The horror genre is an extremely nuanced literary, cinematic, and electronic game genre that has evolved incredibly quickly, literally before our eyes, in the last 40 or so years.  The more recent works of horror are often categorized as postmodern, or late-postmodern horror, and can be defined by a few key characteristics as described by many academics and critics.  Isabel Pinedo, one such academic, lists some of these characteristics in her work, Recreational Terror: Postmodern Elements of the Contemporary Horror Film.  Her work functions based on five notable points, including “violent disruption[s] of the everyday world…” and “transgression[s]… of boundaries,” (Pinedo, 20).  I will borrow these two, as well as focusing on the role of technology and the implementation of media to analyze and compare two works.  First, I will take a look at Dying Light, a survival horror video game released in 2014 by Techland in conjunction with Warner Bros.  After providing some introductory information, I will detail some examples in which Dying Light can be seen to clearly fit the category of postmodern horror.  Next, I will do the same for Black Mirror, season 3, episode 5, Men Against Fire, available on Netflix.  Finally, I will compare and contrast some of the major aspects of each ‘text.’  We will come to see how these two ‘texts’ intersect, overlap, and fit the same genre, despite their obvious differences.

Dying Light, published in 2014, in some ways rides the coattails of some very influential works in the survival horror video game arena, including classics like Resident Evil and Silent Hill, but no doubt holds a light of its own.  The game is played in first person perspective, and opens to your character, named Kyle Crane, booting up some augmented reality heads-up-display in the back of a military aircraft.  You are informed that there is a virus outbreak in the fictional city of Harran, and that an agency called the GRE has hired you to extract some information about the toxin, ostensibly in order to engineer a cure.  The virus outbreak, you quickly learn, has turned most of the population of the city into zombies.  One of the very first things you hear is that your GRE-provided radio is “your lifeline, do not lose it,” else face isolation in this apocalyptic city.  This is the first instance we see of technology being equivalent to safety, to an advantage that is too valuable to lose.  This trope will be continued, as we will see later on.

When you parachute into the city, your parachute gets caught on an awning and a group of thugs finds you, injuring you badly and leaving you to the zombies.  This opening scene violently disrupts whatever expectations either the player or the character had of typical opening sequences in video games, as well as the orderly, tactical, composed feeling you get from the military aircraft and careful parachute ride down to the ground. 

(Watch to 4:45)

Being immediately attacked by groups of both “normal” humans and zombies right off the bat “violates our assumption that we live in a predictable, routinized world by demonstrating that we live in a minefield” (Pinedo, 21).  Lucky for Crane, he is saved by a group of survivors that happen upon him just at the right time.  However, to reinforce this violent upheaval of the norms of the civilized world, the creators of the game remind us quite vividly that no one is safe in this world- though the zombies don’t kill Crane, we see one of his rescuers tackled and eaten by three zombies as Crane and the other survivors narrowly escape out a back door.  Right from the beginning, Dying Light pulls no punches whatsoever.  It is important that the player be shocked as they are thrown into the thick of things with very little warning, as this contributes greatly to both the horror and survival aspects of the game.

Eventually, Crane makes it back to the headquarters of this group of survivors, a place called The Tower.  In The Tower, people feel safe.  The doors, windows, and walls are all barricaded and the fortress can only be accessed by a series of acrobatic jumps and climbing that the zombies are incapable of.  Unfortunately for the group, there are infected left in the building, and we are reminded once again of the fragility of safety in such a world when several more survivors are infected within the walls of The Tower itself.  Not only do we see the borders of one of the few remaining sanctuaries being literally and metaphorically torn down, we get to watch characters conversion from human to zombie.  The newly infected are aware of their fate, which necessitates some difficult actions on the part of Crane, including killing his new friends before they have fully transformed into the zombies that plague them all.  The psychological aspect of being forced to kill something that is not entirely your enemy, and that you remember only as an ally in your struggle to survive is a significant factor in the horror and drama players experience.  Zombies, being the monsters, “violate the boundaries of the body through the use of violence against other bodies and through the disruptive qualities of [their] own bodies” (Pinedo, 21).  Further, to see this disruption of the human and the natural only builds upon this violation and transgression of boundaries, “dissolv[ing] binary differences” (Pinedo, 21) between the proverbial ‘us’ and ‘them.’

Now that we know how we are hunted and haunted by these zombies that fill the streets, there must be a way to combat them.  Indeed there is, but the suggested strategy in Dying Light is not to fight your way through endless hordes, beating them back or gunning them down by the dozens or hundreds.  Instead the game focuses more on the survival, scavenging, and crafting side of things.  Rather than finding a machine gun with a thousand bullets in every building, Crane is forced to loot the world for materials to build more tactical weapons with.

As the game progresses, Crane uses his intellect, military training, and tips from other survivors to combat the zombies with various technologies, from electric spike traps to toxic knives.  Furthermore, the zombies are significantly slowed and weakened by ultraviolet light, including from the sun.  Crane uses this knowledge as well as his technological prowess to make use of powerful lights to slow the zombies that are inside buildings or out at night.  Here we see again the role of technology as a savior, as a weapon against the darkness to help the hero complete his quest.  Technology, as demonstrated in Dying Light is an important part of postmodern horror, but can take very different forms as we will see in Black Mirror.

Last but not least in Dying Light is the implementation of the medium itself: video games.  The game is presented in first person, and offers the player lots of choice and freedom, as the game is open world and guided only by markers on a map as well as voices over the phone.  The inherent nature of such open world, first person games is that they use immediacy to help the audience participate in the horror of the game.  Everything you see, you see through Crane’s eyes.  Not only are you controlling Crane’s actions and choices, he is also controlling the bounds of your perspective and experience of this open world.  By removing the lens of a camera floating over Cranes shoulder, the game employs immediacy and “dictates that the medium itself should disappear and leave us in the presence of the thing represented: sitting in the racing car or standing on a mountaintop” (Bolter, 64).  In this way the player is dragged further into the game, immersing him or her in this violent and strange world,  and enhancing their experience of fear and horror.

Black Mirror more often than not toys with these same principles of violent disruption, the role of technology, transgressions of boundaries, and immediacy to more fully captivate the audience with horror.  In Men Against Fire, we follow Stripe, a soldier in a semi-dystopian future.  Stripe and his fellow soldiers are all equipped with a neural implant, called MASS, that provides augmented reality and facilitates communication amongst the military.  Early on, we see Stripe and his squad hunting for “roaches,” which are said to be mutated humans with diseases, disfigured genes, and monstrous appearances.

Furthermore, the military is far better equipped, with high-tech guns, drones, and other tech such as “the boomer” which uses sound to quickly map the house they plan to infiltrate.  Technology is presented at first as equivalent to power, control, and superiority in this battle between the established and funded military and the underprivileged roaches.

In his first encounter, Stripe kills two roaches, one with a quick, cold shot to the head, and another in a much more intimate fight which ends with a knife in the chest of the roach.  However, in this struggle, the roach is able to produce his own technological weapon, one that uses light and sound to apparently disorient the soldiers, and Stripe clearly is affected by this device.  It turns out that this device actually impairs the function of the MASS implants, which has massive implications.  Stripe’s orderly, military world in which he follows orders and gets his job done is violently disrupted when he encounters more roaches.  At first, Stripe sees the roaches as he did before: disfigured, unable to speak, and enraged. However, Stripe feels the effects of the device from earlier and the roaches transform into normal looking humans right before his eyes.  This makes Stripe hesitate, as the boundaries between ally and enemy, between right and wrong dissolve.  No longer is Stripe set out to systematically kill an enemy he cannot relate to.  Instead, he is faced with helpless civilians, scared and wanting nothing other than to be left alone.  It’s revealed to Stripe that his MASS implant is abusing its augmented reality capabilities, that roaches are not in fact monsters, but are instead targets of genocide following a world war that broke out ten years ago.  All of a sudden, right becomes wrong, wrong becomes right, and Stripe’s entire world is flipped on its head.

One of the most effective ways this episode immerses the audience in the story is immediacy.  Similarly to how video games are often inherently immediate (first person perspective, agency of action, etc.) Men Against Fire employs first person perspective and intimate shots of tense scenes to remove the filter of the media itself between the story and the audience.  Stripe’s dreams are seen through his eyes; we never get a glimpse of him or anything else, and are equally rudely removed from these dream states alongside him.  When Stripe is fighting his first roaches, we see most of the encounter, and most importantly both deaths through his eyes.  As Stripe’s MASS implant begins to glitch, we get to experience the visual and auditory errors that he does.  Throughout the episode, we, the audience, are very intentionally shown this world and its events through the main character’s eyes in order to bring the story more directly to us and to help us empathize more deeply with Stripe’s confusion and disorientation.

As time progresses, new technologies allow for expressions of common literary themes to be developed upon and introduced to the consumer in fascinating new ways.  Video games, being one of the newest forms of media available, is a fascinating avenue down which to assess and analyze the employment of defining characteristics of genres, especially as they compare to more conventional media such as television.  Postmodern Horror relies on shock value, psychological terror, and immersion into the story to scare the audience, to make them think, and to make commentary about the world we live in.  Both Dying Light and Men Against Fire share many of these commonalities, and yet utilize them in differing ways.  In Dying Light, technology serves as a connection to allies and especially as a tool for survival.  However, technology also serves as a reminder of the constant struggle and conflict Crane finds himself in: nothing and nowhere is safe, but technology can be employed to at least diminish dangers.  On the flip side, In Men Against Fire, technology is the deceiver, altering reality and hiding the ugly truth, helping soldiers avoid the ethical dilemma of murdering innocent civilians based on their genetic makeup.  Though these two ‘texts’ make use of technology in nearly opposite ways, they reinforce the danger and abnormality of the horrific world in which the audience finds itself.  Finally, immediacy is crucial in both works.  Without the implementation of first person perspectives and intimate portrayal of violent and life-threatening situations, the audience might feel more of a disconnect between them and the characters, diminishing the sense of fear so central to these narratives.  While video games afford much more autonomy and thereby greater connection to the character, Black Mirror surely doesn’t miss their opportunities to achieve “a similar effect: the impression of an encounter with the real” (Kirkland, 117).  Both of these works conform with many of the typical characteristics of great postmodern horror texts in their own ways to create thrilling, immersive experiences of terror within a compelling narrative, and both deserve to be played and watched long into the future.

References:

“Accelerated Ideas.” Accelerated Ideas, 2014, www.accelerated-ideas.com/news/dying-light–crafting-and-blueprints-guide.aspx.

Bolter, Jay David. “Remediation and the Desire for Immediacy.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, vol. 6, no. 1, 2000, pp. 62–71., doi:10.1177/135485650000600107.

Booker, Charlie. “Men Against Fire.” Black Mirror, season 3, episode 5, Netflix, 21 Oct. 2016.

Kirkland, E. “Resident Evil’s Typewriter: Survival Horror and Its Remediations.” Games and Culture, vol. 4, no. 2, 2008, 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., www.jstor.org/stable/20688091?seq=5#metadata_info_tab_contents.

TheRadBrad, producer. YouTube. YouTube, YouTube, 10 Dec. 2014, www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLHR5smxbsc.

Stephen King’s 2006 novel Cell and 2006 American horror film Pulse (a remake of an earlier Japanese film) both focus on apocalyptic technology-borne diseases that threaten to destroy the human race. In Cell, the central blight is a cell-signal broadcasted across the world that turns anyone using a cellphone into a zombie, referred to as a phoner throughout the book. Phoners are radically violent, targeting and attacking the unaffected, and as the novel progresses, they develop supernatural psychic powers which allow them to communicate telepathically with one another and with non-phoners. The central scourge of Pulse is somewhat less defined, seeming to be transmittable through most forms of technology. Via internet, cell-phone, and radio, primarily, victims are possessed by a sort of virus that drives them to kill themselves. The virus manifests as ghostly, human-like figures outside of its technological hosts, so it is able to chase and force itself upon its victims. While the form of illness, spread of the disease, and method of destruction are different in the two works, the real power behind both Cell and Pulse lies in the successful blurring of the line between human and technology.

