Technology, Monstrosity, and Re - Kimberly Jackson

Technology, Monstrosity,
and Reproduction in
Twenty-First Century
Horror
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Technology, Monstrosity,
and Reproduction in
Twenty-First Century
Horror
Kimberly Jackson
technology, monstrosity, and reproduction in twenty-first
century horror
Copyright © Kimberly Jackson, 2013.
All rights reserved.
First published in 2013 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a

division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe, and the rest of the world,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke,
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United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN: 978-1-137-36103-5
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Jackson, Kimberly, 1975–

Technology, monstrosity, and reproduction in twenty-first century horror/
Kimberly Jackson.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-137-36103-5 (alk. paper)
1. Horror films—History and criticism. 2. Technology in motion pictures.
I. Title.
PN1995.9.H6J33 2013
791.43'6164—dc23
2013019023
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Amnet.
First edition: November 2013
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Printed in the United States of America.

For Sean Kelly, who helps keep the monsters at bay
Contents
List of Figures ix
Permissionsxi
Acknowledgmentsxiii
Introduction: Imagining the Ends of Horror

and of Humanity 1
1 Metahorror and Simulation in the Scream Series and
The Cabin in the Woods 11
2 The Image Goes Viral—Virtual Hauntings in The Ring
and Feardotcom 31
3 The Image as Voracious Eye in The Blair Witch Project,
Cloverfield, and the Paranormal Activity Series 55
4 Memory, Pregnancy, and Technological Archive in
Dark Water and The Forgotten 85
5 The End of Patriarchy—Defining the Postmodern
Prometheus in Splice and Prometheus 111
Conclusion: A New Mythology for Techno-Humanity 143
Notes 153
Bibliography 159
Index 167
List of Figures
1.1 Dewey, Gale, and the “actors” that portray them

in the film-within-the-film study the script that
will determine their fates in Scream 3. 17
1.2 Sitterson and other corporation workers party as Dana
struggles to survive on the screen behind them in
The Cabin in the Woods. 25
1.3 A giant hand breaks through corporate headquarters
in The Cabin in the Woods. 28
2.1 Samara is born from the television screen in The Ring. 37
3.1 The childlike image of the demon (in front of the
fireplace) in Paranormal Activity 4. 70
3.2 Alex’s image in Paranormal Activity 4. 71
3.3 The monster of Cloverfield threatens to swallow
the image. 79
3.4 Beth’s image at the end of Cloverfield. 82
4.1 Dahlia trapped in the elevator with ghost-child
Natasha in Dark Water. 92
4.2 Telly tries to break into the simulated room of her son,
Sam, in The Forgotten. 106
5.1 “Imprinting”: The genetically engineered hybrid
baby of Splice interacts with its “mother,” Elsa. 116
5.2 Dren and Elsa of Splice. 117
5.3 The engineer of Prometheus. 131
5.4 David encounters the wonders of creation in
Prometheus. 137
5.5 “In the desert there is nothing” (Prometheus). 140
Permissions
The following represents previously published material:
Chapter Two
Excerpted by permission of Sage Publications from “The Resurrec-

tion of the Image”, in Theory, Culture, & Society Volume 26, Number
5 (Fall 2009): pp. 30–43. Copyright © 2009
Excerpted by permission of Post Script, Inc. from “The Contagion of

the Image in William Malone’s Feardotcom”, in Post Script: Essays in
Film and the Humanities Volume 30, Number 1 (Fall 2010): pp. 55–65.
Copyright © 2010
Chapter Four
Excerpted by permission of Ashgate Publishers from “Techno-

Human Infancy in Gore Verbinski’s The Ring”, in The Scary Screen
ed. Kristen Lacefield (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 161–174. Copy-
right © 2010
Chapter Five
Excerpted by permission of Intellect Ltd. from “Splice: The Postmod-

ern Prometheus”, from Horror Studies Volume 3, Number 1 (2012):
pp. 125–138. Copyright © 2012
Acknowledgments
I am truly grateful for all of those who have supported me on the

long journey that led to this publication. First, to those at the Univer-
sity at Buffalo who encouraged me early on—Bill Egginton, Rodol-
phe Gasché, Ken Dauber, Carol Jacobs, and Stefan Fleischer—I never
would have seen the scholar in myself if you all hadn’t pointed her
out. To my colleagues at Florida Gulf Coast University who offered
such helpful suggestions along the way, especially my scholarship
“cellmates,” Delphine Gras and Rebecca Totaro, who believed in this
project from the beginning and who shared their expertise and their
time so generously. To all of those who attended conferences with me,
asked me questions, and challenged me to push further, especially
Stephanie Rountree, who got me involved with the feminism pan-
els at SAMLA. To everyone at Palgrave Macmillan, especially Robyn
Curtis and Erica Buchman, for making this process so smooth. And,
on a more personal note, to my friend Linda, who shares my love of
horror, and to my feline friends, who keep me human.
K.B.J.
Introduction
Imagining the Ends of

Horror and of Humanity
T his project examines the ways that the technologically produced

and reproduced image functions in twenty-first-century
American horror films. My analyses cover a wide spectrum of
horror subgenres: popular remakes of J-horror movies like The Ring
(Verbinski, 2002), in which the technologically reproduced image
serves as the film’s ghostly antagonist; “metahorrific” installations,
such as the Scream series (Craven, 1996, 1997, 2000, 2011) and
The Cabin in the Woods (Goddard, 2012), films that are conscious
of their status as technological (re)productions; science-fiction/
horror hybrids like Splice (Natali, 2009) and Prometheus (Scott,
2012), where advances in film technology and computer-generated
images offer the viewer access to spectacles that radically redefine
our understanding of humanity and its origins; and films in which
the camera is a character in its own right, like the Paranormal
Activity series (Peli, 2007; Williams, 2010; Schulman, 2011, 2012)
and Cloverfield (Reeves, 2008). The thematic focus of Technology,
Monstrosity, and Reproduction centers on the image as a site of
monstrous birth. As threatening and ominous as these monsters
may be, they also represent the possibility for a renewed belief in the
reality of the world and humanity’s place within it.
The call for such a renewal resounds from many quarters: from
horror film theory, much of which bemoans the genre’s seeming stag-
nancy in recent years; from philosophy of art and aesthetic theory,
which forecast or proclaim an end of art and of authentic experience;
and from American culture at large, which evinces an anxious ambiv-
alence about shifts in social relations and power structures due to the
increasing determination of these relations by media technologies
2 Technology, Monstrosity, and Reproduction
like the Internet, television, smart phones, and social networking.

As both a symptom of and a contributor to the impression that iden-
tity, interpersonal relations, and indeed reality itself have become
increasingly virtual, media technology occupies a central place in
the rhetoric of ends that characterizes the “post-” discourse of the
past fifty years. This discourse goes by many names: posthumanism,
postmodernism, post-structuralism, postcolonialism, postindustrial
capitalism, and so forth. Taken as a whole, this terminology suggests
that we are in a state of social, cultural, political, economic, and phil-
osophic limbo, characterized by the following: a sense of still being
tied to certain symbolic structures and mythic narratives that we1
no longer believe in, that we mistrust, or that have lost the ability to
effectively ground meaningful relations and practices; a correspond-
ing inability to locate the sources of or effectively manifest figures to
represent power and dominance, though oppression is clearly alive
and well; and a sense of having left our “humanity” behind, finding
ourselves in unmarked territory, in bodies and environments we are
no longer sure how to inhabit.
The current state of the horror genre—its sense of being at an
end, its increasing self-awareness, and its concern with the rela-
tionship between media and message—reflects these larger trends
in Western culture, bringing them to a mass audience and offer-
ing us ever new figures for the nameless, faceless Antagonist that
H. G. Wells already identified in his 1945 work Mind at the End of
Its Tether, which he directly linked to the increasing autonomy of
technology and to the end of humanity as we know it. At the same
time, horror provides us material with which to build a different
understanding of ourselves, its monsters representing ends but also
beginnings, rebirths.
The end of horror thus does not mean that there will be no more
horror movies or that there will be no more creativity or unique-
ness in horror filmmaking, just like the end of humanity need not
mean that human beings will no longer walk the face of the earth or
that the world as such will be destroyed. What it does mean is that
horror movies—and other types of narratives, for that matter—will
continue to be about ends (plural). While there may be some con-
cern about being in a perpetual state of post-ness—David Greven
proposing, for example, that we are in a time of “post-post-modern”
horror—a pause at the end or a pause about ends is not necessarily
a bad thing (2). In terms of horror-film production, one might say
that it has been both good and bad. There are a lot of redos, remakes,
Imagining the Ends of Horror and of Humanity 3
and spoofs, but, as Steffen Hantke remarks, “The vanishing of the

boundary between original and remake . . . signals the abandoning
of originality as a standard of critical evaluation” (xi). And indeed
in addition to seemingly recycled material, there are also a lot of
brilliant new adaptations marking “the thriving afterlife of horror,
a genre whose obituary many critics composed following the events
of September 11, 2001” (Briefel and Miller, 1). As Briefel and Miller
point out concerning post-9/11 culture, “In a context where we could
not openly process the horror we were experiencing, the horror
genre emerged as a rare protected space in which to critique the tone
and content of public discourse” (3). Many of the most recent works
on the horror genre, including Briefel and Miller’s Horror After 9/11,
Hantke’s American Horror Film, Adam Lowenstein’s Shocking Rep-
resentation, and Ian Conrich’s Horror Zone, focus on the relation-
ship between shifts in the horror genre and the trauma and political
import of the events of 9/11.
While 9/11 undoubtedly had a major impact on the way horror
is represented and experienced, many of the genre innovations I will
examine in this study reflect sociocultural shifts that began prior to
those traumatic events. Building on ideas from the latest works in the
fields of horror studies and aesthetic theory, Technology, Monstrosity,
and Reproduction focuses on the ways that media technologies con-
tribute to anxieties about the disintegration of the traditional nuclear
family and about how both of these disruptions are linked to broader
concerns about the origins and ends of humanity. In Kirsten Moana
Thompson’s 2007 work Apocalyptic Dread, largely focused on family
horror of the 1990s, she argues that in such films “a monstrous figure,
the uncanny double of what the family has repressed, emerges and
threatens apocalyptic vengeance because of the specific crimes for
which the family are responsible” (3). According to Thompson, these
films suggest that the end of the family equals the end of humanity
as we know it, a sign of our collective inability to imagine a human
future without or beyond the family and the larger patriarchal struc-
ture in which it situates itself and whose reproduction it ensures.
Thompson echoes Fredric Jameson’s assertion that we have reached
a point at which we are no longer able to imagine a true alterna-
tive future,2 and so we continually fall back on science-fiction films
that “repeatedly replay resistance to alien invasions in the form of
romanticized messiahs or small guerilla groups, rather than through
systemic political change” (2). It is indeed clear that we are “tired of
the same old story.”3
While many of the films treated in this project are difficult to cat-
egorize, all are in one way or another apocalyptic, and most would
also be classed as family horror. Films like The Ring, The Forgotten,
Prometheus, Splice, and Paranormal Activity link a certain apocalyp-
tic end to the breakdown of the nuclear family, often involving the
death of the patriarch and the introduction of new forms of mater-
nity, reproduction, and infancy. These films were chosen, however,
because all of them challenge the narrative structures through which
we have envisioned these ends in the past, none of them offering us
traditional heroes, saviors, or redemption in the end. Because of this,
they all offer possibilities for seeing the future differently.
This book is, thus, very much about ends as sites of rebirth and
renewal and about the ways that, according to the films studied here,
it will be through and not despite our relation to the media image that
these rebirths will be effected. Anxieties about the end of humanity
are intimately linked in these films with the perception that technol-
ogy, particularly media technology, has begun to take on a life of its
own and that the human subject is no longer the determining fac-
tor in how reality is constructed or experienced. The technologically
produced and reproduced image comes to the fore, both as the most
threatening media force and as the one that offers the most promise
in terms of a new understanding of humanity’s place in the world.
While the prevalence of the mediatized image and its possible
effects on reality have many cultural critics and theorists concerned
with and forecasting other ends—the end of representation, the end
of art, the end of imagination—others contend that in fact media sat-
uration has ushered in a new era of aesthetics, one to which we have
simply not yet accommodated ourselves. In the first camp are those
who seek to preserve a space for the “true” or authentic image: the
image that does not merely reproduce or simulate but rather harbors
and offers access to a profound or divine truth. Jean-Luc Marion’s
The Crossing of the Visible (2004) and Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Ground
of the Image (2005) exemplify this stance, each ultimately locating
the truth of the image in the Christian icon. Theorists like Jacques
Rancière, however, argue that the artistic or iconic image cannot be
completely separated from the arena of mass consumption and com-
mercialization, proposing instead an iconography of the commercial
image. In his work The Future of the Image (2007), Rancière contends
that such a revitalization or re-authentication of the image is made
possible through certain forms of montage that, by re-ordering or
reframing communal images, celebrate “the archetypal gestures and
great cycles of human existence” freed from the need to reference a

master narrative or divine origin (67). “[A] substitute for the sac-
raments of religion,” such works offer “the consecration of human
artifice and human imagining as such” (97).
Gilles Deleuze, Bernard Stiegler, and Mark Hansen,4 among
others, similarly champion montage, its discontinuous images an
expression of the chaotic barrage of information that characterizes
the media-saturated environment in which we live. By offering both
an experience of that chaos and a sense of continuity through it,
montage allows us to build up our tolerance, as it were, to be able to
absorb and perceive the technologized world more effectively. Filmic
montage, as each of these thinkers suggests, opens new modes of
perception and experience that would otherwise be inaccessible for
human consciousness and that correspond to what Hansen refers
to as the “inhuman rhythms of the mechanosphere” (243). Hansen,
Stiegler, and Rancière, each in his own way, envision this form of art
as opening new pathways for the formation of collective memory
and thus a new human community more in tune with the technolo-
gized world, more responsive and attentive to its future.
My readings of twenty-first-century horror rely on concepts from
all of these thinkers to develop a fuller understanding both of the
ways technology is alienating and dehumanizing and the paths it
offers for fuller engagement with and experience of the world. In
their unique aesthetics, for example, some of these films possess all
of the qualities of the icon, according to Nancy’s and Marion’s defini-
tions of it, offering access through the visible to an invisible essence
or truth. At the same time, none of these films claims any status sepa-
rate from commercial consumer culture—in fact, quite the opposite.
But this does not make them less meaningful or less important in
shaping our collective understanding of humanity and its possible
futures. Each film not only addresses in important ways the current
age of humanity and its modes of perception but each also has its
own unique aesthetics that may be just as effective as montage at
opening human perception for greater engagement with the tech-
nologized world.
The Films
My intention in these analyses is to highlight the ways in which cer-

tain trends in horror have evolved, their twenty-first-century mani-
festations offering unique innovations to the more specific subgenres
of which they are a part. Many of these innovations are only possible
because of advancements in image technology and computer genera-
tion. Therefore, it is necessary to examine both the specific content of
each film and the ways that content relies and often comments upon
its own production. I, thus, open with several recent examples of
“metahorror”—Wes Craven’s Scream series (1996, 1997, 2000, 2011)
and Drew Goddard’s The Cabin in the Woods (2012)—all of which
are about the staging of horror productions. Each film is both con-
scious and critical of its own position within the genre. Each deals
additionally with the determination of social relations and realities
by media and information technology and the impact of this not
only on the horror genre, but more broadly across a media-satu-
rated culture, examining how power and meaning are constructed
and employed. The Scream films and The Cabin in the Woods fea-
ture heroines attempting to resist the takeover of their reality by its
media simulation, each with minimal success, suggesting not that
the attempt is futile but rather that it will take new tools, perhaps
even a new humanity, to accomplish the task.
The situation of the mediatization of society in the horror genre
suggests two things: (1) there is a collective suspicion that its impact
may not be entirely positive, and (2) there may be hidden or repressed
elements of our relation to media technology we have yet to reveal
or figure for ourselves. Chapter 2 deals directly with these hidden
elements, focusing on Gore Verbinski’s The Ring (2002) and William
Malone’s Feardotcom (2002). Examining the American experience of
“haunted media” in the twenty-first century,5 this chapter explores
the implications of those films that treat images intent not only on
haunting the real world but actually being born into it. Such films
employ the rhetoric of infection, linking the deterioration of the
body to the breaching of the boundary between reality and image.
Because this infection takes place in and through the same images
the external viewer sees, the possibility for contamination extends to
the real world outside the films. But this is only effective if the images
are able to transcend their role as reproductions and attain a status
akin to the religious icon, inspiring belief in the viewer of the invis-
ible source of their power.
Chapter 3 deals with films that not only draw the audience’s atten-
tion to the image as such but also to the camera, the technological
apparatus that films and records it. Shot cinema verité–style, The
Blair Witch Project (1999), the Paranormal Activity series (2007,
2010, 2011, 2012) and Cloverfield (2008) self-consciously employ

the hand-held video camera in order to highlight and challenge the
generic conventions that endow the seer with active power and the
seen with passivity or even victimhood. Like the films in chapter 1,
then, these are deconstructive, not only of the horror genre but also
of the conceptual categories and relations that define the production
and consumption of images in general: namely, relations between
subject and object, male and female, presence and absence, present
and past, reality and image. In each film, power is taken out of the
hands of the human subject and placed in the object/image, which
thereby attains the status of Jean Baudrillard’s “evil genius of technol-
ogy” that “keeps watch beneath artefacts” and “sees to it itself that the
mystery of the world is well-guarded” (Perfect Crime, 73).
Chapter 4 focuses specifically on the interrelations among mater-
nity, memory, and technological archive as they are problematized
in Joseph Ruben’s The Forgotten (2004) and Walter Salles’s Dark
Water (2005). I argue that neither The Forgotten nor Dark Water
privileges internal psychic memory, not simply because the techno-
logical archive has somehow infiltrated or replaced it but because
another form of memory has taken its place as representative of the
primary way that we experience the world. This other form of reten-
tion applies directly to our embodied immersion in a world that is
becoming increasingly inhuman, a state reflective of the fact that
technology no longer functions as an extension of the human but
rather has come to determine how the human exists and interacts
with its environment. In both films, bodily memory and cognitive
memory are inextricably intertwined with the technological archive,
the latter coming to determine how memories are formed and expe-
rienced. Rather than viewing this shift as a negative or even horrific
one, I argue that it represents something of a victory for the female
protagonists, allowing them greater access to the inhuman forces at
work in the technologized world.
In the final chapter, I turn to two films that dare to look toward
a truly alternate future, one in which the human, if it exists, is no
longer the center, ruler, or creator of its world. Not content simply to
challenge the structure of patriarchy, Vincenzo Natali’s Splice (2010)
and Ridley Scott’s Prometheus (2012) offer a new mythic paradigm.
In this alternate model, the father is no longer (1) head of the nuclear
family and biological progenitor, (2) representative of corporate/
sociopolitical power, or (3) representative of divine law. The mother/
woman can no longer be positioned as (1) biological origin/womb,

(2) passive recipient of corporate/sociopolitical power, or (3) deriva-
tive of the human-divine compact and origin of sin. And finally, the
child is no longer (1) the biological product of sexual reproduction,
(2) the product of the current sociopolitical order, or (3) the natural
product of a divine order. However, while these traditional roles are
transfigured, hybridized, and multiplied in both films, they, and the
narratives that sustain and reinforce them, are still clearly present.
This suggests that we have not moved beyond the basic structures
of our culture’s origin stories but rather have updated them for a
new age, one in which the human can no longer separate itself from,
nor does it have total control over, technology and technological
production.
* * *
In the readings that follow, I have attempted to highlight both the

nihilative and redemptive possibilities each of these films presents. I
am sensitive to the fact that, as these are popular culture artifacts, we
can never be certain about what they will ultimately come to mean,
what effects they will have on how we understand or experience our
current realities. As Briefel warns, “To deny its [film’s] exceptionality
would entail accepting its paradoxical status as a consumer product
that may sustain (willingly or not) the very structures it critiques.
And that would be a very scary thing indeed” (159). Both possibili-
ties are equally viable and always at play. I think many of these films
are aware of this paradox and consciously position themselves at the
crux of this tension. On the one hand, there is the threat of Baudril-
lardian “hyperreality”6: a state in which reality is determined by the
simulated image (rather than the reverse), in which we have lost any
relation to a divine or ideal origin and where all things are thus equally
meaningless. In such a state, humans are merely passive consumers
with illusory wills who have lost all contact with the world as it is.
There is no real experience, no sense of authenticity, no newness or
mystery, “no habitable city for the mind of man” (300).7 On the other
hand, it is in the contemplation of this extreme alienation, this obso-
lescence, that the entity formerly known as humanity can once again
be awakened from its slumber and learn to be human again, learn
to inhabit the world as it is, respond to it, care for it, engage with it,
create and build from it. If such possibilities remain, it is because
human imagination is alive and well; in its interactions with the
technologized world, it has simply been transformed. We may not

find much that is recognizably human or comforting in many of the
figures that represent this transformation, but we must remember
that monsters are portents or signs; it is up to us to discern their
ambiguous messages and to decide whether or how to take on the
destinies they s uggest to us.
1
Metahorror and Simulation

in the Scream Series and The
Cabin in the Woods
I n this chapter I want to focus on several recent instances of

