Digital Horror

In recent years, the ways in which digital technologies have come to shape our experience of the world has been an immensely popular subject in the horror film genre. Contemporary horror cinema reflects and exploits the anxieties of our age in its increasing use of hand-held techniques and in its motifs of surveillance, found footage (fictional films that appear 'real': comprising discovered video recordings left behind by victims/protagonists) and 'digital haunting' (when ghosts inhabit digital technologies). This book offers an exploration of the digital horror film phenomenon, across different national cultures and historic periods, examining the sub-genres of CCTV horror, technological haunting, snuff films, found footage and torture porn. Digital horror, it demonstrates, is a product of the post 9/11 neo-liberal world view - characterised by security paranoia, constant surveillance and social alienation. Digital horror screens its subjects via the transnational technologies of our age, such as the camcorder and CCTV, and records them in secret footage that may, one day, be found.

INTRODUCTION 1.    Linnie Blake and Xavier Aldana Reyes, 'Horror in the Digital Age' SECTION 1. HAUNTED TECHNOLOGIES AND NETWORK PANIC 1. Steffen Hantke, 'Network Anxiety: Prefiguring Digital Anxieties in the American Horror Film' 2. Steve Jones, 'Torture Pornopticon: (In)security Cameras, Self-Governance and Autonomy' 3. Steen Christiansen, 'Uncanny Cameras and Network Subjects' 4. Neal Kirk, 'Networked Spectrality: In Memorium, Pulse and Beyond' SECTION 2. DIGITAL HORROR AND THE POST/NATIONAL 5. Linnie Blake and Mary Ainslie, 'Digital Witnessing and Trauma Testimony in Ghost Game: Cambodian Genocide, Digital Horror and the Nationalism of New Thai Cinema' 6. Dejan Ognjanovi?, '"Welcome to the Reality Studio": Serbian Hand-Held Horrors' 7. Zeynep Sahinturk, 'Djinn in the Machine: Technology and Islam in Turkish Horror Film' 8. Mark Freeman, 'An Uploadable Cinema: Digital Horror and the Postnational Image' SECTION 3. DIGITAL STYLISTICS 9. Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet, 'The Politics and Poetics of Night Vision' 10. James Aston, 'Nightmares outside the mainstream: August Underground and reel/real horror' 11. Xavier Aldana Reyes, 'The [.REC] Quartet: Affective Possibilities and Stylistic Limitations of Found Footage Horror'