The first hint of this blurring is apparent even in the language of both texts. The word ‘pulse’ is used consistently throughout Cell to refer to the signal that causes the zombification of cell-phone users. The first line of the novel is, “The event that came to be known as The Pulse began at 3:03 p.m., eastern standard time on the afternoon of October 1” (King 3). While the characters in Pulse don’t use that specific word, it is wired into the mind of the viewer as linked with Pulse’s technology disease as well, being the title of the movie. The word ‘pulse’ is an interesting one because it has both biological and technological associations to the modern audience. ‘Pulse’ can refer to an electrical current or other wave vibration, or it can be a synonym for heartbeat. Cell plays explicitly on this crossover with its cover art; below are two different editions of Cell’s cover, both of which incorporate blood or blood imagery into the scene with a cell-phone, suggesting that the phone itself can bleed.

The subtle linkage in both pieces of the fundamentally human with the fundamentally engineered paves the way for more confusion between the categories as the works progress.

This kind of “category crisis” lines up with Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s third theses in his Seven Theses on Monster Culture. He writes that monsters “are disturbing hybrids whose externally incoherent bodies resist attempts to include them in any systematic structuration” (6). The ambiguity of ‘pulse’ and similar words like ‘virus’ contribute to this defiance of classification for the monsters in both works.

In his essay “Terminal Films,” Steen Christiansen uses the concept of a virus to support the point that Pulse explores the boundary between man and machine. ‘Virus,’ like ‘pulse,’ is a word imbued with both technological and biological connotations. It can be a disease spread between computers, or between creatures, but in the normal world, there is no crossover. Christiansen writes that in Pulse, “we see that a digital virus can infect a biological human, suggesting that the boundary between human and code is permeable. Such permeability questions the usual concept of a human being as a bounded entity” (272). Cell and Pulse both wear this boundary thin, but reach slightly different conclusions about the relationship between humanity and technology.

Though the Pulse virus comes from technology, it gets outside of itself in order to infect. The virus takes the shape of ghostly people (as seen below) to gain contact with its human victims; it takes a corporeal form which allows it to run, attack, and hurt those it seeks to infect. In a sense, the technology becomes humanity in order to corrupt humanity.

This becomes a very internal attack. First the virus becomes human, but then it infiltrates another human as it starts to take root. Virus-people get very close to those they want to infect and there is a strange energy exchange between them, like in the picture below. It resembles the soul-sucking of dementors in Harry Potter. Then, the virus enters the body, causing bruising of the skin and dark thoughts, which drive victims to suicide.

So the arc here is that the Pulse virus becomes human, infects a human, and then destroys the human.

Instead of adopting and polluting humanity like the Pulse virus, the Cell pulse robs humans of their humanity. As the phoners develop their psychic abilities, they become pack-like creatures of habit. They share a hive-mind, sleep at the same time, and work towards common goals. They are more like insects, bees, than like humans. The phoners shift to working more and more like technology or primitive lifeforms, like they are following a code that tells them what to do and when to do it. While in Pulse the virus becomes like a human, in Cell the virus makes humans become like technology.

Norah Campbell and Mike Saren, in their essay “The primitive, technology and horror: A posthuman biology,” discuss a concept they call “dirty technology.” “Dirty technology,” they write, “is an aesthetic which combines the sterile, pristine and inorganic efficiency of technology with the visceral, leaking decaying disorganization of animal life” (167). Watching the disintegration of technology when it is linked with life, they say, implies also a disintegration of the borders between technology and humanity. We see this technique at work in Cell in two capacities. First, there is the descent of the human to the sub-human under the effect of the technological disease. Second, there is the decay of the technology itself.

Towards the end of the novel, it becomes apparent that some of the phoners are behaving differently, less threateningly, than others. The characters theorize that there has been a mutation in the pulse which makes its corruption of the mind weaker. This is a prime example of dirty technology: like something organic, the technological villain of the story mutates and changes so much that it could eventually put an end to the threat it has been causing. Cell closes with a quote directing the protagonist how he might save his phoner son,

“Johnny was different from [the original phoners]. Why? Because the worm was still munching, the Pulse program was still mutating? Probably. The last thing Jordan had said before kissing him goodbye and heading north was If you set a new version of the program against the one Johnny and the others got at the checkpoint, they might eat each other up. Because that’s what worms do. They eat” (447).

The protagonist, Clay, then dials 911 and holds his cellphone up to his son’s ear in the hope that the now-corrupted pulse will reverse the effects of the pulse his son endured before. Cell ends on a note of desperate inevitability, then: technology is a problem that, like any human problem, should eventually take care of itself. It might come close to destroying us first, though.

The feeling created by the end of Pulse is a much bleaker sort of inevitability. About 20 minutes before the close of the movie, the two main characters think they have figured out a way to stop the virus with their own technology. Their friend, before his untimely death, was working on a computer program to stop the virus, which he had stored on a secret memory stick. The protagonists race to the computer lab where the virus began to plug in the flash-drive, and for a minute, they think they’ve been successful. The system seems to crash, but then it reboots. As the virus-humans start to take form again, the protagonists get in a car and drive far away, somewhere with no cell-signal or wireless internet, free of the technological blight. This is the final scene of the movie:

“The will to live never dies. Not for us, and not for them.” There is nothing we can do but let our technology come for us. Our will to live is what makes us human, but because we program our technology, it has that same drive.

Pulse does not offer the same hope of eventual triumph for humans that Cell does. Cell seems to wrap up with a conclusion that technology has a sort of life to it that keeps it beyond our control, but it is just sub-human enough that there is hope for us after all. It is like a parasite that can invade us and change the way we act, growing and changing in an almost organic way, but it does not quite get the best of us. Pulse seems to reach the conclusion that someday, we’ll be locked in a stalemate with technology that is just as human as we are. It will take over our cities and drive us away. Both works play with the boundary between humanity and technology, and though both reach eerie conclusions, the scariest part may be that we don’t really know what the technological apocalypse will look like. The humanity of our machines could still surprise us.

Works Cited

Campbell, Norah, and Mike Saren. “The Primitive, Technology and Horror: A Posthuman

Biology.” Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organization 10, no. 1 (2010): 152–76.

Christiansen, Steen. “Terminal Films.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, vol. 25, no. 2/3 (91),

2014, pp. 264–277. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24353028.

Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, “Monster Theory : Reading Culture”, University of Minnesota Press, 1996. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/davidson/detail.action?docID=310376.

King, Stephen. Cell. Simon and Schuster, 2006, Ebook.

Horror stories usually scare us with exotic and unknown monsters. This fear can take the form of vampires, werewolves, or serial killers. We stand by the ordinary and tortured protagonists, anxiously watch them try to save themselves from these aliens. However, what if the alien they are trying to escape from is actually themselves? The modern horror story presents a more familiar demon – ourselves.

In today’s horror films, the mirror has become a motif for introducing our demon self. The 2008 horror movie Mirrors explores the horror of your own image. The film starts with a scene where a man sees his mirror image cutting his throat and, although he has not committed the act on himself, ends up dying in the same way. Following the opening scene, we see the protagonist Ben, an alcoholic who is separated from his wife, take over the dead man’s position as a night security guard in the Mayflower, a burnt-out abandoned luxury department store fills with pristine mirrors. During his first night at work, he sees in the mirrors grotesque visions, such as handprints on the reflected side, a reflection of an opened door which is actually closed and other images that do not match the reality. At first, he perceives them as hallucinations. However, as the images intensify, Ben starts to believe that the mirrors are inflicting real harm on people in his life. After his sister is killed by her own reflection, Ben angrily confronts the monster inside the mirror and discovers that it is a demon that formerly possessed a young girl 50 years prior. The demon takes the form of Ben’s wife and children in the mirrors trying to kill them, and Ben has to fight the demon to save them.

The Mirror symbolize a reverse and opposite reality. Just as the left and right are switched in mirrors, we fear that morality is also reversed, for we assume that the unknown world behind it is sinister. In Mirrors, good/evil and personality are reversed as your reflections commit evil actions that your real self would not attempt and even murder the real you, while disguised as your face. Historically, this concept may have originated from the old German myth of Doppelgänger, an evil double of your own self who signals your imminent death if you see it. Although the movie attributes the abnormality to the classical horror theme of demonic possession, this fluidity of the demon’s appearance remains the highlight of the film, since this time the demon is no longer restricted to one character’s body, but can appear as anyone’s reflection. Instead of appearing as subversive being with inhuman paleness, scars and green vomit, like the traditional possessed image, the demon in Mirrors is presented in the protagonists’ usual faces. As film and media scholar Isabel Pinedo explains, this “the me/not me” violation “disrupts the social order”, causing panic by changing the most familiar – – yourself – – into unfamiliar (21). Additionally, the abject figures in the movie are not limited to young female characters, but adult men, women as well as old woman (the first victim we see is a man). The wide range of anomalies brings the violence and invasion more intimately to all audiences, and the fear affects everybody. The demonic reflection that plants evil in us is “a fusion figure [which] combines contradictory elements in an unambiguous identity” (Pinedo, 21). Thus, we are frightened by it because the identity, which hides abnormality under the skin of normality, is our own personal identity.

Mirror reveals dualism in humanity

The duality in humanity through the motif of mirror and demonic possession are classic elements in Hollywood cinema. They suggest that evil exists even in the most innocent child. For instance, many film scholars have analyzed how the mirrors and reflections in the glass surfaces in Alfred Hitchcock’s famous thriller Psycho show the split personalities of Norman Bates and the moral degeneration of Marion, who steals money. Both Norman’s and Marion’s reflections imply that guilty desires lurk beneath his boyish and her beautiful face (O. M et al. 2013). Similarly, film scholar Barbara Creed explains that the possessed images actually mirror the corrupted personality of the seemingly innocent victim, exemplified by the possession of the 12-year-old girl in The Exorcist (1993). With respect to Mirrors, Ben’s courageous side is the fearless ex-detective who fights against the demon alone to save his family; he is the protagonist that we support and respect. In his corrupted side, he is an estranged husband and father, and a policeman who is suspended for shooting innocent victim while drunk on duty. Therefore, his reflections are not only supernatural aliens, but can also be interpreted as his violent alter ego who he tries to shed yet follows him everywhere. As folklorist Janet Langlois, who examines the similar mirror-related horror folk game of Bloody Mary, notices, “when any of the girls (the participants) looks in the mirror, she sees herself; in reports of the game-playing, she sees Mary Whales [Bloody Mary], or at least, expects to. In a sense, then Mary Whales becomes the girl’s own reflection (cited in Dundes, 79)” This observation suggests that, like Bloody Mary, Ben’s demonic mirror image is in fact his “self-image”, which in his case, forces him to confront his darkness (Dundes, 86).

Modern Doppelgänger: social media profile

As we transit on the modern digital era, the old myth of the double-self takes a new form as our online avatars. Film critics Alissa Wilkinson makes a connection between the traditional Doppelgänger obsession/panic, and the present trend of social media (2014). She notices that, nowadays, we create our another-self online – Facebook profiles, Instagram accounts, to name but a few – because “many of us are afraid that we’re simply not enough as we are—that we’re not cool enough, pretty enough, passionate enough, or interesting enough…[and] those whom we wish would love us might prefer us if we were better, cooler, more likable.” Unlike the devilish double in Mirrors, while which presents “another version of ourselves”, our social media profiles seem to be “our better double (Wilkinson 2014).” Sociologist Lisa S. Nelson also raises the paradoxical question of the “me/not me” regarding our online personae. She notes that they are our creation, that they “separate from our personal identity in real time and space,” and that “[they] are us”, but “are also not us (2018, 171).” As a result, the question in horror movies “is the mirror image me?” evolves into “is my Facebook self me?” in the digital age.

The Netflix series Black Mirror builds on this theme of double identity in the digital age. In the episode Nosedive, the separation between our true self and virtual profile is further blurred. The story is set in a society in which everyone’s activities are rated by others on a 1-5 scale. The rating system functions similarly to our social networking sites, but in the episode, your rating is identical to your socioeconomic status in real life. Every citizen can see it and it affects your right to enjoy certain services. Lacie, our protagonist, who starts at a 4.2 when we meet her, is fighting to promote herself to a 4.5, so that she can move to a luxury neighborhood. She attempts to increase her rating by interacting with an old friend who has become a highly-rated celebrity and has invited her to give a speech at her wedding. Gladly accepting the invitation, Lacie begins her journey to the wedding, while encountering a series of unfortunate events, which cause her ratings progressively decrease. As her ratings plunge, her transportation options become fewer and she has to resort to hitchhiking, while maintaining a cheerful attitude, to get to the wedding.

