METAFICTIONAL MONSTERS AND FOUND-FICTION NIGHTMARES: REALITY AND NARRATOLOGICAL STRATEGY IN HORROR FICTION

A Thesis submitted to the faculty of San Francisco State University % In partial fulfillment of Z oi4 the requirements for 6 M L the Degree

Master of Arts

In

English: Literature

by

Zoe Elizabeth Dumas

San Francisco, California

January 2019 Copyright by Zoe Elizabeth Dumas 2019 CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL

I certify that I have read METAFICTIONAL MONSTERS AND FOUND-FICTION

NIGHTMARES: REALITY AND NARRATOLOGICAL STRATEGY IN HORROR

FICTION by Zoe Elizabeth Dumas, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree

Master of Arts in English: Literature at San Francisco State University.

Associate Professor

Geoffrey Green, Ph.D. Associate Professor METAFICTIONAL MONSTERS AND FOUND-FICTION NIGHTMARES: REALITY AND NARRATOLOGICAL STRATEGY IN HORROR FICTION

Zoe Elizabeth Dumas San Francisco, California 2019

As technology becomes ever-prevalent in modem society and our lives are documented for all to see on a daily basis, it is more important than ever that we understand the role of narrative in our media. This project explores works of horror fiction that work upon the conceit of being a found text that is in some way representative of the real world. I argue that these texts, rather than just being an adrenaline rush, are able to teach us how to be better readers of the world around us. I study a breadth of horror texts, focusing specifically on the film The Blair Witch Project, the novel House o f Leaves, and the Twitter story “Dear David.” Each text ushers in a new mode of horror, in which we never know who—or what—we can trust. This new, modem horror posits that we must be wary of the nefarious powers that run our everyday lives through technology and social media.

is a correct representation of the content of this thesis.

Date ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work would never have been possible without the love and support of my teachers, family, and friends.

Special thanks to Professors Sara Hackenberg, Geoffrey Green, Summer Star, and

Cynthia Elliott. Each of you taught me invaluable lessons as a writer, reader, and student, and I wouldn’t be the same if it weren’t for all of you.

Leila and Angela: thank you for being wonderful friends and showing me I wasn’t alone in this intense journey.

To my parents, thank you for always believing in me and showing me that it was OK to follow my passion.

George and Chris, thank you for being the best older brothers a little sister could ask for.

No matter what stress I’m facing, you two are always there to make me feel better.

Finally, thank you to Andrew for being the most wonderful and supportive husband. No matter what, you are always there for me to make me smile or bring me a cup of coffee when I need it most. Ultimately, none of this would be possible without your love and support. Thank you, too, for discussing horror with me ad infinitum—this passion would not have grown to what it is today were it not for you. Hail yourself!

v TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction...... 1

History of Found Fiction...... 5

Affect and the Power to Change Belief...... 24

The Weird and the Eerie...... 30

Monsters in the Machine: Horror Online...... 39

Haunted by Ghosts of Our Own Design...... 50

Conclusion...... 58

Works Cited 61 1

Introduction

Until the 2016 Presidential election “fake news” was nonexistent, at least in name.

In the midst of this especially heated news cycle, stories began appearing online with

eye-catching headlines like “Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for

President” and “FBI Agent Suspected in Hillary Clinton Email Leaks Found Dead in

Apparent Murder-Suicide.” Of course, these stories had no substance and only existed to generate clicks. Buzzfeed journalists investigating these outlandish stories discovered that a majority of them originated from the small Macedonian town of Veles. The “teens and young men” who wrote the articles had no real interest in American politics, but they wanted to get more eyes on their sites. The writers determined that “the best way to generate traffic [was] to get their politics stories to spread on Facebook—and the best way to generate shares on Facebook [was] to publish sensationalist and often false content that [catered] to Trump supporters” (Wendling).

This does not imply, however, that “fake news” is only an applicable term for conservative news, nor that a Trump-positive readership is the only target for outright lies in their newsfeeds. The writers of these articles have little else in mind than the money to be made from unsuspecting users and will write whatever it takes to make top-dollar online. Beyond literal “fake news,” or purposefully false news stories made to seem like they are true for sensationalist purposes, there are countless examples of larger powers using social media and other modem technologies to seize control of large populations.

As readers caught on to “fake news” as Buzzfeed describes it, the term experienced a 2

shift in meaning. No longer did “fake news” mean the outrageous news stories coming

out of Veles; now “fake news” is a slur aimed at legitimate news sites whenever a claim

is made to which the reader is opposed. One of the most famous examples of this is when

President Donald Trump replied that information revealed during the investigation of

Russian meddling was “fake news.” Now it is fairly common to see users in online communities dismissing legitimate counterarguments with two simple words. “Fake news” does not describe false journalism anymore, but it is instead a marker of someone unwilling to engage with anything that goes against their current line of belief.

Returning once more to the 2016 election, this malicious confiscation of media and journalistic power came from automated Russian Twitter accounts called social bots.

In the final month leading up to the election, every one in five election-related tweets was published by a bot and not a voting human (Clifton). These bots would hardly matter if they were just voices shouting into the ether, but this is far from the case. USC professor and researcher Emilio Ferrara published a study in 2017 in which he determines that humans are incredibly susceptible to contagious social media messages. As Ferrara puts it, “You’re more likely to retweet something if you see it tweeted by many different sources” (qtd. in Clifton).

Election interference was only the start for these Russian bots, though; further information reveals that the goal of the hackers in control of these bots was to destabilize

American society through political division. Tom McCarthy, a national affairs reporter 3

for The Guardian, states “The overarching goal, during the election and now, analysts

say, is to expand and exploit divisions, attacking the American fabric where it is most vulnerable, along lines of race, gender, class and creed.” These bots worked not by clumsily parroting bi-partisan rhetoric, but instead focused on specific hot-button issues across the political gamut. Some identified imposter pages include “Secured Borders”

(anti-immigration), “Texas Rebels” (anti-Clinton, pro-Texas), “Being Patriotic” (anti­ refugee, pro-Confederate flag), “LGBT United” (pro-LGBT), and “Blacktivists” (pro-

Black Lives Matter). Russia used the bots to spread disinformation to an unsuspecting audience, secretly gathering information on voters and, eventually, subtly discouraging them from voting at all. Ferrara states that the power of bots is “particularly concerning because there is the potential to reach a critical mass large enough to dominate the public discourse and alter public opinion” (Ferrara).

Concerning, indeed. Ferrara’s suggestion that nefarious outside agents could— and do—use our own technology to silently control us sounds more like the terrifying plot of a science fiction novel than reality. The horror which inevitably arises from this knowledge seems like it should be more than enough to turn everyone off technology for good, and yet social media, bots, and other similar technology continues to grow and rapidly pervade everyday life. Users are trapped not only by the conveniences modem technology affords them, but also must interact with this technology in some way to

function within modem society. As romantic as it may sound to “go off the grid,” this is a 4

fantasy that will ultimately lead nowhere. Instead, users must fight to take back the technology that ensnares them, and the first step towards this is recognition of being used in the first place.

As terrifying as it is that we are edging toward Orwellian chaos, plenty of good can still come from modem technology. Social media itself is often lauded for connecting people who would otherwise be separated by physical space. Researchers have also found ways to leverage technology like social bots for good. An example of this is “Botivist,” described by its creators as “a platform that uses Twitter bots to find potential volunteers and request contributions” (Savage et al. 1). As can be seen when any new technology emerges, the evil associated with it comes not from the technology itself, but from the users who exploit it. Technology is never neutral, but is always influenced by whoever has control at any given moment.

Numerous pieces of media explore these concepts, but it is without a doubt the feeling of horror that surfaces as the vital connecting thread between them all. Within the horror genre are works that themselves attempt to fool audiences into believing they are truth rather than fiction. A clear and recent example of this is present in the boom of found-footage horror films in the 2000s, but creators have utilized this conceit throughout time to unpack our relationship with the technologies we create. For example, Dracula and Frankenstein do this, as I argue in more detail later on. Even the first Gothic novel,

The Castle o f Otranto, owes its creation to Walpole’s knowledge of technology—in this 5

case the printing press. These fictions that present themselves as fact inhabit numerous genres and mediums, but horror is the connective tissue that unites the most popular examples. In these cases, the Internet is a deciding factor in what makes the works horrific. The fears that the Internet inspires in such cases are all about control and agency: how is the internet controlling me? How different is someone else’s version of me from the real me? Is there even a real me outside of the internet? And how am I, in turn, complicit in creating and perpetuating alternate versions of others I know online?

Technology will continue to grow and change at a rapid pace, and such change often leaves people uneasy over what this means for humanity and society. Increasing anxiety over how we allow others to control us through technology makes now a critical time to explore how found-fiction horror can help us understand and navigate the world—both physically and online. For my purposes here I will look to a variety of texts with special focus on three: The Blair Witch Project, House o f Leaves, and “Dear David.”

These texts demonstrate the varying ways in which the horror genre pushes back against the impending doom of technological takeover.

History of Found Fiction

Before embarking on a history of found fiction as a style or subgenre, it is first significant to recognize what exactly I mean by found fiction. Found fiction is any piece of narrative that is represented as an artifact of reality and which claims to be a legitimate, factual piece of that reality. Although many works will take steps to appear 6

real, such as mockumentary films, these pieces tend not to convince audiences of their authenticity. There are, of course, exceptions to this, such as the mockumentary “Curse of the Blair Witch,” the companion piece to The Blair Witch , but many mockumentaries clearly acknowledge the satire implied in their genre’s name. Movies like This Is Spinal Tap and Bor at: Cultural Learnings o fAmerica for Make Benefit

Glorious Nation o fKazakhstan allow audiences in on the joke. The ridiculous people and situations filmmakers create are overexaggerated takes on reality, but the intention is more towards laughing at absurdity together and not in attempting to convince anyone that the film is real.

