community of the YouTube content hub. It is through the uploaded images – not just seen on television but through the internet as the ‘open source’ for such material – that the events of that day burnt into the synapses of a global community. Confronting the footage from 9/11 reveals an uncontrolled, chaotic aesthetic in the raw immediacy of the images, the unstaged cries of horror and the unscripted, unexpected developments as the towers burned. It was, in the most ghoulish way possible, an image of blockbuster astonishment – ‘terrorism as theatre’, as Stephen Keane describes it.12 It was an event that was frequently mediated through an understanding of Hollywood blockbuster cinema. This was Independence Day (Roland Emmerich, 1996), except in real life, with the towers ‘an immediately recognisable element of the New York City skyline [ . . . ] familiar from countless movies, televisions shows and even video games’.13 The landscape itself became, under these circumstances, so much a scripted Hollywood effect that director Robert Altman denounced Hollywood for inciting the attacks: The movies set the pattern, and these people have copied the movies. Nobody would have thought to commit an atrocity like that unless they’d seen it in a movie [ . . . ] How dare we continue to show this kind of mass destruction in movies? I just believe we created the atmosphere and taught them how to do it.14

The connection between this uploadable aesthetic and its employment as signifier in contemporary horror is apparent in a review of the footage from that day. One 111

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video uploaded to YouTube, entitled ‘Raw 9/11 Footage from a Hotel Window’, clearly foregrounds the amateur aesthetic through its mostly static shot of the burning North Tower with rough, awkward pans around the area, the sound of the camera itself creaking obtrusively. In the background is a mixture of sounds: the television reporting the incident, televised interviews with eyewitnesses, an announcement by the hotel staff over their public address system encouraging people to stay in their rooms and bursts of dialogue between the inhabitants of the hotel room, as well as their conversations on the phone to others.15 This is the aesthetic of the extraordinary quotidian, almost like apocalyptic tourism: the home video of the end of the world. The imprecision of the aesthetic here is juxtaposed with the extraordinary image of an icon of American supremacy ablaze, with people visibly jumping to their deaths from the burning tower. The camera’s movement is sometimes canted awkwardly as it rests on the hotel bed while the occupants conduct activities within the room; sometimes, it whips quickly to the side, blurring the image until it fixes and sustains the focus of the operator’s gaze. There are abrupt interruptions to the image where the camera is shut off, which draws spectatorial attention to the production of the footage itself. Aurally, the long lapses of silence, the calm tones of the hotel manager over the public address system – ‘[f ]or your safety, please stay in your rooms’ – are dramatically contrasted with the horrified exclamations of those within the room itself. ‘There’s people falling out! That was a person!’, exclaims a voice in the background, directing the holder of the camera to chart the terrifying descent of a figure to the ground below. As an uploaded artefact, the film now exists within a virtual space where it is permanently accessible and permanently immediate, despite its temporal distance from the events recorded. Dialogue makes constant reference to the camera: ‘[y]ou got it on video, though?’, a female voice asks in ‘Raw Footage’, thereby making the truthful, evidential qualities of the technology itself central to the accuracy of the record of events just witnessed. These visions of true horror take shape and are experienced within a borderless sharing community by the spectators through the YouTube portal, where they may interact with a community of fellow viewers or contribute to discussion of the footage itself. Echoing Rosenau’s argument for the ‘fragmegrative’ experience of the postnational, these are graphic scenes that are both intrinsically and exclusively American but also situated within the community of the borderless, online content hub. It is footage that speaks to multiple imagined communities. It exists in the mediated world of the screen, a virtual space traversed through the click of a hyperlink and viewed not necessarily with the spectatorial eye of the nation but potentially with the postnational communal space of the network and the virtual. The success of uploadable images such as this one exists within the constraints of a national broadcaster or production company but in a globalised ground level communal space accessible to (almost) all. It constitutes an untethered aesthetic that has solidified around the ubiquity of the YouTube image, crystallising a visual mode that exists, and is read, as a virtual style and is not bound

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by locale, landscape or geography. The postnational aesthetic of the viral relies on the random, the mundane and the sudden manifestation of the unexpected. It is an aesthetic perfectly suited to a cinema of horror and catastrophe. The impact of 9/11 on the cinema has been well documented in recent years, with Wheeler Winston Dixon, Jeff Birkenstein and Stephen Prince producing work focused on the impact of terrorism on the cinema.16 Ranging from issues concerning the release of films such as Collateral Damage (Andrew Davis, 2002) in the wake of the events, as well as the slew of ‘War on Terror’ films that followed in the ensuing decade, the events of 2001 shaped much of the narrative and thematic concerns of that period. The immediate response was a fear of the blockbuster images of destruction that had been the stock-in-trade of big-budget Hollywood. As Jonathan Markowitz noted, ‘[f ]or audience members comparing these images to those that flickered across their television screens on 11 September, suspension of disbelief had become impossible, as the artifice of cinematic terror [was] now apparent in dramatically new ways’.17 This is a historical period that confronted issues of horror in a multiplicity of ways, and was frequently shaped by the mode of address and the aesthetic tropes that defined the footage from the terrorist attacks. In films such as Brian De Palma’s representation of ‘real’ horror of the Iraq war in Redacted (2007) and in George Romero’s allusive zombie horror film Diary of the Dead (2007), the influence of this visual style in the wake of the footage from 9/11 invokes the virtual, borderless experience of an engagement with content hubs existing beyond the nation. These are films which rely on recurrent visual tropes as a mimetic experience through their invocation of the spectators’ experience with online footage, and motivate their narratives by situating the drama itself within virtual networks and uploaded sharing communities of the postnational space.

The Re-mediation of Redacted Brian De Palma’s Redacted serves as a companion piece to his earlier Vietnam drama Casualties of War (1989) through its depiction of soldiers in the Iraq war in the town of Samarra, their rape and murder of a young girl and the subsequent murders of the rest of her family. This is an act performed by two of the squadron while a third soldier films the events as they unfold. Redacted is a horror film that operates separately from concepts of the supernatural. It is horror cinema that relies on an audience’s familiarity with real life footage of men engaged in warfare, the sort of footage uploaded, shared through social media and accessed by the virtual community. The narrative evokes the 9/11 attacks directly – these are even identified on several occasions by characters as the reason for their participation in this ‘War on Terror’. What moves the film from any number of post 9/11 films dealing with the events and ramifications of the attacks from 2001 towards a kind of postnational aesthetic of the virtual landscape is the presentational mode (or modes) 113

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of delivery. The film is characterised by a collage of acquired footage, mediated through a range of online portals, virtual spaces and social media technologies, thereby inspiring in the film a Castellian image of the network, an emphatic interrogation of a community within a nation and its participation in the stateless flows of the online world. The film begins with the handycam ‘journal’ of one of the soldiers, a common trope of the found footage film, and certainly one that is also exploited by Romero in Diary of the Dead. The direct address to the camera from the cameraman behind the lens, the ‘accidental’ acknowledgement of the camera through panning across reflective surfaces such as mirrors or through staged pieces to camera, encourage a performative, but ‘transparent’, aesthetic. Reflective of YouTube footage, the background is the unselfconscious arena for the mundane: unaware of the camera, those in the background operate as normal, ignorant of its gaze. Redacted draws the audience’s attention to what is not the initial focus of the shot: a casual glance towards a passing woman in a hijab, other soldiers engaged in conversation off screen, the sounds of activity beyond the bounds of the image. As with the experience of watching uploaded footage on YouTube, the peripheral space away from the direct focus of the camera’s gaze is often the locus for revelation. It is the tangential ambient normality of these background activities that easily recalls the experience of the personally uploaded images on video-sharing portals. The Raw Footage clip, for example, may focus for the most part on the image of the burning towers, but, off-frame, we hear someone packing and zipping a suitcase. On the screen, the viewer’s eye may follow a drifting bit of debris, or detect the more solid form of a human body as it plunges to earth in the corner of the frame, an event unremarked upon by the holder of the camera, whose personal gaze is directed elsewhere. The detection of unremarkable detail operates as testament to the veracity of the footage so that the uncontrolled amateurism of the person behind the camera encourages a sweeping gaze that scans the frame for the unexpected or the beginning of a new focal point or centre of interest, the gaze adopted by the spectator when viewing uploaded, uncensored material shared within the online community. De Palma’s film instigates the spectatorial protocols employed to engage with online footage of catastrophe, lending his narrative the same shareable truth aesthetic. This aesthetic directly addresses the imagined community of the virtual world by invoking both national and postnational constructs through its uploadable approach to the images. But Redacted’s visual style moves beyond the mere handycam aesthetic. The narrative itself plays out through a range of mediated screen types. A French crew are filming a documentary of the American deployment in the region and their footage offers the audience a conventional televisual image, carefully constructed to capture light for the frame, and is accompanied by an orchestrated musical score, a more solidly state-bound representation of the conflict. This is placed

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in juxtaposition with the earthy amateurism of the diary. The scene may then transition to a televised Iraqi news report or footage filed by a British journalist. The television sequences possess the smooth assurance of state-led control and serve to draw into sharper focus the artless, awkwardly framed unprofessionalism of the ‘authentic’ sequences shared across cyberspace. As the film continues, security camera footage, YouTube clips, video blogs and Skype-style video conferencing help construct the breadth of the narrative within a mediated reality: it all exists in transmissible imagery. Redacted is a film constructed through a panoply of uploaded material, employing an array of aesthetic modes and thereby developing a networked vision of the events of the war in Iraq. The consistent shifting of these modes echoes Castells’ claims for the splintering and decentralisation of power through the move to the postnational network of multidirectional nodes. This is a process whereby [c]ultural expressions are abstracted from history and geography, and become predominantly mediated by electronic communication networks that interact with the audience and by the audience in a diversity of codes and values, ultimately subsumed in a digitised audiovisual hypertext.18

Each item in the film’s narrative becomes part of a larger mosaic, an experience not unlike cycling through a range of clips on a content hub. De Palma himself claimed that it was by viewing content on uploadable media hubs that he formed the idea and the aesthetic for the film itself. He later described the style of the film as erupting from the ‘unique visualisations’ he found through uploadable video sites.19 Perhaps the most disturbing sequence in Redacted involves the kidnapping and eventual beheading of one of the soldiers in a scene that clearly evokes the death of journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002.20 Pearl’s execution, which was filmed by members of Al Qaeda and was uploaded shortly after his death, was only one of a number of such videos shot and shared during this period, spreading throughout the online community. The horrific murder of Sal (Izzy Diaz) in Redacted is ultimately read through this virtual prism. Its allusive quality forces the audience to become both a viewer of film and a viewer of internet footage, where, just as Anderson proposed the national imagined community through the shared experience of the newspaper, so too does this sequence facilitate the unity of the imagined postnational community. If national cinema can be explained as a process of interpellation, an interjection or summoning of the nation, then De Palma’s film works to also summon the networked, virtual world and the community which functions within it. Anderson’s argument suggested that, through the technology of the printing press, a nation cohered around that shared experience of access and the imagined unity of those engaged in its consumption within its borders. De Palma’s film shifts this experience from the nation to the stateless, borderless 115

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community who share and engage through new technologies with the online image as accessible, transmissible content untethered by state control and as part of the decentralised network of shareable media.

The Uploadable Image as Public Archive: Diary of the Dead George Romero’s Diary of the Dead takes an alternative approach to the digital horror. While still retaining the style of the uploaded image, it positions itself closer to the found footage subgenre of films such as Cloverfield and The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo S´anchez, 1999). The premise of Romero’s film actually borrows significantly from the advertising and promotion employed for Blair Witch, which used a website to promote the film and was predicated on a premise of the ‘truth’ of its titular character. This included apparent search photographs, biographies of the missing students and an extended historical account of the mythology surrounding the Blair Witch.21 The interactive internet process whereby visitors could watch clips and speculate over the veracity of the accounts shaped the film’s ‘buzz’ prior to its release. Peg Aloi argues that the use of the online community in this case created ‘a virtual explosion of literature, images and hype, add[ing] up to the sort of cultural spectacle one normally associates with bigbudget blockbusters’.22 The Blair Witch Project employed the virtual community as the domain for its assertion of the ‘truth’ of the events as both a narrative and a marketing tool. In Diary of the Dead, Romero directly identifies the virtual community as the audience for the material uploaded by the central protagonists, and the visual aesthetic of the film reinforces that viewership. The underlying impulse of the film is the desire to record and preserve the astonishing events which envelop the characters. The prevailing goal is not just survival of the zombie apocalypse but also the uploading of captured footage. As such, the use of recordable technologies and the amateurism of the footage foreground the exhibition space for this history. Romero’s style aims for the abrupt, jagged camerawork the online community experiences when accessing ‘true reportage’ as a viral, nationless commodity by its distribution through an online content hub. In evoking the aesthetic of 9/11 footage, technology in Diary of the Dead adopts a position of overt display. The evident amateurism and the capacity for the footage to cut mid-event and then recur at any given time later is deployed at several crucial junctures in the film. These elisions make the real manifest, drawing attention to the filming process and jarring the spectator with its jagged cut between scenes. The emphasis on this elided footage holds exceptional dramatic power, replicating the experience of the ‘as it happened’ footage of spectacular events online. In the ‘Raw Footage’ clip from YouTube, the camera shuts off suddenly just as the audience hears the roar of the engine of the second plane prior to its impact with the south tower of the World Trade Center. The footage then abruptly resumes with both towers ablaze and the public recognition that this 116

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event has moved from terrible accident to planned terrorist attack. The primary event connecting those two sequences, however, is lost, something which further reinforces the amateur aesthetic of the uploaded image. The controlled image would favour, even emphasise, the moment of impact, ensuring its central position in the frame. Its absence from the footage itself speaks to both its amateurism and its veracity, lending the image greater power as truth. It is through these visual tropes that catastrophe and ‘real’ horror communicate their truth to audiences. In Diary of the Dead, the van driven by the survivors is stopped by men who appear to be soldiers but are, in fact, conducting raids on others to steal supplies. A character demands the camera be shut off, the screen abruptly cuts to black, and the scene resumes some time later with the survivors unhurt but visibly shaken. It is in this temporal absence that there exists, as Geoff King claims, ‘a rhetorical assertion of [the characters’] relative degree of reality: that they have an existence beyond that called into being by the presence of the [ . . . ] camera’.23 These emphatic gaps in the narration work, as the 9/11 footage does, to establish its credibility. When dealing with horror that is incredible, astonishing and unthinkable, establishing the veracity of the image is paramount. Debra’s introduction to ‘The Death of Death’ aligns from the beginning of the film both her efforts and those of a news cameraman who witnesses an early outbreak to upload footage as ‘a way to tell the truth about what was happening’, since having viewed the national services, she finds ‘none of it was useful’. Her dismissal of the reportage from state-run news services identifies the scepticism necessary in dealing with information disseminated from national sources; it is the ‘free’ nature of the democratised uploadable footage which serves as the locus for truth. This is reinforced through a sequence that establishes that there are ‘more than 200 million video cameras in the hands of people worldwide’ and that information and opinion is ‘no longer the domain of network news’. During this dialogue, another voice asks: ‘[w]here do I go to find the truth?’ The answer, according to Romero’s film, is in the delimited landscape of the online exhibition space. The roughness of the image and its foregrounding of amateur style distinguishes itself from the national, positioning itself within the borderless networks of the postnational arena. Coupled with repeated pauses in the action, as characters attempt to upload the footage onto online portals for safekeeping, Diary of the Dead directly engages with virtual landscapes as social and historical memory banks and as the repositories of unfiltered, unmediated truth operating beyond the parameters of the nation. The completed film, ultimately uploaded by Debra (Michelle Morgan), typifies the desire for the preservation of the footage as a kind of testament to its veracity, tapping into the perception of the online world as operating beyond national control and state censorship, capable of seamless and borderless sharing and distribution within the virtual community. This draws into focus the archival nature of the online space as the locus for public record and testimony, a delimited arena where the extraordinary and the horrific are secured for online consumption beyond

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the purview of the nation state. This role of the uploadable artefact as operating beyond the government and nation, and as uncensored truthful reportage, speaks to what Lee Jarvis has argued in his analysis of WhereWereYou.org, a repository for memories and responses to 9/11. In his words, [d]igital archives, such as this one, throw up new opportunities for accessing, transferring and circulating the content of memories. They do so by providing new spaces for the storage and transmission of stories of the past, assisting individuals to record (and hence reconstruct) those pasts anew for disparate audiences.24

YouTube and other file uploading sites act as a repository for social memory, a testament to the veracity of the events, a technological storage bank for filmed reality that exists beyond state control and is capable of sharing and replication across the online community. It is an always-accessible archive where history, memory and truth circulate within a postnational space to a community unrestrained by geography, commercial influence or governmental interference. Characters in Diary of the Dead find security within the uploadable image by depositing these artefacts in the intangible, and apparently untouchable, arena of the online community, beyond the control of government and their discredited institutions. Debra’s decision to upload the footage for posterity signifies her acceptance of the primacy of the virtual community and the archival power of online spaces. It is a recognition of the power of the Castellian network: to transmit the recorded truth of these events without the suppression or manipulation of raw footage by national institutional forces seeking to protect their own interests at the cost of the individual. The online community reaches beyond the purview of the nation and the seamless dissemination of Debra’s footage preserves its purity and veracity within the archives of the virtual world. The postnational horror film builds upon an aesthetic which seeks to reframe spectatorial engagement within a virtual space beyond the nation. As a genre, horror cinema fractures the quotidian with the extraordinary, the unexplainable, the supernatural. Contemporary iterations of these narratives have sought narrative and aesthetic frameworks for the manifestation of terror as a rupturing of the banal and everyday. The source for this paradigm has become content-sharing hubs such as YouTube, which operate as publicly accessible permanent archives existing beyond the bounds of the nation state and within the postnational landscape of the virtual world. Digital horror – whether it is fictionalised accounts of real conflict such as Redacted or the more fantastic narrative of the zombie apocalypse in Diary of the Dead – utilise the online space and the aesthetic of uploaded footage of catastrophe as recurrent tropes for the communication of shock and terror. It is a paradigm constructed out of an acknowledgement of the increasing audience for online material and the disparate networks that shape our experience 118

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of watching within that exhibition space. The aesthetic of amateurism, with its awkward lurches, blurring of focus and dramatic elisions, invokes the experience of watching real-life horror such as the terrorist attacks on America on 11 September. In turn, this uploadable aesthetic forms the basis for the communication of fictional horror. As Jason Creed argues from behind the apparatus in Diary of the Dead: ‘[t]he camera’s the whole thing’. Contemporary horror cinema relies on the idea of the testimonial and the archive, and the delimited scope of the virtual: the postnational. It is a movement that shifts conventional film away from the traditional foregrounding of skill, directorial control and the picture palace. Instead, digital horror deconstructs the production process, shows it to the audience in its disparate, imperfect parts and then places it in an open postnational forum for everyone to see. It is terror told by the amateur, not the craftsperson, and shared with an imagined community that positions itself beyond the borders of their home nation. It is an uploadable cinema that recognises and responds accordingly to the symbols and systems of the emergent postnational age.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 2006), p. 6. Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 35. Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 6. Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900 (London: Verso, 1998), p. 35. It is worth recognising the attempts to impose state control over online space. This exists in several Asian countries, for example, and internet content between nations may be geo-blocked, preventing access. Simple browser plug-ins such as Hola and Media Hint, however, work to obfuscate or misrepresent IP addresses, thereby allowing users access to content previously restricted by national controls. James Rosenau, Distant Proximities: Dynamics beyond Globalisation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 11. Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006), p. 274. Geoff King, American Independent Cinema (London: I.B.Tauris, 2005), p. 111. Amy West, ‘Caught on tape: a legacy of lo-tech reality’, in Geoff King (ed.), The Spectacle of the Real: from Hollywood to Reality TV and Beyond (Portland, OR: Intellect, 2005), pp. 83–92 (p. 84). West, ‘Caught on tape’, pp. 84–5. West, ‘Caught on tape’, pp. 85; Kelly Oliver, ‘Bodies against the law: Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror’, Continental Philosophy Review xlii/1 (2009), pp. 63–80 (p. 68). Stephen Keane, Disaster Movies: the Cinema of Catastrophe (London: Wallflower, 2006), p. 90. John N. Duvall and Robert P. Marzec, ‘Narrating 9/11’, Modern Fiction Studies lvii/3 (2011), pp. 381–40 (p. 381).

