In the above clip, what you just heard is a whispering sound that cultural analysts, scientists, and media talking heads find difficult to categorize. I have just reduplicated to the best of my ability sounds that are meant to generate a physiological response. Though the above was an example of a human voice whispering, other sounds such the sounds of paper shredding, the tapping of metallic objects, the brushing of skin against skin, the tracing of fingertips on soft wood, are currently being listened too across the globe as part of an emerging cultural media trend. First we must define what these strange sounds are called and why they are intrinsically important to an analysis of Postmodern Horror before we embark on an analysis of the specific subcultures related to this trend. (Poerio 120).
This is ASMR, the title now given to these diegetic “tingly” noises, which has for the last ten years or so, grown into a community of online users, and which has pervaded the mainstream with its, well, “weirdness” (Poerio 119-128). ASMR as a community has staked a claim that it potentially alleviates “insomnia,” “anxiety,” “depression,” and the list of scientifically unproven benefits goes on (Poerio 119-128). Given that ASMR seemingly aims to sooth its viewers from their individual waking stresses and nightmares, how is that a horror sub-genre of ASMR videos exists and is, dare I say, pretty popular?
In order to identify the various subcultures within this subculture outgrowth of YouTube, we have to define ASMR as best as is possible with a terminology that may yet exist to do so. ASMR at its most brief of descriptions is an internet phenomenon in which content creators speak and look directly into a camera while addressing their anonymous viewer with soft repetitive, sounds, ranging from tapping to lip smacking to brushing a microphone (Poerio 119-128). Some of these videos are “simulated” experiences as Dr. Gilula Poerio notes in one of the only current scientific studies of the internet phenomenon (Poerio 120). Users who engage in these roleplay-style videos can choose any narrative situation they please, ranging from makeup tutorials to hair appointments to freudian psychoanalytic style scenarios. However, there is a subsection of ASMR in which relaxation and self-servicing sounds are generated by simulations that one could hardly characterize as “relaxing.”
A number of ASMR videos are now devoted to serial killer roleplays. Imagine Ted Bundy calmly whispering into your ear pre-murder. Some of these are done in the vein of parody such as content creator “IamCYR,” in others such as those kidnapping and quasi-American Psycho-esque videos produced by ASMRtist “Ephemeral Rift” and “Crinkleluvin ASMR” appear to be an earnest attempt to satisfy viewer requests. The discomforting content of these videos (including the licking of knives, the tapping of other various torture objects, rope sounds, and the gentle, but threatening whispers of a murderous captor) seemingly do not detract from the “ASMR-ness” of the videos. As multiple users argue these serial killer roleplays are, unnervingly, “relaxing,” even pleasing (Poerio 119).
These serial killer roleplays self-reflexively distort the genre of ASMR videos, which mainly deal with obviously relaxing or soothing environments such as Reiki healing, hair brushing, nail painting, etc (Poerio 119). As with Ephemeral Rift’s video “The Insomnia Killer” (the first linked video) in which audiences are drawn into a state of captivity that plays on their desire to rid themselves of their insomnia is an exact example of the postmodern, nearly parodic, tone that some of these videos employ. However, despite the potential irony of these videos, they still generate for users like me an actual physiological response to the sounds generated.
(Though this paper won’t analyze the clearly parodic serial killer ASMR videos, Ephemeral Rift’s is worth giving a listen).
CrinkleLuvinASMR, a female ASMRtist, has similarly produced a series of these “kidnap” style ASMR videos in which the suggestion of violence jars against the relaxing, physiological comfort we as viewers are induced to feel through the sonicity of the ASMR experience.
As we are confronted by CrinkleLuvin’s gaze, resting just above a medical mask, and told that we are the subject of her psychopathic medical machinations, we are disoriented. We feel calm, we want to keep watching, but wait is that a blood spatter behind her? The comments such as by Rapunzel ASMR laud the video, exclaiming
In the video we see the suggestion of blood on the walls, an “abject” promise of what’s to come after the ASMR part of the video ends, and we are no longer in a state of lull or false security (Pinedo 21). Crinkle Luvin’s murderous character at times yells off camera to her daughter to quiet down. Viewers are fed the illusion that we aren’t alone with our computer, someone else is around. The believability of this is compacted by the sensation of fatigue, of inesacapability that the gentle tapping of medical tools and the rustle of plastic have generated within us. The viewer-captor is told that they’re going to “need a paralytic” and the tingling sensation we requisitely feel in our scalp seems to turn this suggestion into a reality. The manipulation of senses has betrayed us as viewers, our agency is called into question as consumers. CrinkleLuvinASMR tells us we are being made “into dolls.” And for a moment, as our body’s become entranced by the soothing sounds, we almost believe her. Seemingly, what we are experiencing is both “inside” the video and “outside” of the video itself.