Nosedive is a dramatic yet insightful reflection of the current dilemma of me/not me that arises from our online Doppelgänger. The show does not use mirrors or any reflective surfaces to imply the double of the main character. Rather, it explicitly places the image of the Doppelgänger by constantly showing a rating beside the characters’ face.

As with Mirrors, Nosedive also suggests that your double is actually you. Whereas Ben’s sister suffers and dies when the reflection hurts itself, Lacie suffers by not being able to travel by plane when her rating declines. 

With the rating system, Lacie has to play the role of a friendly and smiling figure all the time, which corresponds with Wilkinson’s idea that our virtual profile represents our better self. However, with her anxiety about lower rating revealed as the plot deteriorates, the duality of her personality also emerges. We see Pinedo’s  “contradictory elements” (21) of perfect friendliness and vengeful anger fighting inside Lacie’s identity, the latter winning eventually when she can no longer suppress it.

Social media lures people’s dark side

Although in Nosedive, the profile Lacie displays to the public is perfect, in reality, people always present their ugliest side in virtual image. A 2014 study by Pew Research Centre found that 92% of internet users admit being more critical online (cited in Nelson 2018). The use of pseudonyms shrouds people from the danger of being retaliated on or suffering social stigma; thus, they feel that the internet allows them to behave the ways that would be prohibited in reality (Nelson cited Citron 2018). In doing so, the virtual double serves as a safe outlet for people to release their darkness. While executing harmful actions to others is difficult in real life, it is much easier to do with only the click of a mouse (Nelson 2018), almost as easy as a demon performing supernatural act. Nelson further explains this phenomenon by citing communications scholar Whitney Phillips’ interview with a troll, who confesses that, when he is surrounded by other “citizens of the internet”, he experiences a “fracture between [his] internet and real-life persona (104)” In other words, when “an individual has switched into trolling mode. He has…put on his mask” (157). Again, we discover the split of identity in one individual, with his online Doppelgänger as the corrupted role. Nevertheless, no matter how hard we convince ourselves that the evil reflection is not our true self when posting nasty comment on Facebook, “it [the action] compromises our sense of self (Nelson 2018, 169).” Eventually, we have to accept our contradictory duality of good and evil.

Gaze is dangerous

The theme of duality in both Mirrors and Nosedive is also applied to the gaze. Gaze is un-escapable and ubiquitous. In Mirrors, the demon can emerge not only from mirrors, but glasses, windows, water and other reflective surfaces. The idea that something or someone is constantly watching you without your knowledge is a modern horror in which we are engaged everyday, with the wide coverage of surveillance cameras and civil mobile cameras. (Ben’s sister image) This theme is amplified in Nosedive, in which everybody has the right to rate you and interpersonal judgement can affect your real life. As criminologist Emily Van der Meulen and sociologist Robert Heynen observe, social media mediatizes gaze and converts “the once private social space of bedroom culture… into a quasi-public space by commercial interest (57).” As we see in the episode, Lacie’s every action can be judged by others, akin to a dictatorial monitoring terror; only this time, it is a dictatorship of majority in which “many are trained to recognize and watch for a few types of performances and to incorporate those into interpersonal watching for others” in the “watching and being watched” relationship in social media (Van der Meulen and Heynen, 57). However, ironically, instead of promoting pure horror in Mirrors, the gaze to Lacie is bittersweet. Identifying with Lacie, all of us social media users understand the simultaneous desire to gain attention and stress that comes with the gaze. Lacie changes her behaviors and even her personality because of the expectation of others’ gaze, which exemplifies Van der Meulen and Heynen’s argument in feminist studies that “Social media constitute an interactive space where female presentation can be actively constructed by the user herself through her interactions with her audience(s)” (57). Nevertheless, since the horror and longing of gaze in both works applies to all genders and age groups who suffer from them, I argue accordingly that the personality of all people can be constructed by the interactive gaze in the internet.

The Modern Horror: losing ourselves in the mirror

In the age of social media, we are all like Lacie, trapped in a created profile and suppressing our true identity until it vanishes. If we are not careful, we may submerge into the evil side of the mirror, like Ben. Therefore, the postmodern fear of our Doppelgänger is no longer limited to mirrors or other reflective materials, but to our daily social interactions in our phones. As Wilkinson suggests, this is the most chilling possibility: “if I get too good at projecting my Internet doppelgänger, I might just kill off the “real” me.”

Reference:

Brooker, Charlie. Black Mirror: Nosedive. Netflix. 2016. https://www.netflix.com/us-zh/title/70264888

Creed, Barbara. 1993. “Woman as Possessed Monster” from The Monstrous-Feminine : Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. Popular Fiction Series. London: Routledge: 31-42

Dundes, Alan. 2002. Bloody Mary in the Mirror : Essays in Psychoanalytic Folkloristics. Upcc Book Collections on Project Muse. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

Mirrors. Directed by Alexandre Aja. United States: Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation, 2008.

Nelson, Lisa S. 2018. Social Media and Morality : Losing Our Self Control. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Olivares-Merino, Eugenio M, and Julio A Olivares-Merino. 2013. Peeping through the Holes : Twenty-First Century Essays on Psycho. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Pinedo, Isabel. 1996. “Recreational Terror: Postmodern Elements of the Contemporary Horror Film.” Journal of Film and Video, vol. 48, no. 1/2 (Spring-Summer 1996): 17–31.

Van der Meulen, Emily, and Robert Heynen, eds. 2016. Expanding the Gaze : Gender and the Politics of Surveillance. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Wilkinson, Alissa. “What’s With All the Movies About Doppelgängers?” The Atlantic. March 14, 2014. https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/03/whats-with-all-the-movies-about-doppelg-ngers/284413/.

Bibliography:

Masello, Robert. 2014. Fallen Angels … and Spirits of the Dark. New York: Open Road Media.

Moveigrrl. n.d. “Friday Feature: Mirror Mirror On The Wall, What’s The Scariest Film Of All by @moveigrrl.” The Day Hollywood Stood Still. Accessed February 23, 2019. http://dayhwstoodstill.blogspot.com/2010/07/friday-feature-mirror-mirror-on-wall.html.

Background

Horror is a genre that seems largely incompatible with children.  Many of these films are too graphic and too frightening to show most young children.  I myself remember watching my first few scary movies when I was a child, the first of note being The Ring (2002).  Though twenty-two-year-old me may no longer be frightened by most of the images in the film, six-year-old me distinctly remembers the nightmares I had in the ensuing weeks, and I can assure my parents do not forget either.  Over the next few years, I tended to avoid scary movies as much as I could. By the time I was ten, however, I had developed an early obsession with horror films. Horror soon became my favorite genre, but sadly I couldn’t even get my sister that is two years my elder to watch these films with me.  In a sense, it was illogical for me to engage with films that either horribly misrepresented children or made them unquestioning pawns of evil-doing. A child’s place within the postmodern horror genre thus became my question.

Are children just ‘extras’ to these films to ensure their grounding within our own reality?  Do they act as reflections of our own societal fears about children?  Or do children have more autonomy than we credit them for? While the correct answer probably lies somewhere in between, two distinct horror films with varying levels of child involvement, morality, and agency–Sinister (2012) and It (2017)–reflect society’s beliefs about children’s role within the postmodern horror genre in very different ways.  Sara Martin Alegre, a professor of film at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, posits, “writers like King no doubt use the child to portray the faults of the adults, but in the process they offer adult readers disturbing images of victimised and victimising children” (Alegre, 2001).  At first glance, this appears to suggest that children in horror films are mere symbols that represent parental failure.  While true, this definition seems to lack an encompassing reason that is applicable across all postmodern horror representations of children.

In her article Recreation Terror: Postmodern Elements of the Contemporary Horror Film, author Isabel Pinedo suggests that there are five required characteristics that work in unison to create a postmodern horror film, including, “(1) [a] violent disruption of the everyday world; (2) there is a transgression and violation of boundaries; (3) the validity of rationality is thrown into question; (4) there is no narrative closure; and (5) the film produces a bounded experience of fear” (Pinedo, 1996).  As this essay will explain in further detail below, both Sinister and It both seem to comfortably fit within the postmodern horror film.  Their existence, however, is complicated by the use of children, with each film possessing a different reason for doing such.  As Alegre mentioned previously, children in horror partially exist to represent the shortcomings of parenthood and society.  But as these films show, particularly It, children have a greater function beyond existing as a reflection of the fears and anxieties of parents.  This mirrors the constant fluctuation and transgression of expectations so central to the postmodern genre.

Sinister

Scott Derrickson’s 2012 film Sinister follows the life of a once successful crime-fiction writer, Ellison, and his family as they move into a new house.  Soon after the move, the family begins to uncover a series of murders that are linked to a collection of Super 8 films found in the attic.  From the first scene of the movie, it becomes abundantly clear that the film exists within a postmodern context.  A form of found footage, this clip of a family being brutally hung exemplifies, as Pinedo requires, a violent disruption of the norm, a violation of boundaries, and a sense of total irrationality.  As it follows, these films end up closer to the family than previously envisioned. Ellison, the patriarch, and protagonist of the film, soon discovers that these tapes document a series of unsolved murders. For most, this would be a sign to stay away, but considering Ellison’s writing interests, these tapes become a point of intrigue.  

A key feature of these *graphic* homemade tapes (seen above), as well as the movie, is the rampant use, or exploitation, of children.  In all of these clips, the audience watches along as a child goes about killing their family in various ways.  Highly grotesque and heinous, these clips soon become the focus of the film. Ellison catches onto the trend of these children murdering their family and seeks their origin.  To his inner crime-writer, this is a juicy case waiting to be put on shelves.  Ellison’s own personal aspirations appear to get in the way of properly serving the wants and needs in his family, which support several of the claims Alegre makes.  “Men like King are looking into the darkest aspects of masculinity and considering how the destruction of the current model of failed fatherhood may bring hope for the child and the future,” she writes, which directly parallels Ellison’s own fear of failure in both his career and his fatherhood (Alegre, 2001).  

Ellison’s failure to succeed in either facet ends up birthing the climax of the film in which his own daughter, Ashley, follows through with the murder of the entire family.  We learn throughout the film that the demon, Bughuul, who is loosely based off the infamous “Boogeyman”, is the agent responsible for making these children commit gruesome murders.  This suggests the negative impact that adults can have on highly-influenceable children.  The tapes relay that Bughuul habitually preys on said children and succeeds in luring them into murdering their entire family; a twisted sense of ‘success’ that Ellison lacks.

The children of this film do not have much, if any, jurisdiction over their own lives and actions, which reinforces Alegre’s argument that “just as children were infantilised in the past to signify the patriarch’s total control of family life, they are now demonised to express the parents failure to control them” (Alegre, 2001).  In this case, Bughuul assumes the role of the ‘patriarch’ that Ashley lacked in Ellison.  She is misguided and easily influenced, resulting in her demise.  This fear directly follows Alegre’s notion of children’s role in horror films, as Ashley literally becomes the monster that the parents are unable to contain.  In this case, Ashley’s murder of her family represents the most severe instance of parental incompetence.

It

Based on the novel by Stephen King by the same name, Andy Muschietti’s 2017 film, It, follows a group of seven young outcasts that band together against an evil force reigning over their small town in Maine.  After Bill’s younger brother, Georgie, goes missing (see above), the team of misfits works together to unearth the true nature of Georgie’s disappearance.  Soon the children discover the existence of an ancient monster that takes the form of a clown–the infamous Pennywise. The clown itself is one of the most feared images in horror, especially for children.  Pennywise, however, has a distinct advantage over the prototypical clown in the sense that he is capable of taking any form he wants.  For each child in the movie, he takes on the form of one of their greatest fears. In the case of Stanley, seen here, Pennywise takes the form of an admittedly nightmarish painting. Pennywise’s form changes depending on the child, which invokes a very targeted type of horror for each individual. As the film progresses, each kid must conquer their own greatest fears, whatever it may be, in order to come together to later defeat the evil Pennywise.