Even before horror, or more generally genre fiction, existed, authors would playfully blur the boundaries between their realities and the fictions they created: take, for instance, Don Quixote and his metafictional manner of interacting with the text as text, or Richardson’s Pamela, whose letters many readers at the time considered to be true letters written by the eponymous young woman. In fact, many authors of the earliest novels “almost always claim to be writing factual accounts rather than fictional ones”

(Davis 8). Even prior to these literary works are cultural and religious myths and legends told in such a way as to resemble history rather than fiction. My focus here, however, will be specifically regarding more modem found fictions that are much more deliberately constructed—and meant to be seen as such. Pieces like The Blair Witch Project, House o f

Leaves, and “Dear David” not only mimic reality within themselves as well as in various 7

pieces of paratextual evidence, but they also deliberately call attention to their constructed-ness as it pertains to their themes regarding the tenuous boundary between fact and fiction.

Both The Blair Witch Project and House o f Leaves, for instance, leave hints for readers to understand that even the most realistic-seeming works, like theirs, are constructed. Both the film and the novel are made to mimic the appearance of documentary and academic text, respectively, and in so doing acknowledge that anything can be made so as to seem real or authentic even when it is not. At one point in The Blair

Witch Project, Josh and Heather have a short conversation about what makes film enticing for filmmakers:

Josh: I see why you like this video camera so much.

Heather: You do?

Josh: It's not quite reality. It's like a totally filtered reality. It's like you can

pretend everything's not quite the way it is. ( Blair Witch Project)

Josh here expresses that film allows us a measure of control over the world which we would not otherwise have, and in acknowledging this to Heather tells the audience that the “reality” they are seeing is still under someone else’s control. Danielewski does something that even more explicitly states the nature of the novel’s constructed-ness with one of Zampano’s writing notes found in Appendix C: 8

Perhaps I will alter the whole thing. Kill both children. Murder is a better Word.

Chad scrambling to escape, almost making it to the front door where Karen waits,

until a comer in the foyer suddenly leaps forward and hews the boy in half. At the

same time Navidson, by the kitchen, reaches for Daisy, only to arrive a fraction of

a second too late, his fingers finding air, his eyes scratching after Daisy as she

falls to her death. Let both parents experience it. Let their narcissism find a new

object to wither by. Douse them in infanticide. Drown them in blood. (552)

None of this happens in the novel itself, but what makes it especially apt here is that

Navidson , Record the film which Zampaiio is writing about, is supposed to be a documentary he has watched and not a story he has conceived of himself. This slip in the notes clearly shows that Zampano did construct The Navidson Record. But this note appears in an appendix, not part of the text itself but instead as a piece of additional text that one could very easily gloss over. The revelation that Zampano wrote The Navidson

Record is not for everyone; rather, it can only come to those willing to put in the work to find it. Danielewski reveals the constructed-ness of the film and Zampano’s writing about it, thus demonstrating that even the most convincing works must always be scrutinized, that no text—regardless of how true or real it may seem—is without fault or bias because of the fact that it must be made by a human.

There is never a moment in “Dear David” where Ellis makes this sort of move, or at least not one that can be seen without further narrative context. That being said, the 9

thematic argument Ellis makes regarding social media trauma does demonstrate an awareness of the inherent constructed-ness of all social media interactions. Ellis is putting on a performance in a similar but exaggerated manner to the way everyone puts on a persona for the online world. The very form of Twitter narrative shows deliberate construction that might be less obvious in the types of texts The Blair Witch Project and

House o f Leaves are scrutinizing. All these and other found fiction works utilize their forms to enlighten readers of the constructed-ness of text in general, pointing them towards larger arguments about scrutinizing spaces that appear to be neutral or trustworthy. What these texts demonstrate is that all readers have a responsibility to understand and question what we read. When readers fail to acknowledge this responsibility we edge closer and closer to allowing these pieces—novels, films, news stories, etc.—to control and use us, rather than the other way around.

To start a history of found fiction in the horror genre, it is best to begin at the beginning of modem horror: the Gothic. What we know of today as the literary Gothic was sparked by the Gothic Revival period of architecture and the famed, eclectic author

Horace Walpole whose novella The Castle o f Otranto would capture the mysterious and supernatural spirit of the Gothic. While not technically the first novel to utilize the now recognizable themes of tropes of the Gothic genre, Otranto truly marks the beginning of the Gothic’s literary life: according to Nick Groom, Walpole’s novella was a “modem classic,” and “a trailblazer [which] succeeded in shifting the entire Gothic paradigm” 10

(71). Many of the elements of the early Gothic that Walpole put forward continue to manifest in the horror genre to this day. Walpole’s predecessor, Thomas Leland, had already utilized many of the Gothic characteristics we recognize today—“the castles, crypts, secret passages, dynastic plots, mediaeval Catholic ritual, and latent violence”— but Walpole injected the Gothic with “supematuralism” and the ability of “dreams to direct the action” (Groom 71). How fascinating, then, that the work which truly started us on the path towards modem horror storytelling would make an attempt eerily similar to later found-footage works like The Blair Witch Project.

Upon its initial release, The Castle o f Otranto was sold to audiences as a translation of an unearthed Italian manuscript. Walpole claims in the preface to the novella’s first edition that the manuscript “was found in the library of an ancient Catholic family in the north of England. It was printed at Naples, in the black letter, in the year

1529. How much sooner it was written does not appear” (17). Though Walpole never states the manuscript to be an account of fact, he does claim to believe that “the ground work of the story is founded on truth” and that “If a catastrophe, at all resembling that which [the author] describes, is believed to have given rise to his work, it will contribute to interest the reader, and will make The Castle o f Otranto a still more moving story”

(19). The text, while not a recounting of the truth, must certainly be based on a true story, something that will surely make the novella that much more fascinating to audiences. Not unlike many modem horror films that claim to be “based on a true story,” Walpole 11

cleverly alludes to a truth behind his fiction that might make it more compelling and,

perhaps even more importantly, marketable1.

In addition to marketability, the realism of the novella connects to and indeed

begins the tradition of the horror genre to craft a work upon a “realistic framework”

(Lovecraft, qtd. In Evans 131). This realistic framework is especially vital in Otranto for

its inspiration on the eponymous castle. Walpole confesses in a 1765 letter to Rev.

William Cole that the idea for the novel sprung from a morning walk through his home.

Your partiality to me and Strawberry have, I hope, inclined you to excuse the

wildness of the story. You will even have found some traits to put you in mind of

this place. When you read of the picture quitting its panel, did you not recollect

the portrait of Lord Falkland, all in white, in my Gallery? Shall I even confess to

you, what was the origin of this romance! I waked one morning, in the beginning

of last June, from a dream, of which, all I could recover, was, that I had thought

myself in an ancient castle (a very natural dream for a head like mine filled with

Gothic story), and that on the uppermost banister of a great staircase I saw a

gigantic hand in armour, (source?)

1 In additional to marketability, Walpole’s ruse no doubt was largely influenced by a desire to remove himself from the work should it be poorly received. In his introduction to the text, Walpole’s friend and contemporary Sir Walter Scott states

Mr. Walpole, being uncertain of the reception which a work upon so new a plan might experience from the world, and not caring, perhaps, to encounter the ridicule which would have attended its failure, The Castle of Otranto was ushered into the world as a translation from the Italian. (Scott 6) 12

Nick Groom argues that Walpole’s “primary innovation” with Otranto came not from the mysterious plots and medieval castles we have come to expect from the Gothic, but rather that it is in the book’s “supematuralism” and in Walpole’s willingness to allow “dreams to direct the action” (71). Walpole’s combination of his real home of Strawberry Hill and his Gothically-inclined dreams are what marks Otranto as a pivotal point in the history of the horror genre.

Strawberry Hill is not only key to Walpole’s work and influence on literary history for the way it inspired his writing, however. Seven years before Walpole published Otranto, he established his own private printing press at his home. “I am turned a printer” says Walpole in a letter to friend Sir Horace Mann, “and have converted a little cottage here into a printing-office” (qtd. in The Library). Though Walpole did not himself publish Otranto, his experience as a publisher shaped his novel’s future. In his biography of Walpole, R.W. Ketton-Cremer argues that “it was difficult [for Walpole] to own a private press without succumbing to the temptations of authorship,” but the story may be more complex (qtd. In Clery 97). E.J. Clery argues in “Horace Walpole, The Strawberry

Hill Press, and the Emergence of the Gothic Genre” that Ketton-Cremer’s idea that

“Technology comes first; authorship second” is a particularly “seductive” one, but that it does not take into account the complexity of Walpole’s relationship with print culture and how that affected “his sense of what it was to be an author” (97-98). Clery concludes that

“Walpole, by becoming an independent printer and publisher, establishes himself as a 13

gatekeeper between one world and the next. His press allows him some measure of control: to express his position as patrician and patron ... to suppress his own writings should he have second thoughts ... [and] to transform manuscript into print” (105-106).

Walpole’s role as author and progenitor of the modem horror genre came just as much from the technology he utilized to create the “first” Gothic story.

Walpole’s fusion of the fantastic and the real influences Gothic and horror creators to this day. The real in Otranto grounds the fantastic and makes those elements more realistic, and thus more frightening, because of it. Though Otranto is not perhaps a titan of the type of literature that can make your skin crawl, much of its literary progeny are. Both Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula eclipse the popularity and effectiveness of Otranto, but their methods are not far removed from those Walpole used. Neither Frankenstein nor Dracula were billed as “true” tales upon their respective releases, but each novel does utilize techniques that effectively mimic a found text. Shelley and Stoker primarily form this mimesis in their novels’ epistolary styles: the faux-letters and diary entries in each novel, though recounting supernatural and fantastical events, are collected in a form that is more often associated with truth than fiction.

