Introduction Chapter 1

Notes Introduction 1. For simplicity’s sake, I will often employ this “we.” I will always try to make the context clear. I am generally referring to those who inhabit Western postindustrial capitalist society, often more specifically to the American mainstream, as this is the culture represented in the films and the audience toward which they are targeted. 2. See Jameson’s Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and other Science-Fictions (2005). 3. The line is taken from the REO Speedwagon song “Roll with the Changes,” part of the soundtrack of The Cabin in the Woods. 4. See Deleuze’s Cinema 1 and Cinema 2 (1986, 1989), Stiegler’s Technics and Time 3 (2010), and Hansen’s Embodying Technesis (2000). 5. This is the title of a recent work by Jeffrey Sconce,Haunted Media: Elec- tronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (2000), in which he traces the links between the introduction of media technologies and belief in the supernatural and the occult. 6. See Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation (1994). 7. From Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1888 essay “Pulvis et Umbra,” in which he argues that modern scientific thought turns the world into “impon- derable figures of abstraction” (300). No solace is to be gained from the senses, either. Stevenson finds hope only in the sense of duty, a quality he attributes to all that exists. Chapter 1 1. The first three films of the series grossed between $160 and $170 million worldwide in box office sales,Scream 4 over $95 million (Boxofficemojo. com). 2. Notably, Kendall Phillips’s Projected Fears (2006), Matt Hills’s Pleasures of Horror (2005), and Ian Conrich’s Horror Zone (2009). 3. At the same time, recent analyses of gender construction in the Scream films, notably Valerie Wee’s 2006 article “Resurrecting and Updating the Teen Slasher” and Kathleen Rowe Karlyn’s 2003 article “Scream, Popular Culture, and Feminism’s Third Wave: ‘I’m Not My Mother,’” suggest that 154 NOTES their departures from the conventions of the horror genre are not ultimately conservative, as Sarah Trencansky’s slightly earlier work (“Final Girls and Terrible Youth: Transgression in 1980s Slasher Horror”) sug- gests, but rather progressive, offering new avenues for exploring third- wave feminism through popular culture. 4. Though some would say the first stalker film was Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960). 5. See Derrida’s “Plato’s Pharmacy” in The Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds. 6. In all of the films of the series, Sidney occupies the position Carol Clover refers to as the “Final Girl”: “She is the girl scout, the bookworm, the mechanic. Unlike her girlfriends . she is not sexually active . watchful to the point of paranoia . Above all, she is intelligent and resourceful in extreme situations” (86). While Sidney breaks the cardinal rule of Final Girldom at the end of the first film and loses her virginity, she possesses all of the other essential traits of this figure. 7. See Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, in which he defines the hyperreal as “the generation by models of a real without origin or reality” (1). In its ubiquity and in our reliance on it to bring the events of the world to us, media representation becomes not just a substitute for reality but “more real than nature” (28). 8. Such films will be the topic of chapter five. The subgenre includes films like Blade Runner (1982), the Terminator series (1984, 1991, 2003, 2009), Repo Men (2010), and Splice (2009). 9. The 2012 film adaptation of Suzanne Collins’s 2008 novel of the same name. Chapter 2 1. This phrase was first coined by British philosopher Gilbert Ryle in his 1949 book The Concept of Mind, in response to the Cartesian mind-body dualism. It is now often used in reference to various forms of artificial intelligence. 2. For a full treatment of the body-mind relation in cyberpunk, see Fred Botting’s Sex, Machines, and Navels: Fiction, Fantasy, and History in the Future Present. 3. With the exception of Feardotcom, which borrows heavily from The Ring, all of these films are remakes of Japanese films of the same name. Despite their similarities, the significance of the films for each culture is very different. For important discussions of the transcultural nature of these films, see, for example, Jay McRoy’s Nightmare Japan (Rodopi, 2008) and Kristen Lacefield’sThe Scary Screen (Ashgate, 2010). 4. Though this techno-virus does cause some physical symptoms, it is not as explicitly linked to the notion of “body horror” as, for example, NOTES 155 Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983), in which a videotape itself is liter- ally lodged in a man’s body. Because of the increasingly airy and largely invisible nature of communications technology, its intrusions into the body are less obvious and more insidious. 