Like Bughuul in Sinister, Pennywise embodies the recipe for a postmodern monster: a 1) violent clown that 2) disrupts the normal boundaries of daily life by 3) irrationally tormenting and capturing innocent children by preying on their fears.  Pennywise, however, does so in a way that inherently grants the children more agency.  He does not seek to possess these children to serve as pawns for his own agenda, like Bughuul.  Instead, Pennywise requires the form of each child’s unique phobias to lure them with the hopes of acquiring their souls.  It forces the children to make their own decisions that will ultimately decide their fate, as they have the choice to either succumb to their fear or fight it.

In this scene, Henry Bowers, the bully of the film, gives in to the allure of Pennywise and ends up killing his father, who oddly enough is a cop.  When contrasted with the scene in which Beverly stands up against her abusive father, it becomes clear that the children and young teens in this film are more than just reflections of the wrongdoings of their parents.  Henry’s father simply wants his son to stop being a deviant and bully, but Henry’s warped sense of reality does not allow him to do so.  He is manipulated by Pennywise and, in turn, serves his agenda by giving in to his greatest fear (disapproval from his father) and erasing him from existence entirely.  One would expect Beverly, who was subject to years of physical and emotional abuse from her father, to lash out in such violent and aggressive ways, but this does not hold true.  She made the choice to stand up to her father which directly parallels standing up to Pennywise.  The children in this film, as opposed to Sinister, have a choice of who they want to be.  She appears to have a more developed sense of morality than both the adults in the film and Henry.

The complexity of Pennywise as a monster directly relates to the complex role the children have in this film.  Though Alegre directly references It (the 1986 novel) in her article focused on the works of Stephen King, the film subverts her idea of children in horror more than Sinister, the film that was written by someone other than King.  The group of outcast children thus revert the common trope of the helpless child, perhaps highlighting their standing as outcasts.  In doing so, these children ‘bridge the gap’ between child and adulting, acting as individuals that, for the most part, have yet to be morally corrupt.  They are able to combat Pennywise so effectively because these children exist outside the labels and expectations of their society.  The children defeating Pennywise represents a divide between groups of outcasts (children) and Pennywise (pressures and expectations of society).

Analysis

Both Sinister and It comfortably exist within the most recent generation of postmodern horror films, considering both their subject matter and respective releases within the past 10 years.  With that being said, these films leave the audience with entirely different senses of morality, representation, and justice. At the end of Sinister, the evil entity Bughuul remains victorious as Ellison unknowingly damns his whole family to death by moving to a new house.  His own daughter ends up killing the entire family and serves as a pawn for Bughuul’s agenda. The children in this film are not seen to have any autonomy and act as objects of control for both the demons and the parents.  It, on the other hand, exemplifies persistence and success with the children.  All seven of the outcasts team up to defeat Pennywise in the end, though it is suggested Pennywise can only be defeated for a period of time and will eventually return for blood in the future.  The triumph of the children in this film happened without the aide of parents, and perhaps in spite of them.  Their outcast label allows them to act outside the expectations of normal children, which grants them liberty within the film that children are not normally granted.

At the end of both films, however, the fate of the monster remains at large.  Bughuul was an obvious victor in Sinister by achieving his purpose once again, suggesting that he is likely to do so again in the future.  It, interestingly enough, circumvents the children’s triumph of the monster by alluding to the fact that Pennywise can only be defeated for a period of time.  The children then must create an oath, seen below, to ensure their mutual agreement to combat Pennywise when he inevitably returns.  As Pinedo requires, both films possess ambiguous endings and a bounded experience of fear, which sets up perfectly for a sequel. (Note: Sinister 2 was released in 2015, while It: Chapter Two is set to release in Fall 2019).

So where exactly do children fit within the postmodern horror genre now?  Conflicting roles of children in each film suggest that perhaps children serve a multitude of purposes within a postmodern horror flick.  Alegre believes that “the function popular American Gothic fulfills today is that of pointing at the dark areas of contemporary American society, among which the troubled relationship between children and adults stands out” (Alegre, 2001).  In both Sinister and It, this struggle between adult and child functions on multiple levels.  This explanation of children’s roles in horror that Alegre asserts is undeniably evident in each film.  For example, Ellison’s failure both as an author and a parent is projected onto his children in Sinister.  After all, he is the one that set the course of events into action by obsessing over the Super 8 films and inadvertently shunned his children by getting so caught up in his own business. Sinister would thus appear to further the ‘genre norm’ assertions made by Alegre, that children in horror represent the anxieties of parenthood.

Contrary to what Alegre argues in her own paper, however, the children of the 2017 rendering of It appear to have a heightened sense of ‘self’ when compared to the children in Sinister, and horror films more broadly.  This distinction is crucial to acknowledge the varying purposes that children serve within a postmodern horror film, which Alegre fails to adequately account for.  In his piece Staking the Monster, Edward Ingebretsen suggests that “for one thing, the child represents the vulnerability and powerlessness that society presumably exists to connect” (Ingebretsen, 1998).  The children in Sinister would appear to fall within this reading, while the children of It would not.  Ingebretsen then goes on to say that “throughout subsequent history, the child/monster icon provides a tactical method by which civic emotions contra can be mobilized, focused, and placed in the service of social reformation” (Ingebretsen, 1998).  I argue that, in the case of It, children also act as a means to examine the inherent opposition of child and monster, which tend to carry antonymous connotations.  Ingebretsen’s claim then suggests that the children in the film posses ‘contra-morals’ to those of the monsters.  Rather than just pointing out the failures of parents and society as seen in Sinister, the children in It represent a model of ‘social reformation’, offering a foundation of morals and identities to build upon.  As a group, the band of misfits in It represent a hope for a better future in addition to a critique of the past.

At the end of her article Alegre goes onto say, “[each film] present, thus, different aspects of the relationship between children and monstrosity in adult fiction. What emerges from them is a common portrait of childhood as a time of isolation spent facing the horrors created by adults, while fatherhood is portrayed as the task of facing the monsters arising from faulty parenting” (Alegre, 2001).  As is true with the postmodern movement in general, the place of children in films should be taken on a case-by-case basis.  Children serve a number of purposes that are incapable of being replicated by adult characters.  Children are increasingly becoming an autonomous group, which follows the societal trends of equality and proper representation.  In any case, the role of the child in postmodern horror would ultimately depend on the context and desired ideologies of the film.  The children either exist in contrast to the parents (Sinister), the monster (think of Insidious), or both (It), reflecting the failures of child-raising and modern society, while perhaps offering insight on how to reverse this, as is the case with It.  In unison, the ideas of Alegre and Ingebretsen work in unison to form a working, though constantly transforming, basis for the role of children within the postmodern horror genre.  As is true with all postmodern fiction, the use of children allows for a distanced look at our own values, hopes, and successes, in addition to our own anxieties and shortcomings.

Conclusion

While our highly vulgar horror films of the 21st Century may never be suitable for general child audiences, children still deserve critical roles and proper representations in the genre.  Neither Sinister nor It abandon the norms of the postmodern horror genre, but they do display varying degrees of representation among children within the genre.  As it stands, the child’s role within art is on the rise, representing societies movement towards the equal, ethical treatment of all children.

A child’s fit within the postmodern horror genre would thus appear to be non-linear.  Children are the most explicit representations of empathy within the media.  Their existence in horror films heightens the tension and allows a more overt look at our own anxieties and failures as a society.  Children represent the future, which subliminally hints that the future is either doomed or saved.  Depending on the writers/directors intended morality and commentary, the role of the child is always in fluctuation within postmodern horror.  If only six-year-old me was aware that a demon coming out of the television was a comment on societal shortcomings and parental failure, rather than a targeted warning of my future fate,  I might have been able to sleep better at night.

Works Cited

Alegre, Sara Martín. “NIGHTMARES OF CHILDHOOD: THE CHILD AND THE MONSTER IN FOUR NOVELS BY STEPHEN KING.” Atlantis, vol. 23, no. 1, 2001, pp. 105–114. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41055012.

Ingebretsen, Edward J. “Staking the Monster: A Politics of Remonstrance.” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation, vol. 8, no. 1, 1998, pp. 91–116. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1123915.

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.

Despite our innate instinct to survive and avoid threatening situations, humans have come to enjoy and even seek out thrilling and fearful experiences recreationally. From haunted houses to Hollywood horror, the adrenaline rush of jump scares and gore have become commercialized as a way to make money off of our desire for stimulation. One of these most lucrative domains, the film industry, has produced blockbuster after blockbuster to insight fear and unease in the audience, who hungrily consume the media content. With the invent of pervasive technology and rapidly shifting cultural attitudes, this genre of film has evolved into a more menacing, psychologically unsettling form. Postmodern horror, as described by Isabelle Pinedo in her piece “Recreational Terror: Postmodern Elements of the Contemporary Horror Film,” can be identified by five characteristics: the disruption of the everyday world, the transgression of conventional boundaries, concern for the validity of rationality, lack or narrative closure, and a bounded experience of fear (Pinedo, 20).In this way, the conventional horror trope of good conquering evil is replaced by a more ambiguous, unpredictable plot.

The horror genre has continued to change with the times, introducing “late-postmodern horror” in which fear stems from the unexpected, uncategorizable elements of the film. A work of late postmodern horror often includes the characteristics of an unbounded experience of fear, hypermediacy, self-reflexivity, and metalepsis. In particular, metalepsis, or the “transgression of boundaries between narrative levels or between the inside and outside of the text,” (Sample) has become a popular trope by which horror can instill in the audience an uncertainty about what is real and what is not. In this essay, I will explore and compare the use of postmodern and late postmodern horror elements in two works with the intention of highlighting the ways in which they differ and the overarching themes which they share.

Christopher Nolan’s Inception, often argued to be one of the most thought-provoking films of our generation, involves a story in which individuals can enter into and manipulate the dreams of others. There are levels to these dreams, such that you move further and further from the surface of reality as you dive deeper into the dream world. To reference a popular catch phrase regarding this film, the audience follows the characters as they experience the happenings of a dream, within a dream, within a dream etc. This film embodies and employs a number of Pinedo’s identified elements of postmodern horror, namely a disruption of everyday normalcy, the questioning of rationality, and a lack of narrative closure. In the film, characters are seduced from mundane, everyday life by the controllable, vibrate dream-reality. In fact, the dream worlds can so closely resemble reality that the Cobb, one of the main characters, cautions against the incorporation of real memories, as this is “the easiest way of losing your grasp on what’s real and what is a dream.” (Inception, 2010) In the name of rationality, you should always be able to tell what is real and what is not based on tell-tale markers. However, the construction of these “dream worlds” pull from the psychological content of the holder of the subconscious, such that reality and dream merge into an indistinguishable whole. Because rationality is no longer an effective means by which one can distinguish reality and fantasy, the characters each have a “totem” which signals to them which realm they are in. Cobb’s totem, a spinning top which once belonged to his wife (lost to the dream world), will spin endlessly if in a dream. This totem becomes particularly important at the end of the movie, which may be the most psychologically gripping and unsettling scene of the entire work. As the plot comes to a close, the characters successfully achieve their objective and emerge from the layers of dream realms. As the narrative follows Cobb and his pursuit of his goal to reunite with his children, it seems as though there will be a happy ending. However, as he returns, and we are witness to his emotional family reunion, Cobb puts his spinning top in motion on the table. Yet, Nolan plays the ultimate trick on the audience, as the scene goes black before we can see the top cease to spin. The one marker used to distinguish between dreams and reality is compromised by the reminder that we are the audience, viewing a snapshot of a story through a camera lens. This lack of narrative closure, wondering if Cobb has actually made it back or has just managed to enter another layer of dreams, coupled with the overt reminder that medium of this story is film, are two major elements of postmodern horror.

The second work which I will analyze is an episode of Black Mirror, a Netflix show written by Charlie Booker. This series is centered around the theme of technology advancing to the point where it turns sour, either taking over human nature or leading to its ultimate destruction. In the episode “Playtest,” a vulnerable American who claims to enjoy being scared participates in a beta test of a technologically advanced video game. This game uses the psychological content of the player to construct an individually catered horror experience, like the combination of a spider and an old bully.

