Digital Horror: Haunted Technologies, Network Panic and the Found Footage Phenomenon

by Linnie Blake, Xavier Aldana Reyes

In recent years, the ways in which digital technologies have come to shape our experience of the world has been an immensely popular subject in the horror film genre. Contemporary horror cinema reflects and exploits the anxieties of our age in its increasing use of hand-held techniques and in its motifs of surveillance, found footage (fictional films that appear 'real': comprising discovered video recordings left behind by victims/protagonists) and 'digital haunting' (when ghosts inhabit digital technologies). This book offers an exploration of the digital horror film phenomenon, across different national cultures and historic periods, examining the sub-genres of CCTV horror, technological haunting, snuff films, found footage and torture porn. Digital horror, it demonstrates, is a product of the post 9/11 neo-liberal world view - characterised by security paranoia, constant surveillance and social alienation. Digital horror screens its subjects via the transnational technologies of our age, such as the camcorder and CCTV, and records them in secret footage that may, one day, be found.

Genres: Nonfiction, Technology, Horror

327 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 18, 2015

Reviews

[Myan]

Favourites:
- Network Anxiety: Prefiguring Digital Anxieties in the American Horror Film by Steffen Hantke
- Networked Spectrality: In Memorium, Pulse and Beyond by Neal Kirk
- Digital Witnessing and Trauma Testimony in Ghost Game: Cambodian Genocide, Digital Horror and the Nationalism of New Thai Cinema by Linnie Blake and Mary Ainslie
- An Uploadable Cinema: Digital Horror and the Postnational Image by Mark Freeman
- The [•REC] Films: Affective Possibilities and Stylistic Limitations of Found Footage Horror by Xavier Aldana Reyes

[A.K. McCarthy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic collection that brings an international perspective to depictions of digital technology in horror fiction. If you’re a fan of found fiction horror and you want to think deeply about why these films are so effective, I highly recommend this. Mark Freeman’s piece “An Uploadable Cinema” is particularly thought-provoking about how we experience news events along with online communities that extend beyond our borders and how the YouTube/amateur aesthetic bleeds into fictional storytelling as well.