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14. Robert Altman, quoted in Rebecca Bell-Metereau, ‘The how-to manual, the prequel and the sequel in post-9/11 cinema’, in Wheeler Winston Dixon (ed.), Film and Television after 9/11 (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004), pp. 142– 62 (p. 143). 15. Raw 9/11 Footage from a Hotel Window. Uploaded by CTV911 (1 March 2011). Available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZi4o2OBLE (accessed 10 December 2012). 16. Wheeler Winston Dixon (ed.), Film and Television after 9/11; Jeff Birkenstein, Anna Froula and Karen Randell (eds), Reframing 9/11: Film, Popular Culture and the ‘War on Terror’ (New York: Continuum International, 2010); Stephen Prince, Firestorm: American Film in the Age of Terrorism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). 17. Jonathan Markowitz, ‘Reel terror post 9/11’, in Winston Dixon (ed.), Film and Television after 9/11, pp. 201–24 (p. 201). 18. Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Massachusetts, MA: Blackwell, 1996), p. 476. 19. Brian De Palma, interview by David Davies, ‘Fresh air’, NPR (14 November 2007). 20. Bradley Blackburn, ‘Report says justice not served in murder of Daniel Pearl’, ABC News Online (20 January 2011). Available at http://abcnews.go.com/US/reportjustice-served-murder-daniel-pearl/story?id=12721909 (accessed 10 December 2012). 21. Greg Merritt, Celluloid Mavericks: a History of American Independent Film (New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 2000), p. 410. 22. Peg Aloi, ‘Beyond the Blair witch: a new horror aesthetic?’, in Geoff King (ed.), The Spectacle of the Real, pp. 187–200 (p. 193). 23. King, American Independent Cinema, p. 115. 24. Lee Jarvis, ‘9/11 digitally remastered?: internet archives, vernacular memories and WhereWereYou.org’, Journal of American Studies xlv/4 (2011), pp. 793–814 (p. 798).

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9 Night Vision in the Contemporary Horror Film Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet

Horror films often play with shadows, darkness and nightscapes. One need only to think of Nosferatu’s silhouette creeping along the wall in F. W. Murnau’s classic film from 1922 or just the title of the 2007 vampire film Thirty Days of Night (David Slade, 2007) to appreciate the central place of light, and especially its absence, in this genre. Night vision brings a whole new visual rhetoric to the horror film, however, where the play is no longer with shadows but with unnatural surfaces, colours and reflections. One of the most immediately striking things about night vision is the eerie green glow that turns people into uncanny figures with opaque and shiny eyes. In a medium like film, where the gaze has often been regarded as a central site of human agency, subjectivity and desire, this transformation is all the more disturbing. In this chapter, I will argue that the night vision aesthetic – both in the recent spate of found footage and mockumentary films and in more conventional narrative fiction films – represents a new visual language for anxiety about the status of human agents in the current global economy and, more specifically, registers an unease with the treatment of civilians in the recent wars, defending and expanding that system.1 It is no accident that night vision capability is a key feature of the post9/11 British and US military, and the signature aesthetic of the invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, with filmed sequences of night raids and house searches functioning as the contemporary equivalent of the ubiquitous helicopter shot which served as the generic visual signature of the Vietnam War. It is now commonplace to understand 9/11 as a national trauma that found its way into representational practices in the years that followed, but the wars in Iraq and 123

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Afghanistan have also had an impact, though in a more subtle and ambivalent way. If the terrorist attacks naturally spawned fears of more attacks, the anxieties raised by the wars were not necessarily those of being invaded and occupied. Instead, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (and neighbouring countries) stirred complex feelings of unease and a kind of ersatz perpetrator guilt, as well as anxiety about the rising military presence in American and British culture. These anxieties emerged as the wars dragged on much longer than initially predicted and as revelations of widespread torture and abuse of detainees, of mounting victims of so-called collateral damage from drones and accidental shootings, and of incidents such as the 2006 Al Ishaqi massacre and the 2006 gang rape and killing of a 14-year-old girl in Mahmudiyah, continued to emerge from the war. Many, if not most, feature films made about the Iraq or Afghanistan war deal critically with the question of civilian abuse, veteran PTSD or military incompetence. Horror films, which tend to absorb and express cultural anxieties, have responded to the recent wars with an explosion of found footage productions and night vision sequences. This chapter will examine three British films which employ night vision sequences in ways that directly speak to the anxieties about military abuses of power that emerged from the Iraq and Af-Pak wars: 28 Weeks Later ( Juan Fresnadillo, 2007), World of the Dead: The Zombie Diaries 2 (Michael Bartlett, 2011) and Entity (Steve Stone, 2012).

Night Vision and the Iraq War Night vision technology has existed since World War II and was developed from the start for military purposes. Until recently, however, it was not very effective and did not give American soldiers any significant advantage in the Korean or the Vietnam Wars. In fact, many Vietnam War films and memoirs reveal that the night belonged to the Viet Cong, who frequently took advantage of their greater knowledge of the local terrain to launch operations under the cover of darkness. The full digitalisation of war started with the Persian Gulf War in 1990–1, with communication and imaging technology becoming central to how the war was conducted and, especially, to how it was represented on television to American and international viewers. There were two signature video images of the first Gulf War: Baghdad being bombed at night, filmed and broadcast by CNN, and the endlessly repeated video clip of a laser-guided bomb, a so-called smart bomb, as it fell on its target, provided to CNN by the Department of Defence.2 Both used imageenhancing techniques: night vision, in the case of the night-time bombing, and thermal-based intensification for the missile guidance systems.3 However, night vision truly came into its own with the Iraq and Af-Pak wars. The US military used highly advanced third generation night vision technology, which gave it a significant tactical advantage during the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Soldiers used it for night raids and searches, and while driving and operating checkpoints. 124

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For the first time in American military history, Americans ‘owned’ the night. However, night vision could also be described as having helped render civilians more helpless and vulnerable while simultaneously giving US military personnel and their private counterparts an illusion of invulnerability and omnipotence. As Antonius Robben puts it, ‘public space in Baghdad had become a chaotic environment that bewildered the monitored civilians in this multimedia Panopticon of battle space with its unpredictable tactical practices under the cover of darkness’.4 While US soldiers could see in the dark, civilians could not and would sometimes fail to perceive checkpoints, a situation which led, upon a number of occasions, to soldiers firing upon unarmed drivers and families.5 Night vision also rendered both enemies and innocent civilians highly mediated and often indistinguishable objects in a derealised field of vision – literal figures on a screen. As Dave Grossman, author of On Killing: the Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (2009), observes, night vision devices convert people into ‘inhuman green blob[s]’.6 Even in close interactions, people’s faces look dehumanised, expressionless and unreal. In contrast to the media depiction of the first Gulf War, which focused on long-range shots of Baghdad and its streets and buildings, the most important innovation in the way night vision became diffused in the media was the ubiquitous close-up and personal use of NVG in interactions with Iraqi civilians. Night vision sequences quickly became a standard feature of images of the war shown to television viewers and have been particularly important in documentaries of the recent wars. For example, Garrett Scott and Ian Olds’ Occupation: Dreamland (2005) features several long sequences and key scenes of night-time searches and interrogations, either of women in their homes or men being arrested, all shot in night vision. Fictional narrative films about the war also use night vision in their quest for verisimilitude. Robert Redford’s film about the war in Afghanistan, Lions for Lambs (2008), features a long dramatic scene where two young college students who have volunteered for service are shown fighting and dying during a botched night-time landing where they find themselves surrounded by insurgents. The scene is shown both in the stark grey and black of satellite-relayed thermal night vision and in conventional film, but the moment when their comrades realise the two men have been shot is when their blob-like shapes stop moving on the screen. An even more dramatic example of a feature film using night vision strategically to highlight the impact of the violence of the war is Brian De Palma’s Redacted (2007), which is based on a true incident of a rape and murder of a young Iraqi girl and her family by US soldiers in 2006.7 The scene of the rape and murder is filmed entirely in night vision with the murderers’ own cameras. In short, from early on, night vision sequences became a standard feature of visual representations of the war in Iraq both in documentary and narrative film and were strongly associated with the depiction of the most violent and disturbing moments of the films.

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One of the first uses of night vision technology in commercial horror cinema was in The Silence of the Lambs ( Jonathan Demme, 1991), when detective Clarice Starling ( Jodie Foster) ends up in the serial killer’s basement and he turns off the lights to stalk her in the dark. The audience watches her through his point of view and even perceives the twin circles of vision, as if really looking through a pair of goggles. This use of night vision differs from the current trend of subjective camera filmmaking, however, because it identifies the camera with the killer. In contrast, recent hand-held camera films, such as The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo S´anchez, 1999), typically seek to insert the viewer as realistically as possible into the film, to break down the distance between character and viewer and to make the audience identify with the frightened protagonist and victim.8 However, although it relied extensively on night-time scenes, The Blair Witch Project did not use night vision. A similar effect was created with flashlights and camera lights, which illuminate a small circle of visibility in a dark field of vision, but the film did not explore the uncanny and depersonalised effects of the infrared night shot. This trend would emerge only in the wake of the war in Iraq.

Night Vision in Horror Cinema Since The Blair Witch Project, the phenomenon of found footage horror has proliferated and mutated to incorporate CCTV, mobile phone, laptop camera and footage obtained through other filming devices. The use of the night vision sequence in these films has also evolved and taken on new meanings and roles, especially after 2005. For example, horror films that use night vision in key scenes or particularly interesting ways include The Descent (Neil Marshall, 2005), The Descent II ( Jon Harris, 2009), Death of a Ghost Hunter (Sean Tretta, 2007), Exhibit A (Dom Rotheroe, 2007), [ rREC] ( Jaume Balaguer´o and Paco Plaza, 2007), [ rREC]2 ( Jaume Balaguer´o and Paco Plaza, 2009), The Zombie Diaries (Michael Bartlett and Kevin Gates, 2006), The World of the Dead: The Zombie Diaries 2, Troll Hunter (Andr´e Øvredal, 2010), Evil Things (Dominic Perez, 2011), Quarantine 2: Terminal (John Pogue, 2011), The Bay (Barry Levinson, 2012), the Paranormal Activity series (2007–12) and the Grave Encounters series (The Vicious Brothers, 2011–12). Night vision is also sometimes used in regular feature films, as in the Predator films (1987– 2010), which used thermal detection technology to represent the creatures’ field of vision, and in military films such as Zero Dark Thirty (Kathryn Bigelow, 2012). One of the films I will discuss in this chapter is a conventional narrative film, 28 Weeks Later, the sequel to 28 Days Later (Danny Boyle, 2002), one is a found footage film, The Zombie Diaries 2, and the third, Entity, mixes the two strategies. Although night vision is a relatively new technique in the horror film, it has been adapted to perform functions that are centrally important to the gothic genre since its inception. Although the following categories are far from exhaustive, 126

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there are three main kinds of uses of the night vision sequence in contemporary horror: forensic revelation, traumatic memory and uncanny depersonalisation. The forensic function is rooted in the way night vision is a technology for investigating a visual field: it promises to reveal aspects of reality that are hidden to the naked eye. This aspect is paradigmatic in the found footage genre in general, which is often introduced as police evidence and viewed in the spirit of looking for clues and answers to what happened at an unsolved crime scene. The Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield (Matt Reeves, 2008), Troll Hunter, Grave Encounters and the entire Paranormal Activity series rely on this gambit. Many films even foreground the forensic element, with titles such as Exhibit A or Evidence (the title of two separate found footage films, one from 2012 and one from 2013). Moreover, night vision, because it seems to activate superhuman powers, recalls the more specific gothic tradition of supernatural revelation, in which visual media such as paintings, portraits, sculptures, tapestries and, later, photography are invested with magical and prophetic agency. One can think of the moving paintings in Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), the seemingly magical image in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Oval Portrait’ (1842) or Hawthorne’s and Melville’s extensive mediations on the revelatory power of images in Pierre (1852) and House of the Seven Gables (1851), respectively. The entire spiritualist photography movement in the nineteenth century depended on the idea that the process of capturing images on light-sensitive film opened itself up to interventions from non-material entities such as spirits and ghosts. This is a conceit that permeates the use of night vision, promising greater revelations than simply the physical reality that would be visible in the light. One of the most memorable forensic uses of night vision in the last decade occurs in Jaume Balaguer´o and Paco Plaza’s [ rREC], the Spanish zombie-contagion found footage film analysed by Aldana Reyes in chapter 11 of this collection. During the last minutes of the film, the most important for the horror film’s climactic effects at a structural level, the two main protagonists find themselves, literally and figuratively speaking, in what Carol Clover has called the ‘terrible place’.9 They are in an apartment full of strange instruments, both medical and religious, and they realise that this place is at the origin of the deadly contagion that has spread to the entire building. There are no windows and no light, so they first rely on the camera light, searching the creepy apartment with a small circle of illumination. Soon, even this light source gives out, and the cameraman must use the night vision function on his camera to navigate the apartment. It is during this sequence that we perceive a creature that looks nothing like the rabid and infected people of the earlier part of the film, but something far more terrifying: the figure is deformed, almost naked and hideously scarred. We see her only through night vision, and the film seems to imply that it is visible only in this way, since there was no sign of her when the camera light was on. In the sequel, [ rREC]2 , the supernatural potential

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of night vision technology is made even more explicit when the priest who has come to find her discovers that there are doors and other objects in the apartment that are visible only with the night vision function of the camera.10 Night vision also serves to visually represent traumatic memory, a variation on the common cinematic device of shooting memory or flashbacks – or the past in general – in different kind of film stock, usually grainier or with different colours. Many found footage films will use multiple cameras or recording devices to differentiate between subjective points of view and temporalities. One of the most interesting examples of the use of night vision for memory and trauma is G.I. Jes´us (Carl Colpaert, 2006), a film about a Mexican US Army soldier who returns home to his wife and daughter and finds himself haunted by memories, nightmares and the ghost of a man he killed in Iraq. Curiously, the ghost does not appear in the night vision sequences, in spite of the fact that the spectral aesthetics of the form might invite such a usage. In fact, the ghost appears like a normal character, occupying the same reality as the protagonist. What the night vision sequences are used for, instead, is to represent the protagonist’s memories, dreams and, specifically, his nightmares about his service in Iraq. Some of these nightmares are actual memories of operating checkpoints or conducting raids and some are anxious projections of his troubled bad conscience, such as when he dreams of his own family in night vision in a scene that closely resembles that where he kills the Iraqi man and his daughter. The interesting point, however, is that virtually all of Jes´us’ memories of Iraq, including the killing, are presented in night vision. The fact that the young man is roughly the same age and has a daughter who looks very much like his own recalls the gothic trope of the double. The film’s critique of the war, and specifically its concern about the psychological trauma sustained by soldiers in Iraq, comes to a dramatic climax in a scene where Jes´us finds his wife in a hot tub with a business associate and shoots him with his service weapon. Oddly, like the memories of Iraq and his nightmares about his family, this scene is also filmed in night vision but of the thermal kind, giving it a slightly different look than the dreams and memories generated by his bad conscience. As he pulls the trigger, however, the film highlights the fact that the traumatised veteran will inevitably bring his violent learned behaviour back home with him. At this moment, the film presents a rapid sequence of images, mixing Jes´us’ personal memories with video footage from the news and internet in which Iraqis are killed, in a frenetic video montage showing how private and collective visual memories become indistinguishable. In short, in G.I. Jes´us, the night vision sequences are used not for realism, as is often the case in military films, but for psychological depth, as a visual correlative of the soldier’s moral unease about his actions in Iraq and, particularly, his troubled memories of the raid that cost a young man like himself his life. This brings me to the third major usage of night vision, namely, its uncanny and depersonalising effects. The green or grey look of these sequences can immediately

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create a spectral visual feel that adds emotional texture to a film. Night vision sequences are frequently the occasion of the film’s first shocks or jumps. Often, they are the moment at which the tone of the film changes from light-hearted and mundane to something darker and more uneasy. More specifically, however, the appeal of night vision as an aesthetic of the uncanny lies is the way in which it makes people appear ghostly and inhuman, because of their pale greenish skin and reflecting eyes. Sometimes eyes appear shiny and fluorescent, sometimes opaque, but always flat and strange. The effect is invariably to rob people of their human depth and individuality. Gothic scholars have often relied on Freud’s theory of the uncanny, which correlates all manner of uncanniness to either castration or intrauterine anxiety and which favours the kind of uncanny that is produced by ambivalence between the familiar and seemingly unfamiliar. Yet, there is another kind of uncanny that Freud mentions only briefly in his discussion of Ernst Jentsch’s work and which is far more common and relevant today, especially in the context of contemporary virtual warfare. This is the uncanny that is produced by a confusion with the animate or inanimate nature of a given figure or object.11 This is precisely the kind of uncanny effect produced by the night vision aesthetic: viewed through NVG technology, people look flat, inhuman and interchangeable. The effect is compounded by the way night vision washes out people’s faces so that expressions are very hard to read and appear artificial. In addition to its cultural association with the ground reporting of the Iraq and Afghanistan war, I would argue that this is one of the most fascinating and eloquent effects of night vision.

