When I went back and reread my blog posts from the course of the semester, I have to say I wasn’t very surprised about what I found. I knew already that I usually used the class readings as a jumping-off point from which to link the material to my own experiences or other forms of media, but I think that as the semester went on, I (hopefully) tried to make deeper connections and look more closely at the readings.
Regarding themes, there is definitely a recurring theme of the movies and TV shows I’m familiar with in my posts, such as The Walking Dead, The Sixth Sense, and The Umbrella Academy, but on the other hand, I don’t have much personal experience in how death and technology are related, so it makes sense that I would look to outside examples when writing my blog posts.
Something else I observed in my own writing was my tendency to try to end my posts with a larger question or generalized statement about the class’s topics, sometimes with an added moral element about the concepts of death and technology as well. For example, I noticed that in my most recent post about Chernobyl and dark tourism especially, I focused a lot on the ethics of memorials and touring sites of tragedy (like we had discussed in class regarding Yolocaust).
If I had to go back and revisit or revise my previous blog posts, I think I would try to talk more about the larger theoretical concepts of the class and tie my examples back to those rather than focusing so much on the specific details of the day’s readings.
When I was reading the article on Chernobyl and “dark tourism,” one of the first things that struck me was just how little I know about Chernobyl beyond its role in media as a creepy, dangerous, yet fascinating place to visit. I hadn’t noticed it before, but almost all (or actually all) of my extremely limited knowledge of the Chernobyl disaster came from the few interactions I’d had with heavily dramatized movies or other fictionalized forms of media about this historical event. I realize that this event occurred almost a decade before I was born and I never learned about it in school or anything, but that’s particularly why the media was my one source of information about the Chernobyl accident. In the Yankovska and Hannam article, something that particularly stuck out to me was this fascination with death and tragedy that some people have when it comes to dark tourism, even to the point of personally interacting with the local residents of the site where the tragedy happened, in this case the tour guides’ family members, in order for these tourists to gain some sort of satisfaction that they have heard the “real” story.
Continuing with this theme, the article states that “the media has made the site of the Chernobyl exclusion zone even ‘more tragic’ and ‘exciting’ for tourists” (936), which I think has only furthered the exploitation of this place (and others like it) and the people who have lived and had experiences there, especially when the tour guides and their families feel like they have to embellish their own stories for the entertainment of their visitors. I don’t think that every instance of dark tourism is necessarily harmful; I just think that people should be more aware of their intentions when they are entering a place like Chernobyl (or other memorials, like we discussed when we talked about Yolocaust) that has a tragic history for a lot of people.
For my haunted media project, I decided to create a realistic but fictional memorial website, called In Memoriam, where ten fabricated people died from a tragedy that never actually happened. I used AI-generated photos from thispersondoesnotexist.com and names generated from name-generator.org.uk in order to create these made-up people, and I randomly chose a residential building electrical fire in the (real) city of Fresno, CA on January 13, 2015 as the cause, location, and date of their deaths. I also used a birthdate calculator to determine the victims’ ages and a job generator for their careers, but used the names of actual schools and workplaces in Fresno in order to further the story’s realism. My website is an example of a grief-centric project, and it features an “About” page explaining the fictional purpose of the site, a “Guestbook” page with messages from the imaginary community, and individual pages for each of the fake victims relaying their birthdate, job and interests, surviving family, and more. I also included a few photos of candles as a nod to the “light a candle” buttons on some of the online memorial sites we looked at in class as a digital attempt to embody or convey physical expressions of grief and remembrance.
I wanted to create a memorial site for a fictional event featuring imaginary people in order to explore the connection between grief and online memorials in a way that would allow the viewer to reexamine their own ideas of communal versus personal grief. My project was intended to make the viewer think about the reasons people would create memorial sites for their deceased loved one(s), whether solely for one’s close friends and family to share memories or as a more public space where others can share their condolences.