However, the game takes a rapid turn, as the fear element of the game becomes unbearable for the character. Certain events take place, in which the ability to discern what is real or not real disintegrates. The game moves to use not only characters which take part in the everyday life of the player, but also incorporates tactile sensations such a touch and pain.

The are a number of scenes for both the player and the viewer which cannot be deemed “real” or “not real” until we are shown the comparison to actual reality. This is similar to the dream world of Inception, as dreams “feel real while we are in them. It is only when we wake up that we realize something was actually strange.” (Inception, 2010)This is an overt use of Pinedo’s element of postmodern horror, that the validity of rationality is thrown into question in conjunction with a disruption of everyday life. Overtime, the psychological specificity of the game is too personal, and the player begs to be let out.

We see the player as he is removed from the game, and proceeds through a series of “waking-up,” until he is released to go home and return to his mom. The final minutes of the episode involve everyday elements, such as planes, flight attendants, the player’s home, and even his mother. This is as “real” as it gets, pulling from both unique sentimental aspects of life as well as generically “real” elements with which the audience can identify. However, it is not until the last 5 minutes of the episode, that it is revealed to the audience that the player never did make it home, but that he dies in the testing room. In this way, the audience experiences the majority of the episode thinking that, based on conventional rationality, the player is moving towards returning to the “real world” with a happy ending. The viewer is taken through a rollercoaster of levels, as they are time and time again shown that they are wrong—what they thought was finally “real” was in fact not.

Both of these media works employ postmodern horror elements, as identified by Pinedo, to instill in the audience an unsettling doubt of what is real, not real, and their ability to discern between the two. Yet there is an even greater overarching theme found in the comparison of these narratives: the use of a certain type of metalepsis. Instead of an intrusion of extradiegetic elements into the diegetic realm, the metalepsis “emerges not from the transgressed intrusion between the levels of ‘telling’ and ‘told,’ but from the interferences among the different levels of the ‘told.’” (Kiss, 37) In Inception, this is seen in the layers and layers of “dream” reality through which we follow the characters through the film. In “Playtest,” the different levels within the narrative occur as part of the player’s experience of the horror game. This form of metalepsis can be just as impactful, if not more so, than the typical form. In his analysis “Narrative Metalepsis as Diegetic Concept in Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010),” Miklós Kiss explains the effect of metalepsis as seen in Inception. By layering diegetic levels within the same narrative, “the viewer becomes doubtful about the status of reality… the idea preys upon the sense that the metaleptic playfulness may transgress not only the story’s embedded levels, but the film’s diegetic frame too, triggering an outward, extradiegetic emotion that unravels baffling feelings in the viewer.” (Inception, 42) While this analysis is specific to inception, and the fact that the deepest level of the dream world could be reality and vice versa, this effect appears in “Playtest” as well. In the book Black Mirror and Critical Theory, by Angela M. Cirucci and Barry Vacker, the episode is described as “moving in the borderland between virtual reality, perception, and memory.” (Circucci & Vacker, 206). The numerous layers of “reality” which the player experiences could all feasibly be true reality, based on rationality and our perception of everyday life. Unlike Inception, where the audience is left without a final answer about reality, it is revealed to the audience in the last five minutes of the show that almost none of the narrative has been real. In the case of both of these works of post-modern horror, the same form of metalepsis instills in the viewer uncertain about the ability to tell what is real or fake, causing a ripple of existential questioning and fear even after the movie or episode ends.

The final point of comparison between Charlie Booker’s “Playtest” and Christopher Nolan’s Inception is the concept of time during the narrative. In recounting his prior experience in the dream realm, Cobb explains the dangers of going too far beneath the surface. He says, “I didn’t understand the concept that hours could turn into years down there, that we could get trapped so deep, that when we wound up on the shore of our own subconscious, we lost sight of what was real.” (Inception, 2010) In the dream world, the deeper you go, the farther away from real time you get. This time disconnect appears in “Playtest,” as the audience experiences what seems to be hours in the game, but in actuality is only a matter of seconds. In the last five minutes of the episode, the audience returns to the brightly lit test room, in contrast with the dark tones of the game-world. In this scene, the camera focuses on testing assistant as she records the data for the test, and under the duration, she types 0.04 seconds.

The hours and hours of time spent in these alternate realities, following the player through the video game, his layers of waking up, and his entire flight from the UK back to his home in the U.S., lasted less than a tenth of a second. Thus, in both media works, the most linear, constant aspect of reality is skewed such that we can no longer rely on it to contextualize our world. Above all other aspects of the media, this crack in the foundational concept of time is the most profound for the audience.

At the core of postmodern horror is the psychological, unnerving elements which stay with the audience beyond the jump scares and gore of conventional horror. In employing Pinedo’s postmodern elements of unbounded experience and the uncertainty of rationality in conjunction with diegetic metalepsis, the 2010 film Inception and “Playtest” shake the foundation of what the audience considers to be constant and non-negotiable: time. Our modern conception of time is linear, as its governance over days, months and years gives meaning to our experience on earth. However, the introduction of multiple narrative layers and the inconsistency of time rips out from under us the meaning of life as we know it. This form of existential fear and uncertainty, in my opinion, is the essence of late postmodern horror.

Videogames have always been a favorite timekiller of mine. They offer an escape into worlds beyond on our own and allow us to explore and recreate ourselves in new ways. This freedom enables us to be monsters or heroes. More often than not we choose the path of the hero though. Sure some people are out to destroy and enslave. It is even therapeutic sometimes to tear down things you have built. This need to destroy does not often get the better of most of us though. In my case, I almost always choose the path of the hero. After all I am a marvel age kid. My childhood and young adult life has been full of various superhero and avenger movies in which good always triumphs over evil, Infinity War aside. I always dreamed of having super powers and being the hero of a story. In my case I think it has done me a lot of good. Being influenced by a hero certainly isn’t a bad thing, as long as you don’t go full Syndrome with it. Even still I find myself acting in ways that a hero wouldn’t once a controller is placed in my hand. I will be examining three pieces of entertainment for this essay, Red Dead Redemption II, Black Mirror: USS Callister and West World. These three games and shows have similar themes, but they approach them differently. The two previous mentioned shows made me have a “oh shit” moment during my play through of Red Dead that I think is important to an avid gamer or Movie goer to consider. The thought was, what if these characters are aware of my actions and are just helpless to escape them. What if I am not the good guy after all but a puppet master playing God in a sandbox of my creation and destruction.

To take a step back and examine things let’s look at West World. The show is centered around a futuristic western theme park where rich guests go to reenact their western fantasies. Sounds great, but then the animatronics slowly start to remember their past lives and the system through which they reset everyday breaks down. Their lives still reset when killed, but their memory stays. That’s the key, memory. We tell ourselves as humans that things of lesser intelligence can’t really be effected by our actions and words because, “a fish can only remember like 5 seconds right?” Let’s say Chad is correct in his fish assumption, in that case after you tap a fish’s bowl I bet the fish hates your guts for the 5 seconds it CAN remember. In V.S. Ramachandran’s book The Tell-Tale Brain he explores what it is that makes us human. He identifies memory as an important aspect of being human, but not a defining one. (Ramachandran, 285) Humans suffer from disorders that limit the brain’s ability to recall short term or long term memories and yet they are still distinctly human. Regardless of the amount of time we can recall memories are still an important part of what makes something sentient. That being said there are other unique attributes beyond memory that define us.

Back to West World. The characters have three other distinct qualities that humanize them for the audience. They look, sound and act like we would. We learn later that their actions are almost entirely procedurally generated and predetermined, but the familiarity of their look and decisions humanize them. One example would be the scene where Dolores remembers her past life and the secrets buried within it. This creates the narrative tension that the whole story is centered around. The breaking down of a system based on memory. She sees flashes of the past and the puzzle she is destined to solve. These flashes are her “core memories,” similar memories are found in people, traumatic events and feelings that dictate our personalities and approaches to various situations. West World is not the only show to explore the idea of the lifeless gaining sentient capabilities, so let’s take a jump in a spaceship real quick and head to the world of Black Mirror.

Black Mirror is known for its various social and political comments on society and technology and its most recent series no different. In the first episode of the series we believe we are a part of a Star Trek themed videogame crew exploring the vast reaches of space. In reality we are in a videogame on the hard drive of a depressed, psychopathic game developer who is lost within the fiction of his own game. We see how the characters in the game are digital representations of the various coworkers he hates and or catches feelings for. He creates his own private playground in which he tortures, sexually assaults and constructs fantasies of his imagination. He does so while thinking he is the hero. Now the lines get a little blurry as we take a brief look introspectively. I can name a lot of people I shot who didn’t deserve it in videogames. I have yet to feel any real life consequences for those actions though because in the end it’s just a game, right?

The characters in the Black Mirror game are sentient and are feeling everything. Now, they take advantage of the futuristic videogame they are set in to contact the outside their world and, spoiler alert, eventually get their revenge. Not without their trials and tribulations, like James’s child being murdered and Annette’s (Robert’s sexual interest) face being erased, harking back to an actual Star Trek episode. Boy, being in a videogame sure seems like fun! It is though… for the guy who is controlling the game. When you hold the controller you are God, ruling over meaningless mortals and so you murder them senselessly. Not actually, but sometimes yeah. Once again, sometimes all you need to do is destroy something to feel a little better. I know that was my approach to the new game Red Dead Redemption II.

Open world games offer the ultimate freedom for gamers. We control our character’s outfits, dialog, and actions. All in a world in which we are king. Sure there are enemies that we struggle to kill, but in the end losing to them is just another respawn loading screen. I doubt anyone disagrees about the omnipotent powers that videogames give the player, where they will disagree is on how the player uses these powers. Now every game is different so your actions can be interpreted differently. Games like Call of Duty are linear and almost always have you play as the good guys, with the exception of one airport mission in CODMWII (GRAPHIC). That mission aside those stories are pretty one-sided. Where videogames get interesting psychologically is in games like I mentioned above. “Open World” and RPG games. Games in which you are the hero in a vast digitized world of procedurally generated characters. Sounds a little like West World doesn’t it. In Red Dead Redemption you even play as a cowboy.

I could write an entire essay just on Red Dead Redemption II, but I will stick to just a few key aspects that I find relevant to this argument. The consequences of actions, good vs evil system and your character’s mortality. To narrow my examination even more I will be studying these three themes through the debt collection missions. ALSO SPOILERS AHEAD. In Red Dead you are free to do pretty much whatever you want. It is produced by the same company that makes GTA so you know that means you can literally do anything; no matter how morally corrupt. In the debt collection missions, you are given the names and addresses of settlers who have borrowed money from your gang and failed to pay you back. At the start of the game you are given a debt collection mission from the camp’s treasurer. You go to the debtor’s house and find he lives alone and is determined to not pay you. So naturally you beat him until he cannot stop you from stealing his household items, one of which is a wedding band that presumably belonged to his now deceased wife. Not exactly the actions of a Hero, but business is business… right? You continue on your way after, making even on the debt and go about exploring the world. The developers didn’t want players abusing their freedom though or taking the negative actions forced upon you in the story too seriously. They created the Hero and villain system to monitor players.

Being a Hero and a villain in the game comes with different unique pros and cons. Villains have more cons, but that’s the life of a desperado I suppose. The main point of the ranking system is to determine which ending the player receives. Good players have a more honorable end, where as bad players, you guessed it, have a rather upsetting one. Also to clarify now, I say end as in the end of Arthur’s campaign I don’t count the annoying epilogue. This good bad goes up and down depending on the actions of the player, helping citizens, talking to people and donating money gives a player honor. Robbing trains, people, and murdering gives a player dishonor. For many people, such as myself, we would like to be the hero of the story. That does not mean we do not do things we would certainly not do in real life. For example, I have no interest in robbing a bank and murdering an entire sheriff’s department, but in Red Dead Redemption II that is exactly what I did. Don Gotterbarn had a good analysis on the psychological mindset of such actions in his essay, “The ethics of video games: Mayhem, death and the training of the next generation.” He says that players are aware of the fact they are playing a game and that things we find enjoyable in the game world are not things we would imagine to be fun in real life. (Gotterbarn, 2.1) I agree with this analysis 100%. There is very little guilt to be felt in a game because we rarely face any long term consequences for our actions.