Horror, Night Vision and the Military In Desert Screen (2002), Paul Virilio argued that, with the first Gulf War, war had moved from ‘a geographic field of battle to a multimedia field of vision’.12 During the Iraq War, in turn, inhabitants of Baghdad became unreal and dehumanised spectres in the night-goggled eyes of their occupiers. As Antonio Robben puts it, ‘battle space became a sensorium of generative mediation – a composite of mediated combat realities that transformed human targets into virtual targets and soldiers, literally, into killing machines that were able to suspend natural darkness and fade out moving images with lethal force’.13 ‘The ensuing dehumanisation’, Robben continues, ‘turns the shooting of human targets into spectacide that contains an emotional and visual contradiction between the virtual reality of eliminating mediated images and the violent death of actual human beings’.14 Night vision is therefore an effective visual correlative for exploring this digitalisation of the field of battle and military occupation because it evokes both mimetically and figuratively the dehumanisation that occurs when a highly armed and technologically superior occupying force interacts with a civilian population indistinguishable from insurgents.15 129

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A number of scholars have discussed the situations created in Iraq as a result of these practices in terms of Giorgio Agamben’s theory of biopolitics and the homo sacer.16 Drawing on archaic Roman law, as well as Foucault’s work, Agamben uses the figure of the homo sacer, the man who can be killed but not sacrificed, a creature reduced to pure biological life, stripped of civil and political rights, to describe the condition of people in the grip of power that does not recognise their human and civil rights under existing laws (and sees them, effectively, as exceptions to the law). The most striking example of this phenomenon would be concentration camp victims during the Holocaust; the detention or prison camp in general has been theorised as the typical modern site of the reduction of human beings to pure biological life. Scholars have recently compared the condition of detainees in American prison camps such as Abu Ghraib, Bagram and Guant´anamo Bay to that of the homo sacer.17 It is my contention that the night vision aesthetic serves as a kind of visual code to allude to and explore the unease that the recent wars have awoken, especially with regards to the status of detainees and local populations, and the digitalisation of interactions between these populations and the American military. Three recent horror films have registered this unease with particular force: 28 Weeks Later, World of the Dead: The Zombie Diaries 2 and Entity. All are British and two are apocalyptic sequels to zombie/infection films. The first is a big-budget commercial venture with a mainly conventional narrative frame, while the second is a found footage style independent movie that was only released briefly in British cinemas. Entity is also independent and relatively low budget, and combines found footage with conventional narrative film techniques. All three use night vision in order to evoke a biopolitical nightmare in which people find themselves in concentration camp conditions while in the hands of their own country’s military forces or defence agencies. 28 Weeks Later has only two important digital vision scenes, one with sniper scopes and one with night vision, but both are crucial to the overall impact and meaning of the film. The first is when the rage-like infection breaks out in the compound on the Isle of Dogs where all the protagonists are staying, and, after an initial period of trying to shoot only infected people, the security forces are ordered to shoot infected and non-infected civilians alike: ‘[t]arget everything at ground level – no exceptions!’ The safe haven suddenly becomes a death camp, where Draconian security measures transform all military personnel into mass executioners of the civilian population they were protecting up to then. Thus, the first important video-quality scenes occur when soldiers look through their sniper’s scopes as they shoot into the panicked crowd. From a distance, the infected and the uninfected look very similar, and we are invited to see the logic of following the cruel order even as we recoil with horror at the result. This kind of ethical dilemma, or even aporia, is often staged as part of the gothic genre’s cultural work of examining the limit-horizon of cultural norms and ethical standards. Here, the zombie-contagion

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movie examines the ethical choices that extreme scenarios may create but also registers unease with the military as an institution, one whose relationship with civilians and the rest of society is not always unambiguously protective. The second night vision scene in 28 Days Later is placed near the end of the film and serves as backdrop for the discovery of a mass of dead bodies as the characters head down into an underground subway station. One of them, Scarlet (Rose Byrne), a soldier, uses her night scope to help the teenaged Tammy (Imogen Poots) navigate down the escalator shaft. The scene recalls the classical trope of the descent into hell as Tammy looks back at Scarlet with fluorescent green eyes before stumbling onto the mountain of corpses and falling on top of them. The intense uncanniness of Tammy’s face rendered opaque and shiny-eyed veers into pure horror as the tangled mass of bodies is revealed in the darkness. Besides activating collective cultural memories of concentration camp victims bulldozed into mass graves, this disturbing moment also echoes earlier scenes in the film, where white-suited biohazard-protected workers stacked (presumably infected) bodies before burning them. While these scenes are troubling, it seems reasonable that the infected dead would have to be disposed of quickly and permanently. It is only during the outbreak in the compound – described above – that ethical questions about the methods and priorities of the military authorities emerge. Yet, the fears that, during a crisis, the military would be permitted exceptional and extraordinary powers, such as killing civilians in order to protect themselves or a higher imperative, have forcefully emerged in the wake of the state of exception introduced by the Bush administration in the last decade. The suspension of civil rights in the US and the outright abuse of the human rights of detainees and civilians abroad have stirred anxieties far more subtle and profound than the fear of terrorist attack. According to Donald Pease, these actions have awoken a fear that the populations of the nations leading the war on Iraq, namely the US and the UK, have themselves been reduced to pure biological life.18 Arguing that Americans must be defended at all costs, Bush and his cohorts suspended the very civil liberties and freedoms of speech that they claimed define America, thereby treating US citizens (bios) like bare life (zoe) to be managed rather than political and social beings.19 The independent film World of the Dead: Zombie Diaries 2 takes this conceit a step further by showing brief scenes of uninfected people being rounded up, transported, executed in cold blood and then stacked and burned. These scenes are not shot in night vision, though the rest of the film contains many long NVG sequences, far more, in fact, than any other film discussed here. The status of these harrowing scenes of biohazard-protected workers exterminating clearly uninfected people is not clear from the start, as it appears that these scenes were recorded before the events that are filmed by the soldier who is keeping a video diary. Like the footage in Cloverfield (Matt Reeves, 2008), the video in The Zombie Diaries 2 is a palimpsest of several temporalities, beginning with a family recording a child’s birthday during what is, clearly, the onset of the infection. We are told by our

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video diarist that the tape was found weeks earlier, so the relationship of the main story to the initial footage of a family attacked by a zombie is clear (that is, the main story, following the military personnel, happens several weeks or months after the birthday party massacre). However, what is left unexplained is the sequence of shots of the biohazard workers in gas masks. These reappear periodically throughout the film, interspersed throughout the main narrative, progressing in chronological order as the faceless white-suited workers with guns capture, kill and burn a young woman in a red sweater.20 The short sequences are horrific, filmed in desaturated colour, and the biohazard workers appear like inhuman monsters, evoking images from the Holocaust as they roughly push the girl to a wall and shoot her. In the last sequence, after burning the bodies, the workers pull off their masks and we discover the three main military characters we had followed in the main time frame of the movie, which we now understand must have been superimposed on top of these earlier extermination scenes (since two of these characters will die during the main narrative). This reveals that the three soldiers who appeared wholly sympathetic are, in fact, the same terrifying figures cruelly containing the infection by exterminating both the infected and the uninfected. The film, thus, returns to the theme of the first The Zombie Diaries (and some of Romero’s films) of the living sometimes being more monstrous than the zombies themselves. Although unexplained, the biohazard shots are explicable. They clearly precede the main story frame and take place sometime between the events of the first The Zombie Diaries and the main events of the sequel. Like 28 Weeks Later, the military is shown to be involved in the containment and killing of innocent people (we do not know if they are infected or not) in a cruel and callous way. The methods of detainment, transport and elimination that we could associate with the abuses of colonial regimes or twentieth-century concentration camps are revealed being employed on British subjects in England (the forensic quality of found footage cinema is invoked here in addition to the dehumanising effects of wartime military mentality). The most recent film, Entity, revisits the Cold War by setting the film in presentday Siberia. The plot revolves around a British television crew investigating an unsolved murder case in a remote Siberian forest where 34 unmarked graves had been found some years earlier. They have brought a woman with psychic powers who helps them locate the site and the nearby building where the people had been imprisoned before being murdered. We learn that the victims had all been persons with psychic powers and who were detained and experimented on by the Soviet government in the early 1980s in order to determine if their powers could be used for military operations. In order to augment their psychic powers, all were kept in darkness and isolation and were subjected to sensory deprivation, electroshock and experimental surgery. When the programme finished, they were executed. As we learn this from the Russian translator, who turns out to be the former lover of a victim, with an agenda of his own, the main British journalist (Kate Hansen)

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reminds him that similar experiments, although not so extreme and murderous, were also conducted by Americans and the British. All of the victims are shown to be haunting the gravesite and the abandoned building where they were tormented, and one with exceptionally strong powers ends up possessing the psychic, who kills the two remaining crew members. In the end, all of the crew are dead and their souls or spirits imprisoned at the site. Entity weaves its gothic and technical elements together in an effective and atmospheric way, creating a dark, sinister but also elegiac historical horror film. Night vision is given a central role in the film, which, in fact, begins with a very disturbing sequence of night vision surveillance footage of a camp prisoner in his cell in 1983. Alone, in the dark, the figure is shown to be going mad as he pleads for help, shrieks and crawls, shakes his bed, moves objects telepathically and, finally, floats in the air in a strange and eerie way. The footage carries information in Cyrillic and, later, we see the same room when the crew enters the building. They too leave a surveillance camera in the room with its night vision function activated and can therefore watch the possession of the psychic by the insane ghost (so maddened by his suffering that his is now the evil ‘entity’ of the title). The night vision aesthetics are directly and profoundly linked to the larger themes of the film, which include the classic gothic revenge trope. If the victims of the torture are shown as sympathetic figures, they are also shown as frightening and potentially dangerous, especially the strongest one. Having been driven mad by conditions that resemble, in many respects, the conditions that were routine in Abu Ghraib and Guant´anamo (sensory deprivation, isolation, disorientation), this spirit now seeks revenge and ends up taking it out on this innocent television crew. The message that torture creates a cycle of more violence and suffering could not be starker or clearer. Night vision in the film offers the moments of strongest evidence as to how the madness is induced, hence invoking the forensic aspect of night vision footage. It also influences the way that possession itself is represented in the film, that is, by opaque and flat eyes. When the psychic is possessed by the murdered man we have seen at the beginning of the film, her eyes seem dead and grey, just like those of other ghosts in the prison. The film can be compared to other haunted insane asylum films that have emerged in recent years (Grave Encounters, Session 9 (Brad Anderson, 2001)), but the Siberian setting of the story requires a different approach, one that frames the crimes that are uncovered in the film as part of a larger recent practice of detaining and disappearing people (a practice that is as much a part of the history of the US and its allies – Honduras, Argentina, Chile – as it is that of the former Soviet Union and present day Russia). The frame evoked by the film is, thus, explicitly Cold War and emphasises the insidious way in which the US-Soviet arms race often made the two antagonists resemble each other in uncanny ways. The background history that informs the film is the history of experiments and research into brainwashing techniques, as much as it is the shorter history of research into the

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paranormal. Both the Soviets and the US (and UK Ministry of Defence) have at some point or another spent money researching the possibility of paranormal psychology and, specifically, remote viewing. The film conflates the tactics used in the far more destructive research on brainwashing developed by the CIA in the context of the MKUltra program in the 1950s with paranormal experimentation. For example, the techniques mentioned in the film – imprisonment, sensory deprivation, prolonged isolation, darkness, lack of clothing and other individualising accessories – are all techniques that were developed in experiments by Dr Ewen Cameron between 1957 and 1961 and, subsequently, in 1963, codified into a CIA torture manual (the Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation manual) used in Central America and in Iraq. The photos that emerged from Abu Ghraib in 2004 owe many of their sinister details – hooding, humiliation, nakedness, threat of electroshock – to this research.21 To conclude, the recent night vision aesthetic trend in horror films continues the traditional cultural work of the gothic – of staging thought experiments about ethics and epistemology – by expressing unease with the current political and military order. Specifically, night vision horror proliferated in the first decade of the twentyfirst century as the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and neighbouring countries dragged on and evidence of US-military-inflicted horror began to emerge. These films reflect discomfort with the military digitalisation of death and the concomitant dehumanisation of civilians, soldiers and viewers alike in highly mediated, digitised and visually alienating virtual environments. Most of all, however, the films reflect unease with contemporary neoliberal militarism, as it has produced a species of return of the concentration camp, this time run by a ruthless and impudent US military. Night vision horror offers a taste of what the logic of the black site might lead to and what horrors it might already have generated.

Notes 1. Although Al Qaeda is often portrayed as a religious adversary, the war in Iraq was more about influence over the Middle East and access to oil reserves than about religious difference or even the capturing of people responsible for the 9/11 attacks. According to Andrew Bacevitch, the recent wars in the Persian Gulf must be understood in the context of a larger struggle that began with the Carter Doctrine in 1980. See Andrew Bacevitch, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 179. 2. Jose N. Vasquez, ‘Seeing green: visual technology, virtual reality, and the experience of war’, in Alisse Waterson (ed.), An Anthropology of War: Views from the Frontline (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2009), pp. 87–105 (p. 92). 3. There are three main kinds of night vision technology that are used in film and television images, each with its own distinctive visual style: image intensification, infrared

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5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

illumination and thermal detection. The first two rely on reflection of photons or infrared illumination not normally perceptible to the human eye and the third relies on infrared light released by heat (emission, rather than reflection of a type of light). Most night vision goggles, scopes and cameras use the first kind, the reflecting kind, and this is what creates the particular aesthetic of the green colour (caused by the use of phosphors in the device) or a kind of greenish grey. In contrast, thermal detection devices produce grey images in which heat appears either as a white or a red and orange glow. The most common is called Forward-Looking Infrared Radar (FLIR); battle tanks and helicopters are commonly fitted with these devices. Night vision technology for commercial home video cameras was developed and patented by Sony, who remains the main manufacturer of cameras with a night vision function called ‘NightShot’. This feature became available in the 1990s and is still sold with all Sony home and professional video cameras. NightShot uses infrared, which reflects off human eyes and creates an uncanny opaque appearance, and is used frequently in horror cinema of the amateur video/hand-held camera/found footage subgenre. Antonius C. G. M. Robben, ‘The dead of night: chaos and spectacide of nocturnal combat in the Iraq war’, in Koen Stroeken (ed.), War, Technology, Anthropology (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012), pp. 34–44 (p. 38). Robben, ‘The dead of night’, pp. 37–8. Lt. Col Dave Grossman, On Killing: the Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (New York: Bay Back Books, 2009), p. 170. For a case study of this film, see Mark Freeman’s contribution to this collection (chapter 8). An important precursor of the current found footage genre is Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust (1980), which follows a team of unscrupulous and predatory journalists as they make their way into the Amazon to film indigenous tribes. The film depicts them as both perpetrators and victims of violence, so it straddles the earlier and current uses of subjective camera. Carol J. Clover, Men, Women and Chain Saws (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 31. A similar reliance on night vision, though less explicitly supernatural, occurs in the many found footage films that involve creatures that live entirely or primarily in darkness, such as the trolls in Troll Hunter, the blind mutants who live in the caves of The Descent films and the humanoid creature encountered in the abandoned underground passages of The Tunnel (Carlo Ledesma, 2011). Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock (London: Penguin Books, 2003), pp. 135–6. Paul Virilio, Desert Screen: War at the Speed of Light, trans. Michael Degener (London: Continuum, 2002), p. 136. Italics in original. Robben, ‘The dead of night’, p. 40. Ibid. Antonius C. G. M. Robben, ‘The hostile gaze: night vision and the immediation of nocturnal combat in Vietnam and Iraq’, in Neil L. Whitehead and Sverker Finnstr¨om

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16. 17.

18. 19.

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21.

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(eds), Virtual War and Magical Death: Technologies and Imaginaries for Terror and Killing (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), pp. 132–51 (p. 143). In Iraq, the conditions were particularly conducive to violent overreactions by American servicemen because of their inability to communicate with civilians. The local population was literally opaque to US soldiers, as occupying troops were not taught Arabic and translators were thinly distributed among ground forces. Another factor to add to this equation is that many soldiers train using virtual gaming environments, or were already fans of single-shooter war-themed video games before they enlisted, and their reflexes in highly digitalised situations such as those created by urban military occupation, including search and raid missions and the manning of military checkpoints, have been learned in wholly virtual interactions with fictional enemy targets. See Nick Turse, The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008), pp. 134–5. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel HellerRoazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 8. For example, see Donald Pease, ‘Between the homeland and Abu Ghraib: dwelling in Bush’s biopolitical settlement’, in Ashley Dawson and Malini Johar Schueller (eds), Exceptional State: Contemporary U.S. Culture and the New Imperialism (London and Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2007), pp. 60–87. Pease, ‘Between the homeland and Abu Ghraib’, p. 71. American cinema has also registered this fear but less in the horror genre and more in the science fiction, thriller or action genres: The Island (Michael Bay, 2005), The Hunger Games (Gary Ross, 2012) and Elysium (Neill Blomcamp, 2013) are all examples of American films that address a fear of a majority of American citizens being reduced to bare life, like concentration camp victims. The thriller Rendition (Gavin Hood, 2007) also addresses this fear by imagining the German citizen (Khalid El-Masri), who was kidnapped by the CIA and tortured for months in a case of mistaken identity, as an Egyptian-American Green Card holder. The image of the woman in the red sweater seems to be an allusion to the famous ‘girl in a red coat’, a Jewish child in a red coat who appears in Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) and who is based on a real photograph of the Krakow ghetto. Available at http://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/oct/16/film.features (accessed 10 April 2014). See Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Picador, 2007), pp. 35–58. For Soviet research on parapsychology, see Michael Jura, ‘Soviet research into remote viewing’, Learn Remote Viewing (undated). Available at http://blog.learnremoteviewing.com/?p=1562 (accessed 10 April 2014). See also US and UK testing, ‘Stargate Project’, Wikipedia (undated). Available at http://en .wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate Project (accessed 10 April 2014) and ‘MoD defends psychic powers study’, BBC News (23 February 2007). Available at http://news.bbc .co.uk/2/hi/uk news/6388575.stm (accessed 10 April 2014).

