I have inserted the link to my project video here:
In his book The Weird and the Eerie, Mark Fisher defines eeriness as the following: “The eerie, by contrast, is constituted by a failure of absence or by a failure of presence. The sensation of the eerie occurs either when there is something present where there should be nothing or is there is nothing present when there should be something” (61). I would assert that most people in general have a fundamental concept and notion of what eeriness and can define it when they see it, but Fisher’s definition is so beautiful in its simplicity. Something is eerie specifically when we know that something is off and that things are just not how they should be. Fisher’s fleshing out of this concept with his terms failure of absence and failure of presence do a perfect job with pinning down exactly what characterizes the eerie. My Haunted Media Project which is an edited video of a graveyard with voices plays upon both elements of the eerie.
While my project makes use of both types of eeriness as defined by Fisher, it most certainly centers more heavily upon his failure of absence. Naturally, a graveyard is a place that is meant to be deserted. There are typically no signs of life within a graveyard as it is just a plot of land full of dead corpses buried the surface. My Haunted Media Project is intended to provoke and create the eerie in the fact that my edited video of a graveyard walk is chalk full of signs of life. As the camera walks through the graveyard passing tombstone after tombstone voices can be heard in the background. The sound of voices filled with life and from the living is not something that ought to be found in a graveyard which creates the eeriness that I intended for my video. There is a true failure of absence in that we expect a graveyard to be silent aside from the sounds of nature and thus when something that should not be there such as voices is present the situation is eerie. The failure of voices emanating from graves to be absent is a direct representation of Fisher’s first type of eeriness although it is not the singular method through which I create a sense of the eerie in my Haunted Media Project.
In addition to my emphasis upon the failure of absence in order to create eeriness with voices from beyond the grave, I too make some use of a failure of presence. In this respect, while the voices of the dead ought not be present the fact that they still exist lends credence to an issue with the failure of presence. While the voices existing is creepy in and of itself, it would have been less creepy if you could discern from where they were emerging. It is evident from the project and the way that I framed it that the voices and sounds are meant to be of the graves themselves, but it is never clearly proven to be that way. If there were apparitions or even skeletons that would at least give the voices and sounds a physical manifestation and origin point but the video offers nothing. This lack of a physical body whether a ghost or a skeleton shows a failure of presence which in and of itself is chillingly eerie. As much as voices do not belong in a graveyard they do belong to physical creatures. Thus, to have no obvious source of the sounds adds even more to the eerie feel and disturbing nature of my Haunted Media Project.
The very first thing that I thought of when implementing audio into the piece to serve as voices of the dead was to literally take voices from the dead. I immediately sought to find disturbing audio such as 9/11 calls and other audio recordings of people who were literally upon the brink of death with their lives on the line. I spent hours scouring Youtube in search of disturbing phone calls in which the panic and tension of the caller rose throughout the call. I then took snippets of the videos and dispersed them across my project for a wide range and variety of fearful tracks. For obvious reasons the sounds of people pleading or screaming for their lives is quite creepy and it fits in easily with a tone of eerie graveyard video. The sounds of any human being displaying true and unadulterated fear is scary and something that sends chills down the spine. The importance of utilizing disturbing audio in my Haunted Media Project is to establish the fact this dire fear.
The use of disturbing audio is very essential for my Haunted Media Project and without the voices of the soon to be dead, the tone would not feel as disturbing and eerie as it ought to. By that same token however, to fill up the video solely with haunting audio would not suffice either as it would be limiting to the scope of death. Death is not only the pain and fear of losing life but the removal of the joy that life brings as well. In order to incorporate the true meaning of death I needed to represent too the joys and experiences of everyday life. The audio that I am classifying as everyday audio are from little videos that I have accumulated throughout my life and simply encapsulate what life is all about. If one was to truly walk through and hear the voices of the dead would be reasonable that they would hear moments of life just as much as moments of death. The inability to completely narrow down exactly what type of audio it is makes it more disturbing and sinister in my opinion.
Going along with the inability to pinpoint the audio of my Haunted Media Project, I have purposely taken advantage of anonymity to help shield the sounds in order to make it more disturbing. While there are numerous voices heard throughout the video, with some utilized more than once, never are the voices personalized or identified. While it is obvious that these voices are from beyond the grave it is never defined who these voices belong to on an individual level. This disconnect of identity helps me to create a tone of horror and eeriness and is something that Anthony Enns speaks to in his article titled: Voices of the Dead: Transmission/Translation/Transgression. “By separating the voice from the body and endowing it with a presence independent of the speaker, sound technologies disrupted any equation of the voice with individual experience and identity” (Enns 13).