Red Dead takes a unique stance on the ideas of consequences and guilt though, by transforming you into a mortal being once again. You realize 3/4th’s into the story that you are terminally ill with TB. You are going to die no matter what you do. So it is no longer about the man you want to be in the game, but the man you want to be remembered as. An interesting twist. Suddenly the player is given the option to refuse payment for good deeds as Arthur seems aware of his inevitable fate. It is unnerving. You are sad. Your god is dying. Arthur gets skinnier as the game progresses and those he previously wronged by collecting debts from reappear. The Downes family debt story is very interesting, but too long for this essay so I will link their story here. In summary you beat the sick father of the family to death and through him you accidentally contract the TB that eventually kills you.

Arthur’s whole demeanor is changed and his approach to friends and strangers is forever transformed. He is humbler and sympathetic, leading to two scenes that I felt were very emotionally powerful. Start the clip at 3:20 and end at 8:20. Arthur still knows hes a bad man and the player is forced to face those whom he/she has mistreated throughout their play through. This made me feel particularly uneasy. Never before had a game remembered my actions in such detail and forced me to face them again. It changed how I looked at the game and interacted with people. I thought back to West World and Black Mirror and realized the plot of their stories weren’t quite as far off as I had previously thought. It changed how I approached the game and made me reexamine my approach to open world games as a whole. In the end I think the realization of the player created horror is the greatest digital horror of the modern age. We are the villains of almost all our games because we treat procedurally generated characters as objects and never act as we would in the real world. We do so because we assume that all is forgiven once a new save loads.

Works Cited

Gotterbarn, Don. “The Ethics of Video Games: Mayhem, Death,   and the Training of the next Generation.” Information Systems  Frontiers, vol. 12, no. 4, 2009, pp. 369–377.

Ramachandran, Vilayanur S. The Tell-Tale Brain a Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human. W.W. Norton, 2012.

The Psycho Hiding in Plain Sight

Creep (2014), directed by Patrick Brice, utilizes and subverts elements of postmodern horror to evoke fear through metalepsis. Pinedo discusses the violation of boundaries, the blurring of “boundaries between subjective and objective representation” (Pinedo, 22), as a method of generating metalepsis, the transgression of said boundaries. In the film, we are presented with the POV (point of view) perspective of Aaron’s relationship with Josef. Immediately, this puts us in the shoes, rather the eyes, of the protagonist and allows us to better empathize with the character. However, Brice subverts the POV perspective by carefully weaving in alternate perspectives that create a greater sense of voyeurism towards the found footage. The film interestingly intersplices the POV perspective with set stills of the camera resting on a table or counter, as well as pull backs that remind us that we are in fact still watching a film. The play between immediacy and hypermediacy (Bolter, Grusin) creates a sense of uneasy voyeurism that evokes aspects of postmodern horror. For example, the haircutting scene has us helplessly watching Aaron sleep when all the sudden, Josef takes the camera and begins to “check out”, a la the male gaze, his victim. He then sets the camera down and begins to cut a lock of Aaron’s hair. This shift from immediacy to hypermediacy and then back to immediacy, alongside the act itself, is unsettling for the viewer because we are forced to reconcile the nature of the film, a found footage film. Similarly, the film utilizes pull back shots to again remind us that we are in fact watching a found footage film. The first instance of this shot is the “burial” scene. At first, we think Josef is burying a Aaron’s dead corpse, but the camera quickly pulls back and we realize it is Aaron just recording the television screen. This abrupt jump from perceived immediacy to hypermediacy creates more unease that we as viewers feel as we try and determine what is real and what is not. Additionally, this scene incorporates aspects of metaphysicality because we are watching Aaron view found footage. Typically in found footage horror, we maintain our immediacy because the film is shot from solely one perspective, the  singular POV. In her article, “Found-Footage Horror and the Frame’s Undoing”, Cecilia Sayad argues that the found footage genre is so effective in generating metalepsis “because the camera through which we see things is not external to the diegesis” (Sayad). Creep metaphysically subverts that postmodern element of a transgression of boundaries, of which POV found footage is an example of, by playing with the diegesis of the camera, by interweaving multiple alternate perspectives with the original POV that shift our perception of the film from immediate to hypermediate, forcing us to think critically about the genre itself.

Creep additionally evokes elements of postmodern horror by see-sawing the sympathy and empathy for the monster. The film continually builds and breaks the sympathy Aaron, and the viewer, feels for Josef, thus playing with the monster form as described by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen in his essay, “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)”. Cohen claims that monsters are “disturbing hybrids whose externally incoherent bodies resist attempts to include them in any systematic structuration” (Cohen, 4). I argue that the film plays with Aaron’s sense of sympathy through a back and forth exhibited by the monster, Josef. Though Cohen is discussing the physical problems with monster structuralization/categorization, I think his argument applies here as well as we the viewers try to categorize our sympathy, or lack thereof, for Josef. At the start of the film, we are given key plot to the story itself through Josef’s background. We learn that Josef hires Aaron to film himself talking to his unborn son, as his cancer returns and he is given only a few months left to live. We, through Aaron’s view, immediately feel sympathy towards Josef, a dying father who wants to leave some sort of remembrance for his unborn son. However, directly following Josef’s garnered sympathy is an awkward invitation to film him in the tub. The tub scene begins the see-sawing of Aaron’s, and our, sympathy as we start to see Josef in this dual, give and take nature. Our sympathy remains here, but is thrown into question because the awkwardness of the scenario. Imagine meeting somebody for the first time and then within the first few moments of interaction, they ask you to film themselves in the bathroom. The film purposefully includes these dynamic shifts in sympathy and lack thereof to play with our understanding of the monster. Another example of this see-saw of emotion is how Josef continually garner’s sympathy and then pretends to scare Aaron, and the audience, through jumpscares (a horror film trope). Multiple times in the film, Josef will encourage Aaron and ourselves to give him some sympathy, one example is the initial invitation for a casual drink. We are forced to feel some sense of sympathy for the monster; what is the harm in a casual drink? However, Brice intentionally throws the sympathy back at Aaron and the audience through jumpscares that revoke the emotion. The last example of this in the film is of Josef’s earnest confession and then his analysis of Aaron as a victim. We sympathize for a lonely man who is just looking for a friend because we know that loneliness is agony. However, that sympathy that continually drives the narrative is what leads to Aaron’s death and our confusion surrounding Josef as a monster. Because we feel both extremes of the emotion in play, we are unsure what to make of it as a whole. I believe the film intentionally plays with this emotion to play with genre norms, in this case, with how we view the monster in horror film. Where we typically feel no direct sympathy for the monster, postmodern horror throws that sympathy on its head and makes us critically analyze every detail in an effort to categorize our own emotions towards a dual natured monster.

Living in the Dream

P.T. (Silent Hills) (2014), developed by Konami and Hideo Kojima, evokes postmodernism through its use of the surreal to generate metalepsis, a blurring of lines between what’s real and what’s not. Aiding the surreal in the postmodern game is the lack of logic, as Pinedo writes “that not everything can or should be dealt with in rational terms” (Pinedo, 22). Beginning with the setting of the game, you are situated in a corridor that has one entrance and one exit. This exit seemingly leads back to the entrance of the original corridor. Pinedo writes that in postmodern horror, we are “caught within a closed system from which there is no exit” (Pinedo, 22). I believe that this game plays that quote literally, where there is no real exit from this suburban corridor (there is a front door to the outside but it is locked). What generates the metalepsis is that to progress through the game, you never move on to another area, you instead descend into a more twisted and surreal version of the same looped corridor you have been in since the beginning. The realistic setting of the suburban home contrasting the increasingly dreamlike logic creates a lack of bearing that ultimately blurs the lines between fact and fiction. Furthermore, the progression through the game requires the player to look for enigmatic clues, ones that would not necessary think of doing. One example is in the later part of the game, you must listen to the radio give you instructions and then examine a portrait on the table in order to progress. The radio’s broadcast interspersed with fourth wall breaking (more surrealism) instructions and the fantastical gunshot wound to the woman’s head inside the portrait help create more metalepsis and blur lines because the offputting logic does not follow the realistic setting of the suburban home. Because we all assume the home to be a safe space, the lack of logic here creates a sense of unease that we as the players drown in. It is hard to determine what we can classify as real and what is a dream. However, P.T. (Silent Hills) has a scene in the game where its own logic becomes broken, a dream within a dream. Here you are in the house but in an even more nightmarish version. The game’s setting becomes overtly distorted as “reality” warps into a living nightmare. The looping corridor that you have been inside all game seems to coil itself into a maze of eyeballs and bare photos. Sonically, the non diegetic music also shifts into an even more ominous, foreboding haze the engulfs the player. The idea of a dream inside of a dream metaphysically takes the logic postmodernism subverts and pushes it through the glass ceiling. I argue that this is one of the strongest points of postmodernism in the game and that it takes the line between what’s real and what’s not and obliterates it, to the point where we can only assume that we as the player are stuck in the dream. However, after all logic and illogic have homogenized into one, the game throws a curveball at the player and pretends to glitch out. This scene also includes more enigmatic, surreal clues (a series of numbers), spoken by an outside voice that add to the overall metalepsis but what peaks the fourth wall meter is when the game seemingly resets and catches the player off guard, a true transgression of boundaries. This abrupt shift hypermediates the mainly immediate view of the player. For most of the game, the only fact we can hold onto is the camera’s perspective, first person view. Kojima intentionally throws this “bug” into the game in order shake up the only thing we as players have left to hold onto, the framing. This fourth wall breaking scene makes us reanalyze the game as a medium and creates a distance between us the player and the player character. But we have to reacclimate ourselves to the game’s setting once it reboots so that we can continue pressing forward towards the unknown goal. Parallel to found footage horror as described by Sayad, “the frame’s elasticity and permeability” (Sayad) envelops us the player because we have moment of withdraw from the game itself through the “glitch”. The frame extends to include us, the player, which enters us into the dreamlike setting of the game as a whole. P.T. (Silent Hills) takes surrealism and makes the player agree to play by its terms so that it can then break those terms and further isolate the player.

The Birth of Self Aware Postmodernism (coin new term here←)

I believe that by comparing these two postmodern horror works, I am able to say that the genre has began to sprout an offshoot subgenre of postmodernism. A brand of postmodernism that itself is aware of genre code and works to play with that code. Firstly, both medias serve to point out mediacy and dismantle their own logic. While Creep shifts its mediacy through the movement in the camera (pull back shots), P.T. (Silent Hills) shifts the mediacy through the introduction of the fourth wall (the game glitch). I believe that this concurrent shift from immediacy to hypermediacy and then back to immediacy disorrients our logic and then requires it to work and resituate itself in an attempt to make sense of what is what. In Creep, the entire movie, we assume it is Aaron that has control over the camera, our view. Even when the camera shifts between immediacy and hypermediacy, we know that it is Aaron that holds us metaphorically in his hands. However, the ending  of the movie plays with that when it is revealed that Josef is the one that has the camera, it is his footage we as viewers find. Similarly, P.T. (Silent Hills) sets up the gameplay inside dreamlike logic. It commands the player to adhere to the logic, or lack thereof, in order to progress throughout the game. Even when there is a shift in mediacy, when the game pretends to glitch, we have time to resituate ourselves in the logic that was presented to us earlier in the game. However, in the red hallway scene, our newfound sense in dream logic is taken from us when we the player lose all bearing in the setting we thought to be true. We are forced to learn the new rules or risk being stuck in the infinite loop. Both medias intentionally throw their own rules out in an effort to critique the postmodern horror genre itself. Secondly, both works serve to cause confusion in the audience by presenting two extremes and forcing the audience to reconcile for themselves what is real and what is not. In Creep, we are presented with a dual natured villain, one who displays sympathy, even begs for it at the end, but who ultimately revokes it from us. He continually plays off of Aaron’s good nature and then immediately throws it back at his face to make a point (a wolf in sheep’s clothes!). He garners sympathy in his stories but his actions serve to undermine Aaron’s, and our, sympathy. We are left to decide whether or not we should feel bad for the monster. The film plays with our emotions by presenting us with two extremes and causing us to see-saw back and forth between each. Similarly, P.T. (Silent Hills) plays with our emotions through its deliberate setting and mechanics. Because it situates us inside the home, we assume that we are allowed to be at ease. However, it takes the suburban setting and contrasts it with surreal and gruesome images. Additionally, I think the decision to maintain the same floorplan of the corridor throughout the game was intentionally chosen in order to give the player something concrete to rely on, something to situate ourselves around while the exterior slowly deteriorates into a nightmare. Because we as players cannot distinctly feel the presence of the home or the surreal singularly, we cannot separate out what is real and what is dream. The “glitch” scene itself begs us to reconcile with the game and determine which parts are real and which parts are not. Both medias understand that an element of postmodern horror is the transgression of boundaries, the unreal bleeding into the real. However, unlike previous postmodern works, they both effectively move from real to unreal and vice versa seamlessly to push our emotions to edge just swing them back in again. These two medias display the postmodernism can be reflexive upon itself and can be self aware. I argue that one of the genre’s fundamental characteristics, subverting norms, can be self reflexive upon itself and that a new subgenre of postmodernism is beginning to form. A subgenre that critiques what postmodern horror has laid out in an effort to make the genre fully self aware, not just of other genres and mediums but of itself as well.