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10 Nightmares outside the Mainstream: August Underground and Real/Reel Horror James Aston

‘We must wake people up. Upset their ways of identifying things. It is necessary to create unacceptable images.’1 ‘Nothing could be more legitimate than [the cinema’s] lack of inhibitions in picturing spectacles that upset the mind.’2 ‘[August Underground] is real. Well, as real as I could make it.’3

There has been a proliferation of American horror films in the new millennium that are marked by a move to the extreme. The majority of the focus has been on examples circulated in mainstream outlets, either through theatrical exhibition or DVD releases, and which have come under the rubric ‘torture porn’.4 Here, the range has extended from the numerous remakes of controversial horror films from the 1970s and 1980s, such as The Last House on the Left (Dennis Iliadis, 2009), I Spit on Your Grave (Steven R. Monroe, 2010) and Maniac (Frank Khalfoun, 2012), to lucrative horror franchises such as Saw (2004–10). A considerable body of academic work has likewise appeared, from studies tracking how the rise in explicitly violent content coincides with fears and anxieties circulating in society, to anthologies situating the diverse cultural impact of the Saw franchise.5 Yet, despite the commercial popularity of twenty-first century horror (the Saw franchise has grossed in excess of $870 million worldwide) and related academic discourse, 137

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there has not been a corresponding interest in confrontational or hardcore horror. This is a conspicuous omission when one considers that it has also undergone a contemporary, post-millennial boom and can legitimately lay claim to providing extreme examples of cinematic horror.6 Filmmakers such as Shane Ryan, Lucifer Valentine and Fred Vogel have consistently produced a countermovement of horror films that have forwarded a multitude of extreme images and alternative cinematic practices. They develop the anxieties promoted in these mainstream films by problematising a coherent and stable post-millennial social existence and offer a stark contrast to the commercialism, professional nature and accepted representational strategies of mainstream horror productions. Indeed, Jones defines hardcore horror as independent filmmaking combining the ‘narrative facets and aesthetic practices’ of pornography and horror.7 In doing so, these provide three characteristic elements which distinguish them from other cinematic horror forms. Namely, an explicit focus on depictions of sexual violence, a privilege of violence over narrative context and a realist aesthetic which depicts violence as ‘spontaneous and genuine rather than performed and contrived’.8 Here the graphic combination of sex and violence and the authentic formal and thematic strategies of the films produce a ‘real’ depiction of horror far removed from mainstream representations. Jones has used hardcore horror to underline how empty and misapplied ‘torture porn’ has become when attached to films such as Saw ( James Wan, 2004) and Hostel (Eli Roth, 2005), and how it has become a pejorative term to discredit both the films and the audiences that watch them. In fact, the term ‘torture porn’ refers to a number of films that are anything but and, in doing so, resist critical discussion and debate, especially around the notion of the ‘real’ and authentic within horror. Therefore, hardcore horror, with its unmediated and immediate depictions of violence, can reposition discussions of extreme horror back towards a critical framework which addresses the issue of realist horror in twenty-first century cinema. These ‘hidden’ alternatives to the mainstream represent what is perhaps too convincing for the ‘sanctioned’ horror film which torture porn encapsulates. Thus, despite their ‘under-analysed and neglected’ status, due to their marginality, they are, in fact, better positioned to explore the convoluted and complex areas of the ‘real’ in the contemporary horror film.9 The archetypal hardcore horror film is constituted by Fred Vogel’s series of ultra-low budget, oppositional and transgressive films, August Underground (2001), August Underground’s Mordum (2003) and August Underground’s Penance (2007). These films will form the focus of this chapter due to their strong adherence to the reality aesthetic, alternative distribution practices and provocative representational strategies that are replicated to a large extent in other similar films, such as the Amateur Porn Star Killer series (Shane Ryan, 2006–9) and stand-alone films like The Bunny Game (Adam Rehmeier, 2010). The August Underground films follow, in a cinema v´erit´e/home video style, the banal day-to-day lives of a group of serial

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killers which are punctuated with extended, uncensored and unedited footage of torture, victim humiliation and degradation, bodily violation, sexual violence and murder. August Underground focuses on one killer (played by Vogel himself ) who is filmed by an unseen cameraman/accomplice. The film does not provide any clear exposition or context leading up to the violence committed by the pair and, thus, withholds any rationalisation for their behaviour. Victim perspective is also denied by presenting, whether living or not, the victims as already dead – passive, prone, tied up, mutilated and dismembered. Mordum and Penance develop and expand upon the realist tableaux of the first entry by focusing on an unconventional family of serial killers. In these two entries, more footage is given over to their increasingly bizarre and disturbing daily activities, with the violence being much more graphic, detailed and confrontational than the ‘after the event’ violence in August Underground. In all of these films, Vogel presents the images as ‘found objects’ rather than as the constructed, narrativised expos´e of ‘ordinary’ monsters favoured in classic horror. It is this ‘found’ nature of the films, particularly in August Underground, which provides a unique perspective on the representation of death in the horror film. That is, in the mainstream horror film, death ‘always belongs to the realm of the fake’ and is understood as such despite how technologically advanced the representations may be.10 Therefore, how does August Underground foreground its realist horror so that the films will, according to director Fred Vogel, genuinely ‘fool people’?11 In terms of examining how the trilogy engages with notions of the real, three particular sections from each film will be taken as a key representation of a different approach to realism. In August Underground, the opening scene will be discussed, as it provides a clear example of how the film’s formal properties and sense of verisimilitude of the mise-en-sc`ene provides a form of realism absent from dominant, mainstream horror productions. In Mordum, the focus will be on the end sequence: how it highlights a breakdown between the filmmakers and the film, and the crossing over of actors into the characters. Finally in Penance, the onscreen breakdown of Cristie Whiles, who plays one of the killers, will be addressed in terms of how the collapse of the imitative and the authentic can have serious moral implications for the actors involved. All these examples provide points of entry into the complex nature of realism in film and, in particular, into how horror navigates such a contested and, at times, paradoxical terrain.

‘You are going to love this . . . ’ August Underground starts abruptly, without warning or production credits that may render it a constructed and authored piece of film.12 The first image is of the outstretched arm of an unseen and silent male figure apparently videotaping the footage as he purposefully spills the contents of a beer bottle out over the ground. It is night-time and off camera we hear another male voice say ‘[t]hat is 139

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the waste of a fucking full beer, dude’. As the camera pans up to take in the figure that has entered the diegesis, we see an indistinctly realised male figure carrying a bucket walk toward the camera from what looks like a farm house building. The character continues toward the camera and through another door behind the man with the video camera. Here, we are able to discern that the setting is rural and the interactions of the two male characters and the poorly handled camera seem to signal that the protagonists may be drunk. Nonetheless, this establishing sequence is fairly innocuous in its content and purposefully misdirects the viewer. The next scene has the male who emerged from the house come up to the person filming and say, ‘[c]ome on, I’ve got something to show you’, as he walks into a brightly-lit room (made worse by the garish high contrast of the camera) and down through some steps toward a basement. He then turns back to say ‘[y]ou are going to love this’. At this point, approximately 35 seconds into the film, the viewer has little idea of the direction it is taking or of what is to be found in the basement. When the camera turns the corner and the full violence of the scene is revealed, there is the palpable sense of the horrific. The images on display provide a visual zone not sanctioned or regulated by legitimate and official controls found in mainstream cinematic representations of horror. The main reason is the abject quality of the space, dominated by discarded rubbish and bodily waste. In this hellish mise-ensc`ene, seated under a mural of pornographic imagery, is a naked woman who is tied up, her tortured and mutilated body a brutal spectacle of the abject and stark depiction of the materiality of corporeality. A bucket with her faeces lies at her feet, and it is obvious that its contents have been repeatedly smeared over her body, her wounds in particular. Other parts are covered with vomit and blood. There is also an uncomfortable and distressing sense that this could be real or, at least, something we should not be watching. During this sequence, which is shot in one continuous take of roughly five minutes in duration, a matter-of-fact approach is established as the killer shows the camera operator his ‘murder room’. We see a castrated male in a bath tub, his penis in an adjacent bloodied toilet, and we identify him as the husband/partner of the woman. The camera is continually in motion, revealing the room as a dirty, disgusting space covered with blood, excrement and vomit, and littered by abandoned body parts. The viewer is shown explicitly the violence and degradation that has been carried out so that, according to Vogel, it can ‘visually play with all your senses’ by enabling ‘audiences [to] put themselves in the scene’.13 The main part of the sequence is given over to the ritual humiliation of the woman, in which the killer marks her out as his ‘prize’ and as his ‘favorite’. The killer’s friend also becomes complicit in her torture by repeatedly focusing on her naked body with his video camera. Clearly, the behaviour and actions of the two men in this sequence denote the violation and degradation of the woman as sexual objectification. The scene ends with the killer saying ‘do you want a beer?’, to which he gets the reply ‘you bet’. It is a chilling exchange, which effectively

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emphasises the sociopathic nature of the men and their utter detachment from their actions. A sense of ‘real’ horror is achieved in this scene through two interrelated cinematic strands. Firstly, the strand of realist horror, which Cynthia Freeland defines as a subgenre of horror that ‘showcases spectacle, downplays plot, and plays upon serious confusions between representations of fiction and reality’.14 August Underground conforms to this outline in that it takes a seemingly objective view of everyday horror, evidenced by the familiar space of the basement, the amateurish quality of the footage, the generally badly framed compositions, a very poor image quality, convincing special effects and the verisimilitude of the actors, both victims and assailants. In its presentation of the footage, the film effectively downplays plot (we see a series of random, repetitious and seemingly unconnected sequences throughout the narrative, starting with the opening scene) in favour of an emotionally flattening, yet unsettling and disturbing, spectacle of violence. In addition, the film also corresponds to Freeland’s definition of realist horror, whereby, in destabilising the boundary between mimesis and reality, the narrative often integrates realist news reports, especially of everyday monsters and catastrophic events, into the plot.15 August Underground makes explicit this connection by presenting the film as ‘live’ footage and, thus, aligns it with twenty-first-century news, which often use live amateur footage in their reporting of events in war zones and in the aftermath of environmental disasters. In further establishing August Underground as a realist horror, Vogel has talked at length about how important Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer ( John McNaughton, 1986) was in the gestation of the film.16 With this in mind, it is important to briefly mention that Henry was marketed as an authentic account of the serial killer due to its social realist tendencies and faux documentary style at the time of its release. The authenticity of the film was initially addressed via its promotional poster, which was accompanied with the text ‘He’s not Freddy, He’s not Jason . . . He’s Real.’ For Vogel, Henry addressed the ‘cool, clean, pretty’ mainstream portrayals of serial killers by offering a counterposition, especially in the notorious home invasion sequence where the killers and the violence they carry out is framed with a ‘proximity to the real world’.17 Indeed, Vogel singled out the home invasion scene as its most realist segment, saying I was tired of all the serial killer movies that didn’t show you what’s really going on [ . . . ] Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer’s ‘home invasion’ scene always freaked me out. So, just imagining a feature of that went through my mind, but, five times more real. Really show the viewer what these people are like, not like how Hollywood shows us.18

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with Henry (Michael Rooker) and his accomplice Otis (Tom Towles) as they (re)viewed the footage back on TV, so we watch through the killer’s eyes in the basement. Also similar to Henry and Otis, the killers in August Underground seem to be making the video for their own pleasure and to experience the ‘realness’ of the event over and over again. The second strand of realism manifests in August Underground’s adherence to conventions associated with the mondo movies of the 1960s and 1970s. These films tended to mix documentary footage with constructed scenes in ethnographic depictions of strange customs and practices from around the world. The commercial success of the progenitor of the mondo cycle of films, Mondo Cane (Paolo Cavara, Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi, 1962), laid the blueprint for what was to follow in its abundant scenes of violence and nudity and its exploitational underpinnings that favoured gaudy spectacle over educational content. The mondo film was revived during the late 1970s and 1980s through a series of compilation films featuring a mix of amateur and police/official footage of murders, suicides, shootings and fatal accidents alongside an array of other realworld disasters. Films such as Faces of Death ( John Alan Schwartz, 1978) and Death Scenes (Nick Bougas, 1989) provided ‘a fierce critique of the traditional horror film’ in their graphic, intensive and unmediated representations of death and the defiant violation of the physical body.19 For Brottman, mondo films, by their very nature as ruptures from ‘“sanctioned” horror film narrative[s]’, represented the ‘“hidden” version of the mainstream horror film’.20 As with realist horror, these films pushed representations of death in ways that mainstream horror could not. That is, despite the technical sophistication of contemporary special effects which can render death in ever more credible ways, mainstream horror films ‘can never reveal the violation of the physical body in the same way that mondo can show “actual” human death’.21 Thus, August Underground, in exemplifying these cinematic strands, ‘violates our conceptual categories’, especially with regards to the boundary between representation and the authentic, and with its focus on the physicality of the violated body.22 With regard to the latter, considerable time is devoted to an almost forensic examination of the trauma numerous bodies are put through at the hands of the killers. As with the horror mondo films, the narrative of August Underground explicitly shows the body in various states of ‘fragmentation, dismemberment and collapse’.23 Both these strands move away from legitimate and official representations of horror cinema that are circulated via conventional distribution routes such as the auditorium and the video cassette or DVD. In fact, the last aspect of August Underground’s pursuit of the real connects to the regulations of classification boards and conventional distribution networks that mainstream horror has to adhere to in order to be seen by an audience. The film was not submitted to the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) due to the extreme and prolonged nature of the violence in the film. Neither was it released as an unrated film, which would have

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at least guaranteed a legal release despite a heavily restricted outlet for promotional activity and exhibition. In fact, Vogel wanted to completely bypass the notion of an official release via legitimate channels and intended to leave VHS copies of the film in random public places such as playgrounds and airports. His purpose was to position the film as a type of ‘found object’ to be picked up and played by curious passers-by. The film, thus, emerges as a realist text outside the cultural space of legitimate and sanctioned cinematic practices. That is, the film takes on the form of a series of recorded images passed off as a ‘found object’ and, in doing so, effectively obscures the boundary between representation and the real.

‘You are going to love this . . . ’ Redux Vogel’s attempts to produce a ‘snuff ’ movie were ultimately limited in that he was never able to distribute August Underground in the way he originally intended. Had he been able to, it would have provided a fascinating insight into the paradox of representing death in horror films and the complex relationship between mimesis and realism. Vogel’s mischievous and transgressive act would have undoubtedly produced a film where viewers could not disavow the footage as fictional due to the verisimilitude of the mise-en-sc`ene and the manner in which they had procured the tape. It would have produced a deeply unsettling and troubling experience, exacerbating the difficulty of differentiating between real and simulated violence. It is likely that some viewers would have informed the police and that a police investigation would have ensued. Indeed, Vogel was happy to be arrested and spend a night or two in jail if it meant the film was able to be distributed in this seditious manner. However, Vogel’s lawyer talked him out of the marketing plan due to the immediacy of 9/11 and the subsequent possibility of being incarcerated for a lot longer than a couple of days. What this event effectively shows is that, while Vogel was able to traverse the codes and regulations of cinematic representation and distribution methods, he was unable (or unwilling) to contravene societal structures and dominant beliefs and values that were circulating at the time. As Vogel admitted, ‘my marketing plan for August Underground had to change to letting the world know that it was an actual movie and not a real snuff film’.24 In 2006, Vogel, through his film company Toetag Pictures, released August Underground on DVD. Prior to the release, the film had been circulated ‘unofficially’ through Vogel’s friends and acquaintances and via an independently distributed bootleg. Viewer responses ranged from ‘definitely not seen anything like August Underground’ to ‘it wasn’t even a movie [ . . . ] I don’t know what the hell I was getting myself into.’25 Yet, the film was not received as an authentic and real documentation of murder and death because Vogel’s presence in the film as both on-screen ‘killer’ and distributor marked the film out as a construction. Indeed, the sense of mimesis of the film was ossified by its official release via the accepted and legitimate form of the DVD. The film itself had undergone changes, with 143

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a warning letting people know that ‘[t]his film contains adult language, graphic violence, and nudity. Viewer discretion is advised.’ End credits appeared, clearly detailing the actors and technical staff who were involved in making the film. Therefore, the status of the film shifted from Vogel’s initial intention of creating a ‘real snuff movie’ towards realist horror. The forbidden, illicit, perhaps even illegal, status of the film was scaled back, turning its content into something that has to be endured and, thus aligning it more with confrontational or hardcore horror films. Hence, the film moved away from countering the paradox of showing real death and murder in horror films to an oppositional stance, situating itself as ‘real’ only in opposition to other cinematic texts.

‘These movies have brought me many problems’ August Underground’s Mordum develops the notion of realist horror established by the first film. As is typical of horror sequels, the film’s aim is to top the excesses of the original and this is spectacularly the case, as the amount and unmediated detail of violence and murder threatens to destroy the cinematic, or at least its containment, by the primitive videoing equipment that it is recorded on. The status of the film as a ‘found object’ is prominently missing here due, in the main, to the notoriety and underground cult status gained by August Underground. This does not, however, mean that Mordum offers little of interest in terms of realist horror. In fact, it adds another layer of realism not picked up by Freeland or not often discussed by horror film scholars. This is, namely, the impact such a film had on the people involved in its making. Mordum follows a surrogate family, with Vogel as the patriarchal head, Toetag founding member Cristie Whiles as his girlfriend, and her brother, as the childlike member of the family, who she is also having an incestuous relationship with. The family belongs to an extended coterie of people who represent an underbelly of murder and violence threatening to break through into the normality of everyday society. The film ends with a very powerful and disturbing sequence which sees the family engaged in a number of violent and transgressive acts. In these sequences, the violence breaks through in terms of actor identification with the characters they are playing. While these scenes are now clearly received as imitative due to the growing exposure of Vogel and the notoriety of August Underground, there is still the sense that we should not be watching them due to the reprehensible nature of the acts. They are so far removed from mainstream horror that their appearance in this sequence offers a troubling and uneasy viewing position.26 The brother is seen having intercourse with the partially decomposed corpse of a child as Whiles’ character films the surrounding room, which is full of blood, body parts and excrement. It is a place so overridden with pestilence that maggots are swarming over all the surfaces. This repellent environment is exacerbated by Vogel’s offcamera screaming, which contributes to the sense that delirium and madness is 144

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taking hold of both the characters and the actors playing them. Indeed, the film ends in an out-of-control orgiastic display of violence in which Vogel cuts the throat of a tied up woman and forces his brother to drink the blood. The scene is marked by an intensive display of physical and verbal violence from Vogel to both his girlfriend and her brother as he crosses over from filmmaker to killer, his behaviour becoming untethered from the film as he begins to attack his two co-actors. That Vogel puts the camera down at one point and seemingly forgets he is making a film (eventually Whiles picks it back up) only reinforces the breakdown between imitative and real cues engendered by the embodying of these extreme characters. Thus, Mordum concludes with an extended sequence in which the boundary between the actor and the character breaks down. In doing so, it provides a clear example of how realist horror can destabilise the ‘classical relation between mimesis and reality’.27 The porous nature of character and actor is exacerbated in the conclusion to the trilogy, August Underground’s Penance. The film continues the focus on the same family with more sequences showing them engaging in ‘normal’ activities such as being on holiday and partying. However, the murder sequences are marked by an increasing hostility between Whiles and Vogel’s characters, underscored by a greater physical aggression between the two than has been previously seen. The fractured relationship between the two seems to embody the off-screen relationship between the two actors as well. Toward the end, we see a very reluctant Whiles refusing to engage with Vogel’s actions. This is in direct contrast to the gusto and intensity she brought to her performance in Mordum. At one point, Whiles’ character/actor appears to break down as she begins to torture a woman tied to a chair. Whiles stops mid-scene and refuses to carry on despite the abuse she gets from Vogel’s character. She unties the woman and then leaves the room to enter a bathroom where she attempts to commit suicide. Although she is in character and this is part of her narrative development, this climactic scene can also be read as Whiles the actress refusing to participate and looking for a way out. This particular reading was given more credence during post-August Underground interviews, where Whiles candidly expressed her desire to move on. Indeed, after Penance, Whiles left Toetag and highlighted how the immersion into her character in the films had affected her daily life: I personally had to slip into the character to pull it off as vicious as I wanted. Nothing was scripted so I was constantly thinking of things to say and do every day, all day. It was very uncomfortable, cold and stressful [ . . . ] I lost my job while making the movie [ . . . ] These movies have brought me many problems. I’ve gotten creepy emails. I hear about men getting sexual arousal from abusing women and children.28

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in an unsettling and disturbing manner. The seriousness of this breakdown of the real and the artifice ultimately precipitated Whiles to turn her back on Toetag and pursue different filmic interests.

