Throughout the first part of A Head Full of Ghosts, Merry’s imaginary play-camera shifts to a real, digital one. On page 29 of the novel, Merry, our debatably reliable narrator, mentions that, “[she] didn’t feel 100 percent safe so [she] built motion-detecting surveillance cameras and a laptop computer out of cereal boxes.” Her feelings of unease are brought about by her sister Marjorie’s revelation that she has been sneaking into her little sister’s room every night and playing slightly sinister pranks on her. Her desire for safety-enforcing surveillance technology, imaginary or not, is understandable.
By page 139, one of The Possession’s producers, Ken, has given Merry her own camera (a “Merry-cam,” as he dubs it), and she is so obsessed with it that “[she] placed the camera where [she] could see it from [her] bed because [she] wanted to see when the light would turn to green” while she tries to fall asleep.
The idea of surveillance within the space of Merry’s room has turned on its head; professionals are now attempting to document every movement of each person on the house, and Merry, instead of using fake cameras as a safeguard, is using real cameras for a form of self-surveillance. On page 140, Merry films herself covering her play house with a blanket—the setup for the next terror scene in the novel in which Marjorie supposedly performs for Merry’s camera. Certainly, Marjorie admits that the show she put on was for the benefit of her little sister’s footage, but there remains the question of the extent to which all of the captured footage of Marjorie is performance.
At this point in the novel, the difference between real and fake, analog and digital, is still being teased out, and I image that Tremblay will continue to play with this as he introduces more of Merry’s disturbing blog entries (perhaps another sort of twisted self-surveillance).