metahorror: films overtly concerned with the horror genre and
its conventions. As the films examined here were all released after
the postmodern critique of metanarrative, the term metahorror in
reference to them should receive the following qualification: while the
films self-consciously refer to their own construction and the rules
within which they operate, they do not therefore escape from that
structure; their self-reflexivity is itself a part of their construction,
and they do not in any real way break through the fourth wall. In this
sense, these films are properly deconstructive; they expose the limits
of the narrative structure in which they operate and thereby open up
an internal space of play; they are at once definers of the genre and
moments or examples of it.
While instances of metahorror date back at least to Michael Pow-
ell’s 1960 film Peeping Tom, this subgenre is generally associated with
a sense of genre exhaustion that began in the 1980s. Philip Brophy,
commenting in 1986, remarked that horror had begun to evince a
“violent awareness of itself as a saturated genre” (5). Self-awareness
or self-referentiality is only one quality by which a film might be
characterized as “metahorror”; the other, as is the case in Peeping
Tom, involves a self-conscious use of image technology such that the
act of seeing or viewing, and the potential violence inherent in that
act, comes to the fore. The former type of metahorror includes Thom
Eberhardt’s Night of the Comet (1984) and Tom Holland’s Fright
Night (1985), as well as the more recent I Know What You Did Last
Summer series (Jim Gillespie, 1997; Danny Cannon, 1998; Sylvain
White, 2006) and the Urban Legend films (Jamie Blanks, 1998; John
Ottman, 2000). The most notable examples of the latter—including
Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994), John Carpenter’s In the Mouth
of Madness (1994), Craven’s Scream series (1996, 1997, 2000, 2011),
Gore Verbinski’s The Ring (2002), William Malone’s Feardotcom
(2002), and Drew Goddard’s The Cabin in the Woods (2012)—are
those films that focus not only on the more anxious aspects of visual
technologies but more specifically on their use in the production and
reproduction of horror/the horror film.
The Scream series and The Cabin in the Woods are unique in
that they combine these two aspects of metahorror, commenting
both on genre conventions and on the role of media and commu-
nications technology in determining how horror is produced and
received. Such themes have particular relevance in turn-of-the-
century American culture, where “the large-scale dissemination of
electronic images leads to a saturated state of hyperconsciousness
in which real and simulated events are increasingly determined/
defined in mimetic relation to each other” (Tietchen 102). This state
of hyperconsciousness is accompanied by an ever greater fascination
with and portrayal of violent crime; an overall desire to film, record,
and publicize everything; a simultaneous paranoia that all of one’s
actions are being watched and manipulated; a sense of uncertainty
as to who is in control and/or where power lies; and a sense that
old formulas and structures no longer hold, having become mean-
ingless or exhausted. The Scream films and The Cabin in the Woods
interrogate these tendencies by simultaneously asserting and deny-
ing genre structure and knowledge; producing layers of mediatiza-
tion that make it difficult to locate the space of reality, truth, origin,
or authenticity; and questioning the types of power and desire that
operate in such a state of play. The films’ deconstructive potentials
thus extend beyond the horror genre to society at large.
Genre Construction and Deconstruction in the Scream Series
The Scream series has not only been a box office success;1 the first
film of the series, in particular, is often credited, along with Demme’s
Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Myrick and Sánchez’s The Blair
Witch Project (1999), with reviving the otherwise declining hor-
ror genre. In addition, Scream has enjoyed a prominent position in
recent scholarly works on horror,2 though some earlier criticism of
Scream’s postmodern tendencies was less than enthusiastic. As Matt
Metahorror and Simulation 13
Hills notes, “The problem for these critics appears to be that they
read Scream as excessively playful in its postmodernism rather than
as moralistically referential or indexical” (192). Such readings high-
light the self-conscious aspects of the work over the critical, with
many scholars either doubting that the latter exists or asserting that,
if it does, it is ineffective. In contrast, Hills’s work is more generous,
recognizing that the film’s intertextuality offers audiences significant
“subcultural capital.” Beyond that, I would like to suggest that the
series stages a crucial demonstration of the evolution of the reality-
representation relation in an increasingly mediatized society, inter-
rogating the ramifications of these trends for our understanding of
originality and authenticity.3
In the beginning of Scream, a disembodied, electronically modi-
fied voice on the telephone asks, “What’s your favorite scary movie?”
This killer, enhanced by communications technology and by his
arsenal of genre knowledge, terrorizes a pretty, blond high-school
student named Casey (Drew Barrymore) by quizzing her on her
knowledge of horror movies. It seems as if being in the know will
help her survive, but we quickly learn that is not the case. There is
no way to win this game. Despite the film’s insistence that there are
unbreakable rules in the slasher horror genre, the film also reveals
time and again that those rules are arbitrary, that the genre is, as
Andrew Tudor contends, “what we collectively believe it to be” (qtd.
in Phillips, Projected Fears 5). It is therefore telling that the question
Casey gets wrong—“Who was the killer in Friday the 13th?”—already
breaks the rules. Casey answers correctly given the conventions of
the genre: male psycho killers stalking scantily clad high school-
ers. According to this logic, she says the killer was Jason. However,
the killer in the first Friday the 13th film was not Jason but Jason’s
mother. In true deconstructive fashion, difference lies at the origin.
In fact, if we go back to the true origin of the slasher film, Hitchcock’s
Psycho (1960),4 we see that the killer is both male and female; Nor-
man Bates (Anthony Perkins) dresses like and takes on the identity
of his mother when he kills.
Central to the deconstructive project in Scream is the determina-
tion of the rules of the system within which it sets to work. In this
case, the system is slasher horror and the rules are those conven-
tions that must be repeated in order to maintain the coherence of
the genre. A tension develops between the similarity that must exist
between iterations of the narrative and the differences that are inevi-
tably introduced, a tension that serves horror quite well, as Phillips
notes in Projected Fears, drawing on the work of Greenblatt: “The

broad cultural success of a given work of fiction, then, can be said to
rest, in part, upon the balance the work maintains between its reso-
nance with familiar cultural elements and the unfamiliar elements
that create in its audience a sense of wonder” (7). It is not new for
horror films to reflect on or to be conscious of this tension in vari-
ous ways, and this awareness, as Craven has demonstrated time and
again throughout his career, far from rendering horror ineffective,
can truly enhance it.
The final question the killer in Scream asks—“Which door am
I at?”—is also a trick question, as we later learn that there are two
killers. So he is at both doors at once. Again, there is no way for
Casey, the helpless victim, to win this game. Interestingly, the kill-
ers in Scream gain a measure of power over their victims by sac-
rificing identity, self-presence, and coherence. As both cannot be
the killer, the one must always cede control, either to the other or
to anonymity. In addition to their duplicity, their power over their
victims would be impossible without the use of cell phones, which
allow them to be everywhere and anywhere at once. But not only do
the phones distance them from the action (the one who is talking
on the phone is not the one who is murdering the victim), their use
of the electronic voice disguise furthers their anonymity. Moreover,
they don mass-produced costumes derived from Edvard Munch’s
series of The Scream of Nature paintings, which both disguise who
they are and become an impressionistic reflection not of their power
but of their victims’ helplessness. In this way, the killers are both
victim and perpetrator at once, symbolically enacting their own
deaths through various layers of absence even as they literally ter-
rorize and dismember their victims. As Andrew Schopp contends,
“In a fascinating way, the killers reflect a Gen X angst about lack of
power coupled with a Gen X fantasy about acquiring power” (132).
The killers, Stu (Matthew Lillard) and Billy (Skeet Ulrich), do not
view these layers of absence and mediation as a loss, however. They
desire neither presence nor reality. Instead, their goal is to make their
lives fiction. Their motive, as Tietchen points out, “is horror films
themselves.” Tietchen continues, “The murders become secondary
to the killer’s drive to participate in various modes of representation”
(102). As Billy tells his girlfriend, Sidney (Neve Campbell), “It’s all one
great big movie.” Emulating killers from horror films, their aim is to
fuse reality and representation. “The flux between ‘the real’ and ‘the
representation of the real’ is firmly fixed within Craven’s intentions”
(Tietchen 103). Layers of mediation are produced in the process. Not

only do we have diegetic-reality-as-movie, but further, there is the
representation of this real fiction in the media. These layers are por-
trayed most clearly in one scene toward the end of the film, in which
a bunch of high schoolers are viewing Halloween as one of the main
characters, Randy (Jamie Kennedy), expounds on the rules of horror,
while also commenting on the real string of murders that appears to
be following these rules. At the same time, a hidden camera feeds
the whole scene to a news van sitting outside the house. As Tietchen
explains, “Again the flow of visual information is destabilized as Cra-
ven’s diegesis revolves around a horror movie viewed inside a horror
movie and projected through a ‘news screen’” (103).
To add one more layer of confusion, it is not clear if the message
of the film remains internal to the horror genre or extends to the
real world outside. According to Hills, the latter occurs meaningfully
only in the form of “populist, intertextual subcultural capital” (189).
In other words, the film’s meaning has most to do with the commu-
nity of viewers and the pleasure that comes from being in the know.
Tietchen’s analysis is more open-ended:
Throughout, we are posed an interesting question: Is Craven con-

fronting the emulation of horror films by real serial killers, or is
he merely playing with a film killer’s influence on subsequent film
killers? The Pavlovian response is that his film is reflexive—a mere
inspection of the genre—but the deliberate ambiguity that shrouds
the remainder of his diegesis, coupled by the visual reinforcement of
designed confusion, leads one to wonder whether Craven is hinting at
larger cultural pressures. (102)
As the Scream series continues into the second, third, and fourth
films, Craven keeps this uncertainty alive, each film proclaiming,
particularly through the struggles of the main character, Sidney
Prescott, its own entrapment within the genre and its conventions
while simultaneously highlighting the ever greater intimacy between
fictional horror and true crime.
Genre conventions remain a major part of the way that charac-
ters speak about and attempt to deal with the murders in each film:
Scream 2 is treated as a sequel, Scream 3 as the third installment of
a trilogy, and Scream 4 as a “scream-make” (remake). However, as
Valerie Wee notes, in response to Claudia Eller of the Los Angeles
Times on the release of Scream 2, the Scream series is really closer to
a serial, the difference being that a serial relies more on repetition,
as opposed to a series, which involves some notion of progression

or evolution. Wee’s interest in Scream’s serial qualities lies in the fact
that it is the survivors who move on to the next film and not the
killer(s). Beyond that, I would suggest that in many ways each film
in the series is ultimately the same film; at the very least, all of them
are about Scream. What is revealed in the fourth film, as a remake
of the first, is that indeed all of the films have been remakes of the
first. Scream is neither a series nor a trilogy but rather four films
engaged in what Derrida refers to as “citational play,” each referring
to the others in their separate but similar attempts to construct and
deconstruct the genre and to comment on the status of reality in a
media-saturated culture.5
In addition to the fact that the same main characters are present in
each of the films—Sidney Prescott, our enduring Final Girl6; Dewey
Riley (David Arquette), the delightfully dopey and ineffective police-
man/detective; and Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox), aspiring Pulit-
zer winner—the sequels all have movie versions (titled Stab) of the
first Scream film within them, which are constantly referred to and
which shape the events of each film. In fact, without the intradiegetic
production of the Stab films, which emulate the events of Scream and
supposedly also of Scream 2, there would be no Scream sequels. This
is particularly true of Scream 3, in which even the killer is the direc-
tor of the movie-within-the-movie, Stab 3, and most of the murders
involve cast members. Stab 3 is subtitled Return to Woodsboro, and
all of the actors appear as the originals did in Scream, suggesting that
even Stab 3 is a remake of Stab and, by extension, of Scream. What
began as an attempt to produce a real horror film in Scream becomes
an intertextual playground by Scream 3, where the production of
Stab and that of Scream begin to blur, as cast members of each film
find snippets of script that reflect and predict what will happen in
diegetic reality.
The doubling of characters with the actors that portray them in
the films-within-the-film introduces the question of originality to
the already complex layered examination of the relation between
representation and reality. This device also differentiates Scream
from other such self-aware films, like Craven’s own New Nightmare
and Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness. The motif of replication
in Scream extends beyond the characters to the setting. Much of the
action of Scream 3, for example, takes place on the set of Stab 3, in
which Woodsboro has seemingly been perfectly replicated, particu-
larly Sidney’s own home. In Scream 3, viewers are allowed “backstage”
Figure 1.1 Dewey, Gale, and the “actors” that portray them in the film-
within-the-film study the script that will determine their fates in Scream 3.
to see what goes in to a horror production. The plot unrolls on this

set, in part disallowing the suspension of disbelief that allows for
cinema realism. The viewers, and the characters, are reminded that
houses on a movie set are facades, that sometimes one opens a door
and there is no room on the other side, nothing but empty space
to greet one, as happens to Sidney when she is being chased by the
killer through her own set home. Sidney heightens our awareness
of the set nature of the entire film when she says after being chased,
“He’s there, in Woodsboro.” Detective Kincaid (Patrick Dempsey)
attempts to maintain the difference between diegetic reality and the
movie set, saying, “That’s not Woodsboro.” However, the viewing
audience is aware that the “original” Woodsboro was a set too, even
though Dewey claims that “Woodsboro is the only place that’s real.”
Like the first film, in all three successive Scream films, the media
contributes to the confusion between reality and representation. In
Scream 2, Randy, our horror-film expert, comments that the killer
could be a reporter, as “that’s what reporters do—they stage the news.”
As it turns out, Randy, as usual, is correct; one of the killers in Scream
2 is masquerading as a local reporter, simultaneously committing
the murders and reporting on them. This motif not only highlights
the role of the media in “hyperrealizing” violence but also the fact
that as a culture we simultaneously fear and crave being watched.7
Despite what happened to her in Scream, Sidney has decided to be an
actress in Scream 2, and the second killer is a film major who wants
to be caught because he wants his trial to be on TV. For his defense,
he plans to claim that violence on television was to blame for his
crimes. At the end of Scream 2, Cotton Weary (Liev Schreiber), the
man accused of killing Sidney’s mother in Scream, is in a position to
save Sidney’s life but will only do so once she promises to do a Diane
Sawyer interview with him; by Scream 3, Cotton has his own talk
show, 100% Cotton, on which he discusses the escalation of everyday
violence, such as “road rage.”
Scream 4, released 11 years after Scream 3, reflects the vast changes
in our everyday relations to media and communications technology.
In the fourth film, everyone has cell phones, and they use them to
imitate the Scream/Stab killer, as there is an app for Ghostface’s voice.
The killers face bigger challenges, as everyone is media savvy, and
everyone wants to be seen, not on TV anymore, but on the Inter-
net. The killers are no longer abnormal; their desires are the same as
everyone else’s. In the opening of the film, the layers of simulation
seem endless. Two teen girls sit on a couch discussing scary mov-
ies; the phone rings, it’s the killer’s voice on the other end, and after
an elaborate kill sequence, both girls end up dead. Then we cut to
a new set of girls, who were apparently watching the first set in a
scary movie. This time, one of the girls complains about “the whole
self-aware, postmodern metashit” and how it had been done before.
Her friend takes out a knife and stabs her, asking, “Did that surprise
you?” Cut to yet another set of girls, who were in turn watching the
first two sets as part of a movie—yet another metacommentary on
horror—and then those two girls are butchered. It could have gone
on forever, but finally these last two girls are revealed to be part of
the diegetic reality of Scream 4. However, the distinction between
fiction and diegetic reality in this last film is blurrier than ever.
While Scream 2 and Scream 3 make the apparatus of film production
very visible, in Scream 4 it becomes clear that Woodsboro itself has
become hyperreal. Too long associated purely with the spectacular
murders portrayed all over the media, in multiple films, and on the
Internet, Woodsboro has no reality of its own any longer; it has come
to reflect its own simulation.
Having come full circle, Scream 4 is presented as a remake of
Scream, complete with its new generation cast of characters to match
the old: Gale is replaced by Robbie Mercer (Erik Knudsen), who
is constantly streaming everything that happens to him live on his
Internet site—“Hall Pass with Robbie Mercer”—through a headset
he wears all the time; Randy is replaced by Charlie (Rory Culkin),

also a horror buff; Sidney’s pretty blond friend Tatum from Scream
is replaced by Olivia (Marielle Jaffe) and Kirby (Hayden Panattiere);
Sidney’s creepy boyfriend is replaced with Trevor (Nico Tortorella);
and Sidney herself is replaced with Jill (Emma Roberts), her own
cousin. However, unlike most remakes, which tend to emulate the
original as closely as possible, this one has excess characters; mem-
bers of the old cast—namely, Sidney, Dewey, and Gale—are also
present. Sidney has become a legend, and so Scream 4 becomes a
remake with a vengeance. In order for Jill to be the Final Girl, Sid-
ney has to die. Because all that matters is what appears in the media,
Jill believes she can in fact “stage the news” and make herself the
Final Girl by committing all the murders herself, including Sidney’s
(with the help of a partner, of course, “to stay true to the original”).
Reflecting the extreme of Internet culture, all Jill desires is to be seen:
“I don’t need friends; I need fans.” Jill intends to make her own life
into a horror film to reach her intended audience: “You don’t have to
achieve anything. You just gotta have fucked-up shit happen to you.”
In a scene reflective of the final kill sequence of Scream, it seems
that Jill has achieved her goal. After killing everyone else, including
her own partner in crime, and then beating herself up so she looks
like a victim, Jill lays down next to Sidney’s apparently dead body. Jill
mimics Sidney’s pose as well as she can, showing that she does in fact
want nothing but to be a simulation of Sidney. She does not want to
simply replace Sidney, but to be a perfect replica of her, to destroy her
by mimicking her perfectly, as a Baudrillardian simulation would,
enacting “the murderous power of images, murderers of the real,
murderers of their own model” (Simulacra, 5). As Jill is taken from
the house on a stretcher, news cameras flashing everywhere, a look of
pure ecstasy appears on her face; she has achieved her dream.
However, that is not the end of the film; as Baudrillard himself
contends, “the crime is never perfect” (Preface to The Perfect Crime).
Sidney lives, much to Jill’s chagrin. In the hospital where they both
recover, an epic battle ensues between the original three characters—
Dewey, Gale, and Sidney—and Jill, who strives to kill them all. She
fails, and right before she is dispatched with for good, Sidney tells
her, “You forgot the first rule of remakes, Jill. Don’t fuck with the
original.”
But, given the sequence of films that Sidney has appeared in,
the fact that she has been trapped in the same role and ultimately
the same film again and again, and the way that these films have
portrayed “reality” sliding into simulation, what are we to make of

her claims to originality at this point? In Scream, Sidney finds that
her reality had become a movie; in Scream 2, a film version of her
life determines that she will again be caught up in the movie, the
sequel demanded by the killers of the first film and of course the
viewing public; in Scream 3, she finds herself victimized within
a simulation of Woodsboro, again having to acquiesce to a movie
script; and finally, in Scream 4, she returns to Woodsboro only to find
that it, and everyone in it, has become a simulation. Further, by the
time Scream 4 is released, there have been a number of spoofs of the
Scary Movie variety. Is Sidney’s statement the final turn of the screw
in Scream’s metahorrific commentary, a condemnation of its con-
ventionality and, at the same time, an avowal of its own uniqueness?
An admission that it has never escaped, and perhaps never tried to
escape, from the conventions of the genre it inhabits? An assertion
that, despite the prevalence of remakes and “postmodern metashit,”
the genre still offers potent commentary on the realities of the cul-
ture that consumes it?
I would argue, all of the above. As I stated at the beginning of
this analysis, the Scream series is truly deconstructive. As such, it
never claims to move outside of the structure in which it operates.
In its reflexivity, it does, however, open a space of play within that
structure, a space that does not close with the threat of takeover by
simulacra. In the end of Scream 4, at least two narratives are at work:
the one being told by the reporters outside the hospital, in which
everyone but Jill is dead and Jill is “an American hero right out of
the movies,” and the one taking place behind the scenes, as it were,
inside the hospital, where the “American hero right out of the mov-
ies” is dead, not the hero but the villain. What is at first presented in
the film as the “real-time” nature of the Internet, where everything
appears as soon as it happens and nothing truly happens that does
not appear, is called into question in the end. A lag time is introduced
between the event and its total absorption by the media.
This in-between space, neither on-screen nor offscreen, puts us in
a position to recognize the ways that reality is produced and manipu-
lated without offering a way out of that production. At most, we can
be backstage, an offscreen space not truly separate from on-screen
events that only exists in reference to them. In the end, victory goes
not to the real (Sidney) as opposed to the simulation (Jill), but rather
to the ones who are neither real nor fictional, neither alive nor dead,
neither present nor absent (Sidney, Dewey, and Gale). Sidney is no
more real than Jill is, but she keeps open a space of play between
different layers or levels of mediation, disallowing the total takeover
of simulation. In this space, we can still converse about fiction and
reality, about truth and representation.
When it is impossible to distinguish representations of true crime
from horror movies, then there is the possibility that real life will
begin to resemble a horror movie. When identity is increasingly
determined by public visibility, then there is the possibility that one
becomes only an image, a persona constructed from the outside in.
Baudrillard presents the total realization of these potentialities in his
concept of hyperreality, suggesting that in such a state we lose the
ability to produce meaning and that we consequently pine for a real-
ity that no longer exists.
The Scream series, however, suggests that the movement by which
the image seems to eclipse reality never completes itself. The films
open up a space that is neither reality nor simulation, an intradi-
egetic backstage or offscreen in which a sense of originality is still
in play. By keeping this space open, Scream preserves the difference
between horror film and true crime, between a horror movie that
knows it is a horror movie and true violence that presents itself as a
horror movie. This is an essential distinction if we are to continue to
love horror and to hate real violence at the same time.
The End of Humanity Is a Horror Film
The Cabin in the Woods also utilizes this in-between space to cre-
ate and preserve layers of mediation and to comment on the horror
genre. In fact, in The Cabin there is nothing but this backstage space.
There is only the space of production with no product. Production
becomes the product, and corporate headquarters, the site of the
horror film. In this way, The Cabin exploits the fear of becoming a
product of your products, commenting not only on the end of horror
but of free will in media-saturated consumer society.
The horror film being produced within The Cabin relies on the
near perfect replication of certain genre conventions. Five stock
horror-film characters—Curt, the Athlete (Chris Hemsworth); Jules,
the Whore (Anna Hutchison); Dana, the Virgin (Kristen Connolly);
Holden, the Scholar (Jesse Williams); and Marty, the Fool (Fran
Kranz)—embark on a journey to a secluded cabin in the woods for
a weekend of revelry. But the characters are apparently “real” people
who are unwittingly part of a sort of reality TV show run by an evil
corporation to appease those “downstairs.” Like Scream, The Cabin

in the Woods makes the horror film real, though a heavily manipu-
lated and constructed reality. Whereas in Scream, the “master narra-
tive,” as Tietchen points out, is the horror film itself, The Cabin in the
Woods puts the evil corporation in its place, motioning toward that
brand of science-fiction in which evil megacorporations threaten the
identity and integrity of the human race.8 The Cabin in the Woods is
thus a hybrid film, at once adhering to the conventions of the slasher
film and disrupting that narrative both with metacommentary on the
genre and with another narrative formula that is quasi-apocalyptic
science-fiction. The Cabin is not only about the horror film but also
about the production and consumption of meaning in contemporary
society, about who controls that production and to what end.
In The Cabin in the Woods, the cabin is not real but virtual, part
of a giant computer program, a virtual consciousness that applies a
limited number of scenarios to a fully mechanized, mediated, and
highly controlled space. What is supposed to be scary about a cabin
in the woods—its seclusion, the fact that the rules of civilized soci-
ety do not seem to apply—is not applicable to this cabin. Instead,
this cabin plays on what is directly horrifying about civilized society
itself: constant surveillance, the manipulation of desires and gender
roles, the indifference to suffering and exploitation that character-
izes corporate greed, and the elision of the line between reality and
representation in a culture so heavily mediated. While the college
kids think that they are going to the country to “unplug” in a place
that “doesn’t even show up on the GPS” and where they can enjoy
“one goddamn weekend where they can’t globally position my ass,” in
actuality their every move is being watched, recorded, and carefully
manipulated, suggesting that the system has now fully integrated its
“outside.” There is no longer anything outside the world of media-
tion, commercialization, and corporate power, nothing for the sys-
tem to define itself against.
The system only works, however, if everyone still believes they
operate freely within it; this is the height of hegemony: complete con-
trol masked as free will and individual desire. Everything rests on this
willful servitude. In The Cabin in the Woods, the fate of the world rests
on whether the corporation can manipulate these five individuals
into fully enacting horror film conventions while believing that the
choices are their own. The evil corporation “produces” these horror
films in order to appease some greater authority that is mysteriously
referred to as “those downstairs” for most of the film. The characters
do not know they are part of a horror production. The corporation