In my video I have removed the audio and taken the individual identities behind the words to be represented solely by masses of graves. The voice of a person is something perfectly unique to anyone who ever lived and thus to remove that individuality yet still convey it through inanimate objects is at its root unnatural. If you factor in too the fact that much of my audio is chilling screams of people pleading at the end of their lives, the chilling fear only grows. As Enns alludes to, newly formed sound technologies have interrupted the natural equation between a voice and identity and through my Haunted Media Project I have harnessed this disconnected sound to creepily convey the dead as a wholistic rather than individual.
While the audio is the key ingredient when producing the eerie tone of my project, the true backbone of my project is a video from the YouTube channel Vic Stefanu – World Travels and Adventure in which Vic videotapes his walk-through abandoned graves within the Highgate Cemetery in London. From a visual perspective, the fact that the graves shown in the video are overrun by green forestry is really astounding but not all together surprising as it questions the idea of what a graveyard truly is. Julia Rugg notes in her article “Defining the place of burial: what makes a cemetery a cemetery?”, “A burial ground [is] a large landscaped park or ground laid out expressly for the deposition or internment of the dead . . . these graves were simply a place of disposal, where corpses could disappear” (260). Historically many have understood cemetery’s to be sacred grounds that must be kept up and maintained due to what they symbolized an represented. As Rugg points out and my Haunted Media Project shows, a cemetery is more than that (or less than that depending on point of view) in that it is simply a ground where corpses are buried. There does not need to be any type of consistent maintenance and sometimes graves can be overrun by nature lost to this world but that does not mean they lose any bit of their value as residency for the deceased.
In essence, this is a tourism video even if the location is very secluded and one that many have not and will not visit. This found footage plays upon the impact that photography has upon our world as Susan Sontag highlighted in her piece titled: In Plato’s Cave. “As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, that also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure. Thus, photography develops in tandem with one of the most characteristic of modern activities: tourism.” All of Vic’s travels highlighted upon his channel offers forms of distant tourism as he invites his viewers to explore the world around him though his eyes and the lens of his camera. This is a relatively new phenomena and as Sontag explains, is something that is unique to technology and the photographic business in particular.
While the second part of Sontag’s quotation deals with the use of photography as a tourist tool, the first part explains special features offered up by photographs moving or still. The video shows footage of graves that have been lost to nature and completely deserted in the woods.. These grave sites are extremely well hidden within the depths of the cemetery and the vast majority of people would never encounter them. They could have been lost to time forever except Vic Stefanu and his use of digital recording have exposed them to the world via the world wide web. As Sontag mentions in her quote, the use of photography allows people to experience aspects of the world in new ways that allow more comfort. Through filming or photographing people are able to encounter spaces that would otherwise make the feel insecure in more attainable and relatable ways. Vic and his filming of an abandoned graveyard is a perfect example of this notion as the location is certainly comforting but the filming and ability to traverse the site online makes it less disturbing and for a more engaging audience experience.
Bibliography
Anthony Enns (2005) Voices of the dead: Transmission/translation/transgression, Culture, Theory and Critique, 46:1, 11-27, DOI: 10.1080/14735780500102363
Fisher, Mark. The Weird and the Eerie. Repeater, 2017.
Julie Rugg (2000) Defining the place of burial: What makes a cemetery a cemetery?, Mortality, 5:3, 259-275, DOI: 10.1080/713686011
Sontag, Susan. On Photography. Penguin Books, 1977.
Video Sources Utilized
Crew9t, director. Chilling Real 911 Call- Amputated Foot/ Leg. YouTube, YouTube, 3 Oct. 2012, www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrZQv0w_O78.
F4denfisch, director. The Name of the Doctor – Full Whisper Men Theme. YouTube, YouTube, 24 Jan. 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFjROOcTo8c.
Mar, director. Disturbing 911 Call – THE TALL MAN (EMERGENCY CALL). YouTube, YouTube, 31 July 2014, www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOE7TXBZFQY.
Martin, Josph, director. (SCARY) Elderly Woman Murdered during 911 Call. YouTube, YouTube, 29 Jan. 2013, www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgrG1o8vESw.
Moresey, Sera Lilly, director. The Whisper Men. YouTube, YouTube, 26 Oct. 2014, www.youtube.com/watch?v=ix1P_xdPTas.
Music, Epic, director. Lullaby of Woe. YouTube, YouTube, 28 Oct. 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KkTb4AMW8w.
Stefanu, Vic, director. 0:03 / 12:48 LONDON, EXPLORING HIGHGATE CEMETERY, Let’s Walk along the Hidden Paths. YouTube, YouTube, 22 June 2014, www.youtube.com/watch?v=3l69B3bcN6s.