There is another vital thread that ties Frankenstein and Dracula to their Gothic predecessor, though; technological advance and the push towards modernity. Both texts are deeply concerned with the changing face of society at the hands of technological 14

change. In Dracula, Stoker’s preoccupation with technology comes in the many epistolary forms that make up his novel. As previously mentioned, the novel is made up of letters and journals-—often written in the then-new form of shorthand—but there are additional forms of communication utilized such as telegrams, news reports, and phonograph recordings. In his afterword to the novel, critic Jeffrey Meyers argues that this variety of communication practices “are used to validate the supernatural elements in the midst of what Van Helsing calls ‘our scientific, sceptical, matter-of-fact nineteenth century’” (382). Technology is not only what makes Dracula possible, it makes it plausible as well. Dracula in this vein is a story about the rise of technology and the inevitable victory of modernity and change over tradition and stagnation.

On the other hand, Frankenstein carefully warns us about the dangers when technology goes unchecked. Unlike Stoker, who utilizes a variety of technologies to tell his story, Shelley depends upon technology within the story to make her argument.

Frankenstein is made up of numerous letters written by a single man recounting the narrative that he has been told. The novel is almost like a version of the children’s game

“Telephone;” readers take for granted what they are being told without taking into account that the entire novel is a story being retold to them through the letters of Walton.

Frankenstein’s narrative is filtered through Walton, and the creature’s narrative is filtered through both Frankenstein and Walton. There is a confused sense of what is accurate or real given the plethora of authorial voices Shelley uses. 15

And then, of course, there is the issue of scientific advances that Shelley is perhaps most preoccupied with in Frankenstein. Frankenstein is a perpetuator of modernity and then a victim of that modernity which he so wholeheartedly embraced; he creates technology, becoming “capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter,” before growing to fear and seeking to destroy that which he has created (Shelley 34).

Technology becomes evil for Frankenstein because it has caused him great pain, but that technology, the creature, only causes Frankenstein pain because he is unwilling to treat him as anything other than a creation. There is technological determinism at work in

Frankenstein in that the creature takes on a life and will of its own outside of his creator, but that life and will is necessarily shaped by the world the creature stumbles through.

Technology grows and changes rapidly, for better or for worse, and Frankenstein demonstrates the responsibility we must take as creators and users.

In the Preface to Frankenstein, Percy Shelley—writing as his wife —claims that although “The event on which [the novel] is founded ... [is] not of impossible occurrence

... [the author] shall not be supposed as according the remotest degree of serious faith to such an imagination” (3). In a similar way to Walpole in Otranto, Wollstonecraft Shelley weaves together real advances in science with the fantastic to horrifying results.

2 In her introduction to the Standard Novels edition of Frankenstein, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley states that the novel was written entirely on her own, with the exclusion of the Preface: “As far as I can recollect, it was entirely written by him” (197). Even though my argument largely relies upon the author’s intention—in this case, Wollstonecraft Shelley’s—it seems unlikely that she would disagree with Shelley’s statements made in the Preface. 16

Wollstonecraft Shelley echoes Walpole’s sentiments of half-remembered dreams when she states that after speaking through the night with Lord Byron and Percy Shelley about

“the experiments of Dr. Darwin” and “galvanism” that her “imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided [her], gifting the successive images that arose in [her] mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie” (195-196). Even upon waking,

Wollstonecraft Shelley had to assure herself that her fears were a fiction by

“exchanging] the ghastly image of [her] fancy for the realities around” (196). The dreams of each of these authors were both vastly influenced by and influential of the reality around them, resulting in works of fiction which heavily mimic this intermingling of truth and dreams.

What Walpole and Wollstonecraft Shelley did by intermingling the dream-like supernatural and the real world would become a significant aspect in many horror texts to this day. H.P. Lovecraft, who is now considered one of the most significant figures in modem horror literature, acknowledged the importance of an illusory realism to crafting truly terrifying works. In a letter to friend and fellow author Clark Ashton Smith,

Lovecraft writes

The more I consider weird fiction, the more am I convinced that a solidly realistic

framework is needed in order to build up a preparation for the unreal element...

My own rule is that no weird story can truly produce terror unless it is devised

with all the care and verisimilitude of an actual hoax. The author must forget all 17

about “short story technique” and build up a stark, simple account, full of homely

corroborative details, just as if he were trying to “put across” a deception in real

life—a deception clever enough to make adults believe in it. (qtd. in Evans 131)

Lovecraft’s idea of the hoax-like narrative had been produced before, but it would come through especially powerfully with the rise of horror films. Much like found-footage films like The Blair Witch Project and the Paranormal Activity series, Lovecraft’s works exhibit a dedication to creating a work of fiction that could conceivably represent the real world. Lovecraft would do this within his writing, but other authors and creators would add to his mythos in different ways, crafting this pseudo-real world in which evil cults and mysterious aliens controlled the real both within and outside of the text.

Concerning horrific hoaxes, perhaps none is more famous than that which occurred just one year after Lovecraft’s death: Orson Welles’s 1938 radio broadcast of

War o f the Worlds. Had he been alive to hear it, Lovecraft likely would have been delighted to listen to a radio program which, somewhat unintentionally, was “devised with all the care and verisimilitude of an actual hoax.” On October 30, 1938, the special

Halloween episode of the CBS program The Mercury Theatre on the Air both frightened and enthralled audiences, so much so that reports flooded in of listeners “[fleeing] their homes, [jamming] highways, [overwhelming] telephone circuits, [flocking] to houses of worship, [setting] about preparing defenses, and even [contemplating] suicide in the belief that the end of the world was at hand” (Campbell 32). Perhaps even more so than 18

any other piece of fiction, this production of o f the Worlds demonstrates the immensely negative power a found fiction can have.

At least, that’s what many people believed in the decades that followed the broadcast. Recent research has revealed, however, that the real hoax of War o f the Worlds came not from the broadcast itself, but rather from the news coverage of it on the following day. Newspaper publications, already uneasy about the effects of radio on their profits, took a small sampling of reactions to the Mercury Theatre show and vastly blew them out of proportion. As Joseph Campbell puts it in his chapter “Fright beyond

Measure? The Myth of The War o f the Worlds,”

the notion that the War o f the Worlds program sent untold thousands of people

into the streets in panic is a media-driven myth that offers a deceptive message

about the power radio wielded over listeners in its early days and, more broadly,

about the media’s potential to sow fright, panic, and alarm. (Campbell 33).

If anything, though, the desire to sow panic about the effects of radio backfired, and The

War o f the Worlds would forever be one of the most famous radio shows of all time.

This is not to say, however, that the elements of radio verite found in The War o f the Worlds do not function as Lovecraft intended the hoax-like elements in his weird fiction, or as they would later appear in works like The Blair Witch Project, House o f

Leaves, and “Dear David.” While the intention of any of these or similar works is 19

unlikely to be to provoke mass hysteria or even to truly trick readers and audiences, the effect remains. The Mercury Theatre production of War o f the Worlds did not cause the mass panic that is embedded in American folklore, but the aftermath, in a sense, did:

“The real War o f the Worlds panic—an upswell of anxiety over the power of the media and the future of American democracy” would only begin once listeners realized they had been fooled (A. Schwartz 94). The significance of War o f the Worlds to found fictions today resides both in the “hoax” of its creation as well is in the real hoax of its reaction.

The media event of this radio play demonstrates the power of myth and rumor combined with technological innovation to perpetuate lies and gossip on a wide-spread scale.

News media played an enormous part in establishing the 1938 War o f the Worlds as a cultural touchstone in the American consciousness. Without newspapers drastically misreporting the “panic” caused by the broadcast, the show likely never would have garnered the attention it holds to this day. Fictional media continues to explore the blurry boundary between fact and fiction that War o f the Worlds inevitably pointed to in 1938.

Forty years later, audiences’ ability to recognize fiction in a layer of realistic paint would once more be tested. In 1979, the release of Ruggero Deodato’s partially found-footage film Cannibal Holocaust truly fooled many viewers into believing the “reality” of a found fiction, at least for a time.

This Italian “video nasty” portrays a documentary crew’s exploration of and eventual demise at the hands of a native tribe—the Yanomamo—in the Amazon 20

rainforest. Behind this exploitation-style plot lies a message about the ethical dilemmas of documentary filmmaking and the narrative construction necessary to producing any news or documentary film. Cannibal Holocaust essentially reissues the warning accidentally put forth by War o f the Worlds in 1938: “that when circumstances are right, the media can create panic and other effects that are unpredictable, disruptive, and wide ranging” (Campbell 43). Upon Cannibal Holocaust's release, however, this message was stifled by concerns that the deaths shown on screen were real rather than representations.

The film was confiscated just ten days following its release, and director Deodato was arrested on obscenity charges. The actors whose characters died in the film were

“missing,” but not dead; the actors agreed in their contracts to not appear on film for the entire year following Cannibal Holocaust's release to make the “found” footage seem more real. Audiences fell for this clever ploy, believing the footage was real and that what they had been shown in the theater was actual footage of death. This ruse would continue until Deodato’s court proceedings, where it was shown without a doubt that the film was entirely fictional, the actors were still alive, and the on-screen deaths were the product of keen editing and practical effects (De Angelis).

Technology once more plays a significant role in establishing Cannibal Holocaust as a precursor to found-fiction horror. I am reminded here of Meyers’ argument that the seemingly impossible situations in Dracula are made more realistic by their conveyance through modem technology. Cannibal Holocaust could not work as a faux-artifact if it 21

was not believeable, and this believability greatly emerges from technological innovations in film and filmmaking. The sense of reality in Cannibal Holocaust is due in no small part to the film techniques utilized: Deodato incorporates the

visual devices which one associates with the documentary mode at its most

immediate: shaky, hand-held camerawork, “accidental” compositions, crash

zooms, blurred images, lens flare, inaudible or intermittent sound, direct address

to camera, scratches and lab marks on the print, and so on. (Petley 178)

These characteristics are only possible because of technological innovations—and subsequent normalization of those characteristics in “legitimate” sources like documentary film. A film like Cannibal Holocaust could not have existed prior to the

1950s in any way resembling the film we see today, and it definitely could not have made audiences believe in it as reality were it not for modem filmmaking technology.