controls most of the action of the plot and the personality traits of the
characters. For example, they put something in the blond character’s
hair dye to make her dumb, when in fact she is “pre-med.” They also
release pheromones into the air when two of the characters are in the
woods to ensure that they will have sex so that the “whore” can meet
her end. These stereotypical characters do not exist; they are pro-
duced. Further, the scenario into which the characters are thrown—
the cabin in the woods—is a simulation. Everything is rigged so that
the corporation can control the events. If a character who is supposed
to survive longer looks like he or she might succumb too early, a
weapon appears at hand for the character to use. On the other hand,
if a character who is supposed to die has a chance of escaping, an elec-
tronic wall appears out of nowhere to block the exit. In some ways,
this production is similar to the one in Ross’s The Hunger Games,9 in
which the more popular players receive help from the aristocrats that
run the show. However, unlike The Hunger Games, a strict formula
determines who must die and when. Also, as I explain further below,
there are no aristocrats in The Cabin, no clear line between oppressor
and oppressed, a sure sign that hegemony has reached its apex.
The corporation of The Cabin employs mythic language to nat-
uralize the power structure and identities it produces. In this way,
horror-film characters are presented not as stereotypes but rather as
mythic archetypes, and the murders of horror films, not as instances
of gratuitous violence but rather sacrifices essential to keeping the
“ancient ones” appeased. Whore, Virgin, Fool, Athlete, and Scholar
are mythic figures carved into the bedrock beneath the corporation.
As each character dies, his/her blood fills the outline of the figure that
corresponds to his/her character type, seemingly fulfilling a sacred
obligation. However, the behavior of the corporate technicians in
this regard is anything but reverent. On the one hand, the viewing
audience is given the impression that everything is at stake in the
proper playing out of the horror formula, that in fact the world will
end if the obligation is not fulfilled. As one of the head technicians
states after the first blood sacrifice, “This we offer in humility and fear
for the blessed peace of your eternal slumber as it ever was.” But on
the other hand, as the film plays out on corporate headquarters’ big
screen TV, all of the technicians treat it as nothing more than a game;
in fact, they all bet on how each phase of the film will play out—
from what type of boogeyman will appear to how long it will take
the Whore to reveal her charms. It is only when the Fool manages
to outlive his time and the formula is threatened that the technicians
get serious. At this point, the audience learns that there are similar
corporations all over the world, other films being produced, and that
the rite is in jeopardy precisely because of the fact that no one takes
it seriously any longer; it has apparently become harder and harder
to get the characters to play their roles properly, and more and more
difficult to get the viewing audience, the consumers of the corpo-
ration’s products, to believe in the formula. When this installment
begins, apparently all other corporations have failed in their projects
and it is just “Japan and us.”
The relations among meaning, truth, and reality are perhaps more
complicated in The Cabin in the Woods than in any of the other films
treated in this chapter. Like Scream, the characters of the horror
film are portrayed as real people, but unlike Scream, the “bad guys”
control not just who lives or dies, but the entire “real” environment,
including natural events like sunshine and thunderstorms. The Cabin
thus exploits the fear that mechanisms of surveillance and control
have entered every aspect of our lives, including our thoughts, feel-
ings, and actions.
Ironically, it is the pot-smoking Fool who figures out that he
and his friends are being manipulated, discovering the strings of
the “puppeteers.” This knowledge—and the fact that the marijuana
apparently counteracts all the other chemicals with which the cor-
poration attempts to control the characters—allows him to survive
longer than the formula predicts and contributes to the unraveling
of the corporation.
The rules are fairly simple; everyone must die before the virginal
Final Girl; it does not matter whether she lives or dies so long as
she is the last and so long as “she suffers.” Everything hinges on her
survival, not because she represents the values of mainstream society
and thus must be preserved, as in horror films of the past, but rather
because the formula must be carried out regardless of the circum-
stances (no matter, for example, if she is not really a virgin; as the
CEO states, “we work with what we have”).
The callousness with which the characters are treated is reflec-
tive of the film producers’ conscious desire to critique the genre. In
an interview published by Lionsgatefilmsuk, producer Joss Whedon
explains that horror audiences these days tend to root for the killer.
“The people in the movie don’t matter. But they matter to me”
(n. pag.) Part of the purpose of The Cabin, then, was to show “why
they don’t matter.” As the Final Girl faces off against zombies in what
Figure 1.2 Sitterson and other corporation workers party as Dana struggles
to survive on the screen behind them in The Cabin in the Woods.
are apparently the final scenes of the film, the corporate technicians
turn away, satisfied that the formula has been fulfilled. They throw a
big party, congratulated by all the interns that want to emulate them;
in the background REO Speedwagon’s “Roll With the Changes” plays,
“So if you’re tired of the same old story . . .” Their indifference to the
Final Girl’s screams and struggles to survive and their callousness in
betting on the outcomes of human suffering are apparently meant to
reflect the desensitization of contemporary society to media violence
and the indifference of the corporation to the effects of their prod-
ucts on the human beings who consume them.
However, the corporation is not presented as entirely evil; it is
humanized through two jaded but quite likeable technicians, Sit-
terson (Richard Jenkins) and Hadley (Bradley Whitford), whom we
meet at the beginning of the film and follow throughout the current
production. Their story is part of a subplot that examines the reali-
ties of white-collar existence today. Sitterson and Hadley work all
day in a room with no windows; they are bored, their jobs mean
nothing to them, and they have no meaningful relationship to the
things they produce. They are portrayed as agents of a company they
know to be immoral at its core, but they either cannot or are unwill-
ing to do anything about it. Sitterson and Hadley, though providing
much of the film’s comic relief, are representative of a dark truth: the
naïveté that critics attribute to mainstream American culture, which
allows the majority to participate in cultural practices they know to
be exploitative and oppressive because the ultimate blame is always
somewhere else—on those “downstairs,” for example. At the same
time, they desperately try to keep alive the notion of free will, though
it has become absurd and meaningless. When one of the other work-
ers complains that “it’s fixed,” that the characters are set up to become
the agents of their own destruction, Hadley explains, “They have to
make the choice of their own free will; otherwise, the system doesn’t
work.” In other words, they get to choose which monster will destroy
them, but the result is of course the same. “They don’t transgress;
they can’t be punished.”
However, Sitterson and Hadley will have to contend directly
with those whom they oppress in this film, as the Final Girl and
the Fool manage to break in to corporate headquarters. In the film’s
penultimate showdown, the Final Girl must make a choice. Having
revealed the importance of the formula, the CEO, played by Sigour-
ney Weaver, tells the Final Girl that she must kill the Fool to save
the world. Viewers feel simultaneously elated and betrayed when
Sigourney Weaver appears as the head of the corporation. Weaver’s
character, Ripley, from the Alien franchise is a cultural icon that has
come to represent all of the progressive potential of horror to offer us
strong female leads who can challenge and destroy corporate patri-
archy. Here the same actor plays a character firmly enmeshed in cor-
porate power, schooling this other woman on how to be the proper
sacrificial victim: “Forgive us, and let us get it over with.” The choice
of Weaver to play this role suggests not merely that the film is engag-
ing in intertextual play, referencing another horror franchise as part
of its metacommentary on the genre; this reference is particularly
telling because it places Weaver seemingly in the opposite position,
as oppressor rather than liberator, leaving the audience to wonder
whether the Final Girl’s rebellion here will have any real meaning.
Our confusion over where power is located and how it func-
tions in the film is compounded by the layers of mediation the film
introduces and ultimately entangles. At first, there are those in cor-
porate headquarters watching those in the “outside” world. While
presumably the entire outside world is surveilled and controlled by
the corporation, certain people and areas are targeted more heavily,
becoming parts of the corporation’s “product.” Then there are those,
whom we never see (perhaps implying it is us), who are watching
the “film” that the corporation produces, believing perhaps that their
reality is more real than that of the characters they watch. While it
seems that all of reality is controlled and produced by the corpo-
ration, when the Virgin and Fool storm corporate headquarters, it
becomes part of the very film it was producing. At this point it seems
that any division between reality and simulation has been elided
and that there is truly no one at the helm. Chaos ensues at corporate
headquarters, as the Virgin and Fool succeed in releasing all of the
monsters that plague victims in horror films, which the corporation
had stored in virtual cells, the boundaries of which are obviously not
impregnable. One of the workers comments, “They’re like something
from a nightmare.” The corporation’s chemist corrects him, “No,
they’re something nightmares are from.” These are not monsters cre-
ated by the human mind but rather ones that have nothing to do with
humanity. They are “from the time before.”
Once the corporation’s demons have been unleashed, corporate
headquarters is destroyed and all those in power with it. However,
the film adds a layer of power in the form of angry, bloodthirsty
“gods” who have apparently been demanding these sacrifices, the
corporate productions a response to those demands, an attempt
to keep them appeased so that they do not destroy the world. This
seems to be the point at which critics balked at the film’s metaten-
dencies. A. O. Scott, of the New York Times, states that “there is a
scholarly, nerdy, completist sensibility at work here that is impressive
until it becomes exhausting” (n. pag.). At the end of the film, cor-
porate headquarters is literally crumbling, and an enormous hand
breaks through the ground. Indeed, in a film that emphasizes the
extent to which human reality is constructed by a certain segment of
the human population, it seems strange to then turn to the gods as
the ultimate origin of it all.
To suggest that the formula for horror ultimately came from else-
where, that these stereotypes are real or natural categories, shaped
and demanded by the divine, out of our control, would seem to be
to return to a sort of romantic naïveté, but there is nothing romantic
about these films. And after all, what sorts of gods would demand
movies, images, simulations of sacrifices instead of real ones? And
what sorts of gods are kept below human reality rather than above it?
Would it not be more horrific to believe that humans were in the end
responsible for it all, its success as well as its failure?
These questions can be answered, but I think only effectively
so if one keeps in mind the obliteration of the line between real-
ity and simulation in the film. Once the corporation becomes part
of its own production, then the gods to which it answers and who
emerge at this moment of convergence are also part of that produc-
tion. Further, while the film suggests that the gods will destroy the
whole world, all we see is them destroying the corporation, the site
Figure 1.3 A giant hand breaks through corporate headquarters in The

Cabin in the Woods.
of production itself. So what we are witnessing is indeed the end of

the horror film. As producer Joss Whedon states, The Cabin in the
Woods is “a final statement on the horror film. Not the final statement
but a final statement.” If these latest productions are any indication,
horror is a genre that accommodates final statements quite well. The
question that remains is what relationship exists between these final
statements and social reality outside of the films; why are the end of
horror and the end of humanity figured in the same narrative?
The invocation of the gods “downstairs” at the end of the film
could be seen as a metaphor for the “monster” that is the consuming
mass culture of America. In contemporary consumer society, those
“downstairs,” those who demand that reality continue to be produced
as spectacle, who demand that a certain formula be followed, those
who ultimately determine the success of the corporation, are not
gods but consumers. In the perverse logic by which the hegemonic
structure of contemporary consumerism works, the people demand
the products that oppress them. To invoke The Hunger Games again
as a comparison, the very people whose children are forced to fight
for their lives in front of millions of viewers are the same people
who make up that viewership, who drive up the ratings of the show,
who enable the sacrifices to continue. In The Cabin in the Woods,
one could say that it is the consumer who is the monstrous entity
downstairs, waiting to be set loose, kept down by sacrifices of its

own blood. As in The Hunger Games, it is only when one of the play-
ers refuses her role, refuses to play by the rules, that the system is
challenged in any real way. And even then, in The Cabin she is still
destroyed. She never makes it out of corporate headquarters, never
has any reality outside of its walls. As in Scream, there is no way to
win this game, no exit from the horror production. It is for this rea-
son that from the very beginning of the film, the Fool proclaims that
“society needs to crumble,” and when he has the opportunity to save
humanity, he refuses, stating, “Maybe that’s the way it should be . . .
It’s time to give someone else a chance.” The Fool thus suggests that
the end of horror is linked not with the end of the world but with the
conclusion of the dominion of the human, its giving way to some-
thing else, a different sort of being.
Indeed, the monstrous entity downstairs is reminiscent of the
loathsome, cannibalistic Morlocks of H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine
and the unwitting college kids, the vapid Eloi upon which the Mor-
locks prey. However, in Wells’s novel the Time Traveler serves as the
representative of modern humanity; it is through his critical per-
spective that the reader witnesses the possible decline of humanity,
through his narrative that they have the potential to avoid that fate.
In The Cabin in the Woods, the viewer has only Sitterson and Hadley,
the very individuals responsible for perpetuating humanity’s decline
and who are themselves victimized by it, rendered incapable of exer-
cising free will, of sympathizing with fellow human beings. Truly
incapable of envisioning a human reality outside of the hegemony of
the current socioeconomic system or outside of the media through
which it produces that reality, the film leaves the world to a voracious
inhuman force, not one that preceded the current system but one
that it produced.
Unlike the Scream series, The Cabin in the Woods is truly apoca-
lyptic, spelling out the end of humanity through a narrative on the
end of horror. Straddling the millennial turn, the Scream series sug-
gests that horror’s self-referential abilities have evolved along with
the increasing availability and use of social media and communica-
tions technology. The Cabin in the Woods is poised at the extreme
edge of that evolutionary relation, where self-referentiality turns
self-destructive. By highlighting the process of production and the
various levels at which society participates in the (re)production of
its own end—as victims, as consumers, as producers, as workers, as
monsters—The Cabin offers what seems at first an absurd formula:
the end of humanity is a horror film. It seems laughable to suggest

that the fate of the world lies in the proper playing out of an over-
used formula. And to some extent it is laughable; the film does have
its moments of dark humor. But it is not for that matter a spoof. It
introduces a new kind of monster, an unintended outcropping of
the production process itself, a monster of the image that threatens
not the end of the whole world but only human supremacy over it.
This monster will reappear in the sections that follow, continually
challenging the conceptual categories according to which modern
humanity set itself up as the center and controller of its realities.
2
The Image Goes Viral—

Virtual Hauntings in The
Ring and Feardotcom
T his chapter deals with films in which technology and

technological devices are portrayed as demonized or haunted.
Just in the past forty years, there have been a number of popular
films concerning such “ghosts in the machine.”1 These films come in
many forms: those that deal with normally nonsentient machines,
like John Carpenter’s Christine (1983) or Stephen King’s Maximum
Overdrive (1986); those that deal with cybernetic organisms, like the
Terminator series (James Cameron, 1984, 1991; Jonathan Mostow,
2003; McG, 2009) and Spielberg’s AI: Artificial Intelligence (2001);
and those that focus on media or communications technology, like
Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983) and the Poltergeist series (Hooper,
1982; Brian Gibson, 1986; Gary Sherman, 1988) or, more recently,
The Matrix trilogy (Wachowski Brothers, 1999, 2003, 2003), Gore
Verbinski’s The Ring (2002), and William Malone’s Feardotcom
(2002). In this last category, we might also include Wes Craven’s New
Nightmare (1994) and Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness (1995), in
which the demon has entered into the process of horror production
itself. In all cases, a will, spirit, or consciousness is attributed to
nonhuman, inorganic devices. Endowed with these new powers,
such devices and the creatures that sometimes emerge from them
threaten humanity and human-centered reality.
We can trace a kind of evolution in “techno-horror” correspond-
ing to different phases of technological production and of our rela-
tion to these products. Some films, like T2 and AI, even comment on
certain evolutionary trends. In each, a sense that a turn is occurring
in our relationship to technology manifests itself as nostalgia for old

technology. In such films, previous technological forms, like the first
Terminator (played by Arnold Schwarzenegger) in T2 or the old
androids who are persecuted in AI, are presented as “good guys” and
manifest a nostalgia for a previous human-machine relation in which
the machine is perceived as being more human the less it appears so.
The understanding of the uniquely human in such films is based on
Enlightenment and Romantic models in which the human is defined
as the only creature who is both feeling and thinking, capable of the
highest subjective experiences (emotions, sympathy, pity, suffer-
ing), and also capable of pure rational objectivity. In the films cited
above, the outdated technological models either manifest or desire
these distinctly human traits; they are seen as human creations in a
relation in which the human is still dominant. By privileging these
traits and relations, such films disavow the intimacy of the human to
its newest creations (such as the improved Terminator or David, the
newest version of AI), which are both more and less human: more
human in that they are physically indistinguishable, less in that they
are outside of human moral control.
The distinction between human and technology/machine is ulti-
mately upheld in these earlier films, and the desire to be human
and to save the human-centered world prevails. The fears of los-
ing control and of witnessing the advent of an inhuman world are
also apparent, though in a more complex way, in those films that
deal with media and communications technology. In films like The
Matrix, New Nightmare, and In the Mouth of Madness, this anxiety
concerns the status of reality itself and the fear that reality is con-
trolled, that our stories are being written, by someone or something
else, something antagonistic to humanity. In other narratives, like
Videodrome and certain cyberpunk classics such as William Gib-
son’s Neuromancer (1984), the absorption of the human individual
or self by or into technology or virtuality is portrayed as both hor-
rific and pleasurable. In these examples, there is a fairly strict separa-
tion between body and mind, the goal often being to leave the body
behind as so much “meat” and to fuse human spirit with technology
to form a greater being or higher level of experience.2
In more recent examples of techno-horror—including The Ring,
Feardotcom, Jim Sonzero’s Pulse (2006), and Eric Valette’s One Missed
Call (2008)3—the distinctions upon which these earlier narratives
are ultimately able to rely no longer hold. Not only is humanity not
to be rigorously distinguished from technology, but the human is a
The Image Goes Viral 33
product of technology. The real and the virtual bleed into each other,
and the virtual is no longer an immaterial or spiritual space but
rather is itself embodied. One does not discard one’s body when one
merges with the virtual beings of these films; rather, it is the virtual
that gains a bodily reality, a porous skin, a site of material birth.
While the films discussed in chapter 1 are effective precisely
because they keep the fourth wall intact, the films examined here,
though equally focused on the erosion of the reality-simulation
divide and the role of communications technology in furthering that
erosion, often do break the fourth wall. Such films bring the viewer
into the horror of the film and allow the image to “bleed” into the
real world. Unlike the Scream series and The Cabin in the Woods,
which play with our reliance on and intimacy with technologi-
cal devices, creating levity and horror at the same time, these films
endow these same devices with the dead weight of the gothic. In The
Ring, Feardotcom, Pulse, and One Missed Call, images and wireless
signals become heavy, haunted, ghost-laden. Everything that makes
such devices and signals so light and portable, so seemingly normal
and insignificant, is shown to be a façade; all the time, something has
been watching us through our TVs and computer screens, very near
and waiting to be released, wanting to make contact, literally.
As Jeffrey Sconce notes in his 2000 work Haunted Media, media
technologies have always entertained a relationship with the super-
natural and the occult. Ghostly images were believed to haunt nine-
teenth-century photographs, and voices from beyond the grave to
speak through the radio, the phonograph, the telegraph, and the tele-
phone. Media technologies, whether visual or phonic, open up a tech-
nological “other side,” a “vast electronic nowhere” peopled with human
spirits (126). The introduction of the television to homes across the
country enhanced this relationship because through it stories of such
hauntings could be broadcast to a mass audience, with both moving
picture and sound. Sconce discusses television shows from the 1960s
like Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits, many episodes of which fea-
tured the television or other media as haunted or threatening devices.
In these scenarios, media technologies are more than just media;
they are affected by the material that passes through them. Narra-
tives of haunted media suggest that this material—messages, images,
voices—does not merely pass through; parts of it remain and leave
traces. Further, since these technologies act as extensions of human
consciousness and perception, aspects of those faculties begin to rub
off as well, resulting in narratives of technologies and technological
devices imbued with their own will. The “other side” thus stores much
more than the spirits of the dead; it provides the murky borderland
for all sorts of other-intrusions to disturb the distinctions a society
holds dear: conscious/unconscious, known/unknown, domestic/for-
eign, reality/unreality, life/death, mind/body, self/other.
We should not be surprised, then, that our newest media tech-
nologies have elicited their own ghost stories, especially because of
their greater storage capacity. As Friedrich Kittler notes in Gramo-
phone, Film, Typewriter, “The realm of the dead is as extensive as
the storage and transmission capabilities of a given culture” (13). In
our culture, this would mean that the realm of the dead has become
almost infinite in scope, providing fertile ground for techno-horrific
narratives to multiply, and indeed they have. Exemplars of this new
trend The Ring, Feardotcom, Pulse, and One Missed Call place ghosts
in the videotape, the Internet, the wireless signal, and the cell phone,
respectively. More demon than ghost, these entities do not merely
haunt their victims but come to possess them, body and mind. As
each film ultimately reveals, it is not that demons operate through
media and communications technology but rather that this technol-
ogy itself is demonic; it does not want to remain outside or on the
other side but rather wishes to move within and among us, and in
these films, it has the power to cross that line. Moreover, because of
the ubiquity of technology—not only do we have unlimited access
to it, but it has unlimited access to us—this is not a demon that can
ever be exorcized; instead, one must accede to its presence and to its
demands.
By attributing wills and spirits to technology and technological
devices, these films offer such devices a presence they do not nor-
mally possess, not only because they are lightweight and portable but
also because their very pervasiveness makes them fade into the back-
ground. The films are critical of this lack of awareness, and it is the
task of the films’ ghosts to reveal this failing. In keeping with their
horror heritage, each film highlights the self-imposed isolation of the
technophile, who is alone even when he or she is supposed to be
“connecting” to others. But they also suggest that there is much more
to these isolating connections than we think, that in fact we have
been connecting to others in ways more intimate than the passing of
information, and that all sorts of human-technology interminglings
have been taking place without our conscious knowledge.
In each film, these invisible relations manifest themselves as a
contagious virus that passes through technological mechanisms to
infect the user. The technological devices serve as the media of trans-
mission of the virus from one person to another. The symptoms of
the virus, both biological and technological, vary from film to film.4
In all cases, victims suffer hallucinations, as their perception of real-
ity is overtaken by the will of the vengeful technological ghost that
haunts them until their deaths. There is always a set time from infec-
tion to death—seven days in The Ring, 48 hours in Feardotcom and
One Missed Call—and infection is a death sentence for everyone but
the Final Girl.
In what follows, I will focus on The Ring and Feardotcom, as the
haunting they portray is particularly effective, taking place as it does
through image technology, the very medium through which the
viewer receives the narratives.5 Intimacy is created between viewer
and viewed, the fourth wall breached, as the virus spreads both
within each film and outside, toward the external viewer, who feels
that he or she too might have been infected, having seen the images
that lead to contraction of the disease.
By highlighting the points of contact rather than disconnection
in our technological relations, the highly contagious nature of tech-
nological transmissions, and the movement of images/messages
through technological mechanisms, these films terrorize us, neither
for what they show nor for what they tell, but rather for what they
introduce into our experience of technology. The viewing audience
becomes hyperaware of the undecidable relation between reality and
image, and that undecidability becomes horrific and affective rather
than desensitizing and anesthetic.
Bleeding Images
Both films begin as mystery/detective stories that morph into super-

natural tales once the ghostly nature of the antagonists is revealed.
In Feardotcom, a serial killer named Alistair Pratt (Stephen Rae) has
been stalking young girls, abducting them, and torturing and killing
them live on the Internet while many log on to watch. The detec-
tive, Mike Reilly (Stephen Dorff), has been unable to apprehend him,
not only for the usual reasons—the intelligence of the killer, time
and space between killings, and so forth—but also because the killer
changes the website on which he broadcasts after every murder, so
he is untraceable. When the film begins, so too does a new series of
murders, this time linked to an Internet site that the serial killer has
used in the past. When people log on to this website, they contract
what seems to be a hemorrhagic virus; they bleed from every ori-

fice, they hallucinate, and then they die exactly 48 hours after con-
tracting the disease. The seemingly viral nature of the illness leads
to the introduction of a “new detective” to the case—Terry Houston
(Natascha McElhone), a virologist from the Department of Health
who also ends up being our Final Girl. Mike and Terry are each fol-
lowing a different murderer: Mike, a visible human one, and Terry,
an invisible nonhuman one. The Internet provides the connection
between the two, as the killer website is apparently operated by the
ghost of Alistair’s first victim, Jeannie Richardson (Gesine Cru-
kowski). It appears that Jeannie’s ghost seeks revenge for what was
done to her, as well as the fact that so many logged on to watch. Mike
and Terry follow her clues and eventually discover both her body
and the murderer. They find him just in time to save his latest victim,
and he is appropriately punished for his crimes. However, Jeannie’s
revenge and the virulent force she represents have much wider impli-
cations than the murder of one woman by one man, and the death of
the killer does not offer true resolution.
Likewise, The Ring begins with the death of a young girl, Katie, from
a virus she apparently caught from a videotape. As Katie’s friend Becca
explains before her death, “Have you heard about this videotape that
kills you when you watch it? . . . You start to play it, and it’s like some-
body’s nightmare. And then suddenly this woman comes on, smiling,
right? Seeing you . . . through the screen. And as soon as it’s over, your
phone rings; someone knows you’ve watched it . . . and what they say
is, ‘You will die in seven days.’” Katie’s aunt Rachel (Naomi Watts) is an
investigative reporter. She and her former boyfriend, Noah (Martin
Henderson), a media technician/analyst, locate the killer videotape
and use the images on it to track down the ghost/killer. There is a par-
ticular urgency to this quest, as both they and their son, Aidan (David
Dorfman), have watched the images on the tape and are now infected
with the killer virus. When they find the dead body of the little girl
from the videotape, Samara (Daveigh Chase), they believe they have
solved the crime. It seems that Samara’s mother went mad, locked
her daughter in the barn, and eventually threw her down a dark well,
where it took her seven days to die. Like Feardotcom, however, finding
the ghost’s body does not allow her to rest. As Aidan informs Rachel,
“You weren’t supposed to help her . . . She never sleeps.”
Image technology allows these “spirits” to have a life beyond the
grave and, more importantly, to make contact not only with their
alleged murderers but with a much larger population of individuals.
Figure 2.1 Samara is born from the television screen in The Ring.
Their particular brand of haunting has several interrelated effects:

first, it causes bodily dis-ease in those characters who view the ghosts’
images; second, it forces those it infects to become agents of the dis-
ease, spreading it to others either by making copies of the videotape
or by making the killer website “go viral”; and third, the haunting
allows for the image-ghosts to pass across the TV/computer screen
into the viewer’s reality. Technology and technological devices allow
images not only to appear and propagate but also to spread and to
bleed into reality. Further, the external viewer sees the same images
as those within the film who are infected with the killer virus, so it
seems as if the disease might be able to cross not only from the killer
videotape/website into diegetic reality but also into the reality of the
external viewer.
The intrusion of the image into the reality of both characters
within the films and the external viewers represents something of
a reversal of the formula that William Egginton establishes in his
essay “Reality Is Bleeding,” in which he discusses the preoccupa-
tion with the boundary between reality and fictional representation,
arguing convincingly that this concern is not a new one but rather
goes back at least to the sixteenth century with the establishment
of modern theater and modern philosophy. According to Egginton,
the bleeding between the realms of representation and reality hap-
pens when the audience perceives that the screen/stage is not an
“innocuous medium framing the represented reality” that remains

separate from our objective reality but rather that the images therein
are themselves part of an objective reality, “a trace of some real act of
violence” (212).6 Such confusion occurs, for example, in viewing The
Blair Witch Project. The use of the hand-held camera by the charac-
ters gives the audience the sense that the events portrayed really hap-
pened. The most extreme form of this type of bleeding, as Egginton
notes, is the snuff film, in which the viewer is in fact witness to a real
filmed crime.
There is a difference between these two examples and the type
of bleeding enacted in/through The Ring and Feardotcom. In both
films, the viewing audience is not merely witness to a possibly real
act of violence but potentially a recipient of that violence. Because in
these films it is the image itself that enacts the violence, all of those
watching, those inside as well as those outside the film, become its
possible victims. It is not simply that the line between reality and rep-
resentation is blurred but that the representation crosses the line into
reality in a violent way. Reality is not bleeding; the image is bleeding.
This is possible not only because of the external viewers’ exposure
to the contagious images but also because the virus introduces an
element of invisibility into the visible image. While the technological
foe within the film has a visible face, the virus itself is invisible; its
crossing cannot be perceived. External viewers cannot be reassured,
as they could with visible monsters, by looking under the bed and in
the closets; they can only wait for the phone call saying that they only
have seven days.
Through this type of bleeding, Feardotcom and The Ring present
challenges to the elision of the reality-representation divide that the
films in chapter 1 portend. As both popular films like Scream 4 and
contemporary aesthetic theorists like Jean Baudrillard and Jean-Luc
Marion suggest, in the media-saturated environment in which con-
temporary Westerners live, 24-hour coverage of live events has altered
our relationship to the image/reality divide. Because of our reliance
on media technology to deliver the world to us, we no longer need to
relate to the world itself; mediatized images become our hyperreal-
ity, more real than the real. Marion refers to this phenomenon as the
“idolatry” of the image. The idolic image, like Baudrillard’s simula-
crum, no longer refers to some original reality prior to or outside of
itself; it refers only to itself. According to Marion, this condition has
reached a stage where not only do events “happen” only if they are
mediatized, but all events take on the same level of significance. It
is the status of hyperreality as a flat field that Feardotcom challenges

by imbuing this field with its own “other side,” its own ghost world,
a world of the dead that haunts the mediatized presentation of “live”
events. Similarly, The Ring offers video reproductions that, far from
dissolving the power of the original, maintain its force because each is
endowed with its “spirit.” In these ways, each film attempts to realize
the image, introducing something beyond or underneath its visibility.
Both films contain a double diegesis: On one level, they play out the
takeover of the real by images, both portraying the deadly power of
third-order simulacra, murderers of reality and of the original. But
that is not the end of the story; the crime is never perfect. In each film,
another narrative comes in to disrupt the first and leave it unresolved.
In Feardotcom, for example, the serial killer’s work is undone pre-
cisely because he chooses to broadcast it. In so doing, he not only
jeopardizes the real impact of his crimes but perpetrates them in a
medium where, as Sconce notes, the dead can freely roam. As in so
many recent fictionalizations of the serial killer,7 Alistair believes
that his killings are part of a larger plan, that he is somehow doing
society a favor. Alistair claims that he has been deprived of the ability
to feel, and he sees his own lack of feeling as a culture-wide phe-
nomenon. He blames not woman but technology for his pathology,
though he attempts to solve the problem by torturing her body:8 “We
will provide a lesson that reducing relationships to anonymous elec-
tronic impulses is a perversion.” It seems self-defeating, then, to rely
on such electronic impulses to broadcast his message. He claims that
by killing his victims live on the Internet and giving the audience
the tools to actively participate in the torture, he “offers intimacy.”
According to Alistair, her death is supposed to “give meaning to all
those sad little lives out there.” It seems that his goal is to reimbue
death and violence with some of the force it had prior to the per-
ceived desensitization effected by media technology. Yet he employs
the very technology he condemns, becoming part of the problem he
claims to want to ameliorate and further exacerbating the issue by
making the boundary between reality and technological production
even blurrier. Viewers log on because they want to see a production
of real death, not because they want to witness a real murder. The
problem is, on Alistair’s website, they cannot tell the difference, nor
can he.
Rather than offering his viewers unmediated reality, Alistair ulti-
mately becomes the star and producer of his own reality TV show.
He sees himself and his victims as actors and his viewers as fans. He
tells his victim, “We have a great responsibility . . . to them,” and he

looks into the camera. He even dons an almost comical stage voice
when he speaks to his victim. When he is first stalking his victim, he
films her through his camcorder and asks her to be his “leading lady.”
He relies on the fact that everyone wants to be a star, that everyone
wants to be seen. One could thus argue, as Mark Seltzer does con-
cerning serial killers in general, that he does not rebel against the
social structure he condemns, but instead espouses “absolute con-
formism to the system without belief in the system” (163).9 He gives
the viewing public exactly what they want, and, in his mind at least,
he gives his victim exactly what she wants as well: “Since you have
asked for death, I am no longer your murderer.”
Whereas certain real-life serial killers have entertained a relation-
ship with the public through the media, Alistair’s broadcast repre-
sents something new in our fictional depictions of this iconic figure.
His performance responds to two different but interrelated demands/
anxieties: (1) the “leaky agency” Seltzer ascribes to the serial killer,
which manifests itself in serial violence, particularly against women,
on whom such leakiness and incoherence is projected and on whose
body it must be violently illustrated in order for the male killer to
reclaim his own sense of coherence, and (2) the “leakiness” of the
reality/image divide that characterizes hyperreality, in which the
image is slowly eclipsing and finally substituting for reality. Regarding
the former, Seltzer characterizes popular representations of the serial
killer’s pathology as a culture-wide fear of the permeability of the self
to social and cultural influence. On the one hand, Seltzer argues, the
self is perceived as something created entirely by the social and thus
utterly dependent on it, but on the other hand, the same self feels
totally detached from the social sphere and thus possesses a radical
autonomy. A similar structure of permeability pertains to the rela-
tionship between the self and the media image. As Marion explains,
existence in the postmodern information age is entirely determined
by visibility: “to be is to be seen” (53). The live media image provides
the perfect medium for the fulfillment of this dictum because it
virtualizes the real to the point that it substitutes image for reality.
Images of events can now substitute for the events themselves, and,
further, an event (or a person, for that matter) has no reality if it
has not become image. In the process, reality is edited, cut up, made
into easily digestible sound bites. Once reality has been virtualized
to this extent, existence can only be validated by the desire of the
viewing audience (the serial killer’s subscribers in Feardotcom, for
example), and the audience’s desire is in turn created by the virtual

reality with which it is presented. Neither viewer nor viewed can
claim agency in this scenario, as both are caught in a closed circuit
of desire; each must reflect the other. This indicates a profound inti-
macy between self and image-event, a bleeding of the one into the
other, but also a profound desensitization to those same events, as
the self no longer entertains a creative relationship to them.
If we look at Feardotcom allegorically, we can see the abduction
and torture of Alistair’s victim as the creation of the self-as-image,
a virtual self in bits and pieces. Alistair’s success at luring victims to
his lair depends upon their own desire to be seen. All he needs is a
camera and a pick-up line (“You happen to be the perfect leading
lady.”), and she is already trapped. Alistair arranges to meet her in an
old theater, and there he abducts her. The next time we see her, she
has gotten her wish; she is playing the killer’s leading lady. But the
process of becoming-image is a brutal one. It requires instruments of
torture . . . or are they? At the very least, these instruments—scalpels
of various sizes and so forth—double as surgical tools, and Alistair’s
screen name is The Doctor. If the plot contains an allegory of image-
creation, it would not be a stretch to view these tortures as virtual
plastic surgery, especially since it is the viewing audience, the “sub-
scribers,” who determine which tortures are required based on their
own desires.
Similarly, The Ring acts as an allegory for both the creation of the
self-as-image and the image’s eclipse of reality. The film highlights
the violence of both processes, staging the one as murder and the
other as hostile takeover. Rachel’s investigation into Samara’s back-
ground suggests that Samara was once a little girl whose victimiza-
tion by her own parents led to her death and her rebirth as an image
on the killer videotape. As it turns out, the story of Samara’s origins
is also in many ways the history of technology. To reach the begin-
ning of the story, Rachel must move back in time and regress tech-
nologically. She starts with the Internet and ends up in print archives
of old newspapers; she starts out in a car and ends up with horses;
she starts out in contemporary Seattle and travels to Moesko Island,
a very small island community cut off from the fast-paced lives and
advancements of the modern world. It is as if she has been trans-
ported to a time just prior to the cultural takeover effected by the
media image. She finds that Samara was adopted by a couple whose
livelihood rested on one of the oldest and crudest forms of techno-
logical machine: the horse. The dress of Samara’s mother in the video
and in photos is more suggestive of the Victorian era than the late
twentieth century.
In this past, when Samara was “live,” she performed miracles. She
acted like a little broadcasting station, airing her images directly into
other people’s minds. As her human father describes it, “She’d show
you things—terrible things.” Samara’s mode of communication, like
the first television broadcasts, is so new and seemingly radical, in
many ways even terrifying and intrusive. The anxiety linked with
Samara’s broadcasting ability reflects the underlying fears that shows
like The Outer Limits played upon. Like the suburban housewives
portrayed on these shows, Samara’s mother is most affected by these
intrusive images, eventually destroying Samara and committing sui-
cide. But one cannot destroy an image; Samara is simply stored on
a videotape, no longer live but infinitely repeatable and now capable
of mass dissemination. Further, her peculiar talent gains in power,
because she is now capable of creating real objects from images, like
the fly who begins in Samara’s video and journeys through layers of
screens to end up on the outside of Rachel’s television screen. Sama-
ra’s life, death, and subsequent haunting thus seem to play out the
history of Western culture’s relation to the media image, beginning
with the first television broadcasts and ending in the slow takeover
of the real by images. During the seven days in which each of her
victims is infected, Samara’s images are born into the world, one by
one, until she herself emerges from the television screen.
At first, then, both films suggest that the techno-ghosts, Samara
and Jeannie, were once real people who were victimized and thus
became vengeful ghosts, employing technology to further their
cause. Viewers learn, however, that neither ghost had ever been a
real person; their images do not represent their real selves but rather
something else that exists at the heart of the image itself. As viewers,
we never see either character as a real person. Our first view of Jean-
nie is as a flickering image of a ghost-child in a dark subway, where
she claims her first victim. We see photos of her in the crime file that
Mike keeps of Alistair’s murders. We then see her image when Mike
logs on to her website.10 When Terry visits Jeannie’s mother, we see
a photograph of the ghost-child who first appeared in the subway. It
is supposed to be Jeannie as a child, but as Terry looks at the picture,
the image comes alive and starts to play. Jeannie is always an image
for the viewer, never a real person/character. Even if the photograph
of her as a child did not eerily come alive, there is something not
right about the child depicted in it. She is clearly wearing a wig and
dark lipstick. One could argue, as one victim’s wife does in the film,
that Jeannie even then was “a little girl who wasn’t a little girl.”
Likewise, Samara exists only as an image on her videotape. The
narrative references a previous “real” existence cut short by the infan-
ticide perpetrated by her mother, but the image precedes the reality.
Her original self is never actually seen outside of its representation
on video (as well as the film that we, the outer viewers, watch). Fur-
ther, Samara’s imagistic existence totally eclipses her “original” self
once Rachel and the audience learn that she, like Jeannie, was never
just a little girl. Rachel’s entire investigation revolves around the
assumption that the images on the videotape are direct, literal rep-
resentations of real objects, people, and so forth. This is why she is
led astray, even after Aidan’s father informs her that Samara’s video-
tape has no origin, no control track to register what or who did the
recording. Instead, Samara’s story is an allegory of the history of the
technologically-produced image, and Samara is the embodiment of
its power. Samara and the community in which she lived do not exist
for viewers until they have already seen the videotape, and then they
are both already dead. Similarly, Feardotcom presents the viewer with
a world in decay, from the antiquated architecture to the abandoned
steel mill and inoperative nuclear generator. In contrast to the death
and decay that characterize these old structures and technologies,
new technology is the site of liveness and generation.
The answers to the mysteries Samara and Jeannie present us with,
thus, do not lie in their past (or ours), nor in their origins, but rather
in what their technological images indicate. In both films, the “real
life” of the techno-ghost is secondary to her imagistic existence, a
narrative constructed after the fact, and in both cases this con-
structed narrative does not hold water (literally in the case of Sama-
ra’s, as water gushes from the television screen with her birth). These
ghosts do not seek to avenge real selves that existed prior and were
wronged. There is no real self for them outside of the image. And if
there is vengeance, it is the vengeance of the image asserting its own
reality. The image gains depth not by asserting an origin that existed
prior to or outside of it but rather one that it initiates. The crossing of
the imagistic dis-ease through the television screen, rather than dis-
solving the boundary between reality and image, endows the image
with its own reality—not because it perfectly mimics the real but
because it refers to something within itself that is unrepresentable.
An Iconography of Horror
The distinction Marion draws between the idol and the icon in The
Crossing of the Visible offers an interesting context for understanding
why some images possess such referential force. Marion ultimately
argues that the religious icon is the only object that can withstand the
de-realizing effects of the postmodern image. As opposed to idola-
try, which relies on the production and mass consumption of images
that merely reflect the desire of the viewer, the religious icon oper-
ates according to a different logic, one not based on the reproduction
or imitation of the original but rather an ineradicable dissimilitude
between origin and image. This allows the visible icon to refer to the
invisible divinity without threatening to substitute for the divine or
reduce its power.
To achieve this end, the visible aspects of the icon must make way
for the invisible. For Marion, the efficacy of the iconic painting, for
example, relies upon the effacement of the visible image/representa-
tion in favor of the crossing of invisible gazes. While all paintings rely
on a certain relationship between the visible and invisible—a rela-
tionship experienced by the viewer as what Marion terms “taking
perspective”—the invisible comes to the fore in the icon in a differ-
ent way than it does in representative painting. The iconic painting
does not merely represent an object to be experienced but creates
another gaze that crosses the viewer’s. This other gaze has nothing to
do with the visible image as such but rather with the blank space at
the center of the visible eye through which an invisible gaze can peer:
“I can never see the eyes of another human; or rather, even if I see his
iris and so on, I cannot see his gaze, since it comes out of his pupils,
which are empty spaces . . . the source of the invisible, at the center of
the visible” (Marion 21). While all portraits contain pupils, the icon’s
pupils are not merely secondary images—they refer to another gaze,
the gaze of the divine. As such, when one looks at the iconic painting,
one experiences a prior look therefrom: “The icon . . . overturn[s]
the relation between the spectator and the spectacle: the specta-
tor discovers himself invisibly seen by the painted gaze of the icon”
(21). The viewer thus also discovers himself or herself as the aim of
another intentionality in the face of gazes that “offer themselves as
aims addressed to the spectator” (22).
The process by which the icon effaces itself to reveal the glory of
the divine is a violent one, exemplified by the effacement of Christ’s
body in the crucifixion. According to Marion, this is not a violence
demanded by the invisible God but rather a manifestation of the

hatred of the visible for the invisible. This murderous hatred is part
of the tyranny of the idol, its refusal of a relation to anything out-
side of itself. The violence of this refusal manifests itself as a mark
(a stigmata) that appears in the visible but that refers to a wound
to the invisible (God). The cross then becomes the symbol for the
marks on Christ’s body, which are themselves visible manifestations
of the wound to the invisible. This double distance from the origi-
nal wound does not diminish the significance of the cross nor of
the common icons, crucifixes, that represent it. The copies are not
merely imitations but rather a continuation of the process by which
the visible references the invisible. In this sense, the divine spirit is
contagious; it passes from one copy to the next and to the believer
who beholds them.
One can thus begin to discern the possible connection between
the religious icon as Marion defines it and the viral images of The Ring
and Feardotcom. Samara’s videotape, for example, takes on many of
the traits of the common icon, its copies becoming types. As the con-
tents of the videotape are twice removed from the events they rep-
resent—images from Samara’s life recorded and replayed—it would
seem that each copy would be less and less effective, but that is not
the case. Every copy is just as virulent as the others. Every copy is the
type of a prototype, every one just as close to the origin as the others,
every one capable of crossing the visible. Just as every crucifix refers
to the mark of the invisible, every copy of Samara’s video is capable
of infecting the viewer through the crossing of gazes. In iconic-like
fashion, Samara’s image does not point back to her real suffering in
a relation of similitude, because that suffering was never about her,
never about her visible self. Like Christ, Samara’s entire existence
revolves around what will be revealed through her visible body, and
so her visible representation is instead prototypical. The image of
Samara’s deathly stare refers to an invisible other that gazes through
the visible and disrupts the cycle of desire/self-appropriation.
Both films employ the type-prototype relation to counter the nar-
rative of idolatry that they also contain. Each film in its own way
undermines what the visible image shows in favor of an invisible
element/wound to which it refers. While Feardotcom on one level is
supposed to be about a serial killer who tortures women live on the
Internet, the external viewer never actually sees any of these tortures.
The film strongly implies that Alistair tortures his victims by cut-
ting into their bodies, but there is actually very little visual evidence
of this on the bodies that the film portrays. We, the external view-
ers, see the scalpel, but the body of the victim remains surprisingly
intact. There is a little trickle of blood from the corner of her mouth,
but that is all the evidence the viewer ever gets that she has been
injured. We never see any tortures at all. We see instruments, and we
hear screams. The image of the torn body is withheld. We only know
that the victim is undergoing a slow and brutal transformation. As
with plastic surgery, the cuts are not supposed to be detectable. In the
logic of filmmaking, they are “edited out.” What is supposed to be a
live performance in which the viewer sees all the details appears to
the external film viewer in a highly edited form, which not only calls
into question the reality of the tortures but also makes the viewer
wonder where the true violence lies.
Further, the serial killer himself is not ultimately the filmmaker;
he is also a victim of dismemberment-through-editing. From
the beginning of the film, the external camera enacts its own dis-
memberment on Alistair’s body. When we first meet Alistair, he
is only a pair of feet on a carpet. “The Hokey Pokey” plays in the
background—“You put your right foot in; you put your right foot
out”—further supplementing the theme of fragmentation. Then we
see Alistair’s hands, arranging some anatomical diagrams. His fin-
gers log on to a website titled “Distressed Furniture,” with prompts
for “Blonde,” “Mahogany,” or “Halloween Special.” Scalpels shoot
up on the screen, and a meter measuring subscribers begins to rise.
Alistair’s eye widens. In his next scene, Alistair is merely a mouth,
sometimes a bit of neck and shoulder, and a voice inviting a young
woman to be his “leading lady.” Even as he stalks his victim, we see
him being victimized himself, dismembered, only allowed to be part
of himself at any one time.
The focus on virtual cuts rather than bodily ones highlights the
presence of surfaces of visibility—the TV/computer screen, the
camera lens, the surface of the eye—as broken and thus permeable
skins whose holes could be pores through which imagistic mate-
rial might bleed into the real world or portals through which an
invisible gaze might peer. Thus what the external viewer sees of the
serial killer’s crimes is not important, but rather what he or she does
not see: the invisible element to which the editing “cuts” refer. The
serial killer’s crime is superseded in the film by a much more insidi-
ous violence that takes place between the technologically produced
image and the real world and that produces a hemorrhage of the one
into the other.
The female body that is not cut in the film stands for a different
kind of permeability than the torn bodies of slasher films, though it
is still related to a certain notion of bodily “leakiness.” At one point in
the film, Jeannie Richardson’s mother tells the investigators that Jean-
nie was a hemophiliac. The investigators’ (mis)interpretation of this
information is that since Jeannie’s greatest fear was to bleed, Alistair’s
victimization of her was so traumatic that it allowed for her vengeful
spirit to remain in the “wires” to haunt people by confronting them
with their greatest fears. However, we never see Jeannie being tor-
tured; her death at the hands of Alistair supposedly happened prior
to the events of the film. Further, as the medical examiner informs
us, none of the people who visit Jeannie’s website actually die of his
or her greatest fear. They die of strokes; they die of bleeding. They are
infected with her malady, the visible signs of which refer to an invis-
ible wound in the relation between viewer and viewed that allows the
latter to bleed into the former.
Similarly, the visible image in The Ring effaces itself on several dif-
ferent levels in order to serve as a referent for an invisible violence. On
a purely empirical level, Samara effaces her own image through the
mat of hair that covers her visage, and she forces this self-effacement
on her victims, whose faces appear blurred in all photos and mirror
images. Her victims thus confront the impossibility of encountering
their own self-images and, with that, the impossibility of becoming-
image in the way of the idol. Once this disruption occurs, all images
undergo the same form of effacement; Samara’s victims find them-
selves unconsciously scribbling out all images of faces they encoun-
ter after their infection. Unable to see the image as a reflection of self,
victims experience a radical disruption of the closed circuit of desire
set up in the idolatrous relation to the image.11 All images now fail
to resemble themselves. Their visible defacement reflects Samara’s;
her suffering becomes theirs, and it all refers to that invisible wound
between viewer and viewed, between self and image, a hole in the
visible through which the invisible can reveal its power.
These forms of visible effacement in both films correspond with
a challenge to the subjective authority of both internal and external
viewers. Not only is the viewer passive in relation to these images;
through them, the viewer becomes the object of another’s gaze and
another’s will. In contrast to the religious icon, Samara’s and Jeannie’s
gazes do not bestow grace upon their viewers, nor is the veneration of
the viewers’ gaze one of love. However, the ghosts’ purpose is to inspire
belief in those who gaze upon them, as well as to preserve the space of
the invisible through the effacement of the visible. The ghostly other
side opened up within the virtual in Feardotcom and the infectious
nature of Samara’s videotapes in The Ring offer something beyond the
image’s visibility. The ghosts’ gazes cross through both visible screens
to contact that of the viewer and to offer the viewer another’s gaze,
one that cannot be reduced to a mirror image of his or her own desire.
The viewer is thus addressed through this gaze by someone not only
not-I, but also not-human. The viewer believes because he or she is
addressed, or recognizes the extent of the reverence once he or she is
addressed in this way. Something like a religious passion ensues—a
passivity to a powerful, nonhuman will.
Overtaken by the force of her image, Jeannie’s victims in Feardot-
com are forced to realize that their wills are not their own. When one
logs on to the feardotcom website, Jeannie says, “Time to play. Time
for us to become one.” In the process of merging with this techno-
logical being, one cedes control to this other player. The distinction
between activity and passivity becomes radically undecidable. Jean-
nie’s image asks, “Do you like to watch? Do you want to hurt me?”
Here she acknowledges the equation of these two questions—watch-
ing is the same as hurting—but that is merely the starting point of
her game. She then asks, “Don’t you want to play with me?” Once one
agrees to play (not that one really has a choice in the matter, since
one is already infected as soon as one logs on), one is immediately
overtaken by Jeannie’s virtual images. While those who log on to
Alistair’s site are at least to some extent active (though anonymous)
participants in the violence of image-creation, on Jeannie’s site all of
their actions turn back upon themselves, and Jeannie addresses each
by name. Jeannie reveals the computer screen to be a window rather
than a two-way mirror, disallowing the anonymity that shields one’s
real self from the repercussions of one’s virtual actions. Further, there
is a turn, a reversal, a translation of all verbs from active to passive.
Pressing “enter” means being entered, pressing “play” means being
played. Jeannie’s victims can no longer entertain the illusion of con-
trol over their relation to media images and image-creation, nor the
type of distance that guarantees that control.
Jeannie thus introduces her own form of “intimacy,” which is
much more effective than the serial killer’s. Logging on to Jeannie’s
site forces a violent collision between visual capacity (sight) and
technological space (site). Watching—opening one’s eyes—becomes
synonymous with opening a website, sight with site. And opening a
website is simultaneously being opened by it, which turns the will
inside out and forces it into contact with its “own” alienness; Jeannie
is, after all, a projection of the viewer’s own desire, but she also reveals
the extent to which that desire comes from elsewhere. Because of this
revelation, unlike Alistair’s brand of intimacy, which represents the
virtualization of reality, Jeannie’s represents the reality of the virtual.
Alistair destroys the self and puts an empty idol in its place, creating
a closed circuit of desire around his “show” and its viewers. Jean-
nie essentially reverses the feed—the viewer becomes the viewed,
the subject now subjected to its object’s gaze—which interrupts that
closed circuit of desire and creates an experience of radical exposure
for those who log on to her site.
The human who undergoes this experience is no longer a “me,”
a being/consciousness that operates separately from the Internet.
When Mike logs on to Jeannie’s website, he asks her image, “What
do I get if I win?” She replies, “Me . . .” On the surface, it seems like
if one wins the game, one “gets the girl” (that is, gets to have sex with
her). However, Mike does not get the girl, neither Jeannie nor Terry.
Instead, what one “gets” if one wins is to merge with this virtual being
and to become the hemophiliac “me . . .”—the “me” with ellipses,
which trails periods like little drops of blood. At the same time, the
Internet itself is represented as a skin that can be penetrated. Open-
ing websites tears open little fissures in the reality/virtuality divide
where information and images spill out like blood.
Viewers of The Ring undergo a similar experience. Once the
internal viewer watches the video and is “seen” by the woman within
it, object-images from the video begin to appear in the real world,
the viewer’s reality overlaid and ultimately determined by Samara’s
images. Like opening Jeannie’s website in Feardotcom, the playing
of the video initiates the tear in the screens separating viewer from
viewed, reality from image. Pressing “play” not only initiates the
sequence of Samara’s images, but also the sequence that will lead to
the death of the victim/viewer. It is important to note that the action
and the choice of the human viewer, her or his attitude toward the
image, leads to this violent tearing of screens. Once this happens,
however, the viewer is in thrall. The contraction of the techno-virus
through the tearing of screens is also a contract between the viewer
and Samara, a covenant of sorts. If the viewer makes a copy of the
video and shows it to someone else, passing the disease on to the
next viewer, then he or she will live, no longer as human subject but
as agent of the virus. Either way, the viewer becomes a referent of the
virtual wound created. If the viewer lives, he or she does so without
self-image, as outlined above. Even those who die are not free of this
mark. In the flash we receive of Katie after she dies from the virus,
her face is hideously distorted, unrecognizable.
The veneration individuals feel for Samara is not the result of
religious faith but solely the result of the force of the image. Samara
does not efface her image in order to indicate an invisible divinity but
rather to open up a space within the visible for a relation to some-
thing other. The invisible crossing of the image into reality does not
erase the boundary between the two but rather intensifies it. Samara’s
death is a retreat into the invisible depths of the pupil, the ring: the
site of seeing, not seen. Her resurrection is a revivification of that site,
now no longer situated within the head or mind of the active subject/
viewer but rather in the space between viewer and viewed.
Acting as a prophet of sorts for this new techno-human rela-
tion, the Final Girl of each film—Rachel of The Ring and Terry of
Feardotcom—is essential in establishing the image’s iconic status.
Through her, this other layer of the image and its relation to human-
ity will be revealed. Operating as a carrier of the techno-virus and a
surrogate for the child-figures that embody this technological foe,
the Final Girl comes to represent what the techno-human relation
will look like in the future that the film envisions. The human can
survive but no longer as an entity separate from or in control of
media technologies. Embodying many of the characteristics of Clo-
ver’s archetypal figure, in these films Final Girl and monster are more
directly identified with each other, the monster not a male psycho
killer but a female martyr of sorts. Like the killers of Scream and The
Cabin in the Woods, this monster uses technology as a vehicle for
violence and in a more overt way also uses it to bring awareness to
the victims not only of the isolating and dehumanizing effects of our
overuse of media technologies but also of the ways these technolo-
gies have been using us. Technology has been operating not as an
extension of human power but rather as its own demonic force.
In order to bring the unseen aspects of the image to light, each
Final Girl must make a hellish pilgrimage to a dark place, essentially
to raise the dead. As Marion points out in his description of the
painter as prophet of the unseen, there is always something “mon-
strous” in such a resurrection:
The unseen takes up the visible [l’invu remonte au visible]: it climbs