Therefore though violence is only suggested by these serial killer ASMR videos, we anticipate said violence to come and feel the affects of the personal, if psychopathic, attention we are receiving. Therefore the experience is metaleptic in that our sense of discomfort and disorientation only occur after the video ends. The experience exists outside the text in the sense that we carry this sensation long after the video concludes. Though no violence or shock scares occur, what is horrific about these ASMR videos this is our lack of control over our own physiological reactions. What we have just experienced is what Isabel Pinedo claims is one of the major facets of postmodern horror. Pinedo claims that “horror is an excercise in recreational terror, a simulation of danger not unlike a roller coaster ride… the conviction that there is nothing to fear turns stress into a pleasurable experience” (Pinedo 25).
Pinedo offers us a theoretical framework by which we can understand just how are viewers ostensibly led to feel secure, even soothed, in the pretend, virtual arms of a serial killer, so much so that there’s a demand for content creators to serialize (pun intended) said videos as CrinkleLuvinASMR has. However the answer potentially also rests in the way that ASMR videos construct “subjectivity” through sound (Bennett 134).
Let’s look briefly at a user-generated anecdotal analysis of ASMR that narrates in real time this subjectivity. In “ Relief from a Certain Kind of Personhood in ASMR Role-Play Videos,” Emma Bennett relates her experience of viewing popular “ASMRtist” Olivia Kissper as one in which technology approaches a distinct kind of intimacy, one which situates Bennett “between object-hood and personhood” (Bennett 134).
Bennett writes,
“It is not only her performance, it is mine, too. I have to go along with it, even just a tiny bit, for it to work. I have to receive these recorded, mediated attentions as if they were really directed at me, personally, in the here and now. And it works: when Olivia says, I’ll just gently touch the area of your jaw, my jaw responds, it feels noticed. It’s sort of like it blushes, flinches ticklishly at the mention of its name” (Bennett 131).
Here Bennett narrates the way in which ASMR breaches category distinctions between the virtual and the real. Bennet’s interactions with Olivia’s content creates an experience in which real feeling is felt through a technological conduit . The uncanny ability to make a virtual interaction feel physiologically real through sonic response is perhaps one of the reasons the trend has gained popularity. In his analysis of horror video-game Resident Evil, Ewan Kirkland defines this attempt at a seamless reality as ““immediacy” which “aim[s] for … the impression of an encounter with the real” (Kirkland 117). Content generators often attempt to be as vague as possible in order to seem realistically addressing the unique millions who tune in. Though the level to which we are directly addressed creates a kind of immediacy, we are also aware of the microphone and camera which are the conduits that allow us to experience the sounds emanating from our computer as Bennett notes (Bennett 131). Therefore ASMR engages additionally in a kind of “hypermediacy.” (Sample). ASMR’s ability to generate a physiological sense of tingling, using props that aid in crafting an alternate world through these roleplay environments makes serial killer style roleplays all the more terrifying as a medium of “relaxation.” since they actually sonically feel real.
However, this use of the sonic to engender fear without presenting visually anything that is actually “scary” has been done in horror films such as The Blair Witch Project. In his book Terror Tracks Phillip Hayward describes the way The Blair Witch Project creates terror through a manipulation of sound.
Hayward writes,
“The anticipation and suspense is enhanced by the fact that those images designed to scare us are not overly horrific: piles of rocks and stick figures in trees. Rather these are used cumulatively to establish a spooky context. The dim lighting, black-and-white footage and scenes featuring intermittent and lengthy moments of black screen or almost total darkness all rely on sound and sonic reaction to create an effect (Hayward).”
Therefore a constituent part of postmodern horror seems to be a concern with form over content. As with The Blair Witch Project, ASMR’s horror content never shows real “horror” and yet it is unnerving and disorienting in its manipulation of genre and medium.
Such is the case with Shintaro Kago’s nine page one shot manga Abstraction. In Abstraction readers are first presented with six seemingly normal frames of a young couple at the beach. We know there are six predominantly because unlike normal manga the frames are numbered. This is the first indication of the piece’s metatextual nature and therefore of hyper-mediation as the numbered pages call our attention to the form of the manga genre.
In the top left hand corner of the second page we the subtle bend of the first frame, implying the page is being turned by a hand, a clear prod of self-awareness that points outside of the text to our reading experience. However by the second page the entire form is shifted to a four dimensional block.
As the frames turn, the couple’s bodies too become transformed, sometimes melding together, and at other times turn into pieces of machinery such as cars.
By page seven the frame of the manga zooms out to reveal several more empty text boxes gesturing to concurrent narratives. On page eight the young couple has been completely fragmented from both the confines of the graphic frame and from their bodies.
As the comic climaxes to a surreal peak, the couple’s seemingly engaged in a sexual act, divide into horrifying malformations of their former selves. Sex is accompanied with unexplained and absurd gore. Pinedo would attribute this as a tenet of postmodern horror, claiming that “the fusion and fission figures of postmodern horror assume overtly sexual proportions” (Pinedo 21).
The most postmodern elements of this particular work are its metaleptic manipulation of manga’s actual graphic form. We are made to question the closed nature of each text box as they are literally distorted and its characters become disembodied from a “bounded” frame (Pinedo 26). This distortion becomes inflicted upon the character’s own bodies, and the mediums fragmentation translates onto the horrific gore that the character’s begin to experience without another causation. In Abstraction, the medium is the murderer.
