Now more than ever, we’ve been living in a horror film, as the isolation of seven plus months of lockdown has forced us into a reality mediated almost entirely by screens. For those of us working remotely, days are spent on computers and in video meetings. We socialize through phones and laptops too: Zoom birthday parties, FaceTime calls with friends, and confessional Instagram stories. Every person I interact with is as far away or near as every other. They’re all talking heads inside the same digital squares, as known to me as actors on TV.
It’s strange to live through a time of so much illness and death when daily experience has become so nonphysical. The virus, of course, isn’t virtual at all. Unlike the supernatural transmissions in tech horror films, where a haunting is passed from one form of cursed media to another, Covid-19 spreads through bodily proximity. So, we aren’t living in a tech horror film exactly, but our dependence on digital technologies sets us up to appreciate the genre anew.