toward the visible. But above all, the unseen teaches the visible a thing
or two [l’invu en remontre au visible]: it reveals [montre] the visible
and imposes upon it that of which the visible remained still unaware,
protesting the moribund equilibrium by the immigration of a bar-
baric force. The gates of Hell fly open without ceasing, from which the
painter returns to the light of day as a new master of the visible, who
climbs back up only to teach us a thing or two and, in fact, show us
a monster [nous montrer un monstre]. Monstrum, the presentable [le
montrable] par excellence, the brute unseen, the miracle. (29)
This figuration of the painter’s encounter with the monstrous nature

of the unseen and the bringing of this monster to light mirrors
Rachel’s descent into the deep, dark well in which Samara’s body
resides, only to raise her corpse. While Rachel is not the painter, not
the writer or director of the film itself, hers is the desire and the gaze
that brings what remains unknown of Samara’s brutal violence to the
surface. Through this revelation, Samara will teach us a thing or two
about the image. She will show us a monster. If the story ended at
the border of the television screen, this comparison would have little
merit. But in fact it moves across that border, to present the viewer
of the film itself with a radically transfigured gaze, one no longer
proportionate to her own desire but rather referring that desire to
another. Operating as it does within and from out of the realm of the
idol, The Ring forces the viewer to make the moral choice reserved
for the painter in Marion’s work: “the painter must lose himself in
order to be saved (and to escape)” (28).
While Rachel aids in the resurrection of Samara by undertak-
ing the journey down into the dark well of the image/pupil, Terry of
Feardotcom undergoes a similar journey into a hellish subterranean
nightmare to pull Jeannie’s body from its watery tomb. Further, Terry
is presented to us as a resurrected spirit that comes to life from the
dead body of Jeannie’s first victim, a man named Polidori who had
coauthored a book called The Secret Soul of the Internet, a book he
was clutching as he died. Polidori is thus also more a prophet than a
victim, a martyr for Jeannie’s cause.
As Polidori dies, the camera closes in on his hand, which stops
twitching once he is gone. Immediately after this, we see another
hand, this time coming to life. It is Terry’s hand, hanging over the
side of her bed as she wakes up. It is as if Terry’s life has emerged
from Polidori’s death, as if she were a sort of after-life, like Jeannie,
some kind of ghost. In fact, when we meet Terry, her pajamas are
white, her bed is all white. In the scene in which she meets Mike,12
he is startled at her arrival and exclaims, “Jesus,” to which Terry
replies, “Actually, Terry Huston, Department of Health.” Yet she may

as well be named Jesus; she is the angel of the film, emerging from a
white bed, the figure of innocence, with long hair and big green eyes.
Cloistered in an ivory tower, admitting that she does not “get out
much,” Terry is a figure of divinity, seemingly immune from the evils
of the world. On the other hand, she makes us aware of the fact that
none of us is pure or virginal, that we all sleep with bedbugs, host
to any number of invisible germs and parasites. These revelations
make Mike, used to dealing with visible foes, squeamish, but Terry is
quite comfortable with the knowledge that she is an agent of an invis-
ible army. When she suspects that Jeannie’s victims have contracted
a hemorrhagic virus, Mike wants to don protective gear, but Terry
calmly states, “We’re probably already infected.” Terry’s comfort with
her own permeability makes it such that she does not succumb to the
intrusion of Jeannie’s will as others do but rather is able to use it to
guide her to Alistair’s lair. The fact that Terry does not die from the
virus is not an indication that she has been healed but rather that she
is a more effective host: a Me . . . Born not from the head but from the
hand of a man who wrote a book called The Secret Soul of the Inter-
net, it is as if Terry were penned by him, a character created through
the merger between himself and that very secret soul about which
he wrote. Terry’s contraction of the technological virus thus means
something different than it does for the disease’s merely human vic-
tims. She represents a self differently constructed, one more adapted
to the media-saturated environment of the twenty-first century.
* * *
The Ring and Feardotcom add something new to the horror genre,
presenting us with new monsters, products of the relationship
between humans and the media that they created but no longer
completely control. These demon children are carriers of a virus that
seemingly places the humans further under the yoke of technology,
making them slaves to the processes of simulation and virtualiza-
tion that render their experience of the world two-dimensional and
meaningless. But this is only part of the story. The relationship forged
between the Final Girl and the technological foe that she ultimately
harbors suggests that there is possibility for rebirth and reinvigora-
tion of our culture’s relation to the image.
With the help of these surrogates, human perception and the
images it relates to partake in a reciprocal re-creation or resurrection.
What the age of mechanical reproduction extracted from the work

of art—its “aura,” its unique place, its ties to history and ritual—has
reemerged through the very medium that emancipated it.13 This
reemergence, however, is not a rebirth in the sense of a renewal,
but more of a revenant, a haunting. It does not open up an auxiliary
nature, a new world of perception to supplement the old, but rather
comes in the wake of the complete overtaking of the old and seeks to
become the only nature; this is its tyranny. But within that tyranny a
new form of intimacy is introduced, one equal to the experience of
another’s gaze through the television screen. The postmodern sub-
ject perceives only simulacra, appearances deprived of the depth of
the invisible and thus the ability to take hold of human sensibility.
It is my contention that in films like The Ring and Feardotcom the
aesthetic strikes back in the form of cadaverous and literally mur-
derous images that have violently reclaimed their intrusive and pro-
truding abilities from the very depthless surface by which they have
been kept at bay. Within this violence, however, one can glimpse
moments of the miraculous and the possibility for a new aesthetic.
3
The Image as Voracious

Eye in The Blair Witch
Project, Cloverfield, and the
Paranormal Activity Series
I n this chapter I extend my discussion of the demonology of the

image, addressing a recent trend in supernatural horror—cinema
verité–style filming—that was popularized with the success of The
Blair Witch Project (Myrick and Sánchez, 1999) and continued in
Cloverfield (Reeves, 2008) and the Paranormal Activity series (Peli,
2007; Williams, 2010; Schulman and Joost, 2011 and 2012). In all
of these films, there is a sense that turning on the camera sets the
events in motion, that the camera does not merely record events
but actually makes things happen. Control over the camera and the
events it films passes from the human subjects to a force emanating
from the film/image itself, so that the filming seems to create the
monsters that plague their human counterparts. These monsters
turn the eye of the viewer back upon him or her in a violent way,
ultimately killing the cameraman in Cloverfield, violently dispatching
them in The Blair Witch Project and all of the Paranormal films, and
often threatening to swallow the image itself. This violent reversal
of the viewer-viewed relation calls into question its traditionally
gendered characterization: on one side the male, active subject/gaze
and on the other the female, passive object/image. In these films, the
image is active, and the one behind the camera often becomes the
passive victim. As part of the frame/image itself, however, the power
these monstrous images wield is not subjective; it does not belong
to a rational will existing outside of and ultimately generating the
image, nor is it a reflection of the will/gaze of the subject/viewer. It

is rather an irrational, voracious, all-consuming force. In Jacques
Lacan’s terms, it reflects not so much the powers of the gaze as the
voracity of the eye.
While for Lacan the gaze ultimately belongs to the Other, the
source of power and law, the eye is that which is “made desperate
by the gaze” (116). For the eye, the gaze seems to harbor all but offer
nothing. This is why Lacan asserts that “the true function of the
organ of the eye” is as “the eye filled with voracity, the evil eye” (115).
The eye wants what the gaze has—power over and satisfaction from
the object—but is unable to attain it. Lacan contends that the image
in artistic painting can offer a sense of satisfaction to the eye because
it pretends to be something it is not; it is an appearance that says that
it is the Idea, the thing itself, the origin. The eye is therefore taken
in by it, hypnotized, fascinated. The images in The Blair Witch Proj-
ect, the Paranormal films, and Cloverfield do not offer such satisfac-
tion. Rather than offering the fullness of presence, these monstrous
images inflict on the viewer, each in its own way, excessive presence.
The viewer does not experience harmony or delight but rather chaos
and confusion. While other films may portray chaos and disaster,
most ultimately offer the viewer a “reassuring God’s-eye view”; the
viewer knows what is happening and why, even if the characters do
not (North, 86). In the lack of knowledge and the dizzying incoher-
ence of these films, the eye of the viewer searches in vain for some-
thing to offer it a more stable harmonious experience. Unsatisfied,
the viewer’s eye becomes desperate, hungry. It begins to reflect the
irrationality and voracity of the monster, consuming everything it
sees but never achieving satiety.
Projecting the Blair Witch
In addition to Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and the first
two of Craven’s Scream films (1996, 1997), The Blair Witch Project
(1999) was a major part of the 1990s revival of the horror genre,
which many critics had felt was in decline after a decade of mostly
formulaic slasher horror with its endless sequels and gratuitous gore.
While film critics either loved or hated The Blair Witch, its box office
popularity suggests that for viewers in general, the former attitude
by far prevailed.1 Film theorists have also found the film noteworthy,
resulting in numerous citations to the film in horror studies antholo-
gies and dozens of article-length treatments of it, including those in
The Image as Voracious Eye 57
the edited collection devoted to the film, Nothing That Is: Millennial
Cinema and the Blair Witch Controversies.2
Both the popularity of The Blair Witch and the controversies sur-
rounding it have largely to do with the unique way in which the film
was created. It opens with verbiage on a black screen, explaining that
“in October of 1994, three student filmmakers disappeared in the
woods near Burkittsville, Maryland, while shooting a documentary.
A year later, their footage was found.” The film thus sets itself up as
an account of actual events. Three film students embark on a jour-
ney through the woods to “explore the Blair Witch,” and presumably,
they become her victims. The material they gather from townspeople
before they set out suggests that in the nineteenth century, a woman
named Elly Kedward was hanged for being a witch. Subsequently, a
male serial killer named Rustin Parr, who abducted and murdered
children in an abandoned house in the woods, claimed to have been
possessed by Kedward.
While ghosts, demons, and madmen have always attracted fans of
horror, the addition of documentary-style filming by the films’ char-
acters and retroscripting adds to the suspense, making the events
they chronicle seem “real” or, at least, giving the impression that
they are happening in real time to real people rather than actors.3
In addition, as Higley, Weinstock, and Telotte explore in Nothing
That Is, there was quite a bit of extrafilmic material released on the
Internet alongside the film that offers further information about the
Blair Witch legend, the male serial killer Rustin Parr, and of course
the disappearance of the three film students—Heather, Josh, and
Mike—who were attempting to document it all. Combined with the
faux documentary filming, this additional information contributes a
sense of factuality to the events. Moreover, one could not say that the
events of the film are not strictly true, as the actors—Heather Dona-
hue, Joshua Leonard, and Michael Williams—did have to sleep in the
woods, were subjected to scary noises in the night that they were not
expecting, and had to respond spontaneously to events beyond their
control as they occurred. As Joseph S. Walker contends, “Essentially,
the experiences we witness on the screen are real, are historical.
Whether we see them as Heather, Josh, and Mike being pursued by a
witch or as Donahue, Leonard, and Williams responding to the cal-
culated torments of the filmmakers becomes a matter of preference
rather than necessity” (166). In demonstrating the extent to which
media representation blurs the line between real experience and
fictional construction, the film explores the increasing ambiguity
between “factual discourse and factual means of representation,” a

terrain that grows more unstable every day, as media outlets prolifer-
ate and more and more individuals have almost unlimited access to
them (Roscoe and Hight, qtd. in Higley 12).4
While some film critics saw nothing to get excited about in these
innovations,5 most film theorists have found them laudable, view-
ing them as an effective response not only to the stagnancy of the
genre but also to larger cultural concerns about the effects of media
saturation on our perceptions and experience of reality. The way
that power and identity are displayed in the film, particularly with
regard to gender, however, is a major point of contention. Walker,
for example, argues that “although the film continually disrupts the
conventionalizing forces of linear storytelling and seamless techni-
cal presentation, it ultimately does so only in the service of a deeply
reactionary restoration and defense of the most conservative form
of patriarchal power” (163–64). Indeed, all of the films in this chap-
ter overtly place women in the roles traditionally reserved for them
in horror films, roles that have everything to do with their status as
objects of a male gaze.
In classic feminist readings of the subjugation of women in horror
films by leading critics like Laura Mulvey, Linda Williams, Barbara
Creed, and Carol Clover, the active subject of the gaze, or “I-cam-
era,”6 is gendered male and the object, female. The act of looking
is the province of men, and women either do not look, or if they
do, they are punished for it. While women are often the victims of
the films’ (human or nonhuman) monsters—the viewer taking on
the perspective of the male killer’s gaze—the women are also often
identified with the monsters, ultimately bearing “responsibility for
the horror that endangers” them (Creed, 21). The Blair Witch Project,
the Paranormal Activity series, and Cloverfield all seem to conform to
this logic. However, as I will argue, all of the films undoubtedly call
into question the location of power in regard to the gaze-image rela-
tion, suggesting that a closer look at gender portrayal is also in order.
In The Blair Witch Project, Heather Donahue is the documentary
filmmaker. She has appropriated the power of the gaze for herself.
As Stephanie Moss argues, “Heather depends on the camera for self-
representation; it becomes a psychological object of desire, luring
her, promising stabilized meaning in a woody environment that is
beyond her conscious articulation” (206). In the first half of the film,
Heather retains this power. The two men working with her are at
best indifferent toward the camera and at worst feel victimized by it.
Heather will be punished for the act of looking, however, by the two
men, by herself, and by the monster that she seeks.
As the three lose their way in the woods, Heather loses con-
trol over the gaze. In the first half of the film, Heather appears in
front of the camera very little, instead taking on the active, subjec-
tive role behind the camera. Once it becomes clear that they are
lost, Heather is forced to leave her powerful position and instead
becomes the camera’s object. This loss of control is exacerbated by
the acts of symbolic castration inflicted on her by Josh and Mike.
While Mike kicks her map into the river and laughs at her distress,
Josh takes up the camera himself and emotionally bludgeons her
with it. As he films Heather crying, Josh cruelly taunts her: “Let’s
make some movies . . . Isn’t that what we’re here to do?” He plays
the role of film director, suggesting that her tears are all an act, and
a bad one at that: “Come on, you can do better than that . . . Okay,
here’s your motivation: you’re lost, you’re angry in the woods, and
no one’s here to help you.” This sarcastic taunting brings to light
the extent to which the line between reality and fiction, real acts
and performance, is beginning to blur. This ambiguity is created
not only by the fact that the three are filming their experiences but
further by the fact that there are two cameras at work.
The most unique quality of The Blair Witch Project is that it is a
project. The students are not just three people who film their experi-
ences, but rather, within that filming, they are making a film. The
narrative is split between these two intentions and the two cameras
that separate them. The students actually set out with three recording
devices: a color camcorder, a black-and-white 16 mm camera, and a
digital audio recorder. The black-and-white camera is at first used
only for the official documentary footage; Heather dons an affected
docu-voice for these scenes. The color camera films all of their expe-
riences. The former is edited and doctored, while the latter is sup-
posed to represent unedited “reality.” The inclusion of both cameras
is perhaps an attempt at setting up and keeping hold of this distinc-
tion, which nonetheless breaks down as the situation deteriorates. At
that point, the cameras become interchangeable; the documentary
becomes their reality and vice-versa. None of the three is in control
of this project any longer. They are not the makers of The Blair Witch
Project but rather they are the project—their actions, words, and
emotions are the project-ions of the very thing they are attempting
to document. They have become the objects of their own study, the
cameras and the narrative now controlled by something else.
When things are at their worst for the three students, Josh tells
Heather that he now understands why she has to film everything;
the camera offers distance from what is really happening. Ironically,
the very thing that is supposed to protect Heather from the more
intense, emotional, or violent aspects of their experience is also what
ends up increasing that intensity. It is the very distance created by the
“reality” camera that exposes it to interchangeability with the docu-
cam, and ultimately it is that breakdown between the quasi-fictional
horror that the three wish to document and the quasi-real horror
that they themselves experience that leaves them utterly exposed:
“hungry and cold and hunted.” Heather takes the blame for their
deplorable condition: “It’s all because of me that we’re here now.” But
more specifically, it is not because she decided to seek out the witch,
nor even because she decided to document it, but rather because she
doubled that documentation that Heather is the guilty one.
The act of looking, with all of the power and violence ascribed to
it throughout the horror tradition, is explicitly linked with punish-
ment early in the film, when we, and the documentarians, learn that
the serial killer Rustin Parr would force one of two victims to face
the corner because “he could feel the eyes watching him.” It seems
strange that one would choose to abduct two victims if one had an
issue with being watched, but there is a necessity to this doubling
that has to do with the very “sin” that Parr is punishing and the hor-
ror that he inspires in the film. We also learn at this point that Parr
was possessed by the Blair Witch, Elly Kedward, so he himself was
not only double but dual gendered. This doubling is reflected in the
final scene of the film. In the end, Josh has disappeared, and Heather
and Mike find themselves in a dilapidated old house in the middle
of the night. Each of them has his or her own camera as they run
through the building, finally ending in the basement, where first
Mike’s camera drops and then Heather’s records Mike standing fac-
ing the corner. Then Heather’s camera drops, and the viewer sees
only confusion and then blackout. Heather and Mike, with their two
cameras, reflect the doubling of Elly Kedward and Rustin Parr.
As we never see either Elly or Rustin, one wonders about the extent
to which they exist outside of the film/project. Just as it becomes
impossible to separate the fictional elements of the film from the real
ones, so it is also impossible to say whether the legend inspires the
action and the horror of the film or vice-versa. Does Heather and
Mike’s journey end as it does because Rustin/Elly is a real monster
who murders two people for the sin of looking, or does the legend
conform to the fact that Heather commits the double sin of look-
ing with two cameras, thereby taking control of the gaze herself and
disrupting the line between representation and reality? In other
words, to what extent does Heather create these monsters? And to
what extent are the two monsters brought into existence by the two
cameras: one camera perhaps the mother/witch, the other the father/
serial killer, and the film/project their monstrous offspring?7
Elly and Rustin are never the cameras’ objects, even though the
entire project revolves around them. Nor do they ever occupy an
active subject position vis-à-vis the cameras, as both cameras drop
to the ground and record only confusion in the end. Instead, they
seem to represent an invisible force that drives the plot and pulls the
characters along but toward no real destination. Outside of human
control, the film’s “machines seem self-willed” (Moss, 211). Without
a human perspective at the helm, the viewers’ experience becomes
equally chaotic. As Walker explains, “There is no center and no
predetermined point of entry . . . Both characters and audience are
denied any real sense of place . . . Similarly, time rapidly becomes
meaningless in this setting” (166, 171). Time and space are parts of
human perspective, but there is no human subject in charge here.
One might argue, then, that the position that is ultimately challenged
by the dual-gendered demon of the film is that of the Gaze: neither
subject nor object, the Gaze is the power structure that governs their
relations. Traditionally associated with a patriarchal order in which
the active subject position is gendered male and the passive object
position female, in which the subject renders the objective world
ordered and rational, the Gaze should demand an ultimate resolu-
tion and restoration of that order in the end.
According to Joseph S. Walker, this is indeed the case. As Walker
claims, the students venture into the wilderness, but they begin and
end in the domestic sphere. Walker argues that the final scene, in
which Mike is forced to stand in the corner and Heather is appar-
ently knocked to the ground, “be read as representing not the vio-
lent revenge of the feminized witch but rather the violent return of
a corrective, disciplinary patriarchal force to the domestic sphere—a
domestic sphere that had been corrupted by Heather’s inappropriate
abandonment of a feminine role and by her inappropriate assump-
tion of a masculine role” (178). However, the dual cameras, the mul-
tigendered demon, and the lack of resolution in the end challenge
this reading. Whatever this punishing force is, it has been divorced
from real people, living subjects, and has been transferred to the
technological apparatus itself. As Andrew Schopp writes, “The film