Conclusion: ‘It’s not a movie’29 The August Underground films are modern archetypes of realist horror. In these three films the horror eschews the imitative quality of more mainstream texts in favour of an authentic recreation of killers who are thought of, or exist, as real people. However, the films ultimately fail to break down the paradox of representing ‘real’ death on screen. This is not necessarily due to constraints in the making of the film. In fact, Vogel was successful in this respect, but was unable to distribute August Underground in the way he initially envisioned due to the very real prospect of serious criminal charges. The films also tell us a great deal about the relationship between character and actor in films where the character’s behaviour and actions are morally reprehensible and engage in intense recreations of violent acts. The blurring of the boundary between mimesis and actuality in terms of performance can potentially provide important points of entry into looking at the nexus between formal properties, characterisation and reception of horror films, as well as how such a series of connections can contribute to a sense of real/reel horror. August Underground ultimately attempts to develop the realist horror outlined by Freeland into a real/reel snuff film but, thwarted by societal regulations, ends up providing a corrective to horror realism exhibited in mainstream cinema instead. Vogel flattens out the glamour, plot designs, performances and high gloss spectacle inherent to serial killer films such as The Silence of the Lambs ( Jonathan Demme, 1991), which audiences during the 1990s saw as a yardstick in cinematic realism. Vogel’s characters are ‘ordinary’ people, the violence unpredictable, ugly, brutal and thoroughly degrading, and the plot subordinate to the spectacle of killing. As such, the film seems to be a corrective to 1990s American horror, which, by the end of the decade, had degraded into poor imitations (or diminished sequels) of Scream (Wes Craven, 1996). These bland, repetitious and highly constructed narratives, infused by a post-modern self-referentiality, had turned horror into a safe cultural expression where meaning and socio-cultural context had been hollowed out. In this light, Vogel’s wish to ‘show you what’s really going on’ seems laudable, even necessary.30 However, the aim is not to show the serial killers or murders as they ‘really are’ but to provide a more authentic cinematic realism. Ultimately, Vogel ends up showing audiences a more realistic cinematic serial killer rather than images gleaned from direct, real experience. In conclusion, the August Underground films come across as effective correctives to cinematic representations of horror in general and the serial killer film, in particular. In this respect, Vogel’s films have taken on the form of the simulacrum or hyperreal as the copy (in this case cinematic portrayals of serial killers) that have 146

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become more real than the original (actual killers). Meaning has been divested from the films, as the referent is another film rather than people and events in actuality. In turn, this position marks the August Underground films as direct outcomes of a post-9/11 visual technology society in which amateur footage, news reportage and cinematic narratives have conflated the real with the reel to produce immediate, spectacular and disturbing imagery.31 Vogel may have been sincere when he explained that he wanted to show violence as it really is and to engender a self-reflexive viewing position that echoes both the Picasso and Kracauer quotes that opened this chapter. Yet, as Hallam and Marshment have cogently pointed out, ‘in the society of media spectacle, rational response to horrific violence has become an impossibility. We can only enjoy it as hyperbolic charade or reject it in revulsion.’32 Hallam and Marshment’s position seems a reductive end to Vogel’s original aim to make August Underground a ‘real’ documentation of violence. Yet, within the landscape of a proliferation of (mass) mediated violent imagery and the pervasive cinematic realism of mainstream horror films, perhaps August Underground was, indeed, as real as Vogel ‘could make it’.33

Notes 1. Pablo Picasso, quoted in Brian McNair, Striptease Culture: Sex, Media and the Democratisation of Desire (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 174. 2. Siegfried Kracauer, quoted in Asbjørn Grønstad, Screening the Unwatchable: Spaces of Negation in Post-Millennial Art Cinema (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 11. 3. Fred Vogel, commentary for August Underground DVD (2001). 4. The term ‘torture porn’ was coined by The New York Times writer David Edelstein. See his ‘Now playing at your local multiplex: torture porn’, New York Times (28 January 2006). Available at http://nymag.com/movies/features/15622 (accessed 4 October 2009). 5. Douglas Kellner, Cinema Wars: Hollywood Film and Politics in the Bush-Cheney Era (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010); James Aston and John Walliss (eds), To See the Saw Movies: Essays on Torture Porn and Post-9/11 Horror ( Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013). 6. I adopt the term ‘hardcore horror’ from Jones’ recent book Torture Porn (2013), in which he provides the definition. Although in a number of correspondences with Vogel, and in interviews, the term ‘confrontational horror’ was used, I favour Jones’ term throughout, as it fits much more precisely the narrative and aesthetic strategies of the August Underground films. 7. Steve Jones, Torture Porn: Popular Horror after Saw (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 6. 8. Jones, Torture Porn, p. 126. 9. Jones, Torture Porn, p. 171. 10. Catherine Russell, Narrative Mortality: Death, Closure, and New Wave Cinemas (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), p. 23.

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11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16.

17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28.

29.

30. 31. 32. 33.

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Fred Vogel, DVD commentary. I am referring to the initial bootleg release and not the official 2006 DVD release. Vogel, commentary in August Underground DVD. Cynthia Freeland, ‘Realist horror’, in Thomas E. Wartenberg and Angela Curran (eds), The Philosophy of Film: Introductory Text and Reading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 126–42 (p. 127). Ibid. Fred Vogel and Matthew Dean Hill, ‘Underground: twenty questions with Fred Vogel – Director of August Underground and August Underground’s Mordum’, AtrocitiesCinema.com (October 2005). Available at http://www.atrocitiescinema.com/ interviews/fredvogel.html (accessed 21 January 2006). Vogel, ‘Underground’; Shaun Kimber, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 102. Vogel, ‘Underground’. Mikita Brottman, ‘Mondo horror: carnivalizing the taboo’, in Stephen Prince (ed.), The Horror Film (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004), pp. 167–88 (p. 168). Ibid. Brottman, ‘Mondo Horror’, p. 168. Freeland, ‘Realist Horror’, p. 262. Brottman, ‘Mondo Horror’, p. 169. Fred Vogel, personal communication with the author (2013). See the featurette ‘“Too real for comfort”: an outsider’s perspective’, in the August Underground DVD. Despite Mordum’s fictional representation of violence, the film was still considered so obscene and troubling that Vogel was arrested after he attempted to cross the border into Canada for a film festival. Freeland, ‘Realist Horror’, p. 127. Cristie Whiles and Ronny, ‘Aiming high with Cristie Whiles’, FilmBizarro.com (December 2009). Available at http://www.filmbizarro.com/cristiewhiles.php (accessed 21 January 2009). This quote was featured in the ‘Too real for comfort’ featurette. It represents a recurrent response and highlights how the film disturbed normative viewing positions in terms of the realism and authenticity of its portrait of a killer. Vogel, ‘Underground’. I am referring to amateur footage from the collapse of the Twin Towers to the death of Colonel Gaddafi. Julia Hallam and Margaret Marshment, Realism and Popular Cinema (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 250. Vogel, DVD commentary.

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11 The [•REC] Films: Affective Possibilities and Stylistic Limitations of Found Footage Horror Xavier Aldana Reyes

The production of found footage horror, that is, horror films relying on images supposedly discovered by accident or recovered from lost logs or files, has soared dramatically since 2007 and shows no signs of abating.1 The Paranormal Activity series (2007–present), perhaps its most obvious and well-known example, continues to make strong profits based on return investment and has even begun to rival Saw (2004–10) and Nightmare on Elm Street (1984–2010) as one of the most financially successful horror franchises ever; 2014 saw the announcement of no less than two new instalments, the spin-off Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones (Christopher B. Landon, 2014) and Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension (Gregory Plotkin, 2015). Yet, if found footage horror has not necessarily reached saturation point by the mid-2010s, its limitations may have started to become apparent to filmmakers. When one of the directors of Devil’s Due (Matt BettinelliOlpin and Tyler Gillett, 2014) was interviewed upon the release of the film, he explained that found footage had clear disadvantages connected to the need to justify the presence of the camera.2 According to Bettinelli-Olpin, Devil’s Due was consciously atypical: the finished product did not intend to look like it had actually been ‘found or compiled’ but was, instead, presented as a ‘story told through cameras that exist in that world’.3 The use of found footage, in this case, appeared convenient because it allowed for a sense of ‘intimacy’ that could ‘heighten [ . . . ] 149

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the horror’ and ‘mirror [the characters’] journey visually by shifting to different (and hopefully creepier) POVs’.4 Bettinelli’s thoughts betray a degree of self-awareness that comes with the knowledge of working within a specific filmic cycle.5 They also indicate that found footage is almost inextricable from affect, and that its aesthetics is ultimately dictated by its visual and experiential intentions. David Bordwell has noted that the found footage, or pseudo-documentary, mode follows a series of conventions – from to-camera interviews to awkward framing – that were in place well before the popular The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo S´anchez, 1999), Paranormal Activity (Oren Peli, 2007) and [ rREC] ( Jaume Balaguer´o and Paco Plaza, 2007).6 Over the past decade, however, horror films have increasingly exploited this narrative framework and become strongly associated with it. This is party the case because found footage horror is cheaper to make and the independent and amateurish look of the product appeals to a number of horror filmmakers. More importantly, the hand-held look chimes with the genre’s affective drive and allows for a video game style first-person immersion that was not, until recently, widespread.7 The reliance on feed from hand-held cameras (The Tunnel (Carlo Ledesma, 2011)), video blogs (Megan Is Missing (Michael Goi, 2011)) and phone videos (Cloverfield (Matt Reeves, 2008)) is so overwhelming that the term ‘found footage’, traditionally ascribed to the montage work of avant-garde directors like Stan Brakhage, is now common parlance in horror criticism and may even come to be primarily associated with this genre. Its ubiquity is no doubt a result of the fact that, contrary to popular belief, found footage horror is not itself a subgenre but a framing technique that has been applied to different horror subgenres.8 For example, the possession film, which has experienced a post-millennial revival after the success of The Exorcism of Emily Rose (Scott Derrickson, 2005), has gradually been given the found footage treatment so that subsequent entries, such as The Last Exorcism (Daniel Stamm, 2010) or The Devil Inside (William Brent Bell, 2012), could be best described as found footage possession horror. This state of affairs is naturally encouraging a rethinking of the ways in which we perceive and taxonomise horror in the digital age. As horror finds other, more direct, ways of conveying fear, stylistics and content blur into each other. This is especially the case with found footage, where the story is virtually inseparable from the means by which it is told. The [ rREC] franchise offers a perfect case study of a series of films that have aligned their affective aspirations with the immediacy of found footage. In the first instalment, the excuse of a live TV show that depended heavily on improvisation and the use of non-professional actors helped to create a false sense of directness that undercut the distance between the body of the film and that of the viewer. In fact, the emphasis on realism was such that the thematic content did not need to be developed with the same attention to detail.9 [ rREC]’s framework, indispensable as a tool through which to tell its story, became the film’s trademark and key selling point in marketing campaigns. As I will move on to show, a cursory look at the

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latter instalments in the series reveals that one of the difficulties experienced by the directors as a result of the success of this formula was to extricate the franchise from its format. As with found footage more generally, [ rREC]’s narrative framework had become so synonymous with its conceptual value as affective and immersive horror that the first instalment to abandon these conventions was received as a potential travesty that did not capture the spirit of the original film. As a wellknown entry in digital horror, [ rREC] showed the exciting immersive potential of found footage, namely, its capacity to provide for a more participatory viewing experience. Simultaneously, however, its limitations became more apparent as latter films revisited the same stylistics or attempted to supersede it. [ rREC] evinces that realistic intent for the purposes of affective import immediately implies a number of cinematic compromises that ensure the premise can remain believable. The power of horror lies in its capacity to lure viewers into a state of suspension of disbelief through which they may be moved to feel fear, shock or abject disgust. The predominance of the found footage framework, then, poses an important challenge to the mechanisms of horror as it grows increasingly dependent on the stylistic demands required by its appeal to verisimilitude. In essence, what begins as a mere framing technique that should facilitate the generation of affect quickly develops into the standard by which found footage horror is judged.

‘Experience Fear’: Affective Techniques and Viewer Immersion There are a number of reasons why [ rREC] is one of the most significant horror films of the twenty-first century. Firstly, although European cinema is no stranger to the zombie genre, [ rREC] has, since its release, become an important part of the cinematic zombie canon in a way only comparable to that of only a handful of Italian films.10 Secondly, it is one of the most financially successful Spanish horror films of all time and is also one of the first contemporary horror films, following the positive critical reception of Guillermo del Toro’s MexicanSpanish co-productions The Devil’s Backbone / El espinazo del diablo (2001) and Pan’s Labyrinth / El laberinto del fauno (2006), to be shot entirely in Spanish and distributed outside Spain.11 Given that Spanish horror had, in the past, been firmly embedded within the context of Euro-Horror, [ rREC] is an unusual example of a confidently marketed genre product that explicitly eschewed the use of foreign actors or dubbing to appeal to an American market.12 Surprisingly for a low budget ‘local’ horror film, it was received warmly by critics and went on to win a number of European accolades and prizes.13 Furthermore, as Antonio L´azaro-Reboll has argued, its marketing campaign was a truly ‘transnational’ and transmedial phenomenon, gathering momentum through YouTube and internet dissemination and producing a strong paracinematic output that now includes a video game for iPhone, iPad and Android.14 Most importantly, [ rREC] was one of the first post-millennial horror films, alongside Diary of the Dead 151

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(George A. Romero, 2007), to adopt the found footage motif popularised by The Blair Witch Project at the turn of the century and exploit it skilfully for affective purposes.15 The sense of continuity, achieved through a careful selection of scenes that provide the most relevant or interesting account of the events, hinges strongly on the instantaneity of its images’ purported origin as ‘live footage’.16 ´ [ rREC] opens with TV reporter Angela Vidal (Manuela Velasco) and her fellow cameraman (Pablo Rosso) as they embark on a mission to tape and interview a ´ local fire brigade in Barcelona. Angela’s initial question, ‘are you recording yet?’, offers an early affirmation of the spontaneous and allegedly unmediated nature of the material at hand. Since there are no credits or title sequence and the quality of the image is comparable to that of a professional digital camera, it is clear that [ rREC] attempts to recreate the look of Spanish TV documentary programmes such as Espejo p´ublico (Public Mirror) or Callejeros (Wanderers).17 However, unlike TV reality horrors such as Ghostwatch (Stephen Volk, 1992) and My Little Eye (Marc Evans, 2002), or the horror mockumentaries Cannibal Holocaust (Ruggero Deodato, 1980) and The Last Broadcast (Lance Weiler and Stefan Avalos, 1998), the narrative framework never encourages the possibility that the film is being broadcast publicly. Although [ rREC] advertised itself as a new form of ‘real time’ horror, because it contains bad takes and even a rewinding moment that would never appear in a live recording, the film may be best aligned with the found videotape premise of Paranormal Activity and Cloverfield. In them, the commercial film is presented as footage recuperated from digital cameras which has then been either edited for public consumption or filed away as evidence by the government. ´ Angela’s constant exhortations – ‘[t]ape everything!’ or ‘[d]on’t stop the tape! They need to know everything’ – would seem to signal that the images become a form of record or document through which to challenge the official version of events as reported by the authorities.18 The concomitant implication of the viewer in the recording process is therefore important for immersive purposes. Not only is the potential audience privy to tantalisingly forbidden or secret images, they also participate in the process of their hampered sourcing. To this end, two different styles, the documentary (TV reportage) and the testimonial (video diary), are exploited. The first sequences, intended for the TV programme Mientras duermes (While You Sleep), help to introduce the characters and situation via a familiar descriptive prologue that does not appear contrived. It is established, for example, that it is night-time, that the characters are in a ´ Catalan city, that the crew is composed exclusively of Angela and Pablo, and, later, that an old woman seems to be in distress in a nearby block of flats. This means that, by the time the narrative takes us into the lugubrious apartment where a zombified old woman (Mar´ıa Teresa Ortega) can be found screaming ´ and running towards the camera, the viewer knows as much as Angela and Pablo. Limiting information to whatever is heard within the intradiegetic space of the recording is only one of the many techniques the narrative uses to create a direct,

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if necessarily artificial, alignment between projected viewer and camera. The reporters’ discovery of something that seems to be much worse than anticipated, and which very quickly becomes a real threat, changes the dynamic of the film: the text becomes a survivor’s log. The rest of [ rREC] makes the most of the stylistic possibilities of shaky cam horror to present a seemingly continuous and flowing series of events. As the directors have explained, although films such as Cannibal Holocaust and Blair Witch were an obvious influence, the intention was to make a ‘purely digital-video horror film that could be more direct and hyper-affect the audience by being told in that cine-v´erit´e way [ . . . ] using YouTube language’.19 In order to do this, [ rREC] resorted to techniques that were well-honed by 2007. For example, the film includes unscripted scenes that depend on the improvisation ´ of actors, most notably in Angela’s visit to a real fire station in Barcelona. The realistic reactions of characters, who are often not sure what is happening to them or where sounds are coming from, is crucial in evoking a sense of simulated reality.20 Other techniques include the privileging of long subjective POV shots, unedited to grant the action a sense of fluidity and instantaneity, and a camcorder finish that emphasises the rawness of the footage. The distinctive aesthetics of [ rREC] combines poor lighting with an image that is not static, features rapid and abrupt zoom-ins and outs, blurs and contains shots where figures or actions are partially or totally obscured. The connection between image and viewer is also built around the vulnerability of the camera, which is seen reacting to a host of external attacks, from intentional blows to accidental falls, and portrays images accordingly (the recording skips or fades to black). The damage to the stock is also important in this context, since it fosters alignment between potential viewer and recorded video. ´ The most important of these instances occurs when the camera hits Angela and a loud stinging noise accompanies a few seconds of muted sound. This sequence, which mimics the potentially disorientating and harmful effects of a violent blow to the head, is used consistently throughout the franchise. The techniques I have mentioned are of capital importance in setting up a scene that is believable and in generating an eerie and claustrophobic feeling, but they are not exclusively responsible for the form of mediated affective horror ascribed to [ rREC]. Shock and fear are mostly conveyed through startle effects, which are premised on ‘disturbing intrusion[s] into [a] character’s immediate space’ and, in the case of found footage horror, often feature the reveal of a horrific figure previously off-screen or hiding in the shadows.21 One of the most affective scenes in the film sees the cameraman attempt a circular pan of an attic floor in order to establish it as safe ground. The first part of the pan shows an empty room, but, as the camera gets closer to completing a full circle, the face of a rabid boy (V´ıctor Massagu´e) materialises in extreme focus. The type of intradiegetic sound or loud noise which characterises the startle effect works according to the same principle.22 Since the sequences take place in very dark rooms and there are no establishing shots introducing secondary characters, affective reaction is

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also achieved by playing with the viewer’s attention. When the infected old lady appears, for instance, it is perceptible that she is covered in blood, but her face is only glimpsed in fast-paced, shaky or blurred shots. Hence, when she reappears, her silhouette visible through the light coming from the window directly behind her, the natural instinct is to want to look at her closely. This morbid curiosity, together with the relative slowness of the build-up in this scene, means that, by the time the old lady lunges towards the camera, the focal point is her body. Since she runs towards the policeman (Vicente Gil), who is directly in our line of vision, her sudden scream and assault are also experienced by the image, which shakes, stumbles and recoils accordingly. Because viewers are aligned with the camera, it is likely that they, too, feel attacked. As the film progresses, the action speeds up and provides for an even more syncopated and disorientating experience. The viewer is asked, by accepting to take Pablo’s role, to follow and take stock of the events. The film does not have an obvious plot, particularly after the outbreak leads to a succession of chase sequences that leave little time for exposition and where the emphasis lies on the safety of ´ Angela and Pablo. The latter also stays relatively quiet throughout the majority of the film and his body remains outside the main line of vision, so that it is possible to step into his shoes and adopt a more active viewing position.23 Similarly, since the film does not directly answer any questions regarding the viral outbreak, the viewer is also invited to become a species of narrator, putting together the pieces of the [ rREC] puzzle. For example, when the final scene introduces a number of newspaper cut-outs stuck to a wall, one can build a loose backstory by reading between the lines, but this is not something the characters have time to voice themselves. It is important to notice that this accentuated involvement is made possible, in the first instance, by the found footage framing technique. Because the realistic premise of the film makes that viewing position believable ´ and acceptable, horror becomes more direct. As Spanish horror critic Angel Salas has argued, it is its ‘revolution in the field of textures and sensations’ that turns [ rREC] into an ‘experience’ and what distinguishes it from a host of other zombie films.24 As he explains, the film is not thematically innovative and its ‘radicalness, its cinematic expressivity’, relies, instead, on its needing to ‘be seen’ or the fact that ‘it is pointless to have it told to you by another person’.25 [ rREC] is a perfect example of a/effective found footage horror: it uses available shooting and editing techniques to shorten the distance between filmic action and viewer and, thus, market itself as a special experiential event.

