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.
As always in a time of fear, horror films have been a comfort to me. I watch them as a way to think through my own pain, or perhaps to simply distract myself by watching situations that are worse than my own.
Long before 2020 hit, tech horror films expressed their anxieties in very literal ways. Like, the TV will actually suck your children into it and trap them in a netherworld (Poltergeist). Or the ubiquity of cell phones allows something malevolent to spread through calls and texts (One Missed Call). Or the photograph, with its alarming capture of the past, allows us to see ghosts who would be otherwise invisible (Shutter).
My favorite book about haunted technology, which has informed my thinking about tech horror, is Jeffrey Sconce’s Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Duke University Press, 2000). Sconce describes cultural responses to new communication technologies, from 1840s telegraphs to 1990s cyberspace. He argues that the liveness, simultaneity, and invisibility of electronic media provoke human anxieties and hopes, which often deal with spiritual matters. When people discover a new way to communicate through electronic transmissions, we tend to believe that we can finally reach the “other side.” In tech horror plots, this other side is usually a hellish afterlife.
While in the real world, new technologies can bring optimistic responses — the dream that we can extend our intelligence, escape our vulnerable bodies, and live in harmony and peace — in tech horror, there are only paranoid reactions. Some films and TV series in this genre, such as Black Mirror (2011 – ) offer straight-forward, moralistic warnings about the tech we use. These are less interesting to me. I’m more fascinated by tech horror films that tell of the dangers of a technology while employing that technology and reflecting on it. For example, certain horror movies question the truth status of film itself through the use of found footage. The amateur video that a character shoots of a paranormal event, or the sinister tapes they discover in the attic, present a believable fiction within the larger fantasy. Although viewers know that film can be manipulated and even wholly fabricated through digital techniques, we retain the old sense that film footage, like photography, captures the real. When the victims in The Ring watch the ghost’s videotape and are cursed to die, viewers become aware that we, too, are spectators — and doomed.
This is a good trick. It’s a contemporary version of something that occurred centuries ago, in ghost stories and gothic novels that employed nested narration and literary evidence. In many late nineteenth-century ghost stories, including The Turn of the Screw (1898), the story of a haunting comes to readers through a chain of eye witness accounts. One character tells the tale aloud to a roomful of others, but says it was passed to him through an acquaintance, who herself read it in a deceased person’s diary. Paradoxically, the more distance we’re given from the actual ghost story, the more that story begins to seem like a credible legend, and the more our fear increases. Textual evidence is also brought in to support the veracity of this fiction. In the very pages of the book, the reader is shown excerpts of deeds, wills, letters, and telegrams. In our era, tech horror films often use filmic, photographic, and auditory evidence to the same ends.
Most recently, a new variation on tech horror has emerged, which some have called “desktop horror,” “laptop horror,” or “video chat” movies. These films put viewers in the computer screen itself, offering the limited perspective of a pair of eyes staring at a laptop. We experience the film’s entire story through a shifting array of windows — Facebook, Skype, Zoom, iMessage, and of course, the desktop background with its array of folders. The close-up in these films, if you want to call it that, comes when a window opens and expands, and the character on the other side of the web cam leans in. Because a computer is not a singular window into another world, like a movie theatre screen, it has hidden depths and shifting agencies. Our real-world experience of using a computer is interactive and exploratory. We feel we’re in control of what emerges. In laptop horror films, however, we watch helplessly as apps open, emails are typed, and the plot unfurls.
The best of these films go beyond using the screen as a mise-en-scène gimmick, to explore the specific weirdness of digital experience. The two Unfriended films and the recent Host both do this, and use things like lag time and digital glitches to heighten scares. This subgenre seeks to reveal what lurks behind the smooth, non-human surfaces we’ve come to trust.
In re-watching the following films in recent weeks, I was struck by how, while these movies are “about” haunted technologies, they are more significantly “about” trauma and death. These are still ghost stories. A ghost manipulates a TV screen or smart phone not because she wants to launch some argument about that medium, but because this is how she can reach the living. Along the same lines, it seems that old-fashioned evil has continued in the new media age. Demons haven’t disappeared in 2020 — they’re just more likely to find us on Facebook than in the local graveyard. No matter what utopian dreams tech futurists might hold about our AI-enhanced, incorporeal, extended selves, tech horror reminds us that we cannot escape trauma, illness, and death. In other words, there is no getting out of this.
TOP 8 TECH HORROR FILMS
The Ring – Gore Verbinski, 2002
In my favorite tech horror film, a cursed black-and-white VHS brings death in seven days to anyone who watches it, and a journalist sets out to discover the tape’s origins. I prefer the American remake, though Hideo Nakata’s original Ringu (1998) is also excellent. There’s a lot of interesting material here about old versus new media, recording technologies, and film’s ability to capture a real impression of the past. It’s also a suspenseful, layered ghost story. I find it funny that the evil VHS, which we get to watch several times, looks like a pretty typical student art film.
Related: Dawn Keetley’s “The Meme Revolution in Gore Verbinski’s The Ring.”
Unfriended – Leo Gabriadze, 2014
Unfriended is a laptop horror movie that tells the story of a group of teens who are terrorized by the ghost of a former classmate. This happens entirely through video chat and social media, which makes sense, because the ghost’s death was due to cyberbullying. The sequel, Unfriended: Dark Web (Stephen Susco, 2018) continues in this vein, but moves from the closed world of personal email and social media to the more mysterious cyberspace of criminal activity. I think the Unfriended films are still the best examples of this subgenre.
Related: Horror Homeroom’s reviews of Unfriended, here and here. We were divided on this one.
The Others – Alejandro Amenábar, 2001
The Others might be my favorite ghost film of all time, and the technology it deals with is photography. In the story, one of the characters discovers a stash of memento mori photographs of corpses, which are treated as evidence of a series of deaths. But more importantly, I think the whole film reflects on photography as a medium and its relation to truth, death, and mourning. My intuitions about this were confirmed by Susan Bruce’s excellent 2005 article: “(G)hosts, Hostilities and Mediums in Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others and Postmortem Photography.” I can’t say more without giving away the ending.
Pulse – Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2001
In Pulse, the dead have begun to enter our world through a portal created by a creepy website. In response to these hauntings, people begin killing themselves; the entire balance of the afterlife has been disturbed. Pulse suggests that there is something about Internet usage which increases loneliness and conjures the dead. Ghosts and the living become almost the same, as both are defined by their isolation and despair. This is a very good film, but I found it difficult to re-watch during lockdown because it’s so gray and claustrophobic.
Shutter – Banjong Pisanthanakun and Parkpoom Wongpoom, 2004
In this Thai ghost story, a photographer is haunted by a woman from his past who appears in his pictures. Unlike The Others, Shutter is more straightforward in its claims about photography and buried trauma, but in both movies, the medium is given the power to reveal truths about the past. I also liked the Hollywood remake, Shutter (Masayuki Ochiai, 2008).
Poltergeist – Tobe Hooper, 1982
Here, a suburban family’s life is shattered when their child is sucked into their television, which is a portal to a ghostly world. They hire a team of psychics and parapsychologists to try and get her out. Poltergeist is a classic of tech horror, and also works as a family melodrama. I don’t find the movie scary at this point, but there’s a lot of interesting criticism about what the film says about middle class consumerism in the 1980s. And I like the legends about how the film itself is cursed.
Related: Check out Dawn Keetley’s article on guilt and the American Dream in the 1982 and 2015 versions of Poltergeist.
One Missed Call – Takashi Miike, 2003
In another Japanese story about a vengeful spirit, a group of students begin receiving eerie voicemails from their own phone numbers, with recordings of the final moments of their lives. It’s a race against time that almost always ends in death, which is caused through supernatural methods. A complicated investigation leads to the reason for the haunting, which is, as always, a family trauma and an act of evil.
Host – Rob Savage, 2020
A short (under an hour) Zoom horror film about a group of friends in lockdown who decide to hold a virtual séance. This was a fun laptop horror film to watch, but it also felt very early quarantine. Before the séance conjures something evil, the biggest threat to the characters is the boredom and inconvenience of living in their apartments. The film could have been so much darker if it reflected the actual array of terrors we’re dealing with this year. Watch it for its nods to Zoom-specific aesthetics. (You can stream Host on Shudder.)
Claire Cronin is a writer and musician currently based in California. She has published poetry and nonfiction and is the author of the chapbook A Spirit is a Mood Without a Body. As a musician, Cronin has released records on independent labels, toured nationally, and been featured in Pitchfork and The FADER. She has a PhD in English from the University of Georgia.
Claire’s new book, Blue Light of the Screen: On Horror, Ghosts, and God, is just out and you can find it at Repeater Books or from Amazon #ad:
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