conflates the absent Other [of the gaze] with the individual or force
that controls not only the viewing experience but the lives of these
characters. In other words, the film’s formal process implicitly con-
flates the camera, editor, director, and ‘monster’ ” (136). The mon-
strous force that takes control of the film emerges from multiple acts
of filming that confuse the positions of subject and object, male and
female, gaze and image, reality and representation. In the end, this
technological force has wrested control of the gaze from the subject/
I-camera all together. Both cameras have been violently severed
from their human operators and refuse to record anything of which
the viewer could make any sense. The characters may end up back in
the domestic space, but this domestic space is no longer ruled by the
ordering patriarch; rather, a spirit of disorder prevails.
In some ways, the lack of resolution in the end represents the only
possibility for salvation for the film’s characters and suggests that
perhaps we do not know, or cannot yet envision for ourselves, what
position the human will occupy in this new set of relations. In this
sense, Higley and Weinstock are correct when they write, “The edge
of the woods and the turn of a century . . . we have trouble seeing past
either very far” (27).
The Paranormality of The Image
Filmed at least a decade earlier than the other movies discussed in

what follows, The Blair Witch Project sets the stage for the later films,
which build on its innovations and use them to challenge the gender-
power-gaze triad in new ways. All portray demonic forces at work
in image technology, but in the last film of the Paranormal Activ-
ity series and at the end of Cloverfield, salvation comes in the image
of a beautiful woman. The relationships between these redemptive
images and their monstrous counterparts, far from reducing the
women to passive objects or monsters, place them in crucial posi-
tions vis-à-vis the redefinition of human perspective that each film
enacts.
The Paranormal Activity series, like The Blair Witch Project, began
as an independent film on a shoestring budget; it was quickly pur-
chased by Paramount Pictures and has since become a successful
franchise, consistently breaking box office records on each install-
ment’s release.8 The series employs many of the same devices as
The Blair Witch Project to make the viewer believe that the events
portrayed in the films might have actually happened: the actors

and the characters they play share the same names; the characters
film themselves with video cameras that give the impression of live
unedited footage; and there is black screen verbiage like that used in
documentaries to explain what happened before or after the events
chronicled. Whereas The Blair Witch leaves the domestic sphere for
the wilderness only to end up back in the domestic sphere, Paranor-
mal Activity never leaves. The series sets its horrific events within
the middle-class home, linking its comments on the relations among
gender, power, and the gaze directly to the nuclear family. Like The
Blair Witch, Paranormal turns the hunter into the hunted, taking the
camera out of the hands of the characters and linking their vulner-
ability to the demon that stalks them, with their passivity as objects
of the camera’s disembodied, inhuman gaze.
The backstory of the Paranormal series, to which the viewer is
offered access gradually through clues dropped in the first three films,
involves a long line of witches belonging to a coven that requires
them to give up their first-born sons to the demon that they worship.
The first two films of the series focus on the two granddaughters of
one of these witches: Katie and Kristi. As their mother never had a
son, the curse was passed on to the girls, in the event that either of
them were to give birth to a son. When Kristi gives birth to a boy
child, the demon comes to claim his due. Interestingly, the demon’s
focus in the first Paranormal film is not directly on the family of the
boy child but instead on his aunt, Katie, and her live-in boyfriend,
Micah. Though the child has apparently been born just prior to the
events of Paranormal Activity, it is not until the second film that we
are introduced to him and his immediate family. The reason for this
is revealed in Paranormal Activity 3, which takes us back to when
Katie and Kristi were children. The demon, whom Kristi refers to as
Toby, wreaks havoc on their home, ultimately luring them to their
grandmother’s house, where the coven kills their mother’s boyfriend
and formally claims both girls.
While the birth of the boy child seems to be the focus of the
demon, in each film his reign of terror accompanies the introduc-
tion of video surveillance to the domestic sphere and all that that
portends for family relations. In the first film, Micah meets live-in
girlfriend Katie as she pulls into the driveway. He is filming her with
his new handheld video camera. In fact, he never stops filming her
for the entire movie. While Micah sees the camera as an extension
of himself, even going so far as to ask Katie to kiss it, Katie does not
want to be filmed, tries to evade the camera, and absolutely refuses

to be intimate with or in front of it. Micah’s insistence on keeping the
film rolling becomes at best annoying and at worst predatory, mir-
roring the threatening presence of the demon, who in fact provides
Micah the excuse to keep filming constantly; Micah wants to “cap-
ture” the demon on film. In this way, he might dominate and subdue
the demon with the camera’s gaze as he does Katie.
Up to this point in the narrative, Micah assumes the I-camera of
the killer of slasher horror, Katie representing the “good girl” who
“refuses to look” and who denies her own sexuality, at least in front
of the camera.9 As Linda Williams contends, “The woman’s power
to resist the monster is directly proportional to her absence of sex-
ual desire” (27). However, Katie, as the demon’s true target, is also
associated with the monstrous force that threatens them both; the
constant filming by Micah is punishment for this sin. She ultimately
bears “responsibility for the horror that endangers her” (Creed, 21).
Further, while the film seems to characterize the demon as male,
the viewer never sees it; it has no name per se, and it wants a child,
whether to be its parent, occupy its body, or devour it, we are not
sure. At the very least, we might see the demon as gender ambiguous.
The predatory nature of Micah’s filming and its links to the demon
that stalks Katie are reinforced consistently through the film’s dia-
logue. The camera itself is at first connected with Micah’s potency,
Katie exclaiming that it is “big and impressive.” The first time Micah
himself appears before the camera, he is brandishing a butcher knife
and bragging about the power and control the camera offers him.
In his perpetual filming of Katie, he often stands over her, so that
she has to look up to him and so that the audience views her, belit-
tled, from above. Further, the camera reveals occurrences that nei-
ther Katie nor Micah would be aware of otherwise, like unexplained
movement and noises that happen while the two are sleeping. Katie
repeatedly requests that Micah turn the camera off, realizing that it
is directly linked with the increasing paranormal disturbances, but
Micah refuses. Katie says, “I don’t want to mess with the camera stuff
anymore; I don’t wanna make it mad . . . Maybe we shouldn’t have
the camera . . . This kind of stuff didn’t happen before the camera . . .
You and your stupid camera are the problem!” Micah’s reaction to
Katie’s increasing terror: “This is really good stuff . . . I hope that guy,
it, whatever, shows us a little more action.” Micah’s cruelty becomes
more pronounced as Katie’s fear heightens, and we are several times
witness to her kneeling, crying, and begging him to “please please
please please” stop filming, to help her, to not leave her alone, to not
open a door, to stop making it worse. In many ways, she is begging the
viewer as well to stop watching, stop wishing for her victimization.
It is not long, however, before Micah’s apparent control begins to
disintegrate, the camera linked instead to his increasing impotence.
In the beginning, Micah is under the illusion that the camera is truly
a part of him, so that when he sets it up to film him and Katie when
they sleep, it is really extending his own will, his eternal vigilance,
even when he is unconscious. But as the disturbances get worse, it
becomes clear that the demon has the upper hand, not only wreaking
havoc on the couple as they sleep, but actually beginning to extend
its reign into the daylight hours. It also becomes clear that the demon
resents Micah, particularly his image, as it disfigures Micah’s face in
a photograph of him and Katie. Though Katie fears the demon, the
rise in its power is somewhat reflected in hers. In a telling scene, she
forces Micah to stand before the camera and recite, “I swear to abide
by Katie’s rules and regulations of camera use and other things.” Soon
after, we watch through the bedroom camera in the middle of the
night as Katie gets up, stands, and stares at Micah’s sleeping, vulner-
able body for hours. In impotent rage, Micah screams, “This is my
house, you’re my girlfriend, and I’m gonna fucking solve the prob-
lem!” Katie responds, “You’re not in control; it is in control! . . . You
are absolutely powerless . . . Get over it.”
In the end, neither Katie nor Micah has any control over the situ-
ation. Katie loses her own will all together, apparently possessed by
the demon. In this form, she/it kills Micah, hurls his dead body into
the camera, smiles, seemingly devours the camera, and disappears.
One can certainly see in this ending Barbara Creed’s “monstrous
feminine” at work, the once innocent Katie now allied with the mon-
ster, complete with the all-consuming maw of the vagina dentata,
which links female sexuality and sex organs with the masculine fear
of castration. Such a reading would account for the almost parodic
masculinity of Micah and its links to the cinematic gaze. However,
unlike Carol Clover’s Final Girl, who assumes the camera’s perspec-
tive in the end against the I-camera of the male killer and thus res-
cues the feminine perspective from total subjugation, the demonic
Katie does not assume the camera’s perspective in the end but instead
consumes it. This suggests that the power that once resided in the
gaze, whether that gaze proceeded from a female or male character/
perspective, now inheres in the image itself, in what should be the
object of the gaze and remains in that position vis-à-vis the camera’s
eye. In this way, the demon comes to possess the image itself. In so
doing, it does not take up the camera, does not offer an alternate per-
spective, but rather takes the power away from human perspective10
altogether and sets itself up as the active force in the viewer-viewed
relation. Like the demonic force that takes control at the end of
The Blair Witch Project, this demon remains largely invisible, never
appearing as itself, but only through its effects on objects. The visible
image arranges itself around the invisible demon; the camera does
not control it, but rather invites it in, offers it a site of birth. The para-
normal activity lies in the technologically produced image, divorced
from human subjectivity, the power of the gaze, or active will.
This paranormal activity is largely relegated to the wilderness in
The Blair Witch Project, which to some extent, as Schopp contends,
allows middle-class suburbia to reassume something like idyllic sta-
tus, exemplified by Heather’s “infamous final apology to the moth-
ers of those she has doomed, mothers signifying home and family,
the safe spaces these characters have little hope of finding” (139).
In contrast, the terror of the P aranormal films is placed firmly in
the middle-class domestic space, and Mom is directly allied with
the demon that terrorizes the family. The demonic image emerges
from the intrusion of surveillance technology into the home. This is
even more pronounced in Paranormal Activity 2, in which the father
installs surveillance cameras in all of the rooms of the house and in
the backyard. This act, seemingly meant to protect the family, in fact
unleashes the demon, altering all family relations and turning the
familiar into the strange and threatening.
The setting is not the only thing that distinguishes the Paranormal
films from The Blair Witch Project. Just as important is the ultimate
source of each film’s horror. In The Blair Witch, what the viewer can-
not see is more frightening than what he or she can:
Vision here is correlated with control, safety lies in seeing, and the
underlying assumption is that an effective horror film . . . is precisely
one that traps the viewer in the claustrophobic space of his or her own
mind, forcing the viewer to participate in the construction of horror
through a process of visualization, of filling in the nothing rendered
onscreen. (Higley and Weinstock, 19)
While the Paranormal films begin with this same premise, that
vision offers safety, the first two films in particular undermine this
assumption by imbuing the visible itself with latent violence. The
films achieve this, paradoxically, by offering nothing to see. Whereas
the emphasis in The Blair Witch, despite “a ghastly kind of sameness

to it that brings them back in a circle” (Higley, 88), is on movement
and activity, in contrast to what their titles would suggest, there is
almost no activity in the first two Paranormal Activity films. Much
of what the viewer experiences, particularly in the night filming, is
a still frame in which nothing happens. One character might roll
over or adjust position in bed, but that is all. In PA2, this stillness
is even more pronounced because of the multiple cameras in dif-
ferent rooms of the house. All of this nothing happening is imbued
with latent violence, not so much because there may or may not be a
ghost or demon present but because there are one or more cameras
present. It is the intrusive presence of the camera, and not the demon
(who refuses to reveal itself), that is monstrous and scary in these
scenes. The audience waits for, anticipates, and finally begins to long
for movement, for something to see.
While the demon of the Paranormal films is invisible, I would
argue that the monstrosity he represents and reveals lies in the abso-
lute, excessive visibility of the first two films’ model middle-class
homes. By overtly making an imagistic reproduction of the home,
the camera reveals that the home is merely a reproduction. If there is
nothing to see, it is because the house and everything in it have been
rendered empty and meaningless. As Baudrillard contends in Simu-
lacra and Simulation, in the “precession of simulacra” that character-
izes postmodern culture, there are only models: copies of copies with
no relation to or difference from an original. In the upper-middle-
class suburban communities in which our paranormal families find
themselves, there are only model homes. All houses are exact replicas
of each other, inside and out. Because of the equalizing force of simu-
lation, all objects have the same value. Nothing stands out; nothing
is special or out of place. The viewer scans the scenes, searching for
something that catches the eye, and finds nothing. Everything is so
excessively normal that that very normality begins to take on mon-
strous proportions.11 Safety thus does not lie in seeing; rather the
danger lies precisely in what is visible. The viewer cannot fill in the
nothing through a process of visualization because it is the nothing
of the visible that is the problem.
While there may be nothing in particular to see in the simu-
lated home, there is also nothing hidden. Permeated completely
by mechanisms of surveillance, the homes in the first two Para-
normal films become totally transparent. The closed, secret spaces
and boundaries of the nineteenth-century bourgeois home, which,
as Michel Foucault contends, charged what was separate or not vis-

ible with all sorts of energy and possibility, are absent here.12 All
the doors are open, at least virtually, in these twenty-first-century
homes, everything exposed to view.
Without the hiding places that would have been utilized by mon-
sters of old, the new monster emerges from the mechanisms of repro-
duction and surveillance themselves. It is the camera that introduces
the demonic element to the nothingness of the simulated home.
The camera at once reveals the nothing to see and volatilizes it. It
is the one active element in the inactivity of the homes. It possesses
the house, its objects and the people in it, and through this posses-
sion they become visible once again. The demonic image literally
shakes things up, opens cupboards, throws things around, makes a
mess. In its paranormal activity, however, the camera is not or no lon-
ger analogous to the human gaze. In fact, those who attempt to con-
trol or manipulate the camera in the first three films of the series—all
males—are violently dispatched in the end. It is the demonic power
of the image that activates the camera’s gaze and not the manipula-
tions of a human subject. As in the rest of the films in this study,
fathers are dispatched, mothers and children forced to confront
demonic forces alone.
This transfer of power from the subjective position to the objec-
tive corresponds to Baudrillard’s assertion of an “irony of technol-
ogy.” In The Perfect Crime, Baudrillard argues that we have reached
the end of “the subjective illusion of technology” whereby we believe
that “the aim of technology is to be an extension of man and his
power” (71). Instead, we have now entered into an “objective illu-
sion” through which “all our technologies might . . . be said to be
the instrument of a world which we believe we rule, whereas in
fact the world is using this machinery to impose itself, and we are
merely the operators” (71). This state has come about not because
reality has been destroyed or lost through its technological reproduc-
tion “but because we are no longer in a position to see it.” But it sees
us. “The Evil Spirit keeps watch beneath artifacts” (73). This spirit is
not evil in a moral sense but rather more in a Nietzschean sense: it
represents the overturning of the old order, transformation, meta-
morphosis, hybridity. It is “the evil genius of technology which sees
to it itself that the mystery of the world is well-guarded” (73). This
demon is not therefore damning but redemptive, not purely destruc-
tive but also potentially generative. It may represent a foreclosure of
the order of subjectivity, but it also offers the possibility of a rebirth

to a new world order through the technological image.
Despite this possibility, the first two Paranormal films offer little
in the way of hope for the future. The third offers respite from the
“nothing to see” because it regresses to the past, prior to the age
of the model home and the advancements that have made media
technologies so pervasive. I would like to suggest that the fourth
film is much more focused on a possible future rather than a trau-
matic present. In Paranormal Activity 4, advances in image tech-
nology and the next generation’s intimacy with and knowledge of
these new technologies offer something of an antidote to the uglier,
more violent aspects of the image-domus-gender relations as they
are portrayed in the first two films. In fact, the children of the fourth
film—Wyatt (whom we learn is the boy version of the baby, Hunter,
abducted by the possessed Katie in the second film) and Alex, his
teenaged sister—do not belong to their parents biologically. Hunter/
Wyatt (Aiden Lovekamp) is adopted, and we get the sense that at
the very least Alex (Kathryn Newton) may be the father’s child
from a previous marriage, or she may be adopted as well. To rein-
force the distance between generations, neither the father nor the
mother seems to know how to operate any of the image technology
employed by the kids. In PA4, the children are in charge of the show,
so to speak.
This fourth film is supposed to represent a consummation of the
deal with the devil that governs the first three films. The boy child,
Hunter/Wyatt, will finally be claimed by the demon and will appar-
ently rule over the coven of female witches that, now bereft of their
patriarchs whom they have themselves dispatched, has formed
around this demonic presence. This would represent a violent return
to patriarchy if there ever was one, and on the surface this seems
to be exactly what happens, but I would contend that the ultimate
goal of the film is not to possess the boy child, Hunter/Wyatt, but
rather his adoptive older sister, Alex. Unlike the first three films of
the series, in which surveillance is inflicted on the families by the
patriarchs, in PA4 Alex is both the primary operator/subject of the
various cameras in the film and also their primary object. She is
omnipresent, everywhere at once. She controls everything the viewer
sees and occupies the viewer’s line of sight—in fact her face takes up
the whole screen—for most of the film. It does not hurt that she is
young and beautiful.
Figure 3.1 The childlike image of the demon (in front of the fireplace) in
Paranormal Activity 4.
Since it does seem that Alex is the sacrificial lamb of the film (her
adoptive brother is supposed to kill her in the end to prove himself a
proper host for the demon), one might see all of this apparent control
as her unknowingly contributing to her own doom. However, as in
The Blair Witch Project, we do not actually see anything happen to
Alex, as she is behind the camera up to the very last frames. Also like
The Blair Witch but unlike the preceding Paranormal films, the demon
is doubled in PA4. While the demon itself never appears in the first
three films, the superior image technology of PA4 allows the demon
to be “caught” on film. The visual capture of the demon represents a
decline in its power, symbolized by the fact that its shadowy figure is
small and childlike. Appearing within the visual frame, this demon is
merely image: maybe slightly spooky, but not terribly powerful.
In addition to this child-demon is the still-possessed Katie from
the first Paranormal film, a monstrous-feminine apparition with
razor-sharp teeth in her all-consuming maw. Running counter to
both of these demonic images is the beautiful face of the young
Alex, able to remain “inviolate” because her boyfriend comes into
her room only virtually, through her computer.13 Whereas Katie is
the monstrous projection of that part of femininity not completely
controlled by subjugation and objectification, Alex’s power lies at
least partly in her very status as object. Unlike Katie, Alex does not
resist being filmed. She knows that she could be on camera at any
Figure 3.2 Alex’s image in Paranormal Activity 4.
and all times, and this does not bother her. She perches provocatively
in front of the camera, celebrating her status as image. She even char-
acterizes herself to her boyfriend, Ben (Matt Shively), as a princess
in a castle that needs to be rescued. In a way, she, like Heather of The
Blair Witch, is making a movie in which she is both the star and the
producer. But unlike Heather, Alex’s appearance in front of the cam-
era does not signal a loss of control or authority because Alex’s power
is differently constituted. For her, power does not exist primarily
outside of the image or behind the camera; within the image, she
also looks. Employing image technology like Skype, she looks and is
seen. She sees herself, and she sees others. She sees herself being seen
by others. The line between subject/gaze and object/image in these
moments becomes virtual, pulled into the visible frame just like the
demon. In fact, one could not say that subject and gaze or object and
image correspond. Both the spatial relation between these coordi-
nates has changed—the gaze(r) and the image can occupy the same
space—and the power relation—the object looks and the subject
is visible. This confusion of poles is also manifest in other types of
viewer-viewed relations. For example, when Hunter/Wyatt is watch-
ing television at one point, the viewer looks at him seemingly from
his television screen, so it is as if there is always a looker even when
one is supposed to be consuming a passive image.
One might think that this virtualization of the image-gaze rela-
tion would only further the nothing to see that we witness in the
model homes of the first two Paranormal films, but it has the oppo-
site effect. Not only do we now see the demon, who was invisible for
the first three films, but everything else in the house offers some-
thing to see as well. There are things in this house, things on the
floor, things out of place. It looks real, not simulated. It looks like a
place where human beings dwell. Further challenging the nothing
to see that characterizes the first two films is, interestingly enough, a
domestic cat. The cat is present in so many scenes of the film that one
wonders the whole time what its presence signifies. It never reacts
to the demonic presence and does not become one of its victims, so
what purpose does it serve? If nothing else—and given my reading
of the first two films this is not a little thing—the cat introduces life
and movement into the otherwise motionless surveillance scenes. It
redomesticates the domus, brings it back to life. The home is “nor-
mal” again rather than paranormal, despite the occasional presence
of ghostly images.14
While the demon in the first two films served to volatilize the oth-
erwise stagnant setting, in the fourth film it has itself been domes-
ticated, tamed, rendered childlike. Moreover, the two boy children
who are supposed to be its hosts remain relatively inactive for most
of the film. Hunter, whose name signifies something predatory,
spends most of the film enthralled by electronic images of various
sorts. Most of the time, we see him just sitting and staring. Even in
the final scene, which is supposed to represent his murderous entry
into the demonic circle, he just stands and stares. All of the action in
this scene and others is reserved for the women.
And so we are left with the question of how to read the final scene.
Thus far, I have argued that the demon has been tamed and that Alex
is our true hero, that she has acquired a form of power that was
unavailable to either Katie of the earlier Paranormal films or Heather
of The Blair Witch. The final scene, however, does bear a strong
resemblance to that of The Blair Witch. The main difference is that
Alex manages to “capture” her attackers on film, whereas Heather
could not. In this sense, Alex is the “hunter,” and a successful one
at that. The project that Heather could not complete Alex finishes.
While we are led to believe that Alex is sacrificed in this scene, we
do not see this take place. Unlike the demon, whose potency lies in
its invisibility and recedes when it becomes visible, Alex’s power lies
in her ability to traverse the image. She exists in the image and out-
side it, on all sides. She can be visible or invisible. While the demon
remains tied to the old dichotomies, she has changed the rules of
the game, redefining the spatial relations between subject/gaze and