At the time of Cannibal Holocaust's release, audiences were mortified that “real” death had been shown in theaters to the public. With historical context, though, we know that nothing in the film was real, but was instead cleverly produced to mimic documentary film techniques. Reading the film as found fiction can only truly happen now that it is clear that Cannibal Holocaust is entirely fictional. Looking back on the film, Deodato claims that he was inspired by news coverage of the Red Brigades in the

1970s: “Every night on TV there were very strong images of people being killed or 22

maimed. Not only killings but also some fabrications. They were increasing the sensationalism of the news just to shock people” (qtd. in Rose). Deodato wanted his film to comment upon media sensationalism and to what horrific lengths producers might go to create compelling news. In looking back on Cannibal Holocaust, it becomes quite clear that Deodato is another in the list of horror creators who argue that audiences must learn to question their sources of information and to know that these sources are anything but neutral.

These are the lessons that become abundantly clear from closely reading The

Blair Witch Project, House o f Leaves, and “Dear David.” In The Blair Witch Project, student filmmakers Heather, Josh, and Mike embark on a trek through the woods of

Burkittsville, Maryland to film a documentary about the legendary creature known as the

Blair Witch. Their trip turns into a nightmare, though, as the three become increasingly lost and paranoid. Eventually, the group is separated from one another and all three are killed one by one. House o f Leaves follows a different trajectory, and is perhaps a bit more complicated to explain. The novel partially recounts a documentary about photojoumalist Will Navidson and his family as they explore their apparently “haunted” house, which has begun to grow larger inside than it is on the outside. This portion of the novel—titled The Navidson Record—is told by Zampano, who adds his analysis of the film in his sections of House o f Leaves. Zampafio’s manuscript about The Navidson

Record is discovered by Johnny Truant, who narrates from the footnotes with his 23

comments on Zampano’s work as well as his own story. This is all enveloped in the voice of the Editors, the mysterious, unnamed force that worked with Truant to compose the entirety of House o f Leaves. The final sections of House o f Leaves contain appendices, exhibits, and an index to complicate the narrative that came before them.

“Dear David” shares many narrative elements with both of the previous pieces, but does so in a new way thanks to its medium of publication. Twitter user Ellis documents his experience living in a haunted apartment with the malevolent ghost,

David. The story begins with a simple claim: “So, my apartment is being haunted by the ghost of a dead child and he’s trying to kill me” (@moby_dickhead). Ellis goes on to explain a series of ominous dreams he had with the mysterious ghost, including one in which a second ghost gives him the rules for speaking with David: “He's dead. He only appears at midnight, and you can ask him two questions if you said 'Dear David' first...

But never try to ask him a third question, or he'll kill you” (@moby_dickhead). The story wouldn’t be a story, though, if Ellis didn’t ask that fatal third question, and so inevitably he does by asking the boy who killed him. This is where Ellis’s haunting begins, and from where he attempts to unravel the mystery surrounding David. He shares through tweets the “evidence” he’s gathered of David’s existence, including videos of chairs seemingly moving on their own, photos and videos of Ellis’s cats reacting to the “threat,” and even mysterious messages Ellis began receiving on his phone from David. Ellis’s story concludes with a series of photos in which the ghost of David is clearly visible, 24

standing over Ellis while he sleeps. After this incident, Ellis decides enough is enough and moves away.

What this history of found-fiction horror shows is that modem horror and this artifactual style are deeply intertwined. Without the attempts at realism and mimesis, horror today would be quite a different beast. Of course horror would exist because fear is inevitable, but as a medium of both entertainment and ideology horror fiction posits a healthy skepticism about the world around us. Even works of horror that do not attempt to appear real gamer questions about what we know and what we think we know about reality. In the Internet Age, when technology grows and changes daily and questions of what to believe online are unending, horror is more vital than ever to challenge what we think we know about who and what to trust. This is where newer pieces of found-fiction horror are essential to understanding our relationship to the never-ending barrage of information we experience every day. The Blair Witch Project, House o f Leaves, and

“Dear David” make themselves part of online culture, demonstrating to users today what radio listeners learned back in 1938: not everyone is telling the truth, and sometimes even the strangest fiction can feel like reality.

Affect and the Power to Change Belief

There is an intense and near-unfathomable power in belief. Belief certainly points to the ultimate subjectivity of the human experience, but belief also clearly can hold a 25

negative power over people both alone and in groups. Many will skew the truth to obtain

desired results, while perhaps even more will place faith in an idea and stick to it, despite

any evidence that could logically disprove said belief. Regarding news media, consumers

have, for decades, placed their trust in the medium—newspapers, the radio, television—

rather than the actual facts of a situation. On a more minute level, consumers willingly

accept false truths, no matter how obvious their falsity may seem to outsiders, if they

have placed their trust in a certain organization or personality. For example, a great

amount of the “panic” surrounding the Warof the Worlds broadcast came from people

believing the story must be true because it aired on the radio. Campbell cites an incident

from the night of the show, when a woman disrupted a Methodist church service in

Indianapolis to spread the word: “[hurrying] to the pulpit,” the woman announced to the

congregation that “New York has been destroyed ... I believe the end of the world has

come. I heard it over the radio” (“Radio Play” qtd. in Campbell 44).

Even though today’s consumers might not so blatantly express a belief in the form

of news, individuals are just as likely to believe some sort of “fake news” as listeners

were back in 1938, perhaps even more so now. This belief stems from allegiance to a

specific personality; there are countless instances of people hearing news from a person they admire—regardless of that person’s credibility—and then spreading that “news” like

wildfire to anyone who will listen. The cycle of news and belief is a vicious one, and humanity might never be rid of it. 26

What’s worse, people with strongly-held beliefs in something will often double down on their beliefs rather than listen to another’s reasoning. This psychological phenomenon is called “the backfire effect,” which posits that “When your deepest convictions are challenged by contradictory evidence, your beliefs get stronger”

(McRaney). Additionally, humans have “motivated reasoning,” meaning that human reasoning “doesn’t take place in an emotional vacuum. Rather, our quick-fire emotions can set us on a course of thinking that’s highly biased, especially on topics we care a great deal about” (Mooney). Our emotions work faster than our reasoning, and these emotions react to counterarguments as an attack that subsequently registers in the brain as physical pain. Not every counterargument will trigger this backfire effect; the feeling grows stronger depending on how deeply felt the belief is, and, in turn, how much that belief is intertwined with one’s identity. As Paul Randolph puts it in the article “Why being wrong really hurts,” “any attack on our self-image is interpreted by the brain as physical pain” (2). It is only natural, then, that the person being “attacked” would react negatively instead of listening to logic or reason.

There will always be those who believe through desire and emotion rather than logic, but that does not mean there are not effective ways to provoke a change of thought by using emotionally-based reasoning, or affect. Art is an affectively challenging medium, meaning that it spreads ideas primarily through the feelings it evokes. In the paper “Affect is a Form of Cognition: A Neurobiological Analysis,” authors Seth Duncan 27

and Lisa Feldman Barrett posit that “affect is a form of cognition,” with “cognition” being defined as “all processes by which ... sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used” (1; Neisser qtd. in Duncan 1). Affect exists as part of the processes of the human mind which take in sensory input, including that from art, and transforms them into thoughts and ideas which will be put back into the world.

More specifically, Duncan and Barrett identify “core affect” as serving “the primary function of translating sensory information from the external environment into an internal, meaningful representation that can be used to safely navigate the world” (3).

Obviously, a great deal of information the brain processes is sensory, but pieces of art which are hyper-sensory, such as horror film, are translated into a stronger affect than something which is hypo-sensory, like a drama film: the greater the sensory stimuli, the stronger the affect. This does not mean that horror is the only genre to utilize affect, nor does it mean that drama does not affect audiences; rather, affect is a focal point upon which many of horror’s arguments draw upon, even in seemingly minimalist or

“mumblegore”3 films. Horror is a genre which relishes in being hyper-sensory; thus, the

“Mumblegore” is a play on the genre “mumblecore,” which describes low-budget films with naturalistic dialogue and few special effects:

“Mumblegore is a relatively new term that has blossomed with the low budget, yet character-driven, indie horror films that have been released in the past decade. It was bom out of the Mumblecore genre, introduced in 2002 with films such as Funny HA HA (2002) by Andrew Bujalski and Puffy Chair (2005) by the Duplass Brothers.

Mumblegore takes that genre into the realm of horror, with films such as You ’re Next (2011), The Sacrament (2013), and V/H/S (2012) as prime examples. Due to lower budgets and 28

loud sounds, the splashy visuals, the ominous soundtracks, even William Castle-esque

gimmicks like “smell-o-vision” and “Percepto4” all add to the sensory and therefore

affective quality of horror film. The hyper-sensory content creators infuse into their horror fictions is what makes audiences much more receptive to the arguments being made.

This sense of affect is not solely relegated to film. Clearly, literary works have just as much power as the moving image to create in readers an affective response, whether it is one of laughter, anxiety, and so on. Because literature lacks the sensory devices inherent to film, authors have to get creative with how they will still engage the

senses of their readers. Most commonly, this is achieved through language: people who find joy in reading poetry will often utilize sensory words to describe their feelings.