Bibliography

Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. 1999. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Bolter, Jay David, Blair MacIntyre, Maribeth Gandy, and Petra Schweitzer. 2006. “New Media and the Permanent Crisis of Aura.” Convergence 12 (1): 21– 39.

Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, “Monster Theory : Reading Culture”, University of Minnesota Press, 1996. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/davidson/detail.action?docID=310376.

Duplass, Mark. Creep. Netflix, Independent, 2014, www.netflix.com/watch/70306646?tctx=0%2C0%2Ca96e4838-3f4f-4973-a033-0652cbacf968-4284972%2C%2C.

English, ODiN OnLiNe, director. P.T. Silent Hills ★ NO COMMENTARY FULL Walkthrough Movie Gameplay PS4 Playable Teaser PT Ending. YouTube, YouTube, 16 Aug. 2014, www.youtube.com/watch?v=blD2TiavFJA.

GameZone, director. YouTube. YouTube, YouTube, 14 Aug. 2014, www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6NCC-nnvMU&t=972s.

Grusin, Richard. 2010. Premediation: Affect and Mediality after 9/11. New York: Palgrave Macmillan

Sayad, Cecilia. “Found-Footage Horror and the Frame’s Undoing.” Cinema Journal, vol. 55 no. 2, 2016, pp. 43-66. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/cj.2016.0003

Ryan, Marie-Laure & Emerson, Lori & Robertson, J.. The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. Project MUSE

Both In the Mouth of Madness (1995), directed by John Carpenter and The Cabin in the Woods (2012), by Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon, display an overt awareness of the fact that they are horror films. Newer horror films, in order to be successful, must be aware of the films that have come before them. Both Mouth of Madness and Cabin fit Kimberly Jackson’s definition of metahorror: “their self-reflexivity is part of their construction, […] they expose the limits of the narrative structure in which they operate; […] they are at once definers of the genre and moments or examples of it” (Jackson 11). Metahorror is a reaction to the oversaturation of the genre, often commenting not just on conventions but also on the role of technology in the horror film. With this focus on self-reflexivity, it appears that horror has moved away from what has made horror so appealing in the past: jump scares, suspense, gore, and the reinforcement of normality—all of which allow for a cathartic experience. Postmodern horror films can still frighten, however. Both films include gruesome violence, which Isabel Pinedo argues is in line with postmodernism’s intent to imagine “the fragility of the body by transgressing its boundaries and revealing it inside out” (Pinedo 21). So, though an ironic distance is created between the events on screen and the viewer, it gives the viewer space to reflect on deeper fears, rather than reestablishing the norm.

In terms of theory, postmodernism is “self-conscious, self-contradictory, self-undermining,” and committed to “doubleness, or duplicity” (Hutcheon 1). Postmodernism is borne out of our desire to decentralize previously wholeheartedly accepted acts of life and ways of thinking (though in attempting to decentralize these, may accidentally be reinforcing them). Postmodernism underlines “in its ironic way the realization that all cultural forms of representation—literary, visual, aural—in high art or the mass media are ideologically grounded, that they cannot avoid involvement with social and political relations and apparatuses” (Hutcheon 3). Underlying postmodernism is the assumption that “we can only know the world through ‘a network of socially established meaning systems, the discourses of our culture,’” which rings especially true when looking at the popularity of films such as Scary Movie or Tucker and Dale vs. Evil, which rely on an established knowledge of the horror genre to have meaning (Hutcheon 7). Postmodernism calls into question all that which people had taken for granted, from social order to the existence of reality outside of representation.

Even the name of John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness is self-reflexive and reflects a postmodern playfulness and self-awareness as John Carpenter is a prominent horror filmmaker in his own right (Pilipp 56). As the credits roll before the film starts, book jackets for the novel In the Mouth of Madness are being printed off in the background.

The film acknowledges the construction of the novel which it centers on, hinting that viewers might do the same for the film they are watching. The story of the film follows a cynical detective (a very film-noir character, making scenes shot at night, with chiaroscuro lighting and an emphasis on water in the streets, much more purposeful) as he tries to find a horror book author, Sutter Cane, similar to Stephen King.

Postmodernity illustrates a return to the individual rather than the pre-WWII belief in humanism and collective progress, so it seems fitting that the protagonist of Mouth of Madness would be so reminiscent of a noir hero, a genre focused on self-reliance and isolation (Jancovich 84). Cane believes that the stories he has written are true and that the events will unfold as he describes if people read the book. It is the readers that give the work its meaning, which makes Cane’s readers complicit. The role of the author becomes complex; was it as Cane said, that “they were telling me what to write. Giving me the power to make it all real,” effectively erasing the need for an author? (Mouth of Madness) Outside forces are driving Cane, who eventually is able to control John Trent, the main character. Throughout the film, viewers have to question what parts of the film are “real” and which are related to the novel. The lines of reality and fiction can be blurred due to postmodern intertextuality; “as a result of this fusion (or substitution) of fiction and (for) reality on the part of the viewer, Hollywood has developed a new fad: the tendency of movies to be increasing self-referential, drawing attention to themselves as productions or employing cross-references to other movies” (Pilipp 55-56). The film closes with Trent going to see the film version of the novel he has been forced to set upon the world—he is the star and it is also directed by John Carpenter.

Trent sees his mediated image on the screen, just as audiences watch through their screens. The references that the film makes to the novel and film which take place inside of it force audiences to ask about their own role in the production, and whether they are unwittingly part of a representation of reality.

Intertextuality in Cabin is in many ways more overt, directly referencing monsters and tropes from the horror genre under the guise of business discussions in the corporation headquarters. Hadley and Sitterson are presented as ‘authors,’ yet their characters, and even occasionally the surroundings, elude their control, despite their best efforts. The intended audience within the film is the ancient ones who require sacrifice in the form of performance, much like reality television (Woofter 269). Horror film audiences are put in allegiance with the old gods, as unsympathetic viewers who just want to see gore and death before going on with their lives. Cabin postulates that “the horror genre—caught in its own vacuum of prepackaged, ritualized formula—must self-destruct before it can be ‘reborn’” (Woofter 270). Cabin both celebrates the degeneration of generic formula and critiques it, participates in the generic conventions even as it subverts them. Though most of the meta commentary takes place in the control room by the higher ups, there are times when the college kids realize something is amiss, such as when Marty questions the decision to split up. Because American culture has been so inundated by horror film conventions, it is difficult for an audience to take a traditional horror film seriously and audiences might find characters more appealing and intelligent when they are aware of the situation they are in and the potential absurdity of the plot that surrounds them.

As the previous sections focusing on intertextuality have hinted at, one of the core tenets of postmodern horror is the transgression between reality and fiction, often highlighted through the use of intertextual and self-referential references. Very early in Cabin, it is revealed that there is something monstrous at play, depriving viewers of the gradual reveal. Moments after the characters enter the arena of the cabin, a bird flies into the electrical grid which separates the real world from the virtual, survival-gaming space, which alerts viewers that what hides in these woods (such as a zombie redneck torture family) does not matter.

Instead, pleasure is derived from the voyeurism as we see these characters manipulated and begin to conform into the roles the genre has prescribed for them. “Thus begins a process by which Cabin continually attempts to dislocate both viewer identification and the pleasurable contemplation of attractions by constructing a rather chilly spectatorial position that can derive pleasure solely by looking askance at the proceedings” (Woofter 272). Critics of the film have claimed this apparent distance diminishes the effect of the horror and all the scares are ironic, and therefore safe. But consider that “it is the function of irony in postmodern discourse to posit that critical distance and then undo it,” and Cabin only loses its effect when audiences do not think to reflect the film onto their own lives (Hutcheon 15). This voyeuristic tendency is heightened by “the control-room types behaving how Whedon and Goddard seem to feel horror audiences behave: by ogling the victims’ half-naked bodies, laughing and shouting at their suffering, betting on futile choices they will make, or ignoring them altogether while they go for more beer and chips” (Woofter 276-277).

Some horror is created by reflecting this image onto viewers and reminding them of their role as witnesses to horrific acts which create a mixture of pleasure and unease. The scenes of slaughter themselves are never played for laughs, only becoming humorous when contrasted to the work scenes which remove the viewer from the narrative.

Cabin aligns itself against reality TV, and “draws upon a contemporary discourse that considers visual representation as offering neither infallible access to nor insulation from the real” (Woofter 273). Marty’s skepticism of what is real about the situation reflects the skepticism of reality TV as well as subgenres which utilize observational documentary tactics, such as found footage horror.

Reality is created by the media through which is represented, and the simulacrum replaces the real. If one Hadley and Sitterson are the ‘authors’ of the narrative surrounding Marty, it draws the audience’s attention to the constructed nature of all those genres which we consider more ‘real.’ In terms of the style of the film itself, “in postmodern fiction, too, the documentary impulse of realism meets the problematizing of reference seen earlier in self-reflexive modernism” (Hutcheon 29). ‘Real’ is created through systems of meaning and representation and postmodernism questions what real is and how we come to understand it (Hutcheon 33). In the meta sense, Cabin forces its characters to reconsider what they’ve considered real—especially concerning the premise of the horror genre, which in turn begs viewers to consider the horror films they have seen more closely. The aesthetics of a slasher movie (lack of establishing shots to create confusion, cluttered and dark mise-en-scene, and POV shots from the killer’s perspective) are contrasted with the scenes from the control room, a boundary which is crossed when the monsters are let loose.

When Dana and Marty storm the corporate headquarters, the control room becomes part of the simulation it was trying to control, further confusing the line between reality and representation (Jackson 27).

What the film might lack in traditional jump scares and heightened suspense, it makes up for in commentary on the fabric of our reality and what myths we have either accepted or rejected as truth. “As postmodern man confronts the horror of his own technology turned against him, his survival depends on his ability ‘to realize that the Other is part of the Self,’” and that those that work in the corporate headquarters and even the old gods are just as much a part of humanity as he is (Magistrale 13). The cabin, traditionally considered scary due to its isolation and lack of civilization, instead becomes frightening because it is heavily monitored, the inhabitants manipulated, and the line between reality and representation is trespassed by indifferent overseers. The plan of Hadley and Sitterson only works if the five youths believe they are acting on their own free will—a frightening notion, since most people believe that their choices are always their own.

The transgression between real and fictional is just as striking in Mouth of Madness, though less focused on the end of the horror film genre and more focused on the power of the audience. In the film there is a revolution against humanity itself, and it begs us to “question our own unconscious fears, beliefs and prejudices, not only in terms of the desire that instigates them, but also in terms of the repercussions for society in general” (Belville 17). What is scarier—that Cane’s work is not fiction or that our reality itself is fiction? Just as readers give a book meaning, so does humanity when it chooses to believe in reality. The loss of self (“I’m losing me”) and of perceived free will scares Trent as much as it should frighten viewers (Mouth of Madness). Many “postmodern horror films are about alienation—from oneself, from other people, from the social mainstream, from God Himself” (Magistrale 127). Trent is certainly alienated from other people and the social mainstream, and as the film progresses, from himself and his ability to understand his own mind. Even though it is doubtful Trent was religious, he seemed to buy into the idea that he, along with all other people, were given free will at some people, and thus becomes alienated from God when he realizes he is still being manipulated.