5. I should note here that Feardotcom did not enjoy the same level of pop- ularity or critical acclaim that The Ring did. It did not do well at the box office and was largely considered a failure by film critics. However, placed in context with these other films, Feardotcom, focusing as it does on the live stream and on the link between media and serial violence, adds important dimensions to the current discussion. 6. This gives expression to an attitude in early modern writings on theater in England, which has been well documented by Ellen MacKay in Per- secution, Plague, and Fire: Fugitive Histories of the Stage in Early Modern England. As MacKay argues, the greatest fear expressed by early modern opponents of theater was a situation in which “everyone was felled by a rampant inability to perceive the difference between false acts and real harm” (18). 7. Examples of this include the figure of Buffalo Bill in Harris’s Silence of the Lambs, later made into a film by Jonathan Demme, John Doe in David Fincher’s Seven, and the many serial killers portrayed in popular crime dramas like CBS’s Criminal Minds and CSI. 8. In chapters 3–5, I address the issue of gender in regard to media technology. 9. See Mark Seltzer’s Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Cul- ture (Routledge, 1998). 10. Though Jeannie’s mother is American, Jeannie’s ghost speaks with a German accent. One can interpret this discrepancy in a couple of ways (leaving aside the possibility that it was an oversight on the part of the filmmakers). Either Jeannie is not her mother’s child, indicating perhaps that she is image-born, or Jeannie is playing a role on the website, or both. 11. In a scene reminiscent of the one in the Garden of Eden in which Eve gives Adam the apple, Rachel steps out onto her balcony to wait for her son’s father to finish viewing the fatal video. She looks across to others in their apartments, and what is highlighted is their radical compart- mentalization, each alone in his or her own cubby, and each watching television or talking on the phone. 12. Due to the disease’s viral nature, Terry is much more effective in track- ing down this killer than Mike, whose true goal is to find Alistair. Mike and Alistair form two sides of a dialectical pairing. Serial killer theorists, most notably Richard Tithecott, discuss the dialectical relation between the serial killer and the detective: the way in which, in order to appre- hend the killer, the detective must in a sense dialectically ally himself with the killer, become the killer’s rational “other” and thus contain the 156 NOTES killer within himself. In Feardotcom, just as the serial killer has been superseded, so has the type of detective suited to him. 13. See Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Chapter 3 1. According to Box Office Mojo, the film grossed almost $250 million worldwide. 2. Nothing That Is: Millennial Cinema and the Blair Witch Controversies. Eds. Sarah S. Higley and Jeffrey A. Weinstock. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2004. 3. Retroscripting essentially means that the script is left undetermined until filming begins, which gives the impression that actors are react- ing spontaneously to the events. Further, the characters’ names are the same as the actors’ names, so it is as if they are playing themselves. 4. From Roscoe and Hight’s Faking It: Mock-Documentary and the Subver- sion of Factuality (Manchester, 2001). 5. For a full account of critics’ reactions to the film, see Higley and Wein- stock’s introduction to Nothing That Is. 6. See Carol Clover’s “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film” in The Dread of Difference (ed. Barry Keith Grant). 7. Stephanie Moss contends that “Heather and her camera are mother and infant,” but just as all other power relations are called into question or reversed in the film, so too is this one (206). Heather becomes the “off- spring” of her own camera. 8. Both Paranormal Activity 2 and 3 broke opening day records for horror films, the former appearing before 40 million viewers, the latter 52 million ( Boxofficemojo.com). 9. See Linda Williams’s “When the Woman Looks” in The Dread of Difference. 10. As Marion notes in The Crossing of the Visible, perspective is linked with intentionality, a concept in Husserlian phenomenology that has to do with the way the world/object presents itself to the subject/conscious- ness as something to be perceived, something for perception. Perspec- tive is the way the gaze creates/perceives depth in two-dimensional representation, ultimately the way meaning is made of what would oth- erwise just be colors on canvas.

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