Readers feel they can see, smell, hear, taste, and/or feel what the author is describing. To achieve the hyper-sensory, then, authors will use tactics in addition to poetic language to

almost no studio pressure, these films are much more experimental. A few directors and writers have been credited with the birth and rise of this strange subgenre. Adam Wingard (You’re Next, V/H/S), Joe Swanberg (V/H/S), and Ti West (House of the Devil, The Sacrament) are just a few of the people working to create strange yet terrifying stories that push the boundaries of horror.” (McAndrews)

4 “Castle’s gimmicks attempt to reach out to the audience and incorporate them directly into the cinematic experience, to restore the real or imagined experience of the early cinema spectator. Castle is more Melies than Lumiere ... an inheritor of cinema’s stage magic and carnival roots” (Leeder 774). For more, see “Collective Screams: William Castle and the Gimmick Film” as well as Castle’s autobiography Step Right UP! I ’m Gonna Scare the Pants off America. 29

create a sensory reading experience. Examples of the hyper-sensory in literature can include accompanying music, photographs, and typographical manipulation that makes the text appear somehow atypical on the page, such as in House o f Leaves. Affect is extremely significant to the horror genre because it accounts for the sensory experience of artwork and indeed utilizes this sensory experience to inform the audience’s reading of a piece.

Affect is where found-fiction and horror collide: simply telling someone that something is wrong or illogical will not change their mind. It could instead very well strengthen any preconceived notions or biases: “We present facts and evidence, and it often does nothing to change people’s minds. In fact, it can make people dig in even more” (Silverman 2). The horror genre provides the gut-punching, heart-wrenching stage upon which creators can make their voices heard to an otherwise inattentive audience.

Combine this with the inherent belief in healthy media skepticism that occurs time and time again in found-fiction works, and you have a match that is tailor-made to fit

America’s current media and political climates. Modem creators of found fiction capitalize on this fitting combination, using their medium to teach audiences about the ways they may be controlled by the technology we all so willingly accept. Found-fiction narratives, especially now, are powerful tools to scare some sense into the masses and ultimately make them better readers of fiction and fictionalized “fact.” 30

The Weird and the Eerie

The horror genre has obviously transformed and evolved since Gothic writers like

Walpole and Radcliffe; oftentimes, modem horror works might be more aptly described as pieces of “weird” fiction. Authors and critics will often attribute the “weird” to

Lovecraft, and with good reason: many of his works epitomize the strangeness that is essential to the genre. And yet, Lovecraft himself found his writing to be a part of a vast tradition of weird tales that were quite different from other types of horror fiction. In the introduction to his essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” Lovecraft specifically mentions that the weird is not the “type of fear-literature ... of mere physical fear and the mundanely gruesome” (22). He explains this further by saying

The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a

sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of

breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and

there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming

its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain—a malign and

particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only

safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space”

(Lovecraft 22-23). 31

In the essay, Lovecraft identifies several of his predecessors in the “weird” genre, including Charles Dickens, Henry James, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Despite

Lovecraft’s assertion that the weird “has always existed, and always will exist,” his fiction is a significant starting point for understanding the weird and how it has come to influence nearly all of the most popular pieces of horror fiction since he was writing in the early twentieth century.

Horror is often and with good reason studied through the lens of psychoanalysis and Freud’s concept of the uncanny. While the uncanny is an especially fruitful starting place for reading these texts, there is much analysis left behind when it is the only critical consideration. In his book The Weird and the Eerie, critic Mark Fisher identifies these titular concepts as two modes which have largely been “crowded out” of critical discussion by the vast influence of Freud’s concept of the unheimlich (9). Fisher claims these three—unheimlich, weird, and eerie—share something: “They are all affects, but they are also modes: modes of film and fiction, modes of perception, ultimately, you might even say, modes of being” (9). At the heart of these three modes, Fisher argues, are the strange and the familiar. “Freud’s unheimlich is about the strange within the familiar, the strangely familiar, the familiar as strange,” but

The weird and the eerie make the opposite move: they allow us to see the inside

from the perspective of the outside ... the weird is that which does not belong.

The weird brings to the familiar something which ordinarily lies beyond it, and 32

which cannot be reconciled with the ‘homely’ (even as its negation).” (Fisher 10-

11)

The weird and the eerie are as equally present in reality as they are in fiction, and social media is the most evident way in which they function in everyday modem society.

Never before has humanity been so utterly connected and yet so completely fractured.

Certainly, these fractures are now made more obvious than in the past because they are under the microscope of online interaction, but this microscope has made these fractures deeper and that much harder to heal. The weird and the eerie are concerned with showing

“the inside from the perspective of the outside” and social networking sites, or SNSs, make the same move. Now more than ever, we can get online and find some of the most intimate parts of a person’s life— through things like visual and audio records of their homes, families, and friends—from the comfort of our own private spaces. Social media transforms its users into agents of the weird; they have become “that which does not belong” (Fisher 10). Eeriness, on the other hand, is encapsulated in the metaphysical questions SNSs produce.

When considering found-fiction horrors, Fisher’s conception of the weird and the eerie is especially apt. No matter the medium, whether it be literature, film, or beyond, when horror fiction co-opts the language and mode of a documentary style, that familiar style is taken over by a thing “which does not belong.” The news isn’t for the supernatural, it’s supposed to be for verifiable facts, but the need for said facts cannot be 33

reconciled with the concept of fiction when monsters force their way in. Blair Witch

Project, House o f Leaves, and “Dear David” all insert the weird or supernatural into the familiar to destabilize our understanding of what constitutes reality. Concepts within these texts do engage with Freud’s unheimlich, but their mode of delivery is where the weird is key.

This mode often begins with settings and expectations. Concerning this in

Lovecraft’s fiction, Fisher states “By setting his stories in New England rather than in some inviolate, far-distant realm, Lovecraft is able to tangle the hierarchical relationship between fiction and reality” (24). Each of the three texts discussed herein engage in this muddling of fiction and reality in both setting and form; given its textual similarity to

Lovecraft, House o f Leaves provides an appropriate example.

One of the most striking details in House o f Leaves is the intermingling and leveling that Danielewski does between real and fake scholarship. On almost any given page, scholarship from real, verifiable sources stands next to—neither above nor below— scholarship Danielewski has invented for his narrative. Footnotes 134 and 135, for instance, cite Penelope Reed Doob’s The Idea O f the Labyrinth: from Classical Antiquity through the Middle Ages and Daniel Hortz’s Understanding The Self: The Maze o f You, respectively (Danielewski 114). While Doob was indeed a very real scholar, and this monograph is absolutely one of her works, neither Hortz nor his monograph exist. In the vast sea of critical scholarship, it would be difficult for a reader to make such a claim of 34

any one of the works in House o f Leaves without first doing some research on the subject.

Here and on almost every page of the novel, Danielewski does work similar to Lovecraft:

“By treating really existing phenomenon [or texts] as if they had the same ontological status as his own inventions, Lovecraft [and Danielewski] de-realizes the factual and real­ izes the fictional” (Fisher 24). Both authors, and many more within the genre, are able to put fact and fiction on a level field, making it that much more difficult for readers to gauge what is and is not real. Readers must put in additional effort should they want any semblance of understanding as to where fiction and fact lie within House o f Leaves and beyond.

The Blair Witch Project similarly does this work of “real-izing,” but not with academic texts. Instead, the film “real-izes” Sanchez and Myrick’s fictional Maryland and its legendary Blair Witch through the documentary style. Neither does the film work in service of the weird mode, but instead in its sister mode, the eerie. Before returning to questions of style and aesthetics, it is important to establish how Fisher differentiates the eerie from the weird.

Whereas the weird is “constituted by a presence ... of that which does not

belong,” the eerie is concerned with “a failure o f absence or by a failure ofpresence. The sensation of the eerie occurs either when there is something present where there should be nothing, or there is nothing present when there should be something” (Fisher 61).

Specifically, this failure is characterized by speculation and suspense and “once the 35

questions and enigmas are resolved, the eerie immediately dissipates” (Fisher 62). These

presences and absences are tied up in the question of agency: “What kind of agent is

acting here? Is there an agent at all?” (Fisher 11). The eerie is additionally concerned

with knowledge and the unknown, as well as with “a sense of alterity” when considering that whatever mystery is present “might involve forms of knowledge, subjectivity and

sensation that lie beyond common experience” (Fisher 62).

In his review of the film in 1999, Roger Ebert states “ Blair Witch Project is a reminder that what really scares us is the stuff we can't see. The noise in the dark is almost always scarier than what makes the noise in the dark.” Myrick and Sanchez’s subtle hands in the film are what make it a terrifying standout from many other horror films to this day. The Blair Witch Project considers both aspects of the eerie Fisher identifies. The “something present where there should be nothing” comes from the clear presence of some force that is harassing Heather, Josh, and Mike. The three are supposed to be alone in the woods, and yet there is someone or something obviously there that

eventually kills them.

This directly ties into the notion of the eerie as “nothing present when there should be something;” logically, there should be something physical that is causing the filmmakers trouble. Someone has to place the cairns and stickmen around their campsite,

someone has to kidnap Josh and leave behind his bloody teeth, and someone has to be the one to attack Heather in the film’s final shot. Because of the movie’s story, we assume 36

this presence is the eponymous Blair Witch, but because we never actually see her and confirm her presence in reality it is unknown who attacked and presumably killed

Heather, Josh, and Mike. The agent of the eerie is never revealed, thus robbing the viewer of any sort of resolution to the questions their presence necessarily pose. Because of this lack of resolution the sense of eeriness the film evokes is never dissolved. The eerie stays with the film and is only exacerbated by the question of its status as “real” artifact.

The eerie in The Blair Witch Project is centered around unanswered questions and a quest for the unknowable. The conceit of the documentary within the film is to unearth and share with the viewers the history of the Blair Witch and how she has infected the town of Burkittsville for decades. This quest for knowledge, though, comes with a price; none of the filmmakers escape the situation with their lives. Forbidden knowledge and the unknowable are significant within the eerie mode for creating a sense of alterity within characters and audiences alike. Even if they had survived, the students in The

Blair Witch Project can no longer be anything other than “other” because of their brush with the unknowable in the woods. The only way we can get even remotely close to understanding their perspective is to watch the film, but that prospect comes with epistemologicai dangers of its own.

Lovecraft begins his essay Supernatural Horror in Literature with this statement:

“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown” (21). Many rightly interpret this to mean that the unknown is 37

terrifying because the infinite terrors one can imagine are greater than any one beast or monster in the dark. Conversely, though, Lovecraft could also be summoning with this statement the fear of knowing too much or knowing something which we are not allowed to know. Not only are we scared of what is hiding in the shadows but also how the knowledge of those shadows could itself harm us. Successful found-fiction horror narratives, like The Blair Witch Project, conjure this epistemological terror by placing the audience in the protagonists’ eyes. Heather, Josh, and Mike saw something they should not have; what’s to say we are not next? When we watch The Blair Witch Project or read stories like “Dear David,” we become implicated in whatever crime the characters have committed in front of us. Now, each audience member is themselves in grave danger of becoming the next victim for having seen beyond the veil. This is precisely what horrifies in found-fiction, and what is perhaps even more horrifying about the current technological age. In reality, however, seeing beyond the veil does not lead to a witch or ghost; instead, we are met with our own complicity in the proliferation of technological control. Fake news, bots, and other technological nightmares could not have become the threat they are today were it not for users avoiding the danger in allowing such technology to get out of hand.

Fisher additionally identifies fascination as “integral to the concept of the weird itself—the weird cannot only repel, it must also compel our attention” (17). The fascination audiences feel toward found-fiction is undeniable. House o f Leaves and The 38

Blair Witch Project attracted a great deal of attention from online-sleuths at the time of their respective releases, and fans of House o f Leaves still engage with the work through

forums, Facebook, Instagram, and, most recently, Danielewski’s Patreon page5. More so than either House o f Leaves or The Blair Witch Project, though, audience reaction to and participation in “Dear David” is both strong and well-documented. Fans commented on and retweeted Ellis’s posts, and many news sites were quick to pick up the story of a haunted New York apartment6. David is the object that excites fascination and causes

abject terror; the “negativity” that is his existence is integral to the jouissance experienced in his narrative presence. According to Fisher, in the weird this negativity

“transforms an ordinary object causing displeasure into a Thing which is both terrible and alluring, which can no longer be libidinally classified as either positive or negative” (17).

David is the object, and his presence is the negativity that transforms him from an ordinary ghost to a weird one.

Fisher’s questions of agency and who, if anyone, is acting as agent, apply to the

way we might ourselves question social media users. As issues during the 2016 presidential election reveal, not every “user” of social media is a real person. Instead, these “users” are nothing more than automated bots designed to sway the perceived tide

5 On a Facebook group dedicated to the novel’s 20* anniversary, Danielewski published an unused script treatment he had written for an unmade House of Leaves television show. In December of 2019, Danielewski began offering his Patreon supporters the chance to read newer versions o f a script he has written for a hopeful new show. 6 There is currently a “Dear David” film in production with New Line Cinemas (Sneider). 39

of social media. According to the University of Oxford’s Computational Propaganda

Project, there are 70 countries in which “organized social media manipulation campaigns” have taken place, and in each of these “there is at least one political party or government agency using social media to shape public attitudes domestically” (Bradshaw and Howard, i). Additionally, “Social media has become co-opted by authoritarian regimes” which use the SNSs to “suppress fundamental human rights, discredit political opponents, and drown out dissenting opinions” (i). There are actors using social media as tools of far-reaching control, even going so far as to influence foreign countries online.

These are the agents fundamentally enmeshed in the eerie mode: they are unseen and acting as someone else. As time goes on and the powers that run the world continue to utilize social media for nefarious purpose, sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram will only become more and more eerie.

Monsters in the Machine: Horror Online

Found-footage films are still released to this day and will likely continue to be released with new shifts in technology. In 2014, for example, the film Unfriended followed a group of teens being haunted through their social media profiles and was told entirely through their Skype conversation. In 2018, the horror/thriller Unsane was released: this film stood out because it was shot in secret, entirely on an iPhone 7.

However, some creators and audiences may still be unsatisfied with the line drawn between themselves and the characters and events on-screen: many want something more 40

real, more terrifying. Those who yearn for a different type of horror narrative have turned online to find fictions that cannot be undoubtedly proven as fake, like “Dear David.”

The internet is where found-fiction thrives. Because of the freedom afforded by web-based platforms, anyone can post just about anything with little to no cost, and not much in the way of oversight. Somehow, though, users are still liable to believe what they see and read online. There is an assumption of neutrality many hold about the internet itself, and this combined with the freedom to publish content online results in a plethora of stories—true, false, or otherwise. These online stories told through text, photos, film, sound, etc. are often labeled as “creepypasta.” Creepypasta comes from the portmanteau “copypasta,” which is in reference to the phrase “copy/paste.” (Blank &

McNeill 6). These spooky internet fictions are most often written in an epistolary style as if the narrator/writer is telling the audience of an experience which they genuinely went through. The most famous—and infamous—of these creepypastas is Slenderman, a character that has grown above and beyond the genre for good and for ill. Slenderman is a modem boogeyman: he is a tall, faceless creature in a black suit who steals children for an unknown reason.

The character was originally created as part of a contest on the “Something

Awful” forums, wherein creators were asked to create realistic horror photos. Creator

Eric Knudson, under the online alias Victor Surge, digitally altered two photos of children at playgrounds by adding the ominous Slenderman figure to the background. To 41

accompany the photos, Knudson wrote chilling captions about the children who had

inevitably gone missing soon after the photos were shot. Slenderman found more notoriety after the contest when he became the focus of the found-footage YouTube

series Marble Hornets, about a filmmaker who is attempting to unravel the mystery of

Slenderman. Following the moderate success of Marble Hornets came the video game

Slender, later renamed Slender: The Eight Pages, as well as its sequel Slender: The

Arrival. Given the popularity of the original photos, the Marble Hornets series, and the original Slender game, Slenderman became the figurehead of the growing creepypasta genre.

Slenderman’s popularity would come into question, however, in May of 2014, when young girls Annisa Weier and Morgan Geiser took their friend, Payton Leutner, into the woods and attempted to stab her to death (Effron and Robinson). Afterward, the preteens claimed this murder attempt was to try and gain favor with the fictional

Slenderman and become his “proxies,” or servants. This case put a start to many parents fearing what their children might be getting up to with unhindered access to the world via a smartphone or tablet. It is, of course, easy for adults to look at the case and scoff at the idea of falling for a hoax so obviously fake as the Slenderman, but those adults seem to forget how often seemingly rational people, even they themselves, can and often will fall for a story because it is on the news or even on a friend’s social media page. 42

Although the Creepypasta Wiki is where the burgeoning creepypasta genre emerged, it has since spread to social media far and wide. Users on forum sites like

Reddit and 4chan can easily post their own spooky stories to share with the world. Many of the most popular of these narratives have found wider audiences through adaptation, notably with the SyFy show Channel Zero and the “NoSleep” podcast. Not all creepypastas or their ilk are so clearly demarcated as fiction; some of these scary stories are told in such a way as to entice readers into believing them as fact. The incorporation of “evidence,” whether it be from illegitimate or made-up news sources or a social media feed, makes it harder to clearly define the boundaries of fact and fiction online. That being said, discerning readers do know that creepypastas are not real by virtue of where they have been published. There is fun to be had in the moment that we question the reality of a creepypasta but ultimately understand that the story is, indeed, a fiction.

Creepypastas and stories like them work best in the liminal space between belief and disbelief: we know the story is illogical but for a second have been so enthralled by the story that it feels like it just might be real.

As an open forum of ideas and philosophies, the internet is both an incredible and terrifying entity. Modem horror creators, beginning in many ways with The Blair Witch

Project, utilize the internet as a viable way to complicate their narratives, informing audiences in ways they may not have been from just the text itself. The Blair Witch

Project is a prime example of this: a majority of how Myrick and Sanchez attempt to 43

establish the film as found comes from paratextual information on the film’s website blairwitch.com7. On the website, curious fans could read about the legend of the Blair

Witch that Heather, Josh, and Mike were attempting to document, as well as the grisly tale of serial killer Rustin Parr. The site also hosts information about the missing filmmakers, such as photos, diary entries, and testimony from their grieving families and friends. Two additional tabs contain the evidence unearthed after the filmmakers went missing, including photos of their abandoned vehicle, police testimonials, and photos of the film reels that contain the movie itself. The marketing of Blair Witch Project was heavily invested in the paratextual “evidence” of its reality as found footage, and because of its popularity on internet forums it is widely accepted as the first “viral” hit: “This movie converges with [the young Internet audience.] They’ve embraced it. All the kids have seen it on the Internet. In some ways it’s the first Internet movie” (Block qtd. in

Weinraub).

The documents that make up the “evidence” of The Blair Witch Project's artifact

status play upon the same factors that made people believe The War o f the Worlds broadcast was real in 1938. One of the common reasons people fell for Welles’s play lay in their ignorance of what can and can’t be forged or faked for entertainment purposes. In

7 Today, this site is dedicated to promoting the 2016 sequel Blair Witch. The modem home o f the original blairwitch.com can be found at blairwitch.com/project. 44

the midst of the broadcast, listeners could not fathom that names of government officials and institutions could be used in fictional works.

Listeners regarded the names of these institutions and officials as essentially

trademarks, falsely assuming that they could not be invoked without the

government’s permission. Therefore, if the broadcast said that the governor of

New Jersey had proclaimed a state of martial law, then it must be so, no matter

what. ‘Truly, the broadcast seemed incredible,’ wrote a Maine woman to the FCC.

