Digital Horror: Haunted Technologies, Network Panic and the Found Footage Phenomenon (International Library of the Moving Image)

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. Network Anxiety: Prefiguring Digital Anxieties In The American Horror Film / Steffen Hantke -- Torture Pornopticon: (in)security Cameras, Self-governance And Autonomy / Steve Jones -- Uncanny Cameras And Network Subjects / Steen Christiansen -- Networked Spectrality: In Memoriam, Pulse And Beyond / Neal Kirk -- Digital Witnessing And Trauma Testimony In Ghost Game: Cambodian Genocide, Digital Horror And The Nationalism Of New Thai Cinema / Linnie Blake And Mary Ainslie -- 'welcome To The Reality Studio': Serbian Hand-held Horrors / Dejan Ognjanovic -- Djinn In The Machine: Technology And Islam In Turkish Horror Film / Zeynep Sahinturk -- An Uploadable Cinema: Digital Horror And The Postnational Image / Mark Freeman -- Night Vision In The Contemporary Horror Film / Agniezka Soltysik Monnet -- Nightmares Outside The Mainstream: August Underground And Real/reel Horror / James Aston -- The [.rec] Films: Affective Possibilities And Stylistic Limitations Of Found Footage Horror / Xavier Aldana Reyes. Edited By Linnie Blake And Xavier Aldana Reyes. Includes Bilbiographical References, Filmography And Index. 9780755603718.0002 -1 9780755603718.0004 -1 9780755603718.0005 -1 9780755603718.0006 -1 9780755603718.ch-001 -1 9780755603718.ch-002 -1 9780755603718.ch-003 -1 9780755603718.ch-004 -1 9780755603718.ch-005 -1 9780755603718.ch-006 -1 9780755603718.ch-007 -1 9780755603718.ch-008 -1 9780755603718.ch-009 -1 9780755603718.ch-010 -1 9780755603718.ch-011 -1 9780755603718.0007 -1 9780755603718.0008 -1 9780755603718.0009 -1 This book argues that, in its increasing use of hand-held techniques, the motifs of surveillance and found footage and the trope of 'digital haunting', contemporary horror cinema reflects - and exploits - the anxieties of our age.