Postmodern horror manages to frighten audiences “by destabilizing the trust we place in our perceptions or by questioning the laws of nature, horror movies move […] towards the potentially nihilistic irrationality favored by Nietzsche, wherein we no longer have solid foundations for understanding the world around us” (Syder 82). Rather than focusing on fears which take place in this reality which audiences accept, postmodern horror focuses on the fear that reality is just another representation. In postmodernism, “to be terrified is to be in a state of hesitation or suspension,” which often related to the unimaginable, just as both the endings of the films deal with the unimaginable. The self is also unimaginable, as Trent discovers (Belville 24 and 28). If the postmodern audience believes that “authority is the problem, it cannot be the solution, and […] this leads to a displacement of the traditional authorities from the role of the hero,” and in fact, places authority into the seat of the villain (Jancovich 85). The protagonists of both films are outside of systems of authority and problems arise when stable foundations declared by authorities begin to falter. Both horror movies do not have narrative closure, ending with hints at apocalypse or simply the knowledge that the evil remains to repeat its original crime (Jancovich 86). Horror films have always played with societal fears, and as those fears have evolved, so too have horror films. While monsters and jump scares may provide temporary fear, it is our deeper fears about our place in the universe and relationship with technology that postmodern horror films play and confront us with.

Works Cited

Belville, Maria. Gothic-postmodernism : Voicing the Terrors of Postmodernity, Editions Rodopi, 2009.

Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism, Routledge, New York, 1989.

Jackson, Kimberly. “Metahorror and Simulation in the Scream Series and The Cabin in the Woods.”      Technology, Monstrosity, and Reproduction in Twenty-First Century Horror, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pp. 11-30.

Jancovich, Mark. “Post-Fordism, Postmodernism, and Paranoia.” Horror, B.T. Batsford Ltd, London, 1992, pp. 83-117.

Magistrale, Tony. Abject Terrors: Surveying the Modern and Postmodern Horror Film, International Academic Publishers, 2005.

Pilipp, Frank. “Creative Incest: Cross-and Self-Referencing In Recent Hollywood Cinema.” Literature/Film Quarterly, vol. 27, no. 1, 1999, pp. 55–64.

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.

Syder, Andrew. “Knowing the Rules: Postmodernism and the Horror Film.” The Spectator, vol. 22, no. 2, Fall 2002, pp. 78-88.

Woofter, Kristopher Karl. “Watchers in the Woods: Meta-Horror, Genre Hybridity, and Reality TV Critique in The Cabin in the Woods.” Reading Joss Whedon, edited by Rhonda V. Wilcox,      Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, New York, 2014, pp. 268–279.

Contemporary horror takes its shape in many different elements throughout many novels, videogames, movies, or even series.  Though many episodes and novels may differ, when one digs deeper into their underlying meaning, they can find the many theoretical similarities that lie amongst the two differing pieces.  In this case, I am comparing an A. J. Finn novel titled The Woman in the Window to an episode of Black Mirror titled Shut Up and Dance, relating both of these to each other and the technical uses of contemporary horror in each. Both of these works share many theoretical concepts such as focusing on the anonymous self, separate approaches to the severity of technology, and how the audience is trapped in endless decision making.

A.J. Finn’s The Woman in the Window focuses the story on a woman who is diagnosed with agoraphobia, meaning she is too ill and too traumatized to step outside.  The only way she can cope with her diagnosis is using her camera to take pictures in her house as well as the neighbors across the street.  When one day she is spying on her neighbors through her professional camera, she witnesses an event that she regrets ever seeing: murder.  Throughout the novel, you see the woman develop as a character, still relying her image on technology, and having her camera be the difference between life and death.  By incorporating this eerie habit of constantly watching others from a camera, as well as the idea that the main character has a mental illness, almost makes the reader feel bad for what she has to be going through.  Therefore, the audience can’t distinguish if she’s really doing the right or wrong thing.  As Stephen Prince mentions in his book The Horror Film, dread and anxiety are the leading psychological pushes in horror films.  For example, we dread the idea of phones and computers dying and have anxiety if this takes place.  Thus, the moment that A. J. Finn introduces the main character having developed a disease prominent in the real world, the audience then understands her habit as many people today are attached to technology like she is and dread the thought of losing it.  Just as she sees it as a release, the audience sees technology as a release too.

The Woman in the Window has the main character coping with her agoraphobia by connecting with an online community who are experiencing the same hardships that she is.  While online, she exposes her true self and all of her secrets to an online friend named “GrannyLizzie” that ends up making the difference in her later life or death situation.  This is important because it the idea of the anonymous self generates the sudden questioning if having online profiles is helping or hurting users.  It’s essential to understand how A. J. Finn takes notice of the dangers of unknown identities online; though exposing information may not be killing us now, it may literally kill us in the long run.  This form of psychological horror is gradual and takes time to develop in the novel, as the audience is slowly watching from an outsider’s perspective a daily activity becoming a danger to an ordinary person.

Black Mirror‘s Shut Up and Dance centers the storyline on a teenage boy who spends most of his time on his laptop.  While one evening he is tempted by his loneliness, he then masturbates to children’s porn, all while his laptop is open and the camera is unknowingly on.  He then gets a text, saying that someone has been watching him and threatens to send his information everywhere unless he finishes specific tasks. Throughout the episode, he realizes this anonymous controller has hacked many people’s secrets and is blackmailing them as well, just like the kid, with what these individuals have exposed through technology.  In between tasks (after completed), the anonymous figure texts the main character, saying if what he did was the right thing and then moves on to the next task.  An example of one task is robbing a bank and returning the money to another individual caught in the blackmailing. Another example was the first person to kill each other wins and moves on to the next task.  Technology in this case is literally the difference between survival and death, having the “player” control either if they were to complete the task and move on forcibly or not and get exposed.  The audience therefore feels empathy, as the kid encounters this an irregular temptation, gets the thing that is most feared to others done to him.  People don’t know whether to feel uneasy about the tasks, root for him, or want him dead for the disturbing things he has done.

The dominant type of danger in this episode derives from online communities and the anonymous self, which work hand in hand to put in perspective how dangerous something can be online whether you are or aren’t alone.  The difference between each separate task is the difference between survival, death, and digital death (meaning digitally, one could be exposed of who they truly are).  It’s important to understand that the anonymous blackmailers are never found and always hidden, but they are the ones who do the most detrimental damage to the online community that is trapped in their endless cycle of tasks.  This even further emphasizes that secrets are all too easy to access, even when you think everything may be secured and never found.  The truth is, with technology, nothing can ever be truly hidden.

Both variations of fiction have distinctively different plots, but cross similar theoretical boundaries that would have been difficult to analyze if not comparing each to one another.  To start, by further analyzing Pinedo’s characteristics of the postmodern horror genre in Recreational Terror: Postmodern Elements of the Contemporary Horror, all of the theoretical concepts bind both of these pieces together. Pinedo argues that films produce a bounded experience of fear, the validity of rationality is thrown into question, and that there is a violent disruption to the everyday world.  With these in mind, all of them come into play with both The Woman in the Window and Black Mirror’s Shut Up and Dance episode.  Both take ordinary victims and bound in fear to everyday life situations that anyone could be doing, as well as the disruption of violence that initially starts off as subtle then grows into something massive.

Another main theoretical concept is that technology is the difference between survival and death.  For The Woman in the Window, technology traps the main character in the situation of life and death in the final scene, as well as her accidentally seeing the murder from across the street from her technological device.  Same idea for Shut Up and Dance, however Black Mirror approaches it with someone catching another person through technology, therefore manipulating him with life or death situations with different forms of technology.  This is important because it shows the differentiates of the two plots while connecting similar approaches to death by the producer and author.  In Norah Campbell and Mike Saren’s The Primitive, technology and horror: a posthuman biology touches on the connections of technology and fear in novels.  They mention that humans are withheld on the idea of technology that it is becoming a part of our personality, rather than a physical item apart of our lives.  People’s Dependence on technology highlights the importance of The Woman in the Window’s character encounters with social media, cameras, and ways of online communication.

When referring to the online communities and social medias, people become oblivious to the dangers they unknowingly experience in day to day activities.  This focuses on the idea that both works have their main characters reveal too much information online and not respect that privacy might not be that private.  The interesting part is that in The Woman in the Window, the woman deliberately reveals to another “familiar” figure about her life and private information. The difference is that in Shut Up and Dance, the kid was respecting the law of privacy, thinking he would be safe & no one would find out about his private information. This goes to prove that no matter how the distribution of information is done on technology, nothing will ever be hidden.

An important concept brought in both works but used through different approaches is the danger of the anonymous self. Through synthesizing both pieces, one of the most important pieces of information given to the audience is the fact that the main portion of danger is an unknown figure.  Not only is it an unknown figure, but it’s more or less like a one-sided mirror.  The anonymous person can see through the mirror while the woman and the kid can only see the reflection of themselves, not thinking twice that someone is watching their every move and how. It’s interesting to see similar techniques in that the audience is frightened of who could be watching them without their knowledge.  Any information may not be killing us now but will eventually kill us in the long run. On page 134 of Cyberbullying: An Exploratory Analysis of Factors Related to Offending and Victimization by Sameer and Justin Patchin, the elements of “perceived anonymity online aid in freeing individuals from traditionally constraining pressures of society and behavior in a normal manor.” They then further elaborate how this anonymous self can “get away” with more unethical and textual violence than in person. This is important because it explains how the most violence done to anyone online is through an anonymous figure, therefore it’s easier for them to have their target not know who they are so they can continually repeat this violent cycle.

Incorporating the audience’s sympathy into the plots is a huge element for these contemporary horror pieces. The audience is confused to whether to feel sympathy for the wrong deed done and the repercussions from that or that these figures deserve what is occurring to them.  Personally, this is one of the most important similarities when it comes to postmodern horror and the inclusion of how the audiences’ emotions should be. Both pieces include the main character having some sort of guilty pleasure that is caught by the so called “villain” (for The Woman in the Window, she takes picture of her neighbors because of agoraphobia, while in Shut Up and Dance the main character watches children’s porn because he is lonely and unsettled).  It puts the audience in this position where they need to determine if the main character gets what they deserve or if they should allow sympathy towards them and every bad thing that is occurring.

While these works are fiction, it stresses the danger of realities.  Though The Woman in the Window’s case is agoraphobia, an uncommon mental illness, revealing information in an online community is something that is very common, and the author incorporates this to stress the dangers of technology and social media profiles.  Same distinction with Shut Up and Dance, where the kid is literally the puppet to these blackmailers through technology, as well as revealed himself through an ordinary mac computer.  Both situations almost seem too real for a fiction novel or episode.  Finally, the thought of the known being more fearful than the unknown is applicable for both works as well. In Black Mirror, knowing the main character watched child porn and what could happen is much more dreadful compared to what he doesn’t know about his next task.  He will do anything to protect what he knows, even if it means encountering the unknown dangers. With The Woman in Window, she knew that every part of her information was revealed to an online community, as well as witnessed a murder rather than the unknown idea of what could happen to her.

The differentiating works have completely separate plot lines, but very similar theoretical concepts. From the anonymous self-generating more thought and the audience being incorporated just as much as the main character, the connections between this novel and episode couldn’t be closer.  Online communities seem like a safe, environment, promoting the idea that there are anonymous people out there that are a release for oneself.  Even with the privacy concept, nothing is ever kept a secret when it’s published online.  Though they are very different works, the contemporary horror theoretical concepts shared are all relevant to today’s society of death in the digital age.

Works Cited

Campbell, Norah, and Mike Saren. “The Primitive, Technology and Horror: A Posthuman Biology.” Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organization 10, no. 1 (2010): 152–76.

Hinduja, Sameer, and Justin W. Patchin. “Cyberbullying: An Exploratory Analysis of Factors          Related to Offending and Victimization.” Deviant Behavior 29, no. 2 (January 22, 2008):           129–56.

Pinedo, Isabel. “Recreational Terror: Postmodern Elements of the Contemporary Horror Film.” The Mutual Dependency of Force and Law in American Foreign Policy on JSTOR, 1 Apr. 1996, www.jstor.org/stable/20688091?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents.