Aff ective Intensities and Evolving Horror Forms 6237_Daniel.indd i 20/01/20 11:35 AM 6237_Daniel.indd ii 20/01/20 11:35 AM Aff ective Intensities and Evolving Horror Forms From Found Footage to Virtual Reality Adam Daniel 6237_Daniel.indd iii 20/01/20 11:35 AM Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting- edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © Adam Daniel, 2020 Edinburgh University Press Ltd Th e Tun – Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 11/13 Adobe Garamond Pro IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 5635 7 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 5637 1 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 5638 8 (epub) Th e right of Adam Daniel to be identifi ed as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). 6237_Daniel.indd iv 20/01/20 11:35 AM Contents List of Figures viii Acknowledgements ix Introduction 1 Evolving Forms, Evolving Aff ects 1 Aff ect and Horror Media 3 Horror Media and the ‘Lived Body’ 6 Deleuze, Embodiment, Neuroscience and Horror: A ‘Machinic Assemblage’ 7 Th e Book 9 1. Fro m the Semantic to the Somatic: Aff ective Engagement with Horror Cinema 13 Cognitivist Frameworks of Spectatorship 14 Towards the Somatic 18 Th e Phenomenology of Horror 23 2. From Identifi cation to Embodied Spectatorship in the Found Footage Horror Film 30 To Look (or Not to Look) 30 Technologies of Perception in Horror Film 30 Bleeding Binaries: When a Screen Becomes a Portal 33 Th e Birth and Emergence of ‘Found Footage’ Horror Cinema 38 Th e Unreal Reality of Found Footage 41 Found Footage and the Embodied Spectator 45 3. Camera Supernaturalis 54 Th e Out-of-Frame of Found Footage 54 Into the Woods: Willow Creek and Th e Blair Witch Project 56 Th e ‘Empty’ Frame of Found Footage Horror 63 Cinematic Dread and the Camera of Paranormal Activity 66 Th e Monster as Visual and Aural Intensifi cation 71 6237_Daniel.indd v 20/01/20 11:35 AM vi Aff ective Intensities and Evolving Horror Forms 4. Perception and Point of View in the Found Footage Horror Film: New Understandings via Deleuze’s Perception-Image 74 How Do We Get ‘Inside’ a Movie? 75 ‘Becoming-with’ the Film 79 Deleuzian ‘Spectatorship’ 81 Th e Perception-Image 82 Found Footage Horror and ‘Camera Consciousness’ 88 Deleuze and Representation 91 5. Horrifi c Entwinement: Aff ective Neuroscience and the Body of the Horror Spectator 97 Th e Question of Empathy 97 Empathic Identifi cation and ‘Embodied Simulation eory’Th 101 Mimetic Innervation 106 Foraging through Found Footage: Panksepp’s SEEKING Instinct 109 6. What Hides behind the Stream: Post-Cinematic Hauntings of the Digital 116 Th e Aff ect of Apocrypha: Suicidemouse and 11bx1371 117 Th e Soundscapes of Post-Cinematic Horror 127 Denson and the ‘Horror of Discorrelation’ 128 7. Th e Evolving Screen Forms of New Media Horror 132 Always Watching: Th e Evolving Screen Form of Horror and Marble Hornets 133 Th e Embodied Experience of New Media Artefacts 136 Th e Aesthetics of Distortion: Synaesthetic Qualities of Sound and Image 144 New Modalities, New Tensions 147 ‘Screenlife’ Horror and Unfriended 149 On the Th reshold 154 8. Th e Embodied Player of Horror Video Games 157 Fear in the First Person 157 Lo-fi , High Tension: Marginalia and Anatomy 159 Deleuze and the Video Game 164 Spatial and Temporal Apertures in Alien: Isolation 165 9. Th e Spectator-Interactor of Virtual Reality Horror 171 Th e Meeting Place of Virtual Reality and Horror Cinema 173 Virtual Reality and Presence 178 Virtual Reality and Cinema: Strange Bedfellows? 180 6237_Daniel.indd vi 20/01/20 11:35 AM Contents vii Th e Melding of Spectator and Interactor 186 Th e Radical Potential of Virtual Reality 190 What Cinema Can Return to VR 192 Th e Future of Cinematic VR 194 Conclusion 200 Bibliography 206 Books, Articles and Websites 206 Videos 216 Films 217 Television 219 Games 219 Index 220 6237_Daniel.indd vii 20/01/20 11:35 AM Figures 2.1 Samara crawling out of the television in Th e Ring 36 3.1 Inside the tent in Willow Creek 58 3.2 Heather fl eeing the tent in Th e Blair Witch Project 63 3.3 Katie sleepwalks in Paranormal Activity 70 4.1 Aaron’s point of view in Creep 87 4.2 Josef takes out the trash in Creep 89 5.1 Becca’s fi lmed refl ection 98 5.2 Hide and seek in Th e Visit 108 6.1 Suicidemouse by Nec1 119 6.2 11bx1371’s ‘Birdman’ 120 6.3 Spectrogrammetric analysis of 11bx1371 121 6.4 Cursed Kleenex Commercial 123 7.1 ARE YOU ONE OF THEM, in Conversion 133 7.2 A glimpse of Th e Operator 134 7.3 Th e ‘obscured’ Operator of Marble Hornets 136 7.4 Camera attached to sternum in Marble Hornets 139 7.5 Corrupted imagery in File 145 7.6 Facial distortion in Unfriended 152 7.7 Unfriended’s screens within screens 153 8.1 A fl oating tape recorder in Anatomy 163 8.2 Alien: Isolation motion sensor 166 9.1 Th e woman in 11:57 172 9.2 VR Noir 175 9.3 Catatonic VR 183 10.1 Th e woman in the graveyard in #Screamers 201 6237_Daniel.indd viii 20/01/20 11:35 AM Acknowle dgements Th anks to my family and friends for your love, encouragement and support. Special thanks to Marty Murphy, Duncan McLean, Matthew Campora and Maija Howe for your support and friendship. To Brett Hendry and Kevin Th ompson: two passionate teachers who opened my eyes through their love of education, literature and art. To all of the horror creators cited within, thank you for the potent thrills of the work you create. To the Sydney Screen Studies Network, particularly Phoebe Macrossan, Jessica Ford and Melanie Robson for their encouragement and camaraderie. To Alex Ling: for your wisdom, good humour and constant encouragement. To both Shane Denson and Erin Harrington: for your kindness and intellectual generosity as friends and peers. To Edinburgh University Press and the skilled editorial assistance of Gillian Leslie and Richard Strachan. To Angela Ndalianis and Anna Powell: for their insight and support, and for inspiring me through their work. To Anthony Uhlmann and Sara Knox: for the generosity of their feedback and guidance. To Anne Rutherford: for your constant mentorship, encouragement and generous professional guidance, and for always champi- oning me. To Lara: my very own person, my number one supporter, my best friend. Th ank you for being patient, supportive and loving as I have wrestled with this monster. 6237_Daniel.indd ix 20/01/20 11:35 AM 6237_Daniel.indd x 20/01/20 11:35 AM Introduction Like an expired body that blends with the dirt to form new molecules and living organisms, the body of cinema continues to blend with other image/ sound technologies in processes of composition/decomposition that breed images with new speeds and new distributions of intensities. Th e cinema does not evaporate into nothingness, but transmutes in a becoming that has no point of origin or completion.1 – Elena del Rio, ‘Cinema’s Exhaustion and the Vitality of Aff ect’ EVOLVING FORMS, EVOLVING AFFECTS At the time of writing this, horror cinema is alive and well. Indeed, many argue it is currently experiencing another cycle of expanded popularity. Th e critical and commercial success of fi lms such asGet Out (2017), Hereditary (2018), and Th e Conjuring series (together with its spinoff s), for example, indicates a renewed appreciation of horror cinema in the cinema, with each producing box offi ce returns that have dramatically surpassed expectations. Th e rise of streaming services and the accessibility of on-demand video have also played a signifi cant role in horror fi lm’s current popularity. Recently, the Netfl ix original Bird Box (2018) set a record for streaming within the com- pany, with 45 million individual streams over a seven-day period. Horror as a genre, however, has never been contained within a predominant media form. Instead, it has historically infected both emerging forms and the technologies which deliver them, parasitically preying upon the fears that emerge from these developments. Accompanying these advances in technology and the concomitant evolution in form are mutations in how horror operates, not only at the level of the diegetic content, but also in its reconfi guration of the spectatorial experience. Th ere is something diff erent in the way horror works once it begins to move outside of the borders of horror cinema’s traditional form and content. Th is ‘something diff erent’ is at the heart of this book. In these nine chapters I will explore the transgressions of these boundaries across a variety of media, as well as the fl uctuating experience of horror spectatorship this entails. Central to the book’s various investigations are questions of what modern horror media 6237_Daniel.indd 1 20/01/20 11:35 AM 2 Aff ective Intensities and Evolving Horror Forms is capable of, and how contraventions of the boundaries described above may reveal to us the capacities (and possible limitations) of cinema itself.