Evans, Timothy H. “Slender Man, H. P. Lovecraft, and the Dynamics of Horror Cultures.” Slender Man Is Coming: Creepypasta and Contemporary Legends on the Internet, edited by Trevor J. Blank and Lynne S. McNeill, University Press of Colorado, Logan, 2018, pp. 128–140. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv5jxq0m.10.
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.
Tolbert, Jeffrey A. “‘The Sort of Story That Has You Covering Your Mirrors’: The Case of Slender Man.” Slender Man Is Coming: Creepypasta and Contemporary Legends on the Internet, edited by Trevor J. Blank and Lynne S. McNeill, University Press of Colorado, Logan, 2018, pp. 25–50. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv5jxq0m.5.
At first glance, the 2016 indie horror video game The Survey and Ridley Scott’s 1979 science fiction film Alien do not seem to have much in common, but upon further observation and comparison, certain similarities between both forms of postmodern horror media are revealed. The Survey follows the player character, Marcus Walker, through a seemingly vacant home as he uses clues and instructions from a survey on a smartphone to explore the home and solve the mystery of his family’s past, while Alien follows the the protagonist, Ellen Ripley, and the rest of the crew on the spacecraft Nostromo as they fight back against an alien being who has invaded their ship and is attempting to kill them. Despite these two works’ clear differences in medium and plot, The Survey and Alien are similar in more subtle ways, including the presence of a foreign monster or alien, a sense of anticipation pervading the media where the characters are anxiously awaiting the monster’s attack, and a use of closed and confined spaces.
The Survey is a first-person survival horror game taking place inside of a 13-room house that the player character, at first a nameless protagonist that we later learn is Marcus Walker, cannot leave or escape. Marcus awakes to a notification on his phone saying that he has been selected to participate in a survey that then asks him some strangely specific questions, such as whether or not the house he’s in seems familiar and if he remembers having a family. This prompts the player to begin exploring the house to find notes and scraps of paper providing details into the private lives of the Walker family—including Marcus himself—and the backstory of the game. The horror element of the game comes from the actions that the player character is not in control of: crashing sounds occur from the lower level of the house while the player is upstairs; lights turn out by themselves; items in the house are rearranged; a large porcelain angel that starts out in the living room moves to different rooms and positions, seemingly on its own; and a female monster appears in the darkness of nearby rooms and charges toward the player.
A view of the living room in “The Survey.”
The main thing that makes The Survey unique from other survival horror games of its type, however, is the smartphone interface. The smartphone is how the player answers the survey questions, and it also functions partly as a game menu. It features different widgets, including a clock, photos, mail, settings (that actually allow the player to adjust the game’s display settings), the survey, and timer-based hints in case the player gets stuck. The photos and mail apps provide small clues to the game’s backstory and generally add to the tense, ominous tone and atmosphere of the game world. This smartphone interface is an example of what Ewan Kirkland cites as “digitextuality,” meaning “intertextuality within digital media,” in his article, “Resident Evil’s Typewriter: Survival Horror and Its Remediations” (115). The smartphone and the survey itself help to provide “atmosphere, context, and information” in the game, while also allowing for further immersion into the world of The Survey (Kirkland 116).
The smartphone interface featured in the game.
In addition to the smartphone interface, the game features other examples of technology. There are many television sets in the 13-room house that show channel numbers but play only static, and the player is instructed not to leave the sets on for too long, because, as a cryptic note says, “it makes [the monster’s] ears bleed.” The televisions’ channel numbers are used to solve puzzles within the game, and the numerous radios around the house play different songs and narrate certain aspects of the game’s backstory, and can, like the televisions, be turned on and off.
Furthermore, The Survey utilizes many different examples of what Kirkland calls “hypermediated combinations of diegetic remediation,” such as “paintings and drawings, writing in the form of reports, diaries, inscriptions, text books and picture books, and audio media such as telephones, radio, and audio cassettes” (120). Some examples of remediation that feature more prominently in the game are the forms of writing, mainly through letters and diary entries, and audio media, specifically using a radio. These, in the words of Kirkland, “provide an economic means of conveying backstory, enhance the verisimilitude of fictional spaces in which such media technologies would conceivably be present, and confer a kind of document reality on ludic information contained in virtual texts possessing a physical presence and institutional authority within the game world” (120). Kirkland’s point about virtual texts possessing a physical presence and authority is especially apparent in the player’s quest to collect different documents in order to reveal more information about the family’s backstory and the potential reasons for why Marcus is trapped in the home.
An example of the notes the player can find throughout the game.
In contrast, the classic science fiction film Alien presents a very different and much less interactive experience for its audience. The film portrays the protagonist, Ellen Ripley, and the rest of the spaceship’s crew as they attempt to fight back against and ultimately escape a killer alien. Like in The Survey, the characters in Alien are trapped inside of an enclosed space, but this space is a ship floating through space rather than a townhouse with an impassable front door. In this manner, the audience watching Alien is distanced slightly from the predicament of the Nostromo’s crew, but watching Ripley battle and try to escape the alien onboard is something that viewers still get drawn into, as they don’t know what’s going to occur.
The Alien world may not have the modern technology of smartphones, but the film is rife with many different types of technology that all play large parts in the story, and the most obvious (yet most easily overlooked) of these is the ship itself. In his article “In the Belly of the Mechanical Beast: Technological Environments in the Alien Films,” Steffen Hantke writes, “The one single piece of technology that dominates Scott’s film is the space ship itself in which the events take place, the technological environment through which the protagonists move and parts of which they interact with. That all traces of nature are erased from this environment is treated as a given, which explains why the Nostromo hardly registers as a machine for most viewers” (524). The ship is a “fully technological environment” in which the only natural, non-mechanical beings are the crew members themselves (Hantke 522). This is obviously not the case in the suburban house setting of The Survey, as can be seen in the contrasting images between it and the setting of Alien.
A view of the Nostromo’s interior passageways in “Alien.”
However, when examining both The Survey and Alien more closely, these two works of postmodern horror do have some similarities. First, both works feature some form of monster or foreign creature who is following and attempting to kill the protagonist. In both The Survey and Alien, the image or physical appearance of the monster itself can be analyzed; Cosimo Urbano outlines this representation of the monster as one of the four representational strategies of the modern horror film in his article, “Projections, Suspense, and Anxiety.” He focuses on “numerous scenes in which the monster is the true object of both the characters’ and the spectators’ gaze without it being at that point an actual and immediate source of threat… films such as Alien… seem at times literally obsessed about observing and investigating the monster’s body, driven to look at it, mesmerized by its monstrosity” (Urbano 891). The same can be said for the monster in The Survey; there are a few moments in the game where the player can hear her crying or see her simply standing and waiting before she eventually runs toward the protagonist and attacks.
The monster of “The Survey,” Lilith, before she runs toward the player and attacks.
Along these same lines, an element that borrows from the traditional horror film and also features in both of these works is “a stretched-out anticipation of the monster’s attack” (Lev 32). Though this may be more immediately obvious to the viewer during certain scenes of Alien than to someone playing The Survey, the two forms of horror media utilize the audience’s fear of what is to come to add a sense of unease to the fictional worlds these characters are inhabiting.
The final similarity between Alien and The Survey is both works’ use of closed and confined spaces in order to restrict the protagonist’s movement. In the case of Alien, “the main set is the human spaceship, with a few minutes spent on an uninhabited planet and in the alien ship” (Lev 32). This adds to the suspense and horror of the film because the viewer knows that Ripley and the rest of the crew are trapped aboard the Nostromo with the alien and must somehow either escape the creature or end its life. The same is true for the player in The Survey, who is being followed and repeatedly attacked by this monster inside of a house that the protagonist cannot leave, adding to the tense and uneasy feel of the game. However, a difference here is that the player has no method, weapon, or option with which to fight back against the entity as Ripley does, and must therefore keep evading the monster in order to gain an understanding of the protagonist’s own past. Hantke is specifically discussing Alien when he writes, “there is no escape because there is, properly speaking, no outside… there is no safe ‘outside’ to which the characters can escape,” but his words ring true when thinking about The Survey as well (540). This is especially potent when the player learns toward the end of the game that the protagonist, Marcus, is in a coma, doomed to relive a horrific personification of his guilt over neglecting his sister, and that therefore the entire storyline of the game has been Marcus experiencing his own personal hell.
These two works of horror media, when examined closely, have various similarities that function to make each individual work more immersive, more ominous, and more horrifying. The comparison of these seemingly disparate texts also serves to reveal some of the ways in which the horror genre functions, whether it be through the medium of film or video games. Ultimately, both of these works aim to shed light on aspects of humanity, and whether that is achieved by having one protagonist in a coma being tortured by his own guilt and grief, or by having another protagonist shoot a killer alien out of an escape pod, both TheSurvey and Alien reach this same goal in their own unique—and memorable—ways.
Works Cited
Hantke, Steffen. “In the Belly of the Mechanical Beast: Technological Environments in the Alien Films.” The Journal of Popular Culture 36, no. 3 (2003): 518–46. https://doi.org/10.1111/1540-5931.00020.
Kirkland, Ewan. “Resident Evil’s Typewriter: Survival Horror and Its Remediations.” Games and Culture, vol. 4, no. 2, Apr. 2009, pp. 115–126, doi:10.1177/1555412008325483.
Urbano, Cosimo. “Projections, Suspense, and Anxiety: The Modern Horror Film and its Effects.” Psychoanalytic Review 85.6 (1998): 889. ProQuest. Web. 21 Feb. 2019.
Governments in the Black Mirror episode Men Against Fire and the 2000 Japanese film Battle Royale use violent technology to subvert populations into obedience, thereby maintaining their power. Such premise sounds dystopian, but has and continues to be used in reality, encouraging questioning of where the viewers’ own ideologies came from. The pattern of media horrors representing those of reality’s frameworks has a long precedent, and it emerges clearly in Black Mirror episodes like this one especially and Battle Royale, as systemic
At no point in Men Against Fire, unlike most other horror-tech narratives, do most characters perceive any defect to their technology. In fact, the MASS implants shared across the mostly-military characters do enable good: soldiers can communicate with efficiency, scout out dangers without having to physically approach them, and even program fulfillments for one another like “a good night’s sleep”. However, rookie protagonist Stripe discovers that MASS literally changes perception and that use of this innovation enables manipulation on a, well, massive scale. This case highlights Nazi-like ideology as MASS and implied other propaganda condition people to perceive those deemed undesirable (the disabled, foreigners, homosexuals, and so on) as monstrous creatures worthy of naught but death, rather than as fellow humans. The tactic has a storied past. The American World War Two effort, in addition to its enemies, boosted commitment through production painting its enemies as a savage, less-than-human mob:
Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky asserted in their 1988 book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Economy that media “mobilize(s) support for the special interests that dominate state and private activity” through “’cleansing’ information from the real world to leave only the ‘residue’ which is acceptable to established power systems,” (Pedro-Carañana). Creating a division between one group, especially a minority, and others diverts support to majority, authority-approved sources. A woman victimized by MASS describes in Men Against Fire how she and her son (allusions exist throughout the show about up-keeping a “pure bloodline”) were progressively dehumanized. Again, the process of these happenings mirrors reality: subtle negativity leads to registration which leads to persecution. Saul Friedlander chronicled in his book Nazi Germany and the Jews a timeline of Europe’s turning against Jews in the 20th century, beginning with increasingly broader propaganda and definitions of wrongness before proceeding to registration and, ultimately, to violence, (Friedlander). This timeline matches almost exactly to that revealed to Stripe. More recently, news and other sources of information or entertainment have been used to spread so-called “fake news” for agendas in North Korea, Russia, and even, debatably, the United States. The rise of social media increased that practice, with politicians themselves blogging and posting (Bjola). Drastic change of any kind incites hostility or fear, especially that which impacts the lives themselves of individuals. Yet, gradual change can afford space to extinguish resistance. It is worth noting that military/government motivations do not always involve such insidious ends as in Men Against Fire, but some do. Technology like MASS, or, in our reality, similar social and connective medias have enabled hate, violence, and death, not to mention the mechanical tools invented for fulfilling these goals.
Battle Royale revolves around a differentiation between young and old, a less permanent boundary one would not expect to erupt into violence due to its fluidity. In fact, at least one sympathetic adult character appears. However, the grown-ups of Battle Royale’s dystopian Japan fear the autonomy of their juniors and so employ psychological and technological means to institute their titular control mechanism. Each year, a supposedly randomly-selected school class of children undergoes drugged transport to a fortified island, then must battle to the death with resources ranging from paper fans to machine guns, until the government permits a single winner/survivor to leave. This obviously results in the deaths and traumatization of children, but more generally functions as a deterrent for youth questioning and misbehaving. That is, a troublemaker would fear their and their companions’ inclusion in the Battle or perhaps some other, awful alternative. Tasha Robinson wrote in her article read in class, “Modern Horror Films are Finding Their Scares in Dead Phone Batteries” that the postmodern world presents greater challenges to create isolation in horror, a needed feature because access to the larger world increases the potential to defeat or escape aggressors immensely (Robinson). The government in this movie accomplish separation by holding the Battle on an island accessible only by air or by high-grade boat. The children, of course, possess none of this transportation. In order to obtain one, and next to use it in escaping, the characters determine they must hack the military’s technology, isolating their captors while connecting themselves to navigation, etc. That plan showcases the neutrality of tech: only the manner of its usage deems it positive or negative. Battle Royale’s antagonists, for instance, use innovation to very gorily punish those who defy them, contain threats, and track those under their power (and to literally explode the heads of those who attempt to remove their trackers), while the children harness it to fight back. The horrors they face may seem themselves isolated to the island—one can survive them by winning aka killing everyone else, according to the promoted narrative–, but the first and final scene of the movie exhibit the falsehood of that distinction. This film opens with the announcement of the winner/survivor of the Battle directly before the one chronicled afterwards, in which an elaborate motorcade travels through throngs of rabid media, who represent these happenings to the public through live filming. Such context mires the Battle, especially as a manifestation for the brutality of the government, which otherwise receives little direct exposition, in a false righteousness and, perhaps even, desirability. Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Be Soft Rains” showcases how deviation from normalcy creates horror in itself; Battle Royale explains the fluidity of normalcy, that culture creates routine but does not instinctively adhere to any besides the basic needs of eating and drinking, sleeping, socialization, etc. as needed (Bradbury). Just as the Smart Home of Bradbury’s postwar landscape comes to demise through insistence of maintaining outdated norms (though, as a potentially inanimate being, it may have little agency to deviate), only through changing an imposed status-quo can any of the children survive their experiences without having become traumatized government tools. Conversely, the movie’s final scene features the two survivors/escapees, Noriko and Shuya, attempting to next smuggle themselves out of the country they are now fugitives of as Shuya instructs viewers via voiceover to “run for all you are worth!” before credits slowly appear onto a photograph of most of the people who died onscreen previously:
The end indicates that neither Noriko and Shuya, nor any other living in the movie’s world, nor, in fact, the audience in the real world have not truly escaped their oppression. The horror does not self-contain on an island, to a specific government or country, or even to a finite movie. It pervades throughout, a consistent motivator to remember the atrocities all around us (the sequel movie finishes with a similarly tiny group of traumatized survivors with an unstable future). Finally, the Japan shown in this last scene of the film, as well as in some flashbacks, clearly earns the title dystopia for the overt manipulation, violence, and cruelty of and to its inhabitants. Yet, it looks remarkably like that and like civilization in general today: urban and rural areas, grade schools, grocery stores, traffic lights…the relative indistinguishability from our own setting cements the dissolution of isolationist confines. Altogether, this movie urges its audience to become aware of their own horrors through depiction of those same or like horrors brought to an awful extreme.
This episode and movie differ by 16 years, country and continent, background and plot, and techniques of production. While Men Against Fire uses a genocide storyline ripped from history to illustrate the effects of propaganda n instituting pain, oppression, and brainwashing in a postmodern situation; Battle Royale cautions against the harnessing of power and corruption via postmodern invention. They share, however, the motif that propaganda influences it audience unduly and has but gained ubiquity as technology advances. No impossible monster appears in either, only extensions of the world as is. Only the dark side of human nature, or ambition, magnifies through digital resources. These watchings implore greater attention to how humans use what they create.
Works Cited
Bjola, Corneliu. “The Ethics of Countering Digital Propaganda.” Roundtable: Alternatives to War, 1998.
Bradbury, Ray. There Will Come Soft Rains. 1950, www.btboces.org/Downloads/7_There Will Come Soft Rains by Ray Bradbury.pdf.
Chomsky, Noam, and Edward Herman. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Economy . 1988.
Friedländer Saul. Nazi Germany and the Jews. Phoenix, 2014.
Check out my podcast report on the Black Mirror episode “Playtest” and the horror film Unfriended
Works cited:
Bolter, J. D., & Grusin, R. (2000). Remediation: Understanding New Media (Reprint edition). Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.
Hinduja, S., & Patchin, J. W. (2008). Cyberbullying: An Exploratory Analysis of Factors Related to Offending and Victimization. Deviant Behavior, 29(2), 129–156. https://doi.org/10.1080/01639620701457816
Pinedo, I. (1996). Recreational Terror: Postmodern Elements of the Contemporary Horror Film. Journal of Film and Video, 48(1/2), 17–31.
Tryon, Chuck. 2009. “Video from the Void: Video Spectatorship, Domestic Film Cultures, and Contemporary Horror Film.” Journal of Film and Video 61 (3): 40–51. https://doi.org/10.1353/jfv.0.0034
(Edited 3/7/2019 at 10:30 am ET to accurately reflect the use of sources in the actual podcast)
Video games offer a rich medium for exploring postmodern horror. Among other affordances, games invite users to step into Huizinga’s “magic circle”, connecting the player to the in-game world via the controller or keyboard (105). In addition, the length of games, (often anywhere from 10-30 hours) can provide a framework for producing compelling and complex narratives. When combined with the horror genre, the final product can be truly impressive. In this analysis, I will examine two well-executed examples of postmodern horror video games, Supermassive Games’ Until Dawn (2015), and Team Salvato’s Doki Doki Literature Club (2017), reflecting on the nature of their late postmodern elements and ultimately using each example to illuminate the other.
I’ll begin with Until Dawn. The game follows the well-worn premise of a group of unruly teens vacationing in a remote cabin. Chaos ensues, and the group must make critical decisions regarding who lives, who gets terrorized by a masked psycho, and who gets killed by a modern reimagining of the Algonquin Wendigo monster.
However, the developers at Supermassive Games know that to pull off a pulpy teen slasher nowadays, there needs to be an element of self-awareness. To achieve this, the game subverts several key elements typical to the horror genre through narrative and mechanics. Perhaps the most critical of these is the “Butterfly Effect” system. When players boot up the game, they are greeted with a screen stating, “A tiny butterfly flapping its wings today may lead to a devastating hurricane weeks from now”. In effect, the game features a choice-based narrative, wherein all actions have consequences. Choices are made during tense “quick-time events”, wherein the player must select a choice from several options or successfully complete a button sequence in a limited amount of time. This gives real weight to a player’s choices, and ensures that they are able to shape the story as they see fit. For example, all of the characters can die if certain choices are made, undermining the typical trope of there being a ‘final girl/boy’ to face off against the villain.
Along with the butterfly effect, the game also tailors aspects of its horrors specifically to the player. Each “chapter” of the game begins as a session with a mysterious psychiatrist named Dr. Hill who asks the player to answer questions about various images and scenarios. Depending on what personal insights are revealed, the game will modify certain scenes or jumpscares to reflect the appointment with Dr. Hill. For example, if a player expresses that they are more afraid of needles than storms or dogs, the Psycho will end up using a syringe to incapacite another character instead of a mask filled with sleeping gas. Through the modifications of these cutscenes, the game further subverts its role as a supposedly distanced narrative.
This transgressive sense of metalepsis upsets the boundaries of what is and isn’t within the game. In addition to the emphasis put on player choice and expression, the game uses a form of hypermediacy to further this confusion between the in-game and outside world. This is reflected through one of my favorite mechanics, the “Don’t Move” feature. When one of the antagonists is critically near, players are instructed to hold their Dualshock controllers still until the threat passes. See the video below for a compilation of “Don’t Move” moments.
Unlike a traditional horror film where a spectator may yell, “Don’t go in there!” or “Don’t do that!” to no avail, Until Dawn puts the character’s survival literally into the hands of the player, both reminding them of the medium and further emphasizing the importance of the player/author’s actions.
Mental illness and societal ignorance it is also a topic explored by Until Dawn. By the climax of the game, it is revealed that one of the main character’s, Josh, is actually the masked psycho figure. If players choose to read/watch collectible notes and videotapes, they’ll learn that Josh is suffering from schizophrenia and is wrongly being treated for depression by his psychiatrists, including the aforementioned Dr. Hill. Although the Wendigo monster is a capable and frightening killer, the game situates the true evil as a medical system that doesn’t know enough, or perhaps doesn’t care enough to provide adequate treatment for people like Josh, a character who ends up dead regardless of the choices made. On the other end of the aesthetic spectrum is Doki Doki Literature Club, another video game that has sparked a discussion surrounding mental illness.
On the surface, Doki Doki Literature Club is an entirely different beast. This anime-style PC game brands itself as a cute, brightly-colored dating sim. The story follows a male protagonist who is invited by his childhood best friend to join their school’s literature club. After joining the club, the player is led through mini-games and dialogue with the four female members. Once the player finds a distressing poem written by their best friend, Sayori, the game’s façade quickly cracks, revealing a psychological horror game that relies on metalepsis and heightened self-reflexivity.
Similar to Until Dawn, this game effectively rebels against all expectations of a typical Dating Sim. Although the main point of the first mini-game filled hour is to develop relationships with the girls, the main character’s role in the Literature Club quickly transforms from a possible romantic interest into that of an intervener. Through finding other poems, the player learns of the girls’ issues and troubled home lives, and must help them avoid self-destructive behaviors like self-harm and suicide.
In addition to this task, the user must figure out why the game keeps glitching and restarting. The developers at Team Salvato know how to successfully use hypermediation to create disturbing effects; after the childhood best friend of the main character commits suicide, the game’s graphics quickly devolve, with character animations twitching, glitching, or text boxes being replaced with gibberish. To combat these game-breaking mechanics and produce better endings for the characters, the player must venture outside the game-world to delete files associated with the game.
An example of one of the many glitched screens players will encounter.
These hypermediative mechanics achieve a similar sense of metalepsis to Until Dawn, albeit in quite a different form. At the end of the game, the villain is revealed to be the self-aware NPC Monica, who is trying to create the perfect in-game world to live in with the protagonist forever. She admits to amplifying the effects of the other character’s mental health problems in an attempt to make the player “hate them”. To get to the true ending of the game, the player must figure out how to escape the in-game world and delete Monica’s character file permanently, thus ending the cycle of abuse.
Go to 58:30 to see the file-deleting mechanic in action.
Although both games are aesthetically dissimilar, they intersect in a few key ways. Both produce a sense of metalepsis through calculated hypermediation. Where Until Dawn invites players into the game via the Butterfly effect and the “Don’t Move” mechanic, Doki Doki Literature Club uses glitching and file-manipulation to jolt players out of the game. In her essay on metalepsis in popular culture, Karin Kukkonen describes these two related types of metalepsis. According to Kukkonen, “metalepsis can be ascending across narrative levels, when a character moves out of the fictional world and enters the real world…or it can be descending across narrative levels, when authors or narrators enter the fictional world.” (2). As the ‘author’ of the action in Until Dawn, the player “descends” into the realm of the game, where in DDLC, Monica ascends to the player’s reality, even going so far as to address them by their Steam account name.
The two games also intersect in their sympathetic approaches to the topic of mental illness. Doki Doki Literature Club has been praised for its “clear and frank exploration of mental health” (Rose). Central to the narrative is how each character experiences their respective mental illness. In their role as friend and comforter, the main character must listen to and respond appropriately to their friends’ admissions of depression and suicidal thoughts. And although the game admits that these symptoms are being artificially exaggerated by Monica, the game “refuses to exploit mental health as a mechanic, or even as a gamble” (Rose). The literature club girls are all victims of circumstance; the player is pushed to help them not to gain experience or in-game currency, but because they care about their well-being.
Although Until Dawn ultimately expresses a similar attitude regarding Josh, the way his character is framed for much of the game is steeped in harmful tropes. In The Butler(s) DID it – Dissociative Identity Disorder in Cinema, Peter Byrne writes, “[Many] misrepresentations of schizophrenia invoke the discourse: “schizophrenics” are either a violent threat or figures of fun. In addition to the distress such stereotypes cause, these misconceptions have a bearing on negative attitudes in the community…” (Byrne). For much of the game, Josh is situated in this oscillating binary of “figure of fun” and “threat”, with the distinction becoming more pronounced after the player finds recordings of him practicing his “Psycho” voice, thereby revealing that the masked figure was him all along. Left at this, the game would appear to promote harmful stereotypes (and for many casual players, it may seem as such). However, as mentioned prior, careful examination of in-game collectibles proves Josh to be as much a victim as the other characters, making his inevitable death all the more tragic.
In conclusion, Doki Doki Literature Club and Until Dawn offer two examples of how video games can create richly interactive horror experiences by implementing hypermediative mechanics. Additionally, these works have pushed back against traditional narrativessurrounding mental health, sparking critical conversations surrounding stigma, treatment, and how to further rehabilitate mental health’s presence in popular media.
Works Cited
Byrne, Peter. “The Butler(s) Did It – Dissociative Identity Disorder in Cinema.” Medical Humanities 27, no. 1 (June 1, 2001): 26–29. https://doi.org/10.1136/mh.27.1.26.
Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens. Einaudi, 2009.
Kukkonen, Karin, and Sonja Klimek. Metalepsis in Popular Culture. De Gruyter, 2011.
Rose, Victoria. “God of the Script: How Doki Doki Literature Club Gets Mental Health Right.” Medium.com, 16 Dec. 2017, medium.com/@riningear/god-of-the-script-how-doki-doki-literature-club-gets-mental-health-right-76762a7806c0.
Because of its involvement with death, resurrection has inevitably become tied to many horror story plots. One of the most famous cases of resurrection comes from Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, which would become the inspiration for many later horror works. The “Black Mirror” episode Be Right Back follows the same story as Shelly’s, with Martha as Dr. Frankenstein, social media posts as the graveyard body parts, and new Ash as the Monster. As with any good adaptation, the themes and details within the story have changed to more effectively explore contemporary fears or curiosities; in this case, Be Right Back not only explores the possibility of resurrection, but also looks at the disconnect between someone’s social media presence and their personality.
One of the defining features of this episode was its simplicity. With the exception of the cliff picnic scene, the sets are all bland and forgettable. The characters live very average lives. In fact, the characters themselves aren’t anything to remember. Even the insane technology used to resurrect someone is just brushed aside and never explained in depth. Unlike other “Black Mirror” episodes, there is no physical conflict or grotesque action (like bestiality in S1E1, genocide in S3E3, or sadistic Star-Trek-inspired prisons in S4E1). Instead, this episode relies more heavily on the emotions surrounding the situations the characters are in– something that can’t be shown with images, but can have just as big of an impact.
Fake Ash represents two things: the idealized form of the dead and the shallowness of our online personalities. He is a picture perfect copy of his human counterpart, but is lacking in just about every human capacity possible. The major aspects of Ash’s personality, like his wittiness and kindness, are there, but the more ignorable or less desirable features that would never be presented on social media are missing. Martha can’t handle having only the enjoyable aspects of Ash because she already knew and appreciated the traits that made Ash less perfect. His idealized form made him very one-dimensional, so the relationship between the two also became one-dimensional and unenjoyable. Martha quickly realizes the shallowness of his online persona as fake Ash seems to always be reminding her of his inauthenticity. Fake Ash is essentially a form of human hypermediacy. All of this seems to be reminding the viewer that, for many people, online profiles are NOT them, only the idealized and shallowest versions of themselves.
This episode does a good job at doing what “Black Mirror” does best: it forces you to think about your own choices in the real world. Maybe you don’t have the desire to resurrect a loved one, but you probably do have a Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter account. As Martha steps up into her attic-prison and the screen cuts to black, I like to think the directors wanted the audience to be left staring into that black mirror while considering their own digital presence. Ash is representative of how dangerous and harmful the idealized versions of people can be, so I definitely found myself filled with existential dread (most episodes do this, though) while looking through my own Twitter and Instagram feeds.
This was my first time watching “Be Right Back”, and I find it one of the most chillingly plausible uses of current technology in Black Mirror. I also took note of a few things that jumped out at me.
One thing I noticed a lot of that I normally don’t pick up on is the use of foreshadowing. When Martha is driving she says she will “crash this van”. Watching with subtitles, I noticed that the song playing in the van when this happens is a Bee Gees song, “How Deep is Your Love”. This is an interesting question to raise for the episode, how deep is your love? Is it so deeply intertwined with your reality that as a loved one passes you are constantly reminded of them? Would it hurt less to get to talk to them one last time?
I also noticed how they made so obvious the fact that Ash’s brother had died at a young age. And father. And how his mother handled those losses by putting those memories in the attic. Which is paralleled in the end by Martha banishing AshBot to the attic. An action which I think is meant to provoke a deeper narrative. That’s one of those “hard to chew” moments that gets the viewer thinking about something taboo, “how do we handle mourning?”.
There’s also a point where Martha walks with AshBot on the phone through the countryside. She ends up sitting near the suicide cliff and it was quite clear that this would become a point of climax for the character later on. Especially when the bot points out that people usually jump alone. Whether it would be Martha or a form of Ash I made quick note of the fact that one of them surely would jump.
