BLOOD ON THE LENS : trauma and anxiety in american found footage horror cinema

Connects the found footage horror subgenre to significant traumatic events and societal anxieties in American history and contemporary America Cover Half Title Title Page Copyright Contents List of Figures Acknowledgements 1 Found footage horror: a cinema of absences Why found footage horror? Defining found footage horror Finding found footage horror Found footage horror and trauma Structure Part I 2 Found footage horror and documentary conventions ‘You must admit, it’s exceptional footage!’: documentary modes and styles within found footage horror ‘The camera can see, and what the camera sees the audience sees’: documentary truth and the camera as a tool of veracity ‘Tape everything, you hear me? Tape everything!’: the limitations of the camera, absence as authenticity and the failed documentary project Conclusion 3 Found footage horror and historical trauma ‘Whatever happens, this story needs to be told’: are there limits to traumatic representation? ‘I don’t want to get any more involved’: the (post)allegorical moment and the Jonestown Death Tape ‘We go there so you don’t have to’: the Vice aesthetic and the importance of witnessing ‘You have a great responsibility’: accidental and endangered – failing objectivity, crisis reporting and trauma tourism in The Sacrament Why Jonestown, why now? The Othering of the Jonestown dead and The Sacrament as traumatic space Conclusion 4 Found footage horror and televisual actualities ‘I don’t think either of us are going to want you alive for the things I’m going to do to you’: making a murder documentary with The Poughkeepsie Tapes ‘I wonder what was on those tapes’: the mythology of The Poughkeepsie Tapes ‘Edited strictly for time’: the look of the real in Grave Encounters ‘Be a fucking professional and stay in character’: performing the real, participation and privilege in Grave Encounters ‘People are going to want to see this’: the ever present threat of a haunted landscape Conclusion Part II 5 Found footage horror, 9/11 and a culture of fear Horror with a message(?) Searching the wreckage: the paranoid landscape of post‐9/11 America Fear on screen: cinema and horror post-9/11 – a brief overview A new visual language of terror: bystander footage and the (un)believability of continuing to tape Conclusion 6 ‘They’re going to let us die’: trust in found footage horror ‘They’re not going to let us out of here alive, are they?’: inadvertent witnesses ‘I signed up for brave and courageous’: the heroic firefighter in Quarantine and 9/11 ‘Turn it off!’: editing and crisis censorship ‘Hit her again’: the camera as a tool in found footage horror Conclusion 7 ‘What if they’re not even listening?’: truth in found footage horror ‘There’s a little thing called the first amendment?’: the found footage truth teller ‘With an underlying threat of social satire’: editing ‘We need to keep this in perspective’: on being collateral damage in post-9/11 found footage horror Conclusion Part III 8 Death in digital: found footage horror and the internet Ghosts in the machines: new media/new horror ‘Is it real?’: internet-based paratexts and found footage horror Conclusion 9 ‘You have committed a fatal error’: social media horrors ‘It’s the internet, you should have expected something like this’: real death, the internet and The Den ‘What you’ve done here will live forever’: the haunted (social) media of Unfriended ‘If you’re not documenting yourself, it’s simple. You don’t exist’: content, identity and audiences in Spree Conclusion 10 The footage yet to be found Bibliography Found Footage Filmography and Other Media Filmography Index