This manipulation of form creates a kind of visual vertigo that toys with it’s audience as much as it does the character’s embodiment. The reader’s eye, trained to read comics left from right find themselves struggling to pinpoint the beginning and end of the page. This disorientation becomes exemplified too in the “self-reflexive” nature of the text, which plays on the common subject of romance manga, known as Shoujo, to make more absurd the sudden violent sexual scenes that follow the seemingly mundane romance that Abstraction begins with (Pinedo 28).
Kago’s piece however is part of a larger genre of Japanese horror manga. In an analysis of one of the most salient horror manga artists, Osamu Tezuka, Suzanne Phillips describes a similar genre-style of Japanese horror manga,
“the action now unfolded in an alternate reality, typically in dreams, nightmares, or fantasies that blurred the distinction between what is real and what is not. Without warning, the plots might suddenly veer into the realm of the fantastic and the absurd, sometimes without providing any clear resolution at the end” (Phillips 82).
This description of Tezuka’s work almost perfectly maps on to Kago’s Abstraction and perfectly describes the way Pinedo characterizes postmodern horror as that which “asserts that not everything can or should be dealt with in rational terms” (Pinedo 22) The “absurdity” of Abstraction however relies specifically on the audiences anticipation of a quotidian romance. Kago bases the surrealism constructed in Abstraction through the “ironic” disavowal of this genre (Pinedo 28).
Like with the serial killer roleplays of ASMR, the content of Abstraction does not use visual horror tropes or even methods as the main means which to convey terror. Nothing that objectively terrifying occurs. We see a relationship deteriorating in Abstraction; though the gratuitous anal bleeding scene, the disjointed non-linear narrative (if this can be called a narrative at all) make it hard to discern what’s actually going on in the manga. The locus of horror in these mediums is instead their manipulation of senses which divert attention away from the fact that, as Pinedo says, by the end of their narratives “the outcome is uncertain” (Pinedo 25). In Abstraction, readers experience visual vertigo that is underscored by the text’s “self awareness” of its medium’s genre (Pinedo 25). In horror roleplay ASMR, the content generators awareness of the genre codes appeals to the disorienting sensation the video produces. And while no particularly violent or gory action is purveyed in these roleplays, viewers are instead discomforted by their comfort– a relaxation generated by their involuntary physiological response to sound. In essence, we are held captive not by the virtual captor of the roleplay, but by the computer echoing the quasi-addictive sounds users are drawn back to repeatedly.
Both of these examples highlight that the predominant mechanism of postmodern horror is no longer content, or even plot, but the manipulation of media. As Pinedo concludes for us ” the horror film is an exercise in mastery” and to a degree these slights of comic frame and of soft voice are indeed performing both a “mastery” of the medium and a “mastery” of the the audience (Pinedo 26). This results in disorientation of sensory experience, as our eyes and ears strain to adjust to the surreal phenomenons set before us, and thus puts the consumer’s conception of reality into a state of vertigo.
Work Cited:
Bennett, Emma. “Relief from a Certain Kind of Personhood in ASMR Role-Play Videos.” Felicity Callard, et al., editors. The Restless Compendium : Interdisciplinary Investigations of Rest and Its Opposites. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Worldcat.org. Accessed 19 Feb. 2019.
ASMR, CrinkleLuvin. “ASMR Horror Story: Medical Kidnapping Role Play.” YouTube, YouTube, 29 June 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCc3ATU66Qo&t=442s.
Hayward, Philip. Terror Tracks : Music, Sound and Horror Cinema. Equinox Publishing Ltd, 2009. EBSCOhost, ezproxy.lib.davidson.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=e000xna&AN=639872&site=ehost-live.
Kago, Shintaro. Abstraction. 2000. Mangago.com. http://www.mangago.me/read-manga/abstraction/.
Kirkland E. “Resident Evil’s Typewriter: Survival Horror and Its Remediations.” Games and Culture, vol. 4, no. 2, 2009, pp. 115–126., doi:10.1177/1555412008325483.
Pinedo, Isabel. “RECREATIONAL TERROR: POSTMODERN ELEMENTS OF THE CONTEMPORARY HORROR FILM.” Journal of Film and Video, vol. 48, no. 1/2, 1996, pp. 17–31. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20688091.
Phillips, Susanne. “ Characters, Themes, and Narrative Patterns in the Manga of Osamu Tezuka.” Mark W. MacWilliams. Japanese Visual Culture : Explorations in the World of Manga and Anime, Routledge, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/davidson/detail.action?docID=1900027.Created from davidson on 2019-02-18 18:12:01
Poerio, Gilula. “Could Insomnia Be Relieved with a YouTube Video? The Relaxation and Calm of ASMR.” Felicity Callard, et al., editors. The Restless Compendium : Interdisciplinary Investigations of Rest and Its Opposites. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Worldcat.org. Accessed 19 Feb. 2019.
Rift, Ephemeral. “The Insomnia Killer (ASMR).” YouTube, YouTube, 9 Nov. 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8qzhcK7ZdQ.
Sample, Mark. “Comparative Horror Analysis.” https://courses.digitaldavidson.net/death19/wp-admin/post.php?post=585&action=edit.