‘This Is No Real [ rREC ] Movie’: Narrative Framework as Stylistic Limitation I have, thus far, focused on some of the ‘realistic’ techniques available to found footage and which have driven critics to praise [ rREC] for its seamless capacity to 154

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‘pull [ . . . ] you right into the thick of the action’.26 There are, however, a number of narrative limitations imposed by this stylistics, the most important being the legitimisation of the recording process. As it becomes a character in its own right, the camera has to be justified narratively in two ways. Firstly, it has to follow behavioural patterns that are recognisably human. This means that the image is necessarily bound to the movements and extensions of the human body. It cannot, for example, offer an establishing air shot unless the cameraman is inside a plane or it is made explicit that the images were recorded by a camera attached to a flying object. Found footage also posits a more obvious problem. Since horror is at the heart of these texts, as self-professed genre films, there has to be a real reason for the recording to be taking place, particularly when hiding from a threat or running away would appear a much more natural human reaction than zooming in. Containing the horrific reveal and encasing the deaths of intradiegetic characters within this framework becomes a challenge unless more than one camera is used (Diary of the Dead), several characters use the same camera (Cloverfield) or the subjective camera is intercut with CCTV images or other surveillance feed (Reel Evil (Danny Draven, 2012)). As I have indicated, [ rREC] manages to sidestep the possible shortcomings of this narrative framework because, in it, taping becomes synonymous with witnessing. Secondly, the permanence of the camera also needs to be explained, especially when it is found shooting officials or members of the public who would not normally allow for sensitive images to be recorded. Upon first entering the building in [ rREC], the policeman questions the firemen about the presence of the camera, which is only allowed to record on the basis that it become the responsibility of the latter. Even then, as violence escalates, another policeman asks, and eventually forces, Pablo to turn off the device. The camera’s reintegration into the narrative thereon lies on its capacity to reveal the truth of what is happening and, thus, becomes a form of counter-narrative to the official version of events. The film also legitimises the camera’s presence by turning it into an indispensable tool for survival: its lamp attachment and night vision allow characters to see in lifethreatening circumstances, such as when they are plunged into darkness. However, by [ rREC]2 ( Jaume Balaguer´o and Paco Plaza, 2009), which uses up to six cameras, it becomes clear that the same stylistic mode that contributed to the frenetic crescendo of the action and allowed for affective involvement in the first film might not viably sustain a narrative demanding various points of view.27 The sequel settles this matter by incorporating military helmet cams worn by the members of a SWAT team and a video camera carried by a group of teenagers who accidentally get involved in the events. The use of different perspectives frees up the various POV shots and allows for simultaneous recordings and narrative subplots. It also, as film reviewer Mar Diestro-D´opido suggests, ‘keep[s] the action frantic and the viewer relentlessly disoriented’.28 [ rREC]2 therefore manages to overcome perspectival shortcomings but does so at the expense of its credibility. Since the

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various POVs have been externally edited together, the film loses the tautness of the original. Viewers might become more aware of the process of mediation at hand, as the structure of the film betrays its manipulation. Another significant limitation of found footage horror is the absence of extradiegetic music. If the [ rREC] films are to remain true to the ‘hyperrealism’ of its real time premise, no musical score may be used to convey a specific atmosphere, mood or feeling.29 This means that such effects need to be achieved by other means, mainly startle effects, background noises and bumps. The lack of music does not, of course, preclude the work of the post-production team or the enhancement of sound. The gunning down of the old lady in [ rREC] is amplified and distorted to simulate the sonic effect of a gunshot in an enclosed space, and the whirring heard prior to the entrance of a helicopter has been manipulated to make it especially unnerving. Similarly, the screams of the infected are dubbed using real squeals from animals such as donkeys, birds and pigs, giving them a feral quality.30 As should be apparent, although the franchise has found ways to cope with the demands imposed by its realistic style and, in some cases, has been innovative in its development of alternative shooting and editing techniques, the restrictions of found footage are significant. By [ rREC]3 : Genesis (2012) / [ rREC]3 : G´enesis (2012), director Paco Plaza found it more of a burden than a helpful immersive framework. Plaza’s desire to ‘turn . . . [REC] into something different from what it had been until then’, is evident here.31 The setting (a wedding reception) and lighting (it is filmed, at least initially, in the open on a summer day) are different, as is the tone (the film becomes a ‘splatstick’ celebration of gore and histrionic special effects in the style of Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead (1982)). However, it is the abandonment of the found footage format 20 minutes into the film that distinguishes this [ rREC] from previous entries in the series and which created the most controversy. Kim Newman, in his review for Sight and Sound, warned that this bold reframing ran the risk of ‘alienating long-time fans’, and Guardian reviewer Henry Barnes feared that this move could ‘jettison the [REC]’s franchise’s foundfootage gimmick’.32 Even those who reviewed the film positively and praised its intention to provide a fresh start for the series had to admit that ‘ditch[ing] some of its trademark POV footage style and gloomy aesthetics for this prequel’ meant that, ‘instead of frightening, the resulting gore and cartoonish violence are mostly just gleefully over-the-top’.33 Even if the change in style is welcome, it results in the subsequent alteration of the overall mood. Abandoning the claustrophobic and participatory style of found footage allows for a new original type of formula, but it also necessarily leads to a very different type of visual experience. In the case of [ rREC]3 , this was particularly problematic, for, as Matt Singer noted, ‘without its immediacy and realism, [REC] 3: Genesis becomes just another walking-dead movie’.34 A similar discontent was also registered by a number of fans, who

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complained that there is ‘[n]o motion sickness camera style in [it]’ and therefore [ rREC]3 is ‘no real rec [sic] movie’.35 The general disappointment with the format, register and style, all of them interdependent, seems to have been registered by its makers, since the fourth, and last, instalment in the franchise points towards a return to its origins.36 [ rREC]4 : Apocalypse / [ rREC]4 : Apocalipsis ( Jaume Balaguer´o, 2014) sees actress Manuela Velasco coming back to her leading role and takes up from where [ rREC]2 left off, ´ with Angela being quarantined at sea. It also promises to be ‘the darkest and most savage in the franchise, going back to the raw fear of the original’ and reverting to claustrophobic interiors, this time those of a Russian oil tanker.37 Although little else is known at the time of writing, its first teaser trailer reuses footage from the ´ first two films and assumes knowledge of the Angela character. It, thus, establishes r r a sense of continuity between [ REC], [ REC]2 and [ rREC]4 . Most significantly, however, the hand-held camera aesthetics that became the trademark of the series is, once again, replaced by a widescreen omniscient shooting style. It is impossible to predict whether this decision will be well-received or whether the found footage style will, once more, be missed, but it would appear that the franchise has, at least, made a conscious effort to resuscitate the tone and mood that brought it fame and recognition. To conclude, [ rREC] is a film that prioritised somatic and instinctive reactions and understood viewership as an inherently participatory experience. The series became well-known mostly for its affective qualities, themselves a result of a masterful exploitation of immersive techniques made possible by found footage. To a lesser or greater extent, this was the case with a number of films that used a similar formula, from Paranormal Activity to Grave Encounters (The Vicious Brothers, 2011) and Reel Evil. In extreme cases, such as that of the Uruguayan The Silent House / La casa muda (Gustavo Hern´andez, 2010), the tagline for which promised ‘real horror in real time’, the instantaneity was guaranteed by shooting the entirety of the film in one long take. This foregrounding of verisimilitude and immediacy is important, for it highlights the experiential aspects of horror and it also allows fear to become truly digital, that is, to be filmed digitally. As found footage becomes more inextricable from the unmediated nature of the digital recording, its striving for verisimilitude increases. As is evinced by the critical and popular reception of [ rREC]3 , which was mixed at best, found footage horror is already being associated in the popular sphere with directness and believability. If nothing else, the [ rREC] series is a good example of how the type of haptic and interactive benefits that may be reaped from adopting found footage framing techniques need to be counterbalanced with the restraints and risks of their promise of veracity. Whether found footage horror will survive in the long run will depend on the capacity for films to continue to exploit and transcend the very specific stylistics that distinguishes them from more traditional instances of the genre.

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Notes 1. At least 80 found footage films were released over the five-year period 2007–12. 2. Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, quoted in ‘The need for truth in “based on a true story”’, The Bitter Script Reader Blog (31 March 2014). Available at http://thebitterscript reader.blogspot.co.uk (accessed 31 March 2014). 3. Bettinelli-Olpin, ‘The need for truth’. 4. Ibid. 5. The heavily metatextual Grave Encounters 2 ( John Poliquin, 2012) is a good example of the latter strand of reflexive or metatextual found footage horror. 6. David Bordwell, ‘Return to paranormalcy’, DavidBordwell.net (13 November 2012). Available at http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2012/11/13/return-to-para normalcy (accessed 10 June 2013). 7. I am using the term ‘affect’ throughout to refer to the emotional, but primarily somatic or instinctive reaction, that film, especially the horror genre, aims to achieve in its potential viewers. For more on affect theory and horror, see Xavier Aldana Reyes, ‘Beyond psychoanalysis: post-millennial horror film and affect theory’, Horror Studies iii/2 (2012), pp. 243–61. 8. For more on these limitations, see Xavier Aldana Reyes, ‘Reel evil: a critical reassessment of found footage horror’, Gothic Studies xvii/2 (2015, forthcoming). 9. Proof of the superficial value of its plot is that the two American remakes, Quarantine ( John Erick Dowdle, 2008) and Quarantine 2: Terminal ( John Pogue, 2011), abandoned the spiritual/possession element introduced in latter instalments of the original Spanish franchise to focus on viral outbreaks. Although this move is ultimately shaped by the process of remaking, it does signal that this part of the plot did not seem crucial to the spirit of the film. 10. The film has been included in ‘best ever zombie movies’ lists in websites such as Digitalspy.com or Scifinow.co.uk and is currently on the top 10 of Imdb.com’s ‘Top Rated Zombie Films’ (1 June 2013). Available at http://www.imdb.com/list/mw U5zX4i5V0 (accessed December 12, 2013). 11. As of 2009, the film was number seven in the top ten of bestselling Spanish horror films. See V´ıctor Matellano, Spanish Horror (Madrid: T&B Editores, 2009), p. 110. 12. Interestingly, however, the final product was not deemed transnational enough for the American market, as the film was remade, almost shot-for-shot. On the connection between Spanish horror film and the American market, see Ian Olney, Euro Horror: Classic European Horror Cinema in Contemporary American Culture (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013), pp. 46–82. 13. The most important of these are ‘Best Director’ at the Festival de Cine de Sitges (2007), ‘Best Actress’ in the Goya Awards (2008) and, outside Spain, the ‘Special Jury Prize’ at the Festival International du Film Fantastique de G´erardmer (2008), the ‘Silver Scream Award’ at the Amsterdam Fantastic Film Festival (2008) and the ‘Audience Jury Award’ at the Portuguese Fantasporto (2008). 14. Antonio L´azaro-Reboll, Spanish Horror Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), pp. 274–5.

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15. This narrative framework has proven popular in its native Spain and has been subsequently borrowed by later productions, such as Atrocious (Fernando Barreda Luna, 2010), Ocaso (Lu´ıs Cerezo, 2011) or Sesi´on 1.16 (Hern´an Cabo, 2012), and used in specific POV scenes in Paranormal Xperience 3D (Sergi Vizcaino, 2011). 16. The BBFC were moved to observe that ‘the film’s sense of immediacy and realism creates a strong sense of genuine threat which results in a terrifying, disturbing and intense viewing experience’. See Mark Kermode, ‘DVD of the week: a real shocker with teeth’, The Observer (18 August 2008), p. 18. 17. The casting of actress Manuela Velasco, who worked as a TV hostess for the popular music programmes Del 40 al 1 and Los 40 principales, is also noteworthy. 18. There is no space here to consider the subversive or radical potential of this aspect of the film. However, future work on [ rREC] might benefit from exploring the ways in which challenging the ‘official’ version of events has an important effect on viewer investment and conveys a strong political message. 19. Jaume Balaguer´o, quoted in Alan Jones, ‘Nervous [ rREC]’, Fangoria cclxxvi (October 2008), pp. 32–4. Promotional campaigns aside, which were eminently digital in the marketing of [ rREC], it is important to note that digital found footage horror does not represent a break with its analogue counterpart but, instead, continues its stylistic practices whilst incorporating the subjective POV shots typical of the survival horror video game. If anything, the increasing ubiquity and ease of access to recording devices since the advent of portable cameras legitimises the profusion of videos and their mundane contents. 20. Balaguer´o, quoted in Jones, ‘Nervous [ rREC]’, p. 34. See also Jaume Balaguer´o and Paco Plaza’s commentaries for the 2008 Spanish version of the DVD. 21. Robert Baird, ‘The startle effect: implications for spectator cognition and media theory’, Film Quarterly liii/3 (2000), pp. 12–24 (p. 17). 22. For more on the role of sound in the startle effect, or ‘cinematic shock’, see Julian Hanich, Cinematic Emotion in Horror Films and Thrillers: the Aesthetic Paradox of Pleasurable Fear (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), pp. 136–8. 23. Pablo’s face is never shown. ´ 24. Angel Salas, Profanando el sue˜no de los muertos: la historia jam´as contada del cine fant´astico espa˜nol (Pontevedra: Scifiworld, 2010), p. 320. Incidentally, one of the commercial TV adverts for the film used the tagline ‘experimenta el miedo’ (‘experience fear’). 25. Salas, Profanando el sue˜no de los muertos, p. 321. 26. Damian Tully-Pointon, ‘[REC]: the critical DVD round-up’, Metro (12 August 2008), p. 26. Similar points were made by Edward Porter, ‘(REC)’, The Times (13 April 2008), p. 12, and Philip French, ‘Review: chilling Spanish practices’, The Observer (14 April 2008), p. 17. 27. In the ‘making of’ of the Spanish DVD release of ‘[ rREC]2 ’, the directors explain that using only one camera for scenes that involved several infected people became ‘too complicated’. 28. Mar Diestro-D´opido, ‘[ rREC]2 : review’, Sight and Sound ( July 2010), p. 69. 29. This term is used by Plaza as he explains the reason for the lack of music. Quoted in Jones, ‘Nervous [ rREC]’, p. 34.

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30. Jaume Balaguer´o and Paco Plaza’s commentaries for the 2008 Spanish version of the DVD. 31. Paco Plaza, quoted in Sean Smithson, ‘[ rREC]3 : the infection escapes’, Fangoria, cccxvi (September 2012), p. 37. 32. Kim Newman, ‘[REC]3 Genesis: review’, Sight and Sound (October 2012), p. 98; Henry Barnes, ‘[REC]3 G´enesis: review’, The Guardian (30 August 2012). Available at http://www.theguardian.com/film/2012/aug/30/rec-3-genesis-review (accessed 10 October 2013). 33. Boyd van Hoeij, ‘Review: [REC]3 : Genesis’, Variety (9 March 2012). Available at http://variety.com/2012/film/reviews/rec-3-genesis-1117947218 (accessed 10 October 2013). 34. Matt Singer, ‘Review: [REC]3 : Genesis’, Time Out New York (4 September 2012). Available at http://www.timeout.com/us/film/rec-3-genesis (accessed 10 October 2013). 35. Goatmachine, ‘Review: [REC] 3: Genesis’, Metacritic.com (28 October 2012). Available at http://www.metacritic.com/movie/rec-3-genesis/user-reviews?sort-by=mostclicked&num - items=100 (accessed 10 October 2013). Fan reviewer Meg Whiteley expresses a similar opinion on the same page, as does ‘Dead Angel’ in Rottentomatoes.com or ‘didich’ in the specialised thread on Nolanfans.com. Those who praise the film mention the levels and treatment of gore in the film, and not necessarily the abandonment of found footage as framing technique. 36. This was a fear that Production Manager Oriol Maym´o expressed in the ‘REC: Genesis – preparing a bloody wedding’ featurette in the European DVD release: ‘I was very afraid because the [REC] concept is a very established concept within the shared cinematic language of the audience. Changing the format was a risk.’ Translation is my own. 37. Anonymous, ‘What do we know about [REC] 4 APOCALIPSIS?’, Rec-Infectados.es (6 November 2013). Available at http://rec-infectados.es/rec4/r4.htm (accessed 10 November 2013). Translation is my own. See also Samuel Zimmerman, ‘Jaume Balaguer´o teases horrifying, claustrophobic [REC] 4 in new featurette’, Fangoria.com (19 August 2013). Available at http://www.fangoria.com/new/jaume-balagueroteases-horrifying-claustrophobic-rec-4-in-new-featurette (accessed 15 September 2013).

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Aston, James and John Walliss (eds), To See the Saw Movies: Essays on Torture Porn and Post-9/11 Horror ( Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013). Bacevitch, Andrew, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Badley, Linda, Film, Horror and the Body Fantastic (London and Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995). Baird, Robert, ‘The startle effect: implications for spectator cognition and media theory’, Film Quarterly liii/3 (2000), pp. 12–24. Baldick, Chris and Robert Mighall, ‘Gothic Criticism’, in David Punter (ed.), A Companion to the Gothic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), pp. 209–28. Barnes, Henry, ‘[REC]3 G´enesis: review’, The Guardian (August 2012). Available at http://www.theguardian.com/film/2012/aug/30/rec-3-genesis-review (accessed 1 October 2013). Baudrillard, Jean, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, trans. Paul Patton (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995). Bell-Metereau, Rebecca, ‘The how-to manual, the prequel and the sequel in post9/11 cinema’, in Wheeler Winston Dixon (ed.), Film and Television after 9/11 (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004), pp. 142–62. Belton, John, ‘Digital cinema: a false revolution’, October c (2002), pp. 98–114. Birkenstein, Jeff, Anna Froula and Karen Randell (eds), Reframing 9/11: Film, Popular Culture and the ‘War on Terror’ (New York: Continuum International, 2010). Bitter Script Reader, The, ‘The need for truth in “based on a true story”’, The Bitter Script Reader Blog (31 March 2014). Available at http://thebitterscriptreader.blogspot.co.uk (accessed 31 March 2014). Bjeli´c, Duˇsan I., ‘Introduction: blowing up the “bridge”’, in Duˇsan I. Bjeli´c and Obrad Savi´c (eds), Balkan as Metaphor: between Globalisation and Fragmentation (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002), pp. 1–22. Blackburn, Bradley, ‘Report says justice not served in murder of Daniel Pearl’, ABC News Online (20 January 2011). Available at http://abcnews.go.com/US/report-justiceserved-murder-daniel-pearl/story?id=12721909 (accessed 10 December 2012). Blake, Linnie, The Wounds of Nations: Horror Cinema, Historical Trauma and National Identity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008). Blanchot, Maurice, ‘N’oubliez pas!’, La Quinzaine litteraire cdlix (1986), pp. 11–2. Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (London and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). Bordwell, David, The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies (London and Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006). ‘Return to paranormalcy’, DavidBordwell.net (13 November 2012). Available ---at http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2012/11/13/return-to-paranormalcy (accessed 5 June 2013). boyd, danah, ‘The power of fear in networked publics’, SXSW conference, Austin, TX (10 March 2012). Available at http://www.danah.org/papers/talks/2012/SXSW 2012.html (accessed 3 February 2014).