object/image. Her image remains inviolate in the end precisely
because she does not appear, though her attackers do. Instead, she
keeps her position behind the camera, and we see all of her female
ancestors, throngs of women ruled by this demonic force, the poor
souls of the past who were either reduced to passive objects or mon-
sters. No wonder they advance upon her so greedily, so intent upon
revenge. But ultimately, Alex exists in a space they cannot access,
and, despite the fact that the last coherent image we see is the gaping
maw of the monstrous Katie, this is still Alex’s victory.
Operation Cloverfield: The Image Takes Manhattan
In addition to employing handheld video cameras, the first Para-

normal Activity film and Cloverfield share several significant narra-
tive elements. As in Paranormal Activity, the camera in Cloverfield
is at first portrayed as a predatory tool of men who use it to chase
and “capture” women. At a certain point in both films, it becomes
clear that the cameraman no longer has control of the gaze—power
is passing to a monstrous presence within the camera image. Fur-
ther, in both films the women who begin as objects of the gaze are
soon allied with this monstrous force, which starts to direct all of
the characters’ actions. Unlike the invisible demon of the first three
Paranormal films, however, the monster of Cloverfield is exces-
sively visible, and the inactivity of Paranormal 1 and 2 is replaced
with hyperactivity, chaos, and confusion. The Cloverfield mon-
ster’s excessive and traumatic presence is juxtaposed to a previous
recording on the same camera over which the monster footage is
being shot. As in Paranormal Activity 4, this recording involves the
image of a beautiful woman. Instead of disrupting spatial relations,
however, this beautiful image represents a revolution in how we
experience time. This second recording, as I will argue in what fol-
lows, represents an idealized, irretrievable past that, try as it might,
the monstrous image is unable to vanquish. In the relationship
between these two recordings, Cloverfield offers unique commen-
tary on the status of the technologically produced image in post-
9/11 America.
Cloverfield is in fact most often read in terms of its relation to the
events of 9/11. Taking place in New York City and including scenes
of collapsing buildings, streets clouded with dust and strewn with
debris, and people running in terror from an unknown antagonist,
links to the images from that day are hard to miss. Indeed, as Homay
King notes in “The Host versus Cloverfield,” the film is rife with
“highly iconic images . . . that bring to mind unforgettable, trau-
matic, and widely circulated pictures from the first decade of the
twenty-first century” (124–5). Beyond the trauma of that day and
the months that followed, 9/11 has been a revelatory event. The
ways the events were portrayed, how those portrayals were received,
and how the sum of event and representation translated into cul-
tural meaning reflected in popular media and artistic production in
the years that followed—all of this constitutes the larger event that
9/11 has become, the event itself serving as an intense center point
around which this larger constellation has formed and thus addi-
tionally serving as an important gauge as well as determinant of the
relationships among these different elements. Among other things,
9/11 has taught us a lot about how American culture perceives and
experiences relationships between reality and its media presentation,
between art and social reality.
In its relation to 9/11, Cloverfield has received mixed critical
reviews, some arguing that the film is tasteless and exploitative while
others contend that the film, if not meritorious, is at least revelatory
precisely because of its unmistakable resemblance to media footage
of the events. For example, Laura Frost points out the ways that both
representations employ “black screen” as a form of censorship, with-
holding the more gruesome images of death. In this way, Cloverfield
“inadvertently demonstrates how mainstream representation’s con-
sistent devices . . . are so dislocated from the real trauma of human
devastation” (29). Cloverfield’s narrative devices also address the state
of representation in the years following 9/11. In the characters’ insis-
tence on filming every aspect of their lives, even intense trauma, and
the bracketing of that self-presentation by the government label that
claims the video as a classified document, King, for example, sees the
film as an “allegory of digital media” that highlights on the one hand
“broader access to the means of digital production, as well as . . . the
notion that identity is increasingly dependent on one’s capacity to
appear in networked spaces” and on the other hand “the Patriot Act,
FISA, and federal wiretapping provisions that make all such acts of
self-presentation . . . potentially the property of the state” (136–7).
Media representation has long been a battleground where power and
identity are defined, manipulated, created, destroyed, and negoti-
ated. In many ways, the events of 9/11 demonstrated that the stakes
have never been higher. Yet if this is true, how is it possible that an
almost parodic portrayal of such events—as many critics agree Clo-

verfield is—could be tolerated, much less applauded?
On the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Verso Press published
a series of three texts treating the philosophic significance of the
events: Jean Baudrillard’s The Spirit of Terrorism, Slavoj Žižek’s Wel-
come to the Desert of the Real, and Paul Virilio’s Ground Zero. As the
series editors state on the books’ inside covers, “These three books
from Verso present analyses of the United States, the media, and the
events surrounding September 11.” Baudrillard’s and Žižek’s texts
in particular treat the relationships among the realities of the event
itself, its media representations—including the string of popular
disaster films that preceded the attacks, giving the sense that we had
“already seen the same thing over and over again” (Žižek, 17)—and
its symbolic impact. Both thinkers view the attacks as a nightmar-
ish realization of a collective fantasy by which the United States had
envisioned its own destruction. At the same time, most experienced
the attacks as “image-events,” but for neither thinker does this lessen
their impact. Baudrillard writes, “Whereas we were dealing before
with an uninterrupted profusion of banal images and a seamless flow
of sham events, the terrorist act in New York has resuscitated both
images and events” (27). The status of the attacks as image-events in
fact added to their symbolic significance. As Žižek argues,
We should therefore invert the standard reading according to which

the WTC explosions were the intrusion of the Real which shattered
our illusory Sphere: quite the reverse—it was before the WTC collapse
that we lived in our reality, perceiving Third World horrors as some-
thing which was not actually part of our social reality, as something
which existed (for us) as a spectral apparition on the (TV) screen—
and what happened on September 11 was that this fantasmatic screen
apparition entered our reality. It is not that reality entered our image:
the image entered and shattered our reality (i.e., the symbolic coordi-
nates which determine what we experience as reality). (16)
As both thinkers suggest, through the violent intrusion of these trau-

matic images, the media image in general regained its potential as
an essential and effective aspect of the way that cultural meaning is
constructed and events collectively experienced.
For Žižek, then, to condemn media representations of the events
or to censor films that employ similar images after the fact repre-
sents a “‘repression’ of the fantasmatic background responsible for
the impact of the WTC collapse” (17). To engage this aspect of our
collective imagination would be to instead “traverse the fantasy,”

“fully identifying oneself with the fantasy” rather than denying it or
relegating it to mere fiction (17). For Žižek, this approach would
offer us the possibility of discerning what is real in our fictions, what
in our representations corresponds to “the excess that resists our
immersion in daily reality” (17). Such an approach might help us
to see the significance of a film like Cloverfield, for example, which
unapologetically employs traumatic images of real events alongside
images borrowed from a host of disaster and monster movies of the
past. It is not that the two types of images are equivalent, but both
have an essential relation to the ways that our culture collectively
envisions and structures its reality. It is in the ways that Cloverfield
juxtaposes different types of images that it makes an important
statement about how meaning is created and preserved in a media-
saturated culture. In Cloverfield, a relation is set up, not between
image and reality/origin but rather between two types of images: one
that preserves the event in its irretrievability and another, inextri-
cable from the first, that threatens to erase all traces of the irretriev-
able. As I will argue, the two are not simply antagonistic; it is only in
the face of this second nihilative image that the first can offer some
sense of redemption.
Prior to the monster’s emergence on the scene, the main charac-
ters of Cloverfield are having a going-away party for the “hero,” Rob
(Michael Stahl-David), who is leaving New York for a job in Japan.
One of Rob’s friends, Hud (T. J. Miller), has been tasked with col-
lecting video “good-byes” to Rob from the partygoers. For the most
part, however, he uses the camera to stalk his love interest, Marlena
(Lizzy Caplan), who does not return his feelings and would clearly
rather not be filmed. The camera allows Hud to pin her down, so to
speak, to force her to talk to him. In this way, the object of the gaze is
gendered female and the subject, or I-camera, male. This perspective
is reinforced when Hud accidentally plays old footage on the video
camera of Rob and his love interest, Beth (Odette Annable). In this
previously recorded footage, Rob films an unwilling Beth as she lies
in bed. We later learn that Beth seemingly has the upper hand in the
relationship when Rob’s brother, Jason (Mike Vogel), exclaims that
she is way out of Rob’s league. However both in the filming scene and
later, when we see Beth pinned down and impaled in her apartment
after the monster’s rampage, she has seemingly been captured and
subdued. In the meantime, Marlena, the film’s other love object, is
violently allied with the apparently female monster, infected by one
of its parasitic offspring. Like Katie of Paranormal Activity, Marlena

represents the monsterization of the object of the gaze; beginning
as sexualized object of desire, she becomes the monstrous-feminine
through the monster’s violent entry into and takeover of her body.
The modicum of control that Hud and Rob gain over their (love)
objects through the camera comes to a violent end with the string of
disasters initiated by the attacks of what seems to be a giant sea mon-
ster that emerges from the harbor to wreak havoc on Manhattan.
Unlike the demon of Paranormal Activity, this monster is female,
at least in its reproductive capabilities; it asexually sheds its prog-
eny, who then move on to infect any human with which they come
into contact. Barely able to operate the camera correctly anyway, the
now panicked Hud takes the viewer on a dizzying roller coaster ride,
catapulting our eyes through the streets of Manhattan as he and his
friends attempt to outrun the beast. This sense of panic affects both
the characters and the viewer, providing a powerful reinforcement
of the unease that this type of filming produces in a viewing audi-
ence used to the feeling of control that comes from the belief that
the screen offers all there is to be seen. As King explains, “Contrary
to the conventions of classical cinema, this mode of filming signifies
extreme vulnerability, emphasizing the limitations of human vision
and soliciting paranoia regarding off-screen space” (129). Similarly,
Daniel North argues, “The camera here is emphatically embodied
through this sense of its fragility” (89). Not only does Hud lose con-
trol of the camera and the objects it records, but the viewer is also
thrown into a state Frost characterizes as “epistemic confusion” (14).
North points out that this state of confusion began before the film
opened, in a publicity campaign that allowed little snippets of images
and information, often misleading, to go viral, never really revealing
anything about the film’s actual plot. “This opacity is ultimately dra-
matized in a film that continues to conceal images and information
from its audiences” (North, 78). While solid fact or knowledge of
what is happening or why is lacking both for characters and viewers,
complete vision of the monster itself is not. As Frost writes, “We see,
in fact, too much of the monster, in ways that make it excessively
concrete” (27). Combined with the cinema verité–style filming, the
excessive visibility of the monster elicits a sense of “anxious hyper-
presence and immediacy” (King, 128).
This loss of control and confusion both on the part of the charac-
ters and the viewing audience takes an even more radical turn when
the characters stop running away from the monster and instead
begin to run toward it. While this reversal seems to rest on Rob’s
decision to rescue Beth from her apartment rather than save himself
by leaving the city, in fact escape from the city has become almost
impossible, the bridge that would lead them out having collapsed.
More importantly, reading the film in terms of what is happening
in the relationship between object and gaze, in the monsterization
of the object, power is shifting decidedly away from the subject of
the gaze. If Marlena becomes the monstrous-feminine in her violent
alliance with the monster, Beth is no less so. She is the one that draws
the characters and the viewers closer to the monster. In fact, as I will
explain further in what follows, the monster is born in Rob’s initial
filming of Beth prior to the main events of the film. In the final snip-
pet that we see of the day with Beth that Rob recorded on his camera,
they are riding a monorail to Coney Island, and we see an unidenti-
fied object drop from the sky and fall into the sea: perhaps the alien
pod that unleashed the monster?
In any case, at this point in the film, it is the object that controls
and draws the gaze along rather than the other way around. The
camera, out of the hands of its human operator, who never really had
control of it anyway, bears the characters along toward the monster.
This dizzying ride culminates in the monster killing the cameraman
and threatening, like the monstrous Katie of Paranormal, to consume
the camera/gaze itself. The camera is like an eye dislodged from its
face, a seeing with no seer. It is not the camera that generates the
image, as it is itself controlled by the force of the image, but neither is
the camera part of the image in the same way that objects within the
frame are. The camera is a partially independent appendage tacked
on to the image as the object of its gaze. The predatory aspects ini-
tially attributed to the subject of the gaze, the male operators of the
camera, now belong to the monster.
Once the cameraman is dead and the last possible human opera-
tors buried in rubble, it becomes clear that the image wants noth-
ing outside of itself. Even the military disclaimer in the beginning
is of course a part of the film, an appendage of the monstrous image
within.15 It does not therefore represent a victory of humanity
against this monstrous force but rather the fact that all attempts to
master it get sucked into its wake. When the monster, about to eat the
cameraman, stares into the camera, into the eyes of the viewer, and
opens wide its gaping maw, for a split second the viewer confronts
the unthinkable: the total annihilation of the gaze, its consumption
by its own object. Instead, the monster tears image technology out
Figure 3.3 The monster of Cloverfield threatens to swallow the image.
of human hands all together and makes it witness to the human’s

destruction, not by the monster but by itself; the military’s attempts
to destroy the monster culminate in the Hammerdown Protocol,
which involves a “necessary sacrifice”: the total destruction of Man-
hattan that results in the death of our heroes, Rob and Beth. This is
the epitome of Baudrillard’s “perfect crime”—the destruction of the
self in the attempt to obliterate the other—but, as Baudrillard recog-
nizes, the crime is never perfect; it always leaves traces. Operation
Cloverfield would be a perfect crime were it not for the survival of
the camera, which is both the birth site of the monster and the only
thing that limits its annihilating force.
The images recorded on the camera represent both the possibility
of the total annihilation of image and gaze, self and other, subject
and object and the possibility of redemption, these dual potentialities
residing in the two layers of the recording: the monster’s rampage
recorded over the previous filming of Beth and Rob’s romance. The
preservation of images of the latter is necessary both to limit and to
highlight the monster’s destructive force. The imagistic layers add a
sense of temporal difference to what would otherwise be a chaotic
timelessness that would deprive both characters and viewers of the
ability to construct meaning because of its erasure of the difference

between past and present, presence and absence. For the main char-
acters, the monster represents a direct threat to their ability to make
and preserve memories. Its violent rampage disrupts the making of
the good-bye video for Rob, and the footage of the monster’s attack
that Hud is shooting for most of the film is being recorded over the
earlier footage of Rob and Beth. It is as if the monster’s excessive
presence as image shatters the relationship that would otherwise
exist between the absent, irretrievable event and the image that pre-
serves that event in its irretrievability.
Rob’s relationship to Beth and to his friends is defined from the
beginning according to absence, and the camera, by recording and
preserving events, is the vehicle that establishes the relationship
between absence and presence. In the first images we see of the Rob
and Beth footage, Beth’s absence is doubly inscribed. Rob begins by
filming pictures of Beth strewn around the apartment where they
have just slept together and then moves into the bedroom to film
Beth herself. The sense that we get is that the camera marks the
momentous nature of this event as something that will never hap-
pen again, something irretrievable. The recording of the monster’s
rampage threatens to erase all traces of that event, slowly eating away
at it.
Neither of these imagistic layers is really past or present, as both
are past in that they are recordings and both are present in that they
are being viewed; they are present as images. Despite their equal sta-
tus in this regard, however, the sense that the viewer gets is that a
traumatic present is erasing an idyllic past, that the former is antag-
onistic to the latter. The monster’s attack propels characters and
viewers alike into a perpetually traumatic present that threatens to
obliterate all traces of a now idealized past and barely lets us rest to
mourn for it, borne along on a roller coaster ride so physically dis-
turbing that there is no time to process the events.
The “no time” of the attacks and the attendant erasure of a rela-
tion to the past is representative of the monster’s mode of reproduc-
tion: an infinite parasitic replication that threatens to replace finite
human imagination, the generativity of which depends on temporal-
ity. As Martin Heidegger explains in his phenomenological reading
of the function of human imagination in Kant and the Problem of
Metaphysics, time and the image are coextensive. As the faculty that
marks human consciousness as finite, the imagination has an essen-
tial relation to the past as that which preexists and grounds its own
activity. Similarly, the finitude of imagination opens the future as that

which is not yet, as a space of possibility. Without the relationship of
past, present, and future, of absence and presence, instantiated in the
inaugural event that is the creation of the image, there is no thought,
no meaning, no experience. In Cloverfield, it seems that this crucial
function has passed to the technologically produced image, the past
images of Rob and Beth on the camera representing the only pos-
sibility for preserving these essential relations precisely because of
their proximity to the annihilating images of the monster.
However, the monster is present even in these “past” images. The
dark blot that falls from the sky in the final images of the Rob and
Beth footage suggests that the monster was already there in that idyl-
lic past, in fact may have been born from it. In his filming of Beth,
Rob seems to have unleashed the monster that would destroy not
only that recording but the very relation between absence and pres-
ence that would allow any recording to mark an event’s irretriev-
ability. In addition, as I have already argued, at the point in the film
when Rob decides to rescue Beth, he also begins to move toward the
monster and its annihilating force. Beth and the monster are thus
seemingly coterminous.
Moreover, the past recording only enters the picture at those
moments when the impotence of the human/subject in relation to
the camera/image is most apparent: at the going away party when
Hud cannot figure out how to operate the camera properly and after
Hud is eaten by the monster. One could therefore argue that the
monster and the annihilating force it represents “wins,” that there is
really no difference between the two types of images, as the monster,
its predatory nature and its challenge to human supremacy, is already
present in the Coney Island footage.
Such a reading only holds, however, if one sees the monster foot-
age as erasing the Coney Island footage. As all of the footage ulti-
mately has the same status—it is all recorded images—one could just
as easily claim that the Coney Island footage disrupts the monster’s
attack. The viewer assumes that the Coney Island recording was
already there—that it represents the past and the monster attack, the
present—but in a film that so challenges narrative coherence, such
an assumption might be unfounded. The final image that the viewer
sees is not the monster but rather Beth on the monorail at Coney
Island, proclaiming, “I had a good day.” In the timeline of the film,
Coney Island is the last image, the closest to the present. In the battle
for survival as image, Coney Island wins. In fact, Beth wins. Not the
Figure 3.4 Beth’s image at the end of Cloverfield.
monstrous object but the original object of the gaze, in a world where
there are only images, Beth has the last word; she is the one who says,
“I,” in the end, strangely liberated by the monster’s seizure of power
for the image at the expense of the subject of the gaze. Beth’s image in
the end is like the return of the Apollinian veil which, in Nietzsche’s
reading of art in The Birth of Tragedy, covers over the horrific abyss,
the monstrous wisdom of Silenus, who declares that it is better never
to have existed, that all existence is nothing. For Nietzsche, as in Clo-
verfield, the beautiful image redeems existence and offers hope in the
face of an annihilating truth.
This recorded past thus seems to represent the only positive pos-
sibility for the future. One might argue that preserving that last
image is what the entire film has been about, rescuing not the “real”
Beth but the image of her. In this revised scenario, it is not so much
that the film and all its characters ultimately end up serving and
resembling the monster but rather that the monster serves the cause
of preserving the irretrievability of the event. The final image har-
bors the birth of the monster, it is true, but the monster might rep-
resent redemption and rebirth rather than destruction and death.
In the confrontation with the extremity that the monster represents,
the image is redeemed. The monster forces us to face the extreme
of postmodern nihilism: the end of the subject, the end of meaning,
the end of memory, the end of imagination. But luckily, the monster
is not entirely successful. While it threatens to swallow the camera/
gaze itself, thus obliterating the entire film, wiping out all traces of
the event, it does not. We are left not with the black-out burial of
Rob, Beth, and the camera but with their imagistic afterlife. The
only antidote to the “no time” that the monstrous image represents
is a sense of the irretrievable event, an event whose irretrievabil-
ity is preserved only because it has become an image, because it is
marked by absence or has become the mark of an absence, whereas
the monster represents an excessive presence. But it is precisely
that excessive presence that allows the viewer to experience that
last image as the mark of an absent, irretrievable event rather than
merely a present image that refers to nothing outside of itself. It is
as if the excess of the monster creates an “outside” within the image,
a relation between imagistic layers that reimbues the image with its
referential force.
The Cloverfield monster seems to represent the end of imagina-
tion, the end of time and of memory. However, the fear of losing
time that the film invokes is, for Fredric Jameson, essential if we are
to revive our relation to futurity: “Perhaps indeed we need to develop
an anxiety about losing the future which is analogous to Orwell’s
anxiety about the loss of the past and of memory and childhood . . .
it would be a fear that locates the loss of the future and futuricity, of
historicity itself, within the existential dimension of time and indeed
within ourselves” (233). To take on this possible loss not as an exter-
nal threat but as part of our very being would be to engage with both
the utopic and the apocalyptic in a very different way. It would mean
seeing the end of humanity not as an eventuality but as an essen-
tial aspect of our relation to our own being, a mode of relating to
our future and not its impossibility. Seen in this light, the monster’s
destructive nature offers possibility; it does not represent a form of
image-production antagonistic to human consciousness but rather
internal to it.
One thus need not view Cloverfield as tasteless “horror satire,” as
a meaningless reproduction not only of images from other horror
films but also of real traumatic events. Rather, one might see the film
as offering commentary on the revitalization of the image and the
transformation of its role in the collective imagination as a result of
9/11 and its media coverage. For many, 9/11 was profoundly mean-
ingful not despite but because it was shared collectively as a media
event. Images of and in reference to the events of that day do not
necessarily detract from its meaning but rather add to our collective
understanding and experience of it. They offer us the possibility of
taking on the image-event as an essential part of our relation to the

world and to the future of humanity.
By highlighting the presence of image technology, The Blair Witch
Project, the Paranormal Activity series, and Cloverfield are all able to
reveal certain shifts in the relationships among subject and object,
viewer and viewed, presence and absence that might not other-
wise manifest themselves precisely because of our culture’s current
immersion in technological media. Looking closely at the relation-
ship between image and gaze in these films, it becomes clear that the
old formulae no longer hold. The image is no longer passive, and
while it asserts its power in violent and monstrous ways, those very
threats allow for the emergence of new heroes, well equipped to fight
such monsters on their own turf.
4
Memory, Pregnancy, and