‘But not as incredible as the thought that our government would allow its name to

be used to disseminate such a lie. (A. Schwartz 78)

Believers in the factuality of The Blair Witch Project similarly fell for that hoax because of their naivete and assumptions about what can or cannot be written on the internet. The

Blair Witch Project is often labeled as the first film to go “viral” because it came out as the internet was becoming a commodity in everyday life: the film “[capitalized] on the fact that no one was quite sure where to turn to for trustworthy information [online]”

(Hawkes). Even trusted websites were advertising false information; the Internet Movie

Database—or IMDB—was edited by producers to reflect that the cast was “dead.”

(Marthe).

This sort of viral marketing could not work, though, if the film and paratextual content did not accurately reflect some semblance of reality. Although witches and the 45

supernatural seem far-fetched, the surrounding context of Blair Witch Project makes them plausible because of the incorporation of elements that are folkloresque. In an interview in 2016, Myrick and Sanchez recall their inspirations for what the world of The

Blair Witch Project would be and how it could exist in our reality. According to Sanchez, all the film’s mythology was intended to “be very rooted in reality ... [Sanchez and

Myrick] made [the film] believable enough that [they] thought people could believe it”

(Marthe). Myrick goes on to state “We used American contemporary folklore as a reference point. The Devil’s Triangle was a really good reference, a mysterious place where people reportedly disappeared, lots of conspiracy theories surrounding it but no one has any real proof one way or the other.” The legend of the Blair Witch is just believable enough because it echoes real folklore and urban legends.

In doing so, The Blair Witch Project itself became its own urban legend. In the earliest days of the internet, users interested in the film and captivated by its pseudo­ legend engaged with the legend of the movie by attempting to become a part of it. It is the act of ostension, or “the acting out of a legend,” that is key to the legendary status The

Blair Witch Project has received (Blank & McNeill 7). Folklorists Trevor J. Blank and

Lynne S. McNeill state that “Ostension is key to almost all contemporary legend complexes” and that “supernatural and contemporary legends lend themselves best to ostension through their connection to present-day society and questions of possibility”

(7). Fans of The Blair Witch Project were able to engage with the fake legend in a way 46

that might prove difficult with more traditional texts or films. In becoming a legend in and of itself, The Blair Witch Project demonstrates what it takes for a legend to catch on in the public consciousness. Audiences may not have been around to witness earlier media legends like that surrounding War o f the , but they can now see plainly before them the mechanisms necessary to creating a legend. Or, on a dourer note, the mechanisms that have been—and are being—used to write and rewrite reality socially and politically.

The practice of “legend tripping,” in which people “[visit] a legend site to explore and test the narratives,” is perhaps the most clear example of ostension regarding the

Blair Witch, and is the focus of the film’s maligned sequel Book o fShadows: Blair Witch

2 (Blank &McNeill 7). There are other ways fans engaged with this legend though, especially online. Users could scout forums and post their own findings about the eponymous witch for other fans of the films to find. Fans could even engage in “reverse ostension,” in which their actions and words created additional narrative about the legend and the film (Blank & McNeill 7). The ostension that occurred when The Blair Witch

Project was at the height of its popularity cemented it as a modem urban legend in much the same way that “rumours about the existence of ‘snufF movies stubbornly refuse to go away” (Petley 173).

Regarding ostension, House o f Leaves is quite dissimilar from The Blair Witch

Project and later “Dear David.” There is no question as to the fictional status of the novel 47

or the film within that novel. Danielewski does, however, adopt the style and codes of works like creepypasta stories to create the kind of piece that could ostensibly pass as

“real.” This is owed in no small part to the way the novel was purportedly first published according to the dust jacket:

Years ago, when House o f Leaves was first being passed around, it was nothing

more than a badly bundled heap of paper, parts of which would occasionally

surface on the Internet. No one could have anticipated the small but devoted

following this terrifying story would soon command. Starting with an odd

assortment of marginalized youth—musicians, tattoo artists, programmers,

strippers, environmentalists, and adrenaline junkies—the book eventually made

its way into the hands of older generations, who not only found themselves in

those strangely arranged pages but also discovered a way back into the lives of

their estranged children. (Cover copy)

There is little evidence of how true these claims are, but similar claims of online, serial publication are a bit easier to track down. On February 15,1999, publisher Pantheon and the self-publishing website iUniverse.com announced “that Mark Z. Danielewski's 734- page debut novel House o f Leaves will be serialized on the Daily Section of the site for free (iuniverse.com/daily) from February 15th through March 17th” (iUniverse.com). So, in a sense, the novel was available online for “the small but devoted following” as the cover claims. Given the difficulty in finding this information—very few sites or 48

interviews mention the process, so it is nearly impossible to locate an array of sources with the information—the novel itself is given an air of mystery and legend. Unlike with

The Blair Witch Project, though, there is not much ostensive action that can be performed regarding House o f Leaves.

What Danielewski does instead with his novel is simulate the phenomenon of reverse ostension. Folklorist Jeffrey A. Tolbert argues that reverse ostension privileges representation over experience: “creators are effectively reversing this process

[ostension] by weaving together diverse strands of ‘experience’(in the form of personal encounters with the creature, documentary and photographic evidence, etc.) into a more or less coherent body of narratives” (27). Tolbert emphasizes the collaborative nature of reverse ostension, citing Slenderman as a clear example. House o f Leaves is clearly not a collaborative work in this way, but Danielewski makes it resemble one through the many voices within his novel. The story of the house on Ash Tree Lane, The Navidson Record,

Zampafto, even Johnny Truant himself are all “strands of ‘experience’” that form the narrative as a whole. Danielewski simulates the experience of unearthing a document and utilizes a hypertextual style to make that experience part of the digital age. The only thing about the novel that cements its fictional status is the fact that it was published in novel form, rather than scattered about the web. Danielewski’s simulation of reverse ostension in House o f Leaves mimics true reverse ostension as we see it online. These fictional 49

versions of humans trying to unravel a mystery are eerily similar to the real humans who engaged in this action before with The Blair Witch Project.

“Dear David” is, in a sense, a culmination of the legendary The Blair Witch

Project and House o f Leaves would attain. Adam Ellis brings together the is-it-real-or-not aspect of The Blair Witch Project and the multimedia hypertext aspect of House o f

Leaves. Ellis, additionally, adds his voice and story to the larger body of legendary narratives about ghosts and the supernatural. Of all the works I have thus far mentioned,

“Dear David” is the only one in which there is no definitive answer as to the reality of the situation. Ellis claims to this day that the haunting is real. In an interview with

TheWrap.com following news that “Dear David” would be adapted for film, Ellis states

“I’ve never been interested in convincing anyone that ghosts are real — I just wanted to tell my story. If it was all fiction, I probably would’ve updated more than once every couple weeks” (Verhoeven). It is perhaps Ellis’s insistence that his ghost is real that makes “Dear David” the logical next step in found fiction. “Dear David” is creepypasta taken to a wider audience, to a scale of much greater magnitude and plausibility because of how and where it was published. Ultimately, however, the question of the reality of

“Dear David” must be set aside if the narrative is to do any ideological work as found fiction. To read Ellis’s story as anything other than fiction, strangely enough, risks further dehumanizing Ellis the writer. By insisting on the reality of “Dear David,” Ellis separates his true, authorial self from his haunted online persona. 50

Haunted by Ghosts of Our Own Design

The immediacy and intimacy of Twitter is what sets it apart as a narrative platform over other social media sites like Facebook. Since Twitter booted up its servers in 2006, variations on the tagline “It’s what’s happening” have been vital to the company’s image. There is a freedom and spontaneity to Twitter that seems lacking on other sites, even though those sites have since tried to mimic this feeling through the addition of features like stories and filters. Thus, when a tweet appears about an event happening in real time it is made more immediately believable by the platform’s nature.

Twitter is, therefore, an exceptional platform for a work like “Dear David. Ellis’s narrative is ultimately concerned with the ways in which we can be hurt by the very technology that is supposed to help us.

One of the ways technology like social media can cause harm concerns how we see each other and ourselves. In her article “You have one identity’: performing the self on Facebook and Linkedln,” new media professor Jose van Dijck that users SNSs ought to pay close attention to the ways in which these networks can manipulate them.

The conflation of self-expression, self-communication and self-promotion into

one tool, which is subsequently used for personality assessment and manipulating

behaviour, should raise the awareness of users in their different roles as citizens,

friends, employees, employers and so on. After all, social media are not neutral 51

stages of self-performance—they are the very tools for shaping identities, (van

Dijck 213)

As news media and SNSs continue to merge into a single entity, van Dijck’s warning is incredibly potent. Issuing this cautionary statement through an academic journal, though, forgets that a majority of the individuals whose identities are under threat of being misshapen will not have proper access to said warning. Popular entertainment can and often does provide the necessary link between arguments like van Dijck’s and a large part of the population. Thus, when a work like “Dear David” cautions against the threat of social media’s ghosts and demons, it is imperative to listen.

In many ways, “Dear David” is precisely about being haunted by our past selves online and the longstanding repercussions we can face from anything we have posted. One of the ways in which Ellis accomplishes this is through the found-fiction style he utilizes. In found-footage films especially, a diegetic reason must be given to explain why the cameras are still running even after the horrors have begun: whoever is recording needs to document what is happening in order to prove and validate their experiences. Even if the documentation cannot provide physical protection from whatever monster is plaguing the characters, it does protect those who see it by providing knowledge of said monster. In “Dear David,” this is accomplished very similarly to the way it is done in the Paranormal Activity franchise, in which static cameras are placed around the home to record what happens when the protagonist is asleep or away. 52

Additionally, Ellis utilizes tropes of literary found fiction by recording his story in an almost epistolary fashion, where the individual twitter threads serve as letters to the audience. The serial ity of “Dear David” makes these tweets feel more real because it simulates the feeling of reading the events in real-time.