From the getgo I also noticed how disconnected Ash was. Martha asks him bizarre questions, like if he wants his soup from a shoe, and he isn’t present. He just responds with a simple “yes” having not heard the question. Kind of robotic. His answering machine is also “I’m too busy or lazy to answer so leave a message”. I think this was particularly moving to me when the AshBot replies to Martha on the cliff that he only wishes to serve. The bot’s actions are clearly not those of Ash, but what the bot could learn from him. All meant as a tool for Martha.
And in classic Black Mirror fashion the technology doesn’t seem so far fetched. It reminded me a lot of what I think can be called Natural Language Processing, and Twitter Bots. The idea being that you can train a computer based on a dictionary of people’s work – like Shakespeare – and recreate sentences that are similar to what might have appeared in the original. The product and original aren’t quite the same – in fact normally they are quite strange.
There’s a pretty funny example of this in @KeatonPatti on Twitter “forcing a bot to watch over 1,000 hours of _”. Olive Garden, Porn, Trump’s State of the Union. The product is what is probably a human-altered script made by a bot using NLP, but they’re fun to read. While these are pretty silly examples, I know Dr. Sample you’ve also got a few bots that operate in a similar way in your Moby Dick bot https://twitter.com/MobyDickatSea and your favorite things bot that operate on their own. It’s interesting to think of them as eventually being used to learn from our digital literature (facebook, twitter, etc) and perhaps recreate our sentiments postmortem.
Throughout the entirety of Black Mirror’s “Be Right Back” episode, I was immediately transported into the horrid situation of a loved one leaving my presence. As much as I would want this loved one back, it would never be the same, even if it was through artificial intelligence or the replication of their social media platforms. While a woman and her husband are happily married with a kid on the way, the husband spends too much time on social media during a drive, having technology literally being the reason he is killed. However, as the woman is talking with more and more people, friends introduce her to this new concept where the dead can be replicated through taking text messages, emails, social media platforms, etc. to try and mimic the emotions and communication methods this loved one exhibited. The funny part is, technology was the reason the husband died, but was simultaneously the only reason he lived again.
By analyzing this situation, it was interesting to observe how social media can be our institution of survival as well as death. Even if social media were able to revive one’s online self into the physical self, who’s to say this person is the same or different while they were living? As much time as people spend on social media, I personally argue that the social media presence in all of us will never live up to who were are as a person, our emotional styles, and our communication styles. However, since watching this episode, I have thought much more in depth about if I were to die today, how people would really remember me, and could my social media accurately replicate who I was/what type of a person I was. Even furthering this thinking, how I would personally remember my close friends, and if their social medias accurately replicated their online persona in real life. The image of weeks 1-6 on the Death in the Digital Age blog accurately pictures anyone briefly idolizing technology, whether or not they’re missing it or loving it.
Like most episodes of Black Mirror, what I found the eeriest was the sheer possibility of the technology in “Be Right Back.” The whole time, I couldn’t help but think that it would be nice to be able to pretend to talk to a loved one after they are gone, especially if the death was sudden. The sudden death of a young person leaves so much up in the air and it can be hard for the people in their lives to define their relationship with the deceased enough to mourn properly. Martha and Ash weren’t married (I’m assuming) but they were obviously very involved. Feeling suddenly isolated in the world, Martha’s desperation to talk to Ash seemed justified (especially after she found out she was pregnant – a nice touch on the part of the producers to further rationalize her desire). The result was that as I watched it, I really emphasized with Martha and didn’t think that the idea was that absurd until I saw just how horribly it could go wrong (which is probably the ultimate goal in the production of every episode).
However, the episodes seemed to date itself with the technology it scrapes to build a profile of Ash. If someone wanted to learn how someone thought, talked, and felt, Facebook and emails would not be the way to go. I’m formal over email and only use it to communicate with adults when I need information. Like many of my peers, I rarely post Facebook updates. Nowadays, if someone wanted to really get to know me, they could do so pretty well by scraping my texts. My generation constantly text/instant message each other, often about similar topics and with similar tones as we converse in person. The whole point of social media now seems to be projecting a person that is better than who you really are: more thoughtful, articulate, funnier. Intimate digital communication mediums are where true personalities can come across and that’s what I would like my persona to be built after when I die.