In this same vein, Aaron Hess argues that “memorializing on the web is a unique form of communal and vernacular discourse. Using the internet as a specific form of representation, the commemorating webmaster enters the public domain in order to memorialize; this opens space for communal memorializing, but also hampers the commemorating individual’s ability to speak without barriers” (813). I would say that Hess’s last statement is true because, whether someone has created a memorial site themselves or is simply interacting with one through a message, comment, or guestbook, this interaction will always be one degree removed from, for example, speaking or praying at a loved one’s grave. This is mostly due to the fact that these websites are extremely public spaces, where anyone can go and view the profiles or memorials of those who are recently deceased.
On a related note, according to the article, “Online Memorialisation: The Web As A Collective Memorial Landscape For Remembering The Dead,” one of the unique facets of online memorials is that “the Internet offers the ability to memorialise in a public place, where anyone can visit at any time, without imposition to others, and without interruption to themselves” (Veale). The immediacy and simultaneous public/private sphere of online memorials were some of the reasons I chose a digital format, rather than some sort of physical shrine, for my grief-centric project. Veale also writes, “So what can cyberspace offer memorialisation? Cyberspace lacks physicality but … can be a spiritual space. Several authors agree this notion extends to memorialisation practice” (Veale). The same is true for my project because the entire site is an example of memorialization without physicality, and potentially a spiritual space for the victims’ families as well due to the images of candles featured on certain pages.
Likewise, in the article “Gravesites and Websites: A Comparison of Memorialisation,” Connor Graham et al write, “We show that … online memorials mark a less bureaucratic, more individualised and neo-modern approach to memorialisation where the dead, once again, become part of everyday social interactions and so are given an existence. We also show that online memorials … focus on the immediate family. More speculatively, we suggest online memorials support the wider engagement of a grieving public” (38). These statements are true for my own fictional online memorial as well. For example, the site is meant to be a place for both the imaginary deceased’s immediate family and for the fabricated wider community to come together in memorialization and grief as a part of daily social (media) life. The “Guestbook” page in particular represents this, as it features a form for the user to fill out if they wish, as well as entries and signatures from made-up family or community members to add to the realism of the story. Furthermore, Graham et al also recount that “Web memorials not only mark resistance to the bureaucratisation of memorialisation and a move towards postmodern death rituals but … they also … support continuing bonds between the living and the dead” through “three types of memorial content”: a letter to the deceased, a eulogy or obituary, and a tribute (39). On In Memoriam, all three of these types of memorial content are represented. The letters to the deceased are featured on the “Guestbook” page, in the messages that the imaginary victims’ family members have written to their loved ones; the site itself and its separate pages on each of the victims function as both a group obituary and individual obituaries; and the fictional Meg Stafford’s guestbook entry serves as a tribute thanking the members of the community for their creation of the site.
Another point that Graham et al make in this article is that, “Rather than being a place of internalisation, of quiet contemplation, the Web memorial answers the question of what the bereaved are thinking and feeling, at times communicating ‘wrenching expressions of grief and loss’ (Foot, Warnick, and Schneider 2005) and showing grief as individuated in its expression and extent” (51). The same is true for my memorial site; both the “About” and “Guestbook” pages display community expressions of grief as well as individual ones, leading to a more holistic view of the online grieving process as a whole and a comparison between public and private grief.
In Mark Fisher’s article, “Approaching the Eerie,” the author explains the concept of the eerie as occurring “either where there is something present when there should be nothing, or when there is nothing present where there should be something” (61). Something that I found particularly eerie in regards to this project was the AI-generated photos of the “victims” because of how realistically they depict people who do not actually exist but instead were created by an AI that learns facial features from a database of celebrity faces and generates artificial face photos that become more realistic over time. Another aspect of this project that I found eerie was the act of creating a memorial for people who were never real, because it caused me to think about and wonder what sort of memorials might be created in the future, online or not, both for those people that I know and those that I do not. In the words of Fisher, “We are compelled to imagine our own world as a set of eerie traces,” and these eerie traces are precisely what the act of creating this project made me confront (63).
The process of making an online memorial was, at times, difficult for me, even though I have not (yet) had the personal experience of grieving the death of a close family member or friend. Sometimes I would catch myself looking on real memorial sites for examples of phrases to use or I suppose the word would be “inspiration,” and I would feel a pang of guilt for appropriating and perhaps even tokenizing the real experiences of grief that people feel every day when their loved ones pass away. In fact, one of the reasons I decided to create a fictional tragedy with made-up people, rather than basing my project around true events or real people, was to avoid the so-called “grief porn” that might come from focusing so strongly on the victims and/or perpetrators of a true event such as a murder or suicide. Another unexpected aspect was that I had a bit of trouble constructing my—for lack of a better word—characters’ identities and family members in a way that was simplistic, but still felt real to the viewer or reader. It was also somewhat eerie to me to be creating these two- or three-sentence snapshots of people’s identities, despite the fact that they didn’t actually exist, and it made me realize just how superficial and unrepresentative of someone’s full personality an obituary, online or not, can be.
In summary, the haunted media project provided an opportunity for me to delve deeper into the topic of memorial websites and how people grieve online, both privately and publicly. The process of going through this project also made me think on a more personal level about digital identities, and more specifically, the digital afterlife. My intention was to have the viewer think about these issues, and the reasons people create these sorts of websites to remember their deceased loved ones, as well, and hopefully my project achieves this goal.
Works Cited
Fisher, Mark. “Approaching the Eerie.” The Weird and the Eerie, 2016, pp. 61–64.
Graham, Connor, et al. “Gravesites and Websites: A Comparison of Memorialisation.” Visual Studies, vol. 30, no. 1, 2015, pp. 37–53, doi:10.1080/1472586X.2015.996395.
Hess, Aaron. “In Digital Remembrance: Vernacular Memory and the Rhetorical Construction of Web Memorials.” SAGE Publications, vol. 29, no. 5, 2007, pp. 812–30, doi:10.1177/0163443707080539.
Veale, Kylie. “Online Memorialisation: The Web As A Collective Memorial Landscape For Remembering The Dead.” The Fibreculture Journal, no. 3, 2004, http://three.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-014-online-memorialisation-the-web-as-a-collective-memorial-landscape-for-remembering-the-dead/.
When reading “A Resonant Tomb,” with all of the focus on preserving someone’s voice beyond their death, I was reminded of characters in films and television shows such as Cole in M. Night Shyamalan’s 1999 film The Sixth Sense or Klaus in the new Netflix show The Umbrella Academy. Both of these characters can “see dead people,” as Cole says in that famous scene, but what seems to be more frightening to them is not only the visual aspect of being able to see ghosts, but more so the fact that they can also hear these dead people speaking (or weeping or screaming or whatever the case may be).
In Jonathan Sterne’s article, he writes that sound recording was “aiming for the preservation of the voice in such a form that it may continue to perform a social function” (297). This reminded me of the two examples mentioned above since, in the case of The Sixth Sense and The Umbrella Academy, the dead characters speaking to Cole and Klaus are doing so in order to pass on some sort of message to those who are still living or to gain peace so they can move on to the afterlife. Furthermore, later in the reading, Sterne examines the painting His Master’s Voice (aptly, the cover image for this unit of our class), stating that “When we see a dog listening to a gramophone, we understand that the important issue is the sound of the voice, not what was said” (303). The same is true for both Cole and Klaus; what is alarming is not necessarily what the ghosts are saying, but rather the fact that they are hearing the voice of someone that no one else can. This implies that Cole and Klauswon’t stop being haunted by the dead beings until they rectify their situations and allow the ghosts to be at peace with their deaths.
Finally, on a deeper level, sound is obviously a major part of visual and audio media such as films and TV shows, and therefore the actors who play and voice these characters are embodied and stored in time. After all, no matter how many times you watch a movie or video or how many years it has been since it was created, the people within that video exist within a “carefully bounded frame” of “repeatable time,” in the words of Sterne (310). In this way, sound recording, films, and television gives us the opportunity to relive the past in the present.
At first glance, the 2016 indie horror video game The Survey and Ridley Scott’s 1979 science fiction film Alien do not seem to have much in common, but upon further observation and comparison, certain similarities between both forms of postmodern horror media are revealed. The Survey follows the player character, Marcus Walker, through a seemingly vacant home as he uses clues and instructions from a survey on a smartphone to explore the home and solve the mystery of his family’s past, while Alien follows the the protagonist, Ellen Ripley, and the rest of the crew on the spacecraft Nostromo as they fight back against an alien being who has invaded their ship and is attempting to kill them. Despite these two works’ clear differences in medium and plot, The Survey and Alien are similar in more subtle ways, including the presence of a foreign monster or alien, a sense of anticipation pervading the media where the characters are anxiously awaiting the monster’s attack, and a use of closed and confined spaces.
The Survey is a first-person survival horror game taking place inside of a 13-room house that the player character, at first a nameless protagonist that we later learn is Marcus Walker, cannot leave or escape. Marcus awakes to a notification on his phone saying that he has been selected to participate in a survey that then asks him some strangely specific questions, such as whether or not the house he’s in seems familiar and if he remembers having a family. This prompts the player to begin exploring the house to find notes and scraps of paper providing details into the private lives of the Walker family—including Marcus himself—and the backstory of the game. The horror element of the game comes from the actions that the player character is not in control of: crashing sounds occur from the lower level of the house while the player is upstairs; lights turn out by themselves; items in the house are rearranged; a large porcelain angel that starts out in the living room moves to different rooms and positions, seemingly on its own; and a female monster appears in the darkness of nearby rooms and charges toward the player.
A view of the living room in “The Survey.”
The main thing that makes The Survey unique from other survival horror games of its type, however, is the smartphone interface. The smartphone is how the player answers the survey questions, and it also functions partly as a game menu. It features different widgets, including a clock, photos, mail, settings (that actually allow the player to adjust the game’s display settings), the survey, and timer-based hints in case the player gets stuck. The photos and mail apps provide small clues to the game’s backstory and generally add to the tense, ominous tone and atmosphere of the game world. This smartphone interface is an example of what Ewan Kirkland cites as “digitextuality,” meaning “intertextuality within digital media,” in his article, “Resident Evil’s Typewriter: Survival Horror and Its Remediations” (115). The smartphone and the survey itself help to provide “atmosphere, context, and information” in the game, while also allowing for further immersion into the world of The Survey (Kirkland 116).
The smartphone interface featured in the game.
In addition to the smartphone interface, the game features other examples of technology. There are many television sets in the 13-room house that show channel numbers but play only static, and the player is instructed not to leave the sets on for too long, because, as a cryptic note says, “it makes [the monster’s] ears bleed.” The televisions’ channel numbers are used to solve puzzles within the game, and the numerous radios around the house play different songs and narrate certain aspects of the game’s backstory, and can, like the televisions, be turned on and off.
Furthermore, The Survey utilizes many different examples of what Kirkland calls “hypermediated combinations of diegetic remediation,” such as “paintings and drawings, writing in the form of reports, diaries, inscriptions, text books and picture books, and audio media such as telephones, radio, and audio cassettes” (120). Some examples of remediation that feature more prominently in the game are the forms of writing, mainly through letters and diary entries, and audio media, specifically using a radio. These, in the words of Kirkland, “provide an economic means of conveying backstory, enhance the verisimilitude of fictional spaces in which such media technologies would conceivably be present, and confer a kind of document reality on ludic information contained in virtual texts possessing a physical presence and institutional authority within the game world” (120). Kirkland’s point about virtual texts possessing a physical presence and authority is especially apparent in the player’s quest to collect different documents in order to reveal more information about the family’s backstory and the potential reasons for why Marcus is trapped in the home.
An example of the notes the player can find throughout the game.
In contrast, the classic science fiction film Alien presents a very different and much less interactive experience for its audience. The film portrays the protagonist, Ellen Ripley, and the rest of the spaceship’s crew as they attempt to fight back against and ultimately escape a killer alien. Like in The Survey, the characters in Alien are trapped inside of an enclosed space, but this space is a ship floating through space rather than a townhouse with an impassable front door. In this manner, the audience watching Alien is distanced slightly from the predicament of the Nostromo’s crew, but watching Ripley battle and try to escape the alien onboard is something that viewers still get drawn into, as they don’t know what’s going to occur.
The Alien world may not have the modern technology of smartphones, but the film is rife with many different types of technology that all play large parts in the story, and the most obvious (yet most easily overlooked) of these is the ship itself. In his article “In the Belly of the Mechanical Beast: Technological Environments in the Alien Films,” Steffen Hantke writes, “The one single piece of technology that dominates Scott’s film is the space ship itself in which the events take place, the technological environment through which the protagonists move and parts of which they interact with. That all traces of nature are erased from this environment is treated as a given, which explains why the Nostromo hardly registers as a machine for most viewers” (524). The ship is a “fully technological environment” in which the only natural, non-mechanical beings are the crew members themselves (Hantke 522). This is obviously not the case in the suburban house setting of The Survey, as can be seen in the contrasting images between it and the setting of Alien.
A view of the Nostromo’s interior passageways in “Alien.”
However, when examining both The Survey and Alien more closely, these two works of postmodern horror do have some similarities. First, both works feature some form of monster or foreign creature who is following and attempting to kill the protagonist. In both The Survey and Alien, the image or physical appearance of the monster itself can be analyzed; Cosimo Urbano outlines this representation of the monster as one of the four representational strategies of the modern horror film in his article, “Projections, Suspense, and Anxiety.” He focuses on “numerous scenes in which the monster is the true object of both the characters’ and the spectators’ gaze without it being at that point an actual and immediate source of threat… films such as Alien… seem at times literally obsessed about observing and investigating the monster’s body, driven to look at it, mesmerized by its monstrosity” (Urbano 891). The same can be said for the monster in The Survey; there are a few moments in the game where the player can hear her crying or see her simply standing and waiting before she eventually runs toward the protagonist and attacks.
The monster of “The Survey,” Lilith, before she runs toward the player and attacks.
Along these same lines, an element that borrows from the traditional horror film and also features in both of these works is “a stretched-out anticipation of the monster’s attack” (Lev 32). Though this may be more immediately obvious to the viewer during certain scenes of Alien than to someone playing The Survey, the two forms of horror media utilize the audience’s fear of what is to come to add a sense of unease to the fictional worlds these characters are inhabiting.
The final similarity between Alien and The Survey is both works’ use of closed and confined spaces in order to restrict the protagonist’s movement. In the case of Alien, “the main set is the human spaceship, with a few minutes spent on an uninhabited planet and in the alien ship” (Lev 32). This adds to the suspense and horror of the film because the viewer knows that Ripley and the rest of the crew are trapped aboard the Nostromo with the alien and must somehow either escape the creature or end its life. The same is true for the player in The Survey, who is being followed and repeatedly attacked by this monster inside of a house that the protagonist cannot leave, adding to the tense and uneasy feel of the game. However, a difference here is that the player has no method, weapon, or option with which to fight back against the entity as Ripley does, and must therefore keep evading the monster in order to gain an understanding of the protagonist’s own past. Hantke is specifically discussing Alien when he writes, “there is no escape because there is, properly speaking, no outside… there is no safe ‘outside’ to which the characters can escape,” but his words ring true when thinking about The Survey as well (540). This is especially potent when the player learns toward the end of the game that the protagonist, Marcus, is in a coma, doomed to relive a horrific personification of his guilt over neglecting his sister, and that therefore the entire storyline of the game has been Marcus experiencing his own personal hell.
These two works of horror media, when examined closely, have various similarities that function to make each individual work more immersive, more ominous, and more horrifying. The comparison of these seemingly disparate texts also serves to reveal some of the ways in which the horror genre functions, whether it be through the medium of film or video games. Ultimately, both of these works aim to shed light on aspects of humanity, and whether that is achieved by having one protagonist in a coma being tortured by his own guilt and grief, or by having another protagonist shoot a killer alien out of an escape pod, both TheSurvey and Alien reach this same goal in their own unique—and memorable—ways.
Works Cited
Hantke, Steffen. “In the Belly of the Mechanical Beast: Technological Environments in the Alien Films.” The Journal of Popular Culture 36, no. 3 (2003): 518–46. https://doi.org/10.1111/1540-5931.00020.
Kirkland, Ewan. “Resident Evil’s Typewriter: Survival Horror and Its Remediations.” Games and Culture, vol. 4, no. 2, Apr. 2009, pp. 115–126, doi:10.1177/1555412008325483.
Urbano, Cosimo. “Projections, Suspense, and Anxiety: The Modern Horror Film and its Effects.” Psychoanalytic Review 85.6 (1998): 889. ProQuest. Web. 21 Feb. 2019.
I’ve seen enough zombie media to know that there are only ever two outcomes in these types of movies or TV shows: either the characters die, or they become zombies themselves. For example, whenever I watched a long-running zombie show such as The Walking Dead, I would only be interested up to a point, and then I’d give up and stop watching; after all, the show has to end eventually, and realistically no one can survive, so what’s the point of still continuing to watch?
However, when watching Dead Set I somehow hoped for a different outcome (at least for the characters I liked—I have to say I was waiting from episode 1 for Patrick to either be killed off or zombified). But the show is a miniseries with only one season, so it makes sense that all the characters either died as humans or became members of the living dead. I have to say, at the very end of episode 5 when Kelly was in the diary room, I know it was unrealistic, but I still had a shred of hope that she would make it out of the Big Brother House alive. But true to character, this is a show written by Charlie Brooker, who we all know from Black Mirror constantly critiques media culture, and that’s why I was struck by one of the final shots of the series finale: the image of Kelly’s zombie face, covered in blood, staring accusingly at us, the viewers, through multiple television screens.
This is another example of the hypermediation we talked about in class last Wednesday, and it might be too obvious to say so, but this scene really hammers home the media critique theme of the show by calling attention to the act of looking that we, the viewers, are doing on our own screens, which mirror the television screens in the shot above. This scene seemed to me to be Brooker’s way of turning the message of the show onto the audience and critiquing the way we consume media most of the time: mindlessly. So who’s next to be zombified? Arguably, the audience ourselves.
Most people would consider The Exorcist to be a “classic” horror movie due to its immense popularity and revered place in the horror film canon, having influenced countless other stories and texts since then, but what struck me after watching this movie was its relevance to Isabel Pinedo’s article on postmodernism and the contemporary horror film. The Exorcist seems to me like an example of a film that blends together both classical and postmodern elements of the horror genre, at least from my understanding of Pinedo’s article on the subject.
In The Exorcist we do see some characteristics of the classical horror genre, including for example the clear distinction between good and evil. We (the viewers) know that the demon possessing Regan is evil and that Regan’s mother Chris, Father Karras, and Father Merrin are good. Furthermore, the film ends with Regan having been saved from the demon and therefore good has triumphed over evil (but the Exorcist franchise continues in various sequel and prequel films, so it could be argued that the ending to this film is ambiguous as well).
Conversely, The Exorcist also displays some postmodern elements of the horror genre. For example, it is the priests, not the psychiatrists or men of science, who ultimately save Regan. Additionally, the plot of possession and exorcism is irrational and is presented within the film itself as being irrational (even to Father Karras). Finally, the setup of the story presents an example of a disruption of the everyday suburban life that Chris and Regan enjoy prior to the possession, shown at the start of the film.
The Exorcist provides an interesting look at the classical and postmodern horror genres Pinedo outlines in her article, but ultimately it seems to be its own unique creature, not able to fit squarely into either category. And maybe this is an aspect of what has allowed the film to last so long in our cultural imagination—but that could just be due to the 360-degree head turns and green vomit, too.