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Briggs, Julia, Night Visitors: the Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story (London: Faber, 1977). ‘The ghost story’, in David Punter (ed.), A Companion to the Gothic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), pp. 121–31. Brottman, Mikita, ‘Mondo horror: carnivalising the taboo’, in Stephen Prince (ed.), The Horror Film (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004), pp. 167–88. Brown, William, ‘Man without a movie camera – movies without men: towards a posthumanist cinema?’, in Warren Buckland (ed.), Film Theory and Contemporary Hollywood Movies (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), pp. 66–85. Canini, Mikko, ‘Introduction’, in Mikko Canini (ed.), Domination of Fear (New York: Rodopi, 2010), pp. viii–xiv. Carroll, No¨el, The Philosophy of Horror: or, Paradoxes of the Heart (New York and London: Routledge, 1990). Caruth, Cathy, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). ‘Trauma and experience’, in Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg (eds), The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003), pp. 192–9. Castells, Manuel, The Rise of the Network Society (Massachusetts, MA: Blackwell 1996). Clover, Carol J., Men, Women and Chain Saws (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). De Cuir Jr., Greg, ‘The Yugoslav Black Wave: the history and poetics of polemical cinema in the 1960s and 1970s in Yugoslavia’, in Anik´o Imre (ed.), A Companion to Eastern European Cinemas (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), pp. 403–24. De Palma, Brian, interviewed by David Davies, ‘Fresh air’, NPR (14 November 2007). Denson, Shane, ‘Crazy cameras, discorrelated images, and the post-perceptual mediation of post-cinematic affect’, Medieninitiative (7 March 2013). Available at http://medieninitiative.wordpress.com/2013/01/18/shane-denson-crazy-camerasdiscorrelated-images (accessed 15 October 2013). Diestro-D´opido, Mar, ‘[ rREC]2 Review’, Sight and Sound ( July 2010), p. 69. Djordjevi´c, Mladen, ‘Poetika subverzije’, Filaˇz i (2009), p. 56. ‘Pain and perversion in the Balkans’, Rue Morgue cvii (November 2010), p. 19. Duvall, John N. and Robert P. Marzec, ‘Narrating 9/11’, Modern Fiction Studies lvii/3 (2011), pp. 381–400. Edelstein, David, ‘Now playing at your local multiplex: torture porn’, New York Times (28 January 2006). Available at http://nymag.com/movies/features/15622 (accessed 4 October 2009). Elmer, Greg and Andy Opel, ‘Pre-empting panoptic surveillance: surviving the inevitable War on Terror’, in David Lyon (ed.), Theorising Surveillance: the Panopticon and Beyond (New York: Routledge, 2011), pp. 139–60. Epright, M. Carmela, ‘Coercing future freedom: consent and capacities for autonomous choice’, Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics xxxviii/4 (2010), pp. 799–806. Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1977).

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‘The eye of power’, in Colin Gordon (ed.), Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), pp. 146–65. Fox, Richard, ‘Someone to watch over us?: back to the Panopticon’, Criminal Justice i/3 (2001), pp. 251–76. Freeland, Cynthia, ‘Realist horror’, in Thomas E. Wartenberg and Angela Curran (eds), The Philosophy of Film: Introductory Text and Readings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 126–42. French, Philip, ‘Review: chilling Spanish practices’, The Observer (14 April 2008), p. 17. Freud, Sigmund, The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock (London: Penguin Books, 2003). Friedberg, Anne, ‘The end of cinema: multimedia and technological change’, in Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams (eds), Reinventing Film Studies (London: Arnold; New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 438–52. Furedi, Frank, Culture of Fear Revisited (London: Continuum, 2007). Gardner, Dan, The Science of Fear (London: Dutton, 2008). Goatmachine, ‘Review: [REC] 3: Genesis’, Metacritic.com (28 October 2012). Available at http://www.metacritic.com/movie/rec-3-genesis/user-reviews?sort-by=mostclicked&num items=100 (accessed 1 October 2013). Graham, Stephen and David Wood, ‘Digitizing surveillance: categorisation, space, inequality’, Critical Social Policy xxiii/2 (2003), pp. 227–48. Grant, Barry Keith, ‘Digital anxiety and the new v´erit´e horror and SF film’, Science Fiction Film and Television vi/ 2 (2013), pp. 153–75. Grønstad, Asbjørn, Screening the Unwatchable: Spaces of Negation in Post-Millennial Art Cinema (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Grossman, Lt. Col Dave, On Killing: the Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (New York: Bay Back Books, 2009). Gunning, Tom, ‘Re-newing old technologies: astonishment, second nature, and the uncanny in technology from the previous turn-of-the-century’, in David Thor and Henry Jenkins (eds), Rethinking Media Change: the Aesthetics of Transition (London and Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003), pp. 39–60. Haggerty, Kevin D., ‘Tear down the walls: on demolishing the Panopticon’, in David Lyon (ed.), Theorising Surveillance: the Panopticon and Beyond (New York: Routledge, 2011), pp. 23–45. Hallam, Julia and Margaret Marshment, Realism and Popular Cinema (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). Hanich, Julian, Cinematic Emotion in Horror Films and Thrillers: the Aesthetic Paradox of Pleasurable Fear (London and New York: Routledge, 2010). Hayles, Katherine, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999). Hewison, Kevin, After the Asian Crisis: Challenges to Globalisation (Lebanon, NH: University of New England Press, 1999). Hill, Matthew Dean, ‘Underground: twenty questions with Fred Vogel – director of August Underground and August Underground’s Mordum’, AtrocitiesCinema.com (October 2005).

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11/05/us-turkey-erdogan-students-idUSBRE9A410N20131105 (accessed 5 November 2013). Tookey, Chris, ‘Antichrist: the man who made this horrible, misogynistic film needs to see a shrink’, Daily Mail (24 July 2009), p. 15. Truffaut, Franc¸ois, Hitchcock (London and New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), pp. 45– 65. Tully-Pointon, Damian, ‘[REC]: the critical DVD round-up’, Metro (12 August 2008), p. 26. Turse, Nick, The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008). Uc¸akan, Mesut, T¨urk Sinemasında I˙deoloji (Istanbul: Sepya Publishing, 2010). van Hoeij, Boyd, ‘Review: [REC]3 Genesis’, Variety (9 March 2012). Available at http://variety.com/2012/film/reviews/rec-3-genesis-1117947218/ (accessed 1 October 2013). Vasquez, Jose N, ‘Seeing green: visual technology, virtual reality, and the experience of war’, in Alisse Waterson (ed.), An Anthropology of War: Views from the Frontline (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2009), pp. 87–105. Virilio, Paul, Desert Screen: War at the Speed of Light, trans. Michael Degener (London: Continuum, 2002). Werth, Robert, ‘I do what I’m told, sort of: reformed subjects, unruly citizens, and parole’, Theoretical Criminology xvi/3 (2012), pp. 329–46. West, Amy, ‘Caught on tape: a legacy of lo-tech reality’, in Geoff King (ed.), The Spectacle of the Real: from Hollywood to Reality TV and Beyond (Portland, OR: Intellect, 2005), pp. 83–92. Wetmore Jr., Kevin J., ‘Technoghosts and culture shocks: sociocultural shifts in American remakes of J-horror’, Post Script xxviii/2 (2009). Available at http://www.free patentsonline.com/article/Post-Script/200723442.html (accessed 3 February 2014). Winichakul, Thongchai, Siam Mapped: a History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994). Winston Dixon, Wheeler (ed.), Film and Television after 9/11 (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004). Wright Mills, C., The Power Elite (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). Zimmerman, Samuel, ‘Jaume Balaguer´o teases horrifying, claustrophobic [REC] 4 in new featurette’, Fangoria.com (19 August 2013). Available at http://www.fangoria.com/ new/jaume-balaguero-teases-horrifying-claustrophobic-rec-4-in-new-featurette (accessed 4 September 2013). Zittrain, Jonathan, The Future of the Internet: and How to Stop It (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008).

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Filmography 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, USA, Dir. Stanley Kubrick, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). 7th Hunt, The (2009, Australia, Dir. Jon Cohen, Vanguard Cinema). 28 Days Later (2002, UK, Dir. Danny Boyle, Twentieth Century Fox). 28 Weeks Later (2007, UK/Spain, Dir. Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, Twentieth Century Fox). 30 Days of Night (2007, USA/New Zealand, Dir. David Slade, Columbia Pictures). 99 Pieces (2007, USA, Dir. Anthony Falcon, Vanguard Cinema). Amateur Porn Star Killer (2006, USA, Dir. Shane Ryan, Alter Ego Cinema). Apartment 143, aka Emergo (2012, Spain, Dir. Carles Llorens, Werc Werk Works). Are You Scared? (2006, USA, Dir. Andy Hurst, Lionsgate). Art of the Devil 2 / Long Khong (2005, Thailand, Dirs. The Ronin Team, Five Star Production). Atomic Submarine, The (1959, USA, Dir. Spencer Gordon Bennett, Allied Artists). (A)Torzija (2003, Serbia, Dir. Stefan Arsenijevi´c, Studio Arkadena). Atrocious (2010, Spain, Dir. Fernando Barreda Luna, Bloody Disgusting). August Underground (2001, USA, Dir. Fred Vogel, Toetag Pictures). August Underground’s Mordum (2003, USA, Dirs. Jerami Cruise, Fred Vogel, Killjoy, Michael Todd Schneider and Cristie Whiles, Toetag Pictures). August Underground’s Penance (2007, USA, Dir. Fred Vogel, Toetag Pictures). Bad Seed, The (1956, USA, Dir. Mervyn LeRoy, Warner Bros.). Bang Rajan (2000, Thailand, Dir. Thanit Jitnukul, Film Bangkok). Battle Royale / Batoru rowaiaru (2000, Japan, Dir. Kinji Fukasaku, Toei Company). Battle Royale 2: The Requiem / Batoru rowaiaru II: Chinkonka (2003, Japan, Dirs. Kenta and Kinji Fukasaku, Toei Company). Bay, The (2012, USA, Dir. Barry Levinson, Lionsgate). Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, The (1953, USA, Dir. Eugene Lourie, Warner Bros.). Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006, USA, Dir. Scott Glosserman, Anchor Bay Entertainment). Behind the Painting / Khang Lang Phap (2001, Thailand, Dir. Cherd Songsri, Sahamongkolfilm Co.).

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Blair Witch Project, The (1999, USA, Dirs. Daniel Myrick and Eduardo S´anchez, Artisan Entertainment). Blob, The (1958, USA, Dir. Irving S. Yeaworth Jr., Paramount Pictures). Brainscan (1994, USA, Dir. John Flynn, Admire Productions). Breathing Room (2008, USA, Dirs. John Suits and Gabriel Cowan, Anchor Bay Entertainment). Bunny Game, The (2010, USA, Dir. Adam Rehmeier, Death Mountain Productions). Cabin in the Woods, The (2012, USA, Dir. Drew Goddard, Lionsgate). Cannibal Holocaust (1980, Italy, Dir. Ruggero Deodato, Grindhouse Releasing). Captivity (2007, USA/Russia, Dir. Roland Joff´e, After Dark Films). Casualties of War (1989, USA, Dir. Brian De Palma, Columbia). Chronicle (2012, USA, Dir. Josh Trank, Twentieth Century Fox). Cloverfield (2008, USA, Dir. Matt Reeves, Paramount Pictures). Coffin (2011, USA, Dirs. Kipp Tribble, Derik Wingo, Artist View Entertainment). Colossus – The Forbin Project (1970, USA, Dir. Joseph Sargent, Universal Pictures). Collateral Damage (2002, USA, Dir. Andrew Davis, Warner Bros.). ¨ D@bbe (2006, Turkey, Dir. Hasan Karacada˘g, Ozen Film). ¨ D@bbe 2 (2009, Turkey, Dir. Hasan Karacada˘g, Ozen Film). D@bbe: A Djinn Case / D@bbe: Bir Cin Vakası (2012, Turkey, Dir. Hasan Karacada˘g, As Sanat). D@bbe: Possession / D@bbe: Cin C ¸ arpması (2013, Turkey, Dir. Hasan Karacada˘g, As Sanat). Daeng Birley and the Young Gangsters / 2499 Antapan Krong Muang (1997, Thailand, Dir. Nonzee Nimibutr, Tai Entertainment). Day the Earth Stood Still, The (1951, USA, Dir. Robert Wise, Twentieth Century Fox). Death Factory: Bloodletting (2008, USA, Dir. Sean Tretta, Maxim Media International). Death Scenes (1989, USA, Dir. Nick Bougas, Wavelength Productions). Death Tube: Broadcast Murder Show / Satsujin Dousa Site (2010, Japan, Dir. Yohei Fukuda, Cinema Epoch). Death of a Ghost Hunter (2007, USA, Dir. Sean Tretta, Fremantle Home Entertainment). Demon Seed (1977, USA, Dir. Donald Cammell, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Descent, The (2005, UK, Dir. Neil Marshall, Path´e). Descent II, The (2009, UK, Dir. Jon Harris, Path´e). Devil Inside, The (2012, USA, Dir. William Brent Bell, Paramount Pictures). Devil’s Backbone, The / El espinazo del diablo (2001, Mexico/Spain, Dir. Guillermo del Toro, Sony Pictures). Devil’s Due (2014, USA, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, Twentieth Century Fox). Diary of the Dead (2007, USA, George A. Romero, The Weinstein Company). Dracula (1931, USA, Dir. Tod Browning, Universal Pictures). Dr. Strangelove (1964, USA, Dir. Stanley Kubrick, Columbia Pictures). El-Cin (2013, Turkey, Dir. Hasan Karacada˘g, As Sanat). Elysium (2013, USA, Dir. Neill Blomcamp, Sony Pictures). Entity (2012, UK, Dir. Steven Stone, Brainstorm Media). Evidence (2012, USA, Dir. Howie Askins, Osiris Entertainment and Showbox).

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FILMOGRAPHY

Evidence (2013, USA, Dir. Olatunde Osumsanmi, Image Entertainment). Evil Dead, The (1981, USA, Dir. Sam Raimi, New Line Cinema). Evil Things (2009, USA, Dir. Dominic Perez, Earth Gate). Exhibit A (2007, UK, Dir. Dom Rotheroe, Cornerstone Media International). Exorcism of Emily Rose, The (2005, USA, Dir. Scott Derrickson, Screen Gems). Exorcist, The (1973, USA, Dir. William Friedkin, Warner Bros.). Faces of Death (1978, USA, Dir. John Allan Schwartz, F.O.D Productions). Fail Safe (1964, USA, Dir. Sidney Lumet, Columbia Pictures). FeardotCom (2002, USA, Dir. William Malone, Warner, Bros.). First Man into Space (1959, USA, Dir. Robert Day, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Fourth Kind, The (2009, USA, Dir. Olatunde Osunsanmi, Universal Pictures). Friday the 13th (1980, USA, Dir. Sean S. Cunningham, Paramount Pictures). Frontier(s) (2007, France/Switzerland, Dir. Xavier Gens, EuropaCorp. Distribution). Ghost Game / La-Tha-Pii (2006, Thailand, Dir. Sarawut Wichiensarn, NGR). Ghost in the Machine (1993, USA, Dir. Rachel Talalay, Twentieth Century Fox). Ghostwatch (1992, UK, Dir. Stephen Volk, TV, BBC). G.I. Jes´us (2006, USA, Dir. Carl Colpaert, Westlake Entertainment). Grave Encounters (2011, Canada, Dirs. The Vicious Brothers, Tribeca Film Festival). Grave Encounters 2 (2012, Canada/USA, Dir. John Poliquin, Tribeca Film Festival). ˇ Grbavica (2006, Serbia, Dir. Jasmila Zbani´ c, Coop99). Halloween (1978, USA, Dir. John Carpenter, Compass International Pictures). Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986, USA, Dir. John McNaughton, Maljack Productions). Home Movie (2008, USA, Dir. Christopher Denham, IFC Films). Honeymoons / Medeni mesec (2009, Serbia, Dir. Goran Paskaljevi´c, Nova Film). Hostel (2005, USA, Dir. Eli Roth, Lionsgate). House with 100 Eyes (2011, USA, Dirs. Jay Lee and Jim Roof, Scream HQ). Hunger (2009, USA, Dir. Steven Hentges, Imagination Worldwide). Hunger Games, The (2012, USA, Dir. Gary Ross, Lionsgate). I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958, USA, Dir. Gene Fowler Jr., Paramount Pictures). Independence Day (1996, USA, Dir. Roland Emmerich, Twentieth Century Fox). In Memorium (2005, USA, Dir. Amanda Gusack, Indieflix). Invaders from Mars (1953, USA, Dir. William Cameron Menzies, Twentieth Century Fox). Invitation Only / Jue ming pai dui (2009, Taiwan, Dir. Kevin Ko, G2 Pictures). Island, The (2005, USA, Dir. Michael Bay, DreamWorks and Warner Bros.). Island: Wedding of the Zombies / Ada: Zombilerin D¨ug˘u¨ n¨u (2010, Turkey, Dirs. Talip Ert¨urk and Murat Emir Eren, Beyin Film). I Spit on Your Grave (1978, USA, Dir. Meir Zarchi, Cinemagic Pictures). I Spit on Your Grave (2010, USA, Dir. Steven R. Monroe, Anchor Bay Entertainment). I Was a Teenage Frankenstein (1957, USA, Dir. Herbert L. Strock, American International Pictures). It Came from Outer Space (1953, USA, Dir. Jack Arnold, Universal International). Jan Dara (2001, Thailand, Dir. Nonzee Nimibutr, Tai Entertainment).

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Kairo (2005, Japan, Dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Toho Company). Karadedeler Case, The / Karadedeler Olay´ı (2011, Turkey, Dirs. Erdo˘gan Ba˘gbakan and Erkan Ba˘gbakan, Tiglon). Last Broadcast, The (1998, USA, Dirs. Lance Weiler and Stefan Avalos, Ventura Distribution). Last Exorcism, The (2010, USA, Dir. Daniel Stamm, Lionsgate). Last House on the Left, The (2009, USA, Dir. Dennis Iliadis, Rogue Pictures). Last House on the Left, The (1972, USA, Dir. Wes Craven, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Lawnmower Man, The (1992, USA, Dir. Brett Leonard, New Line Cinema). Legend of Suriyothai, The / Suriyothai (2001, Thailand, Dir. Chatrichalerm Yukol, Sony Pictures). Life and Death of a Porno Gang, The / Zivot i smrt porno bande (2009, Serbia, Dir. Mladen ˇ Djordjevi´c, Baˇs Celik). Lions for Lambs (2007, USA, Dir. Robert Redford, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Ljubav i drugi zloˇcini (2008, Serbia, Dir. Stefan Arsenijevi´c, Icon Film). Look (2007, USA, Dir. Adam Rifkin, Captured Films). Lucky Loser / Mak Tae (2006, Thailand, Dir. Adisorn Tresirikasem, GMM Thai Hub). Lunopolis (2009, USA, Dir. Matthew Avant, Virgin Films and Entertainment). Made in Serbia (2005, Serbia, Dir. Mladen Djordjevi´c, Arhitel). Man Bites Dog / C’est arriv´e pr`es de chez vous (1992, Belgium, Dirs. R´emy Belvaux, Andr´e Bonzel and Benoˆıt Poelvoorde, Metro Tartan Films). Maniac (1980, USA, Dir. William Lustig, Magnum Motion Pictures Inc.). Maniac (2012, France/USA, Dir. Franck Khalfoun, La Petite Reine). Meadowoods (2010, USA, Dir. Scott Phillips, Cut Entertainment Group). Megan Is Missing (2011, USA, Dir. Michael Goi, Anchor Bay). Metropolis (1927, Germany, Dir. Fritz Lang, UFA). Midwinter Night’s Dream / San zimske no´ci (2004, Serbia, Dir. Goran Paskaljevi´c, Nova Film). Mondo Cane (1962, Italy, Dirs. Paolo Cavara, Gualtiero Jacopett and Franco Prosperi, Cinerix). Monsters Are Due on Maple Street, The (1960, USA, Dir. Ronald Winston, TV, ABC). My Girl / Fan Chan (2003, Thailand, Dirs. Vitcha Gojiew et al., Tai Entertainment). My Little Eye (2002, UK, Dir. Marc Evans, Universal Pictures). Nang Nak (1999, Thailand, Dir. Nonzee Nimibutr, Tai Entertainment). Nightmare on Elm Street, A (1984, USA, Dir. Wes Craven, New Line Cinema). Nosferatu / Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922, Germany, Dir. F. W. Murnau, Films Arts Guild). Ocaso (2011, Spain, Dir. Lu´ıs Cerezo, Cerezo Films). Occupation: Dreamland (2006, USA, Dirs. Garrett Scott and Ian Olds, Rumur Releasing). On the Beach (1959, USA, Dir. Stanley Kramer, United Artists). Ordinary People (2009, France/Serbia, Dir. Vladimir Periˇsi´c, TS Productions). Overture, The / Hom Rong (2004, Thailand, Dir. Ittisoontorn Vichailak, Sahamongkol Film International). Panic Button (2011, UK, Dir. Chris Crow, Phase 4 Films).

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10:57

FILMOGRAPHY

Pan’s Labyrinth / El laberinto del fauno (2006, Mexico/Spain, Dir. Guillermo del Toro, Warner Bros.). Paranormal Activity (2007, USA, Dir. Oren Peli, Paramount Pictures). Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension (2015, USA, Dir. Gregory Plotkin, Paramount Pictures). Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones (2014, USA, Dir. Christopher B. Landon, Paramount Pictures). Paranormal Activity 2 (2010, USA, Dir. Tod Williams, Paramount Pictures). Paranormal Activity 3 (2011, USA, Dirs. Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, Paramount Pictures). Paranormal Activity 4 (2012, USA, Dirs. Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, Paramount Pictures). Paranormal I˙stanbul (2011, Turkey, Dir. Kemal Topaz, Kemal Topuz). Paranormal Xperience 3D (2011, Spain, Dir. Sergi Vizcaino, Sony Pictures). Penance (2009, USA, Dir. Jake Kennedy, Monster Pictures). Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959, USA, Dir. Edward Wood Jr., Reynolds Pictures). Pleasantville (1998, USA, Dir. Gray Ross, New Line). Poltergeist (1982, USA, Dir. Tobe Hooper, MGM/UA Entertainment Company). Pretty Village, Pretty Flame / Lepa Sela Lepo Gore (1996, Serbia, Dir. Srdjan Dragojevi´c, Cobra Films and RTS). Psycho (1960, USA, Dir. Alfred Hitchcock, Paramount Pictures). Pulse (2006, USA, Dir. Jim Sonzero, The Weinstein Company). Quarantine (2008, USA, Dir. John Erick Dowdle, Screen Gems). Quarantine 2: Terminal (2011, USA, Dir. John Pogue, Sony Pictures). [ rREC] (2007, Spain, Dirs. Jaume Balaguer´o and Paco Plaza, Filmax International). [ rREC]2 (2009, Spain, Dirs. Jaume Balaguer´o and Paco Plaza, Filmax International). [ rREC]3 : Genesis / [ rREC]3 : G´enesis (2012, Spain, Dir. Paco Plaza, Filmax International). [ rREC]4 : Apocalypse / [ rREC]4 : Apocalipsis (2014, Spain, Dir. Jaume Balaguer´o, Filmax International). Redacted (2007, USA, Dir. Brian De Palma, HDNet). Reel Evil (2012, USA, Dir. Danny Draven, Full Moon Entertainment). Rendition (2007, USA, Gavin Hood, New Line Cinema). Ring, The (2002, USA, Dir. Gore Verbinski, DreamWorks). Ringu (1998, Japan, Dir. Hideo Nakata, DreamWorks). Running Man, The (1987, USA, Dir. Paul Michael Glaser, TriStar Pictures). Saw (2004, USA/Australia, Dir. James Wan, Lionsgate). Saw II (2005, USA/Canada, Dir. Darren Lynn Bousman, Lionsgate). Saw III (2006, USA/Canada, Dir. Darren Lynn Bousman, Lionsgate). Schindler’s List (1993, USA, Dir. Steven Spielberg, Universal Pictures). Scream (1996, USA, Dir. Wes Craven, Dimension Films). Semum (2008, Turkey, Dir. Mubariz Hajimudarov, J-Plan). Senseless (2008, UK, Dir. Simon Hynd, Shoreline Entertainment). Serbian Film, A / Srpski Film (2010, Serbia, Dir. Srdjan Spasojevi´c, Kontra film).

175

DIGITAL HORROR

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176

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10:57

Series 7: The Contenders (2001, USA, Dir. Daniel Minahan, USA Films). Sesi´on 1.16 (2012, Spain, Dir. Hern´an Cabo, Cats Films Entertainment). Session 9 (2001, USA, Dir. Brad Anderson, USA Films). ˇ Sheitan’s Warrior / Sejtanov ratnik (2006, Serbia, Dir. Stevan Filipovi´c, Hypnopolis). Shoah (1985, Germany, Dir. Claude Lanzmann, Historia / Les Films Aleph / Minist`ere de la Culture de la Republique Franc¸aise). Shocker (1989, USA, Dir. Wes Craven, Universal Pictures). Silence of the Lambs, The (1991, USA, Dir. Jonathan Demme, Orion Pictures). Silent House, The / La casa muda (2010, Uruguay, Dir. Gustavo Hern´andez, Optimum Releasing). Stone Tape, The (1972, UK, Dir. Peter Sasdy, TV, BBC). Tarantula (1955, USA, Dir. Jack Arnold, Universal International). Teenagers from Outer Space (1959, USA, Dir. Tom Graeff, Warner Bros.). Them! (1954, USA, Dir. Gordon Douglas, Warner Bros.). Tingler, The (1959, USA, Dir. William Castle, Columbia Pictures). Torture Room (2007, USA, Dir. Eric Forsberg, Cerebral Experiment). Troll Hunter (2010, Norway, Dir. Andr´e Øvredal, Magnolia Home Entertainment). Tron (1982, USA, Dir. Steven Lisberger, Disney Pictures). T. T. Syndrome / T. T. sindrom (2002, Serbia, Dir. Dejan Zeˇcevi´c, Revision). Tunnel, The (2011, Australia, Dir. Carlo Ledesma, Distracted Media). Underground (1995, Serbia, Dir. Emir Kusturica, Komuna and RTS). Unseen, The / G¨or¨unmeyenler (2012, Turkey, Dir. Meliks¸ah Altuntas¸, Pinema Film). Untraceable (2008, USA, Dir. Gregory Hoblit, Universal International). Vacancy 2: The First Cut (2008, USA, Dir. Eric Bross, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment). Videodrome (1983, USA, Dir. David Cronenberg, Universal Pictures). Virtuosity (1995, USA, Dir. Brett Leonard, Paramount Pictures). War Games (1983, USA, Dir. John Badham, United Artists). War Tapes, The (2006, USA, Dir. Deborah Scranton, SenArt Films). Wolf Creek (2005, Australia, Dir. Greg Mclean, Optimum Releasing). World of the Dead: The Zombie Diaries 2 (2011, UK, Dirs. Michael Bartlett and Kevin Gates, Metrodome Distribution). Wounds, The / Rane (1998, Serbia, Dir. Srdjan Dragojevi´c, Cobra Films and RTS). Young and Healthy as a Rose / Mlad i zdrav kao ruˇza (1971, Serbia, Dir. Joca Jovanovi´c, Dunav Film). Zero Dark Thirty (2013, USA, Dir. Kathryn Bigelow, Sony Pictures). Zero Day (2003, USA, Dir. Ben Coccio, Avatar Films). Zombie Diaries, The (2006, UK, Dirs. Michael Bartlett and Kevin Gates, Revolver Entertainment). ˇ Zona Zamfirova (2002, Serbia, Dir. Zdravko Sotra, Dream Company). Zone of the Dead / Zona Mrtvih (2009, Serbia, Dirs. Milan Todorovi´c and Milan Konjevi´c, Talking Wolf Productions and Viktorija Film).

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Index [ rREC], 3, 10, 126, 127, 149–57 [ rREC]2 , 126, 127, 155, 157, 159 n32 [ rREC]3 : Genesis, 10, 156, 157, 160 n31, 160 n32, 160 n33, 160 n34, 160 n35 [ rREC]4 : Apocalypse, 157 7th Hunt, The, 37 9/11, 5, 9, 10, 56, 57, 98, 103, 111–3, 116 30 Days of night, 123 28 Days Later, 3 28 Weeks Later, 10, 124–30, 130–2 99 Pieces, 32 abject body, 23 abjection, 20, 140, 151 Abu Ghraib, 40 n14, 119 n11, 130, 133, 134, 136 n17 affect, 3, 10, 17, 23, 44, 98, 101, 110, 149–57 Agamben, Giorgio, 130, 136 n16 Al-Qaeda, 19, 115, 134 n1 Amateur Porn Star Killer, 138 Anderson, Benedict, 107, 108, 109, 115, 119 n1 Apartment 143, 7, 42–52 Are You Scared?, 33, 36 Art of the Devil 2, 71 Atomic Submarine, The, 20 atrocity, 72–5, 77, 92, 111 August Underground, 10, 138–47

August Underground’s Mordum, 138, 139, 144 August Underground’s Penance, 138, 139, 145 Bad Seed, The, 96 Bang Rajan, 71 Battle Royale, 73 Battle Royale 2: The Requiem, 76 Bay, The, 126 Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, The, 126 Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon, 4 Black Mirror, 55 Blair Witch Project, The, 3, 62, 97, 101, 116, 126, 127, 150 Blob, The, 24–6 Brainscan, 18, 24 Breathing Room, 31 Bunny Game, The, 138 Cabin in the Woods, The, 7, 25–6 Cannibal Holocaust, 152 capitalism, neoliberal, 2, 4–7, 10, 70, 71, 134 Captivity, 29 Caruth, Cathy, 70, 78 Casualties of War, 113 CCTV, 1–8, 13 n12, 29, 30–3, 36–7, 39, 48, 104, 126

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Chronicle, 4 Cloverfield, 3, 111, 116, 127, 150, 152, 155 Coffin, 31 Cold War, 7, 20, 21, 26, 132, 133 Collateral Damage, 113 Colossus: The Forbin Project, 23

Evidence (2013), 127 Evil Dead, The, 156 Evil Things, 4, 126 Exhibit A, 126 Exorcism of Emily Rose, The, 150 Exorcist, The, 96

D@bbe 2, 96, 100 D@bbe, 8, 96 D@bbe: A Djinn Case, 9, 96, 98 D@bbe: Possession, 96, 97, 100 Day the Earth Stood Still, The, 20 Death Factory: Bloodletting, 32 Death of a Ghost Hunter, 126 Death Scenes, 142 Death Tube: Broadcast Murder Show, 34 Demon Seed, 23 Descent, The, 126 Descent II, The, 126 Devil Inside, The, 150 Devil’s Backbone, The, 151 Devil’s Due, 149 Diary of the Dead, 6, 9, 113–4, 116–7, 151, 155 digital horror, 2–11, 17, 20, 23, 25, 26, 30, 52, 64, 70, 73, 97, 103, 107, 116, 118, 119, 151 digital identity, 11, 100, 107, 108 djinn, 95–104 documentary style, 3, 4, 8, 9, 72, 80, 82, 84, 87, 89, 90, 92, 96, 97, 100, 101, 110, 114, 125, 141, 142, 150, 152 Dr. Strangelove, 22–3 Dracula (1931), 96

Faces of Death, 142 Fail Safe, 22–3 fear as affect, 22, 151, 153, 157 of contemporary world, 3, 64, 124, 131, 137 culture, 7, 30, 37–9, 55 of Islam, 9, 96, 104 of surveillance, 7, 38, 99 of terrorism, 151, 153, 157 FeardotCom, 6 First Man into Space, 21 Foucault, Michel, 7, 30–1, 36, 130 found footage, 3, 4, 9, 10, 11, 42, 45–6, 52, 62–3, 80, 85, 87, 96–7, 100, 103, 107, 114, 116, 123–4, 126–8, 130, 132, 134 n4, 135 n3, 135 n10, 149–57 Fourth Kind, The, 4 frame cinematic, 4, 10, 75, 123–35, 135 n10, 155 narrative, 57, 61–3, 114–30, 151, 157, 159 n15 Freud, Sigmund, 21, 24, 27 n1, 69, 78, 129 Friday the 13th , 4 Frontier(s), 29

El-Cin, 96 Elysium, 136 n19 embodiment cinematic, 42, 43, 44 human, 45, 46, 49, 50 non-human, 45, 48, 110 Entity, 10, 126, 133 Evidence (2012), 127

178

11:13

G.I. Jes´us, 10, 128 Ghost Game, 8, 70–8 Ghost in the Machine, 24 ghosts, 47–50, 54–64, 74–5, 98–9 Ghostwatch, 54, 152 Grave Encounters, 4, 126, 157 Grave Encounters 2, 126 Grbavica, 87 Gulf War (first), 124, 125, 129

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I Married a Monster from Outer Space, 20, 23 I Spit on Your Grave (1978), 29 I Spit on Your Grave (2010), 137 I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, 24 identity, 3, 5, 7, 8, 100, 107 In Memorium, 8, 55–7, 61–4 Independence Day, 111 internet, 1, 6, 8, 9, 13 n12, 24, 54–64, 97–8, 100, 104, 111, 114–6, 119 n5, 128, 151 Invaders from Mars, 20 Invitation Only, 29 Iraq War, 3, 5, 113, 115, 123–6, 128–31, 134, 136 n15 Islam, 9, 95–104 Island: Wedding of the Zombies, 96 It Came from Outer Space, 20, 23 Jan Dara, 79 n7 Jones, Steve, 12 n7, 40 n1, 40 n12, 46, 138, 147 n6 Kairo, 55, 56, 97, 98, 100 Karadedeler Case, The, 8, 96, 97, 100 Last Broadcast, The, 152 Last Exorcism, The, 5, 150 Last House on the Left, The (2009), 137 Lawnmower Man, The, 24 Legend of Suriyothai, The, 71

Life and Death of a Porno Gang, The, 8–9, 80–92 Lions for Lambs, 125 Look, 5 Lucky Loser, 71 Lunopolis, 4

INDEX

hand-held cinematography, 2–6, 31, 45, 72, 74, 80–92, 100–101, 107, 109, 110, 126, 150, 157 haunting, 1, 3, 8, 43, 45, 50, 54–64, 133 Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, 141–2 Home Movie, 4 horror, hardcore, 10, 92, 138, 144, 147 n6 Hostel, 138 House with 100 Eyes, 5, 31 Hunger, 32, 34, 37 Hunger Games, The, 76

11:13

Made in Serbia, 89 Man Bites Dog, 6 Maniac (2012), 137 Meadowoods, 31 Megan Is Missing, 150 Metropolis, 19 military, 9, 20–6, 27 n3, 27 n4, 60, 123–35, 136 n15, 155 military industrial complex, 7, 9, 23–6, 27 n4, 27 n9 Mondo Cane, 142 mondo movies, 142, 148 n19 ‘Monsters Are Due on Maple Street, The,’ 21 musical score, 83, 85, 114, 156 My Little Eye, 5, 6 Nang Nak, 79 n7 national identity, 1, 9, 70, 82, 107 (see also postnationhood) Cambodia, 70–8 Serbia, 8–9, 80–92 Thailand, 8, 70–8 Turkey, 9, 95–104 network digital, 1–2 and society, 108 and subjectivity, 8, 17–26, 50–1 New Balkan Cinema, 81, 82 night vision, 4, 10, 75, 123–35, 135 n10, 155 Nightmare on Elm Street, 23, 149 Occupation: Dreamland, 125 off-screen space, 114, 153 On the Beach, 27 n8

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Ordinary People, 82 Pan’s Labyrinth, 150 Panic Button, 34, 36 Panopticon, 7, 29–39, 40 n2, 40 n7, 46, 74, 124 Paranormal Activity franchise, 3, 4, 54, 62, 96, 126, 149, 150, 152, 157 Penance, 29 Plan 9 from Outer Space, 20 Poltergeist, 23, 54 pornography, 62, 80, 83–92, 138 post-nationhood, 9, 108–10, 112–5, 117–9 Pretty Village, Pretty Flame, 81 Psycho, 96 Pulse, 8, 55–60, 63–4

11:13

T. T. Syndrome, 88 Tarantula, 20 television, 17–9, 24, 54, 57, 70–8, 82, 98–9, 112–3, 115, 124, 125, 132 Them!, 20, 26 Tingler, The, 24, 25 torture, 7, 10, 19, 72–5, 77, 84, 124, 133–4, 136 n19 torture porn, 29–39, 87, 90, 137–47, 147 n4 trauma, memory, 5, 77, 85, 118, 127, 128 trauma, witnessing, 69–78 Troll Hunter, 4, 126, 127 Tron, 23 Tunnel, The, 4, 150 Untraceable, 36

realism, 9, 10, 49, 137–47, 150–5, 159 n16 cinema v´erit´e, 89–90, 153 Redacted, 9, 113, 114–5, 125 Reel Evil, 152 Ring, The, 17, 18, 54, 57, 63 Ringu, 17, 54, 56, 57, 63 Running Man, 76, 78 Saw, 31, 137, 138, 149 Scream, 146 Senseless, 34, 36 Serbian Film, A, 8, 80–92 Series 7: The Contenders, 78 Session 9, 133 Sheitan’s Warrior, 88 Shocker, 24 Silence of the Lambs, The, 126, 146 Silent House, The, 157 Stone Tape, The, 54 surveillance society, 1–7, 11 n1, 11 n13, 29–39, 40 n2, 40 n14, 42–51, 70, 76, 99, 104

180

VHS, 57, 83, 89, 100, 143 video games, 26, 111, 136 n15 Videodrome, 18 Virtuosity, 24 virus, computer, 6, 58, 60 War Games, 23 war on terror, 3, 40 n14, 113, 120 n16, 123–4, 134 Wetmore Jr., Kevin J., 56–7 Wolf Creek, 29 World of the Dead: The Zombie Diaries 2, 10, 126, 130, 131–2 YouTube, 9, 58, 77, 87, 104, 109, 112, 114–6, 118, 151, 153 Zero Dark Thirty, 126 Zero Day, 4 Zombie Diaries, The, 10, 126, 132 Zona Zamfirova, 83 Zone of the Dead, 88