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

by Xavier Aldana Reyes (Editor), Linnie Blake (Editor)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780857729750
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	10/13/2015
Series:	International Library of the Moving Image
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	200
File size:	493 KB

About the Author

Xavier Aldana Reyes is Research Fellow at Manchester Metropolitan University. Linnie Blake is Director of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies, University of Manchester.
Xavier Aldana Reyes is Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Film at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. He is the author of Spanish Gothic (2017), Horror Film and Affect (2016)and Body Gothic (2014), and the editor of Horror: A Literary History (2016).

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION 

1.    Linnie Blake and Xavier Aldana Reyes, 'Horror in the Digital Age' 


SECTION 1. HAUNTED TECHNOLOGIES AND NETWORK PANIC 

1. Steffen Hantke, 'Network Anxiety: Prefiguring Digital Anxieties in the American Horror Film' 
2. Steve Jones, 'Torture Pornopticon: (In)security Cameras, Self-Governance and Autonomy' 

3. Steen Christiansen, 'Uncanny Cameras and Network Subjects' 
4. Neal Kirk, 'Networked Spectrality: In Memorium, Pulse and Beyond' 

SECTION 2. DIGITAL HORROR AND THE POST/NATIONAL 

5. Linnie Blake and Mary Ainslie, 'Digital Witnessing and Trauma Testimony in Ghost Game: Cambodian Genocide, Digital Horror and the Nationalism of New Thai Cinema' 
6. Dejan Ognjanovi?, '“Welcome to the Reality Studio": Serbian Hand-Held Horrors' 
7. Zeynep Sahinturk, 'Djinn in the Machine: Technology and Islam in Turkish Horror Film' 
8. Mark Freeman, 'An Uploadable Cinema: Digital Horror and the Postnational Image' 

SECTION 3. DIGITAL STYLISTICS 

9. Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet, 'The Politics and Poetics of Night Vision' 
10. James Aston, 'Nightmares outside the mainstream: August Underground and reel/real horror' 
11. Xavier Aldana Reyes, 'The [•REC] Quartet: Affective Possibilities and Stylistic Limitations of Found Footage Horror'

Editorial Reviews

This excellent and cohesive volume makes a timely and much needed intervention into the field of Gothic studies. By combining political awareness with a close attention to the cinematic history and language of the found footage film, this collection manages to articulate the significance of what is all too often a critical maligned form. Thanks to the skillful editing from Blake and Aldana Reyes, the cohesion of the whole collection is assured and the critical exploration of the form deeply compelling.” —Gothic Studies

From the Publisher