Ellis’s adoption of found-fiction characteristics definitely make the piece feel more “real,” for better and for worse. Audiences cannot help but be intimately involved with Ellis’s life as they try to understand what is happening with David. Looking through the comments on any one of Ellis’s “Dear David” threads will reveal the three types of audience members that engage with the content. The first is the reader who truly believes in ghosts and the supernatural, attempting to guide Ellis on how he can most effectively escape his haunting. The second reader is the skeptic who cannot accept the narrative as fact and truly believes the entire story is a ruse. The final reader, and perhaps the most common, is the curious onlooker: they don’t have a hard stance on the truthfulness of

“Dear David,” but they are there, popcorn in hand, ready for an entertaining scary story.

This reader from the majority is most receptive to Ellis’s argument about social media because they occupy the liminal space between belief and disbelief; still affected by a good scare, but only insomuch as it serves their understanding of the point of “Dear

David.” When constructing and presenting the self, there is always a sense of an audience. But social media especially has made this audience far more pervasive and potentially dangerous. By presenting narrative as real-life through social media, Ellis 53

acknowledges the ways in which audiences can unintentionally make themselves part of someone else’s story. The varied fans of “Dear David” illustrate the lack of privacy made increasingly clear in the digital age.

Ellis forgoes much of his privacy in the way he writes “Dear David:” many of the posts and videos could easily give away the location of Ellis’s home, and one might be hard-pressed to say that the videos that show Ellis sleeping are not private moments.

Even if many fans of the story demonstrate concern for Ellis’s wellbeing, there is no telling what type of dangerous people could try to get involved in “Dear David” for their chance in the spotlight. Ellis’s physical safety is not the only thing in danger, however; the narrative construction “Dear David” readers make when reading the story has the potential to dehumanize Ellis. For many readers, Adam Ellis is not an author or human being, but a character in a story. Even without the involvement of ghosts or the supernatural, users of SNSs often engage with other users in this dehumanizing way. The screen of a computer or phone creates a physical boundary through which it is difficult to truly see an individual. Friends and followers are subjected exclusively to a tailored vision of a person’s existence, often bespoke by an algorithm to speak specifically to the user’s desires. The “characters” in social media narratives make up a small part of each user’s own social narrative, existing more in a functional capacity than a real one.

Humans experience our lives narratively. In our endless attempts to construct meaning from our lives and the world around us, we understand the world through a 54

linear, cause-and-effect temporality. In the article “Narrative Psychology, Trauma and the

Study of Self/Identity,” Dr. Michele Crossley elaborates:

Everything experienced by human beings is made meaningful, understood and

interpreted in relation to the primary dimension of ‘activity’, which incorporates

both ‘time’ and ‘sequence’. In order to define and interpret ‘what’ exactly has

happened on any particular occasion, the sequence of events is of extreme

importance. Hence, a valid portrayal of the experience of selfhood necessitates an

understanding of the inextricable connection between temporality and identity.

(Crossley 531)

To an individual, life is a story and they are the protagonist; the people in the surrounding world are simply parts to a single narrative whole with the protagonist at the center. This notion gets complicated, however, when considering that every person is the protagonist of their own story. There is no completely objective viewpoint because everyone’s experience is shaped by different narrative pathways. Viewing ourselves thusly

O necessitates the introduction of the idea of “character-space” and “character-system ”

(Woloch 14). In the Introduction to his book One the Many: Minor Characters and the Space o f the Protagonist in the Novel, Alex Woloch argues that these two

g “Character-space” is “that particular and charged encounter between an individual human personality and a determined space and position within the narrative as a whole,” while “character-system” refers to “the arrangement o f multiple and differentiated character-spaces—differentiated configuration sand manipulations o f the human figure—into a unified narrative structure” (Woloch 14). 55

narratological categories are integral to understanding characterization in the realist novel. There is a center to these novels in the protagonist “who stands at the center of the text’s symbolic core” (18). All other characters, then, are secondary to this main character and centrifugally expand from the “referential core” of the protagonist, becoming less- and-less realized and more functional the further they move from this center (18).

Woloch is clearly discussing the “lives” of fictional characters and not real humans, but his focus on the 19th-century realist novel belies how such a view is significant to our understanding of narrative within reality.

The notion of narrative-driven life and individual centrality within that life is exacerbated by the addition of social media. With the Internet, the audience—and the secondary characters—expands to a worldwide scale. In the case of stories like “Dear

David,” this can be a great boon for creative storytelling, or an unknowable curse for an individual’s wellbeing. Considering for a moment that Ellis is not constructing the story of “Dear David,” then that means he has opened up his life to the world in a way he can never truly take back. Ellis’s life will always be influenced by his ghost story, for better or for worse. This is precisely why it seems impossible that “Dear David” is anything other than fiction (belief in ghosts and the supernatural notwithstanding). Ellis already had a decent following on social media due to his employment through Buzzfeed and his fairly popular webcomics before his ghost story gained popularity. There were enough people already paying attention so that “Dear David” did not fall through the cracks and 56

become another obscure Internet urban legend. This made the story a premiere space for executing a necessary critique on the ways we use SNSs.

There is no clear demarcation between “Dear David” and the rest of Ellis’s life.

This lack of boundary points to the way we all can be and often are irrevocably affected by social media. Very real people’s lives have been altered for the worse because of a mistaken post on Facebook or Twitter. Take, for instance, the incident of Justine Sacco; on December 20,2013, Sacco was aboard a flight from New York to Africa. Before taking off, Sacco jokingly tweeted “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” Before Sacco landed, she started trending on Twitter. Users happily joined in the public shaming outcry and Sacco was fired from her job with I AC before her plane touched down9. At least for a moment, Sacco was immensely popular for all the wrong reasons, and her insensitive, poorly thought out Tweet would forever haunt her life on- and offline.

This is the real ghost that Ellis grapples with in “Dear David.” With his seemingly-innocuous ghost story, Ellis unravels our relationship with our online past- selves. As common wisdom would have it, once online, nothing is ever really gone.

Sacco is still associated with her problematic Tweet: it is more than likely that she would

It is important to note that Justine Sacco is once again working for IAC (Wagner). Although many would like to completely dismiss the idea of holding people accountable because of “cancel culture,” very few people who have been “cancelled,” or publicly shamed online, have not, at least in-part, rebounded. 57

continue to go unnoticed today were it not for what she said online. Ellis plays with a horror trope that goes back as far as the genre itself. Ghosts in fiction are almost always representative of past traumas and sins. What Ellis does by incorporating Twitter into

“Dear David,” however, explicitly acknowledges the role of the Internet in creating modem versions of these ghosts. There is now an easily accessible record of what we have done and said online for all the world to see.

Found fiction on the internet is always somehow grappling with how we are perceived by others. Social media is the most obvious way everyday users put on a persona online, but, just as with everything else in life, everything we do is construed as part of our character. By removing the human aspect of the persona, the Internet makes real the very terrifying concept that we can be—and are—fictionalizing and fictionalized.

This is happening now with Ellis, and it happened to the actors in Blair Witch

Project when the film was at the height of its popularity. Heather Donahue recalls the bizarre experience of being a living person and a dead character: “It was my mother getting sympathy cards, it was people coming up to me on the street telling me that they wished I was dead, saying they want their money back” (Marthe). Our idea of someone online can be so incredibly different from what they are in reality that, when confronted, we are momentarily destabilized and do not know how to treat that person as anything other than a character. We fictionalize others, and recognizing this in turn forces us to come to terms with the fact that others fictionalize us, as well. This has always happened 58

and will always happen, but the internet and specifically social media are making it so we can see nothing other than the fictional versions we create.

The vast web of interconnected individuals and communities online is larger than any in reality: we can literally reach across time and space to speak with someone in a manner of seconds. But we cannot always see the human, and technology is getting so advanced that even a visual confirmation of a “human” online could very easily be a falsified version of them10. Technological advances have already outpaced our ability to tell fact from fiction, and the gap between these advances and our understanding of them will only continue to grow. This concept is frightening enough as it is before we even take into consideration what powerful governments and corporations can and do use these technologies for. Found fiction is a tool to instruct audiences of the ways they are being controlled by the technology we use on a daily basis. We are no longer the user; instead, we are being used, transformed from consumer to product, by this technology and its owners for the growth of their own money and power.

Conclusion

Rapid changes in technology and social media are, to be frank, scary. The majority of society revels in the delights of technological advancement, but instances like the Russian hacks of the 2016 election remind us that we must remain wary of the

10 Here I am specifically considering the new trend o f “deepfakes,” wherein anyone’s face can be digitally altered in order to appear to do or say just about anything (O. Schwartz 2018). 59

technology we love. Even sources within the country demonstrate this, like Amazon’s recent unveiling of Twitter “users” that cheerfully defend the aborhent work conditions in their warehouses. TechCrunch journalist Devin Coldewey writes “Amazon has developed

an unnerving, Stepford-like presence on Twitter in the form of several accounts of definitely real on-the-floor workers who regurgitate talking points and assure the world that all is right in the company’s infamously punishing warehouse jobs.” These accounts may very well be real Amazon employees paid to do social media PR work for the company, but the “Stepford-like” tone Coldewey pinpoints resonates with social media users fear of social bot activity.

None of this is to say that technology or even social media is an inherently bad thing. Just as with anything where humans are involved, there is the potential for both negative and positive effects. From the days of Otranto to War o f the Worlds and even now, readers take for granted that media spaces must be neutral, including the internet.

What all of these works and subsequent reactions to them show, however, is that they were never neutral. The media—in print, radio, and online—must be constructed by a human presence. Maybe the future holds something different, but that is a narrative too fraught with potential horror to discuss here. “Found fiction” has existed for centuries, but the new mode of horror birthed by technological advances gives the genre new life.

What was once a tool for marketing and a way to hide an author’s identity has morphed into a genre crucial for understanding our current technological age. We cannot 60

accurately predict what the future holds, but horror’s ability to affectively teach us might make us more prepared to utilize our technology to our advantage rather than letting it control us. 61

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