Technological Archive in
Dark Water and The Forgotten
T his chapter will focus specifically on the relationship between

image technology and the nuclear family, eventually pinpointing
the themes of maternity and technological reproduction, particularly
as they relate to memory. As in The Blair Witch Project and the
Paranormal Activity series, the position of paternal authority is
challenged in Joseph Ruben’s The Forgotten (2004) and Walter
Salles’s Dark Water (2005). Both films involve absent fathers and
single mothers attempting to save their children from a seemingly
destructive technological foe. As in Cloverfield, technologically
produced images and archives seem to be parasitic on internal,
psychic memory, pulling memories out of the mind, destroying and/
or manipulating them. The relationship between past and present,
absence and presence is disturbed in the process, and the future is
radically uncertain, as these technological forces threaten the lives of
the children in each film. Paradoxically, it is through the very same
technology that appears to be threatening the mother-child relation
that that relation will be preserved and the children saved.
Before entering on what is unique to these two films, I want to offer
a wider context for the larger subgenre that is sometimes referred to
as “family horror” and that includes such classics as Hooper’s The
Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and Poltergeist (1982), Craven’s Last
House on the Left (1972) and The Hills Have Eyes (1977), and, more
recently, the Paranormal Activity series (2007, 2010, 2011, 2012), The
Forgotten (2004), and the Japanese-inspired The Ring (2002), One
Missed Call (2008), The Grudge (2004), and Dark Water (2005). As
this list suggests, the nuclear family has been under siege in horror
films for decades. As Tony Williams contends in Hearths of Darkness,

not only is it common and valid to discuss “a family trajectory within
horror itself,” but “the genre’s very form has an intrinsic relationship
with family situations” (17). Since Freudian psychoanalysis’s contri-
butions to our understanding of the psychosocial in modern Western
society, the family, and the relations initiated therein, is situated as the
first and the primary locus of trauma, fear, paranoia, aggression, and
violence. It seems fitting, then, that our culture’s collective experience
and understanding of the horrific would stem from those relations.
Critics agree that the portrayal of family relations in horror from
the 1950s to the present has trended toward the dissolution of those
bonds and the structure of patriarchy validated by them. While hor-
ror films have always tended to place the family in jeopardy, the fam-
ily structure itself comes under attack only later in the genre’s history.
As David Greven contends, “What primarily distinguishes modern
from classic cinematic horror is the former’s obsession with the fam-
ily and its disruptions” (88). Kendall Phillips continues, “Early hor-
ror films [of the 1950s and early 1960s] utilized the family as a kind
of moral center, which simultaneously offered and needed protec-
tion. During the second golden age of horror [of the late 1960s and
1970s], however, the family took on a different role in horror films . . .
often shown as morally compromised at its core” (Dark Directions,
109). The moral descent of the family has grave consequences for
society at large. Without the family unit to reproduce both sexually
and socially, the future is radically uncertain, a state that tends to be
portrayed negatively. Writing of horror in the 1990s, Kirsten Moana
Thompson argues, “A monstrous figure, the uncanny double of what
the family has repressed, emerges and threatens apocalyptic ven-
geance because of specific crimes for which the family are respon-
sible” (3). Following this trajectory, it is no surprise that the nuclear
family, though still present in horror of the twenty-first century, has
undergone major renovations. As I will argue, in contemporary hor-
ror the family is no longer the site of patriarchal power or sexual
reproduction; having lost both its symbolic force and its biological
support, what is left of the family serves only to confuse both the
viewing audience and the protagonists of the films, leading to misin-
terpretation and a disturbing lack of resolution. However, this very
lack of resolution leaves open new and even hopeful possibilities for
understanding the future differently.
Despite its subversive potential, the horror genre, by and large, has
been considered a conservative genre; though the dominant system
Memory, Pregnancy, and Technological Archive 87
of power relations and identities might be challenged in any given

film, this system and those who represent it are ultimately victorious
in the end, reinforcing both its power and its validity. This gener-
ally results in the reestablishment of masculine authority through the
vanquishing of monsters who represent failed masculinity or dan-
gerous feminine power and an immortalization of those who enact
patriarchal vengeance. Beginning in earnest in the late 1990s, how-
ever, the terrain undergoes a significant shift, and we find a num-
ber of popular films in which the (human) father is dead or absent,
and mothers and children must battle monstrous forces alone. Such
films include Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), The Sixth Sense
(1999), The Others (2001), AI: Artificial Intelligence (2001), The Ring
(2002), The Forgotten (2004), Dark Water (2005), and One Missed
Call (2008). Some of these films may not offer much in the way of
an alternative to the failed system that they portray. As John Lewis
points out in his article “‘Mother Oh God Mother . . .’: Analysing the
‘Horror’ of Single Mothers in Contemporary Hollywood Horror,” in
films like The Ring, The Others, and The Sixth Sense, the horrors fac-
ing single mothers seem at first to uphold traditional family values
to the detriment of the new family she and her child represent, but a
closer look reveals that these films also offer potent critiques of patri-
archy and oppressive ideologies (para. 4). Lewis argues, however, that
both The Sixth Sense and The Others portray “single mothers as weak,
inferior, and powerless” but that in all three films “science and ratio-
nal (male) thinking [are] shown to be ineffective and equally hor-
rifying” (para. 18, 22). Beyond these equally dysfunctional parental
alternatives, films like The Ring, Dark Water, and The Forgotten offer
another alternative—no less horrifying but much more powerful—in
the form of technology and technologically engineered monsters.
The link between the nuclear family and anxieties over the dangers
of media technology, particularly the television set itself, has a history
that goes back as far as the introduction of these devices into the Amer-
ican home in the 1950s and 1960s. In Haunted Media, Jeffrey Sconce
discusses television shows from the 1960s, like Twilight Zone and The
Outer Limits, many episodes of which featured the television or other
media as haunted or threatening devices. Sconce focuses on The Outer
Limits in particular, as it “centered most immediately on the American
family, a scenario that offered repeated parables about the audience’s
own relationship to the TV set, and the set’s relationship, in turn, to a
vast electronic nowhere” (136). Sconce continues, “Born of the same
disillusionment with suburbia that informed the fantastic sitcom, The
Outer Limits also recontextualized TV families within paranormal and

supernatural scenarios, producing a defamiliarized account of domes-
ticity that accommodated often trenchant social commentary” (138).
Sconce points out that many episodes of The Outer Limits, as well as
other works of fiction at the time, focus particularly on the housewife
who, locked in the home and the suburban wasteland, had become
a major consumer of daytime television. In addition, the association
between women and television in the 1960s led to the characterization
of television as feminine. “In a variety of contexts, television signaled
the invasion of feminine and thus ‘inauthentic’ culture, presenting a
direct threat to the taste, values, and autonomy of the ‘husband-phi-
losopher-hero’” (153). In Dark Water and The Forgotten, this feminine
threat directly confronts the husband-philosopher-hero, replacing his
brand of power with a new one that positions mother and child as the
inheritors of a new mode of being.
There was already a sense of this ensuing confrontation in Hoop-
er’s 1982 film Poltergeist. In “Making Monsters, or Serializing Kill-
ers,” Nicola Nixon writes that “Poltergeist also presented something
else, something other than a drafty window or bricked-in basement
as the liminal space between the demonic and domestic world: it
posited a television set as the interstice and conduit between specu-
lar reality and what gets portentously referred to throughout the film
as the ‘other side’” (217). Through this imagistic conduit, mother
and daughter pass to the “other side” and are reborn into the world,
gooey with ectoplasmic afterbirth. Poltergeist in many ways inau-
gurates this particular strain of “tech-noir” films, as it is the first to
combine techno-paranoia, the theme of rebirth through technology,
and the disruption of the domestic sphere through the isolation of
mother and child from the patriarch. Unlike its twenty-first-century
descendants, Poltergeist ends conservatively, with the defeat of the
ghosts and the reestablishment of the family structure, even stronger
than before. There is no sense in the end that life will be much dif-
ferent for the family, except that they will watch less TV. In contrast,
the family units of The Ring, Dark Water, and The Forgotten, already
broken from the beginning of the film, will not survive the wrath of
the techno-ghost. The children in these films are not simply taken
by the other side of the technological mechanism; to some extent
they are from the other side. The ghosts in The Ring and Dark Water,
for example, do not ask to be rescued but rather to be continuously
reborn; this rebirth spells the end of humanity, but, as I will argue,
this end is ultimately generative.
Horror-film history has its share of creepy, malevolent, and

demonic children, the anti-Christ Damien character from The Omen
series being a prime example. The technological ghosts of The Ring,
Feardotcom, One Missed Call, and Dark Water are no exception. The
particular relationship set up between the demonic child and the
human child in The Ring and Dark Water furthers the horror with
which we encounter them. This relation endows the human child
with inhuman powers, a sixth sense or precognition. The common
understanding of children’s abnormal behavior—drawing scary pic-
tures, writing violent phrases, becoming sullen and withdrawn—
used to be that the child “just wanted to be heard,” but the new horror
is that the child might actually know something not only that the
adults do not know, but also that could potentially destroy the very
structure in which the child is tied to its parents, both b iologically
and sociopolitically. As Gary Westfahl explains in his introduction
to N ursery Realms: Children in the Worlds of Science Fiction, Fantasy,
and Horror, “More disquieting are the ideas that these new children
may not be simply evil or good, but rather different from us, and that
these superior beings may, without malevolent intent, be destined to
supplant ordinary humans” (xi). Extending beyond the horror genre,
this wider trend suggests that children have become the figures for
and harbingers of not a new humanity but something else that might
replace it.
This is not surprising, as it becomes clear in the films that paren-
tal relationships are established primarily through technology and
not through biology or sexual reproduction. There is little to no
real sex in these films, and even when there is, some technologi-
cally produced matter intervenes, so that the “products” of these
unions always have both human and inhuman parents. Further, rela-
tions between the human and technological mechanisms are (re)
productive and sexualized. For example, in The Ring, not only are
children conceived through technological interference, but replac-
ing love scenes are close-ups of human hands inserting videotapes
into VCRs. Technological devices serve as wombs. Unlike the more
container-like techno-wombs of the past, which, despite the efforts
of critics to complicate the comparison, will still tend to be linked to
the female body and to sexual reproduction, the actual sites of birth
in these films, the sites that link to a techno-human future as yet
unfigured, are not containers but rather flat screens: the TV screens
between viewer and viewed both within the film and between the
external viewer and the film itself, the camera lens, the surface of the
eye. These sites, marking as they do such nonphysical boundaries as

that between reality and representation, subject and object, self and
other, do not necessarily map onto physical objects but are present
just the same. They allow the image to free itself from the devices to
which it has been linked and in which it has been imprisoned. These
screens become sites of exposure that do not foreclose on the essen-
tial distinctions between image and reality, self and other, but instead
offer these relations generative force. It is the two-dimensional image,
and not the three-dimensional device, that is pregnant in The Ring,
Feardotcom, Dark Water, and The Forgotten.
The emphasis on the mother-child relation and the absence of
fathers from these films distinguishes them from the Saw films,
for example, which, despite the overt presence of video surveil-
lance and the importance of the technologically produced image in
heightening the horror of the films, remain paternalistic. As Chris-
topher Sharrett argues in his article “The Problem of Saw: ‘Torture
Porn’ and the Conservatism of Contemporary Horror Films,” films
like Saw “embrace . . . dominant ideas about power and repression”
(35). Attempting to preserve the patriarchal order, Jigsaw’s vendetta
“speaks to the need of the pissed-off citizen to strike back, or to find
a strong dad who can” (35). In his seeming criticism of contempo-
rary American society, the serial killer Jigsaw represents the “angry
white male lashing out at a society he will either remake in his
image or obliterate” (34). Not content merely to kill, Jigsaw creates
over-the-top spectacles of blood and gore. At its best, torture porn
thus might serve to demonstrate the more dangerous and nihilistic
aspects of the relation between violence and the image. As Jean-Luc
Nancy explains in The Ground of the Image,
In a world ordered and organized by sacrifice, bloodshed quenches

the thirst of the gods or irrigates their fields; its coagulation seals the
passage beyond death. But once this world has been taken apart, once
sacrifice is impossible, cruelty is no more than the extreme violence
that closes in upon itself in its own coagulation; and that coagulation
does not seal any passage beyond death, but seals only the violent
stupidity that believes it has produced death immediately before its
eyes in a little puddle of matter. (25)
Once the “gods” are themselves only part of the production, as in The
Cabin in the Woods, the spilling of blood must take new forms if it
is still to be effective and meaningful rather than a stupid puddle. In
true sacrifice the spilling of blood symbolizes and effects the crossing
of the boundary between human and divine, heaven and earth, life
and death. To be effective, bloodshed in our age must point toward
the boundary between image and reality, perhaps even lead to the
breaching of that boundary, as do The Ring and Feardotcom. It is at
this crossing that the line between life and death is redrawn, facili-
tating not only the passage from life to death but also from death to
rebirth.
The link forged between conception and image in these films
complicates a metaphysical paradigm that goes back to the husband-
philosopher-hero Plato, who, as A. Samual Kimball points out, uses
biological conception as a metaphor for spiritual conception or
thought.1 As all thought for Plato is remembrance, memory plays
an essential role in the construction of the concept, the progeny
of the mind. Internal, psychic memory is privileged over external
signs because the former is seen as being closest to the true nature
of things. In both Dark Water and The Forgotten, however, memory
itself is externalized and embodied. Access to the world, to reality
and to experience, is granted only through these embodied images.
What is more, one only reproduces or conceives—one only “has”
one’s child—by these same means. The future of family relations rests
on whether the human is capable of accepting the terms of this new
mode of being.
Dark Water: Tomb or Womb?
Like The Ring, Dark Water was adapted from a Japanese film written
and directed by Hideo Nakata: Honogurai mizu no soko kara (2002).
In both the Japanese and the American versions, a recently divorced
woman and her daughter move into a creepy, old apartment build-
ing, in which water is constantly gushing from one of the upstairs
apartments and dribbling into their own. This building is haunted
by the ghost of a little girl whose mother, as in The Ring, was appar-
ently responsible for her death. The water is again connected both to
birth and death; its presence corresponds with the emergence of the
ghost-child but also signifies her death by drowning. In Dark Water,
the child has fallen into a water tower on the roof of the apartment
building. The ghost-child’s connection to technology lies in the fact
that she appears first in the video camera of the apartment building’s
elevator. The elevator becomes a literal “delivery room,” as the camera
inside allows the ghost-child to emerge and interact with the unwit-
ting tenants.2
Figure 4.1 Dahlia trapped in the elevator with ghost-child Natasha in

Dark Water.
While the Japanese and American versions of the film are very
similar, the child’s technological status is more pronounced in the
American remake. Both connect the ghost-child’s abuse to the moth-
er’s own childhood, and the deterioration of the apartment building
to the breakdown of the mother’s mental and emotional stability. In
the American version, this connection is emphasized by the fact that
the same actress (Perla Haney-Jardine) plays the role of ghost-child,
Natasha, and the mother, Dahlia, as a child. So it is as if this techno-
ghost is really a “recording” of the mother’s own childhood, a retro-
spective haunting of the mother by herself as a child.
The techno-ghost’s story mirrors that of Dahlia’s childhood, and
the scenes in which Dahlia interacts with this apparition are inter-
rupted by flashbacks of her own past. Each suffered abuse at the
hands of a mother who had succumbed to madness; their fathers
simply abandoned them. While Dahlia survived this treatment, the
parallels that the film highlights between her own abuse and that of
the techno-ghost suggest that her trauma was recorded in some tech-
nological “other side” that has finally come to claim her. It would be
tempting to call this haunting “the return of the repressed,” as in its
more complex formulation this phrase refers not to events that can-
not be remembered but rather an event that never registered as such,
its traumatic after-effect triggered by a seemingly disconnected sign
in the present. But Dark Water takes this disconnect even further.
Whatever trauma the ghost represents, though clearly linked to the
mother’s past, not only appears in the wrong place and time but to
someone other than Dahlia. The film thus in part narrates the process
by which internal memory or experience is externalized, co-opted by
its technological reproduction.
The dilapidated apartment building that serves as the setting for
most of the film is located on Roosevelt Island, which, because of
its isolation from the rest of New York City, had historically been
the site of lunatic asylums and prisons. The island, too, has a past
that will not stay past. The building seems to offer an obvious anal-
ogy for Dahlia’s apparent mental breakdown, particularly in the
relationship between her apartment and the one just above it. Tak-
ing the Freudian self as a model, one could see the upstairs apart-
ment as the unconscious and Dahlia’s apartment as consciousness.
The “dark water” incessantly dripping from Dahlia’s ceiling is a sig-
nal that something from the unconscious is beginning to seep into
consciousness. This seeping water connects the ghost-child’s abuse
and murder with Dahlia’s own childhood trauma. The only one who
knows about the dead body upstairs is the building’s super(ego), Mr.
Veeck (Pete Postelthwaite), who keeps attempting to patch up the
hole in the ceiling, to keep the unconscious matter hidden. His fail-
ure to do so leads to the eventual deluge of water into Dahlia’s apart-
ment, accompanied by her m ental breakdown and eventual death.
But this Freudian analogy, too, will be complicated by Natasha’s
technological being. It becomes clear through the course of the film
that the trauma that Natasha represents has separated itself from a
human past or a human unconscious.
The film begins with a drumbeat. Little Dahlia sits in the pouring
rain, awaiting the arrival of her truant mother and playing a small
hand drum. This drumming sound will later be connected to the
sound of beating in Dahlia’s head when she is beginning to break
down and has one of her debilitating headaches. The sound effect for
this beating comes from an ultrasound, a recording of a technologi-
cally transmitted infant heartbeat. This technological heartbeat will
be repeated throughout the film, indicating that all along something
is germinating, that as we move closer to Dahlia’s ultimate breakdown
and death, we also move closer to the birth of something else. It is
thus fitting that the child-ghost’s name is Natasha, the Russian ver-
sion of Natalia, the etymological connections to the “natal” making
her the perfect ambassador for this rebirth. In this respect, Dahlia’s
headaches could be seen as labor pains. Natasha, the externalization

of her own memory/image of herself as a child, will be born through
the mediation of the elevator’s camera.
In the second scene, we flash forward to the present day. We
view the adult Dahlia through a rain-streaked window, as she waits
for her husband, Kyle (Dougray Scott), to show up to a mediated
divorce hearing. In this hearing, Kyle claims that Dahlia will never be
able to raise their daughter, Ceci, on her own. The film implies that
because Dahlia’s mother failed as a parent due to mental illness, so
will Dahlia. In this sense, one could view Dahlia’s deterioration as the
inevitable hand of fate. But the intervention of the ghost complicates
this reading. The repetitive cycle of mental illness, abandonment,
and abuse that seems to be making its claim on Dahlia will be inter-
rupted by a different kind of repetition: that of the recorded image.
As an external recording of Dahlia’s own past, Natasha will provide
the possibility for another ending to the story.
In order to break the cycle of abuse and to not be like her own
mother, Dahlia is determined to make it on her own. She decides
to rent the apartment on Roosevelt Island, despite the condition of
the building, which Ceci describes as “yucky.” Ceci soon changes
her mind, however, when she finds a Hello Kitty backpack that she
would desperately like to keep, but Mr. Veeck informs her that it
belongs to someone else. As it turns out, the backpack belonged to
Natasha, whose dead body rots away in the water tower and whose
family apparently lived in the apartment just above the one Dahlia
has just rented. Like Aidan of The Ring, Ceci has an intimate rela-
tionship with the ghost of this dead child, who becomes her “imag-
inary friend.” Further, Ceci knows that Natasha and her mother are
to some extent one and the same. At one point Ceci tells Dahlia
that Natasha is “lost, like you.” Dahlia asks, “Who told you that?”
Ceci replies, “You did.” Ceci’s relationship with the ghost is an indi-
cation that Natasha is much more than just Dahlia’s own personal
ghost/memory; though connected to Dahlia, Natasha exists as an
external entity in her own right.
The friendship between Ceci and Natasha becomes a sort of
sibling rivalry, however. In their first trip in the building’s elevator,
Veeck watches Dahlia and Ceci through the surveillance camera. A
third child-figure soon emerges on the screen. Seemingly jealous of
the relationship between Dahlia and Ceci, this child-ghost separates
the two by locking Dahlia in the elevator after Ceci walks out. Dahlia
feels a small hand touch her own, just as Ceci’s had done moments
before, and she experiences another flashback to her own childhood.
It is as if Dahlia has literally been touched by the past through this
recorded image. Unlike the reminiscence that attends a viewing of
oneself in home videos, this encounter includes the embodiment of
the recorded image, and this image has a will of its own.
The leak in the ceiling begins as soon as Dahlia and Ceci move
into the apartment. As the water stain gets bigger and bigger and
the water gushes faster and faster from the leak, Dahlia’s mental and
emotional state deteriorates until, at last, Dahlia is surrounded by
pouring water as she screams, “I can’t be her mother!” As in The Ring,
Dahlia eventually traces the source of her hallucinations to the dead
body of a drowned child. But also like The Ring, her finding the body
and seemingly solving the crime of Natasha’s murder by her own
mother does not end the ghost’s revenge; it only unleashes the ghost
to work further mischief upon her and her daughter.
In the true climactic scene, Natasha tries to drown Ceci in the
bathtub. As Dahlia struggles to save Ceci, all three plunged into
the same death-womb, the ghost finally reveals to her that Ceci will
be allowed to survive if Dahlia “crosses over” and agrees to be the
mother of the child-ghost. The techno-ghost does not want to rest in
peace; she wants a parent. As in The Ring, the techno-child is calling
for attention; she “just wants to be heard.” To save her child, Dahlia
agrees to be Natasha’s “mommy” and drowns, fully immersing her-
self in the dark water through which Natasha communicates. This
final scene is reminiscent of that of Nakata’s The Ring Two (2005), in
which Rachel, the mother, sacrifices herself in a watery “death,” only
to be reborn as it were, deposited back on her living room floor with
her son beside her. While Dahlia is not reborn precisely in this man-
ner, she is offered something of an afterlife in the film, which begs
the question, what exactly do these “deaths” entail, given the seeming
immortality of the spirits that haunt each film?
Like the relationship between Samara and Rachel in The Ring,
Dahlia is identified with Natasha through the image, and like
Rachel’s descent into the well to retrieve Samara’s body, Dahlia’s
immersion in the dark water of the bathtub is a sort of baptism to
this other mode of being, in which she already to some extent par-
ticipates. As in The Ring, there is no relationship to the past except
through or as a projection of the technologically produced image. In
addition to producing images of Natasha’s past, Natasha’s presence
allows Dahlia to replay her own past, to re-view her own mother’s
abandonment of her, to the tune of that other technological repro-
duction—the ultrasonic infant heartbeat. The two narratives
become intertwined to the point that the viewer has difficulty dis-
cerning which images belong to Natasha and which to Dahlia. The
only difference lies in the two mothers. Different actresses play the
roles of Dahlia’s mother and Natasha’s (Elina Löwensohn and Zoe
Heath), but the one is always morphing into the other in Dahlia’s
visions. Over the course of the film, we are introduced to three sets
of mothers and daughters: (1) Dahlia (as a child) and her mother,
(2) Dahlia (as an adult) and Ceci, and (3) Natasha (played by the same
actress as Dahlia as a child) and her mother. Time is out of joint, not
only because the first and the third, both relationships of the past,
seemingly threaten the second, a relationship of the present, but
also because the two “past” relationships are neither separate from
each other—they cross over each other through the technological
recording, Dahlia’s memories entangled with Natasha’s—nor do they
remain in the past: Natasha exists; she has been born to the present
through the camera image. One could in fact argue that it is not Nata-
sha’s ghost/memory that mirrors Dahlia’s but the other way around.
Dahlia’s own memories begin to align themselves with those of this
techno-ghost both through the technological image and the inhuman
bodily-technological rhythm of the techno-infant heartbeat.
The intertwining of Dahlia’s past narrative with this technological
version of her child self makes of her past more than just a memory.
Time is no longer what it was; memories are not in the past; past and
present exist at once, simultaneously. Partially embodied in this ghost-
child, memory takes on its own existence outside of Dahlia’s mind.
Because of this separate existence, made possible by technological
recording, this memory-image is now capable of flooding Dahlia’s
world, sweeping her and Ceci away and destroying everything in its
wake. Like the monster of Cloverfield, Natasha is a recorded past that
becomes a traumatic present(/presence) and seems to want to sub-
stitute its mode of being—also parasitic and immortal—for the finite
memory/consciousness of the protagonist. Natasha is parasitic on
Dahlia’s memories, just as the monster is parasitic on the past record-
ing of Rob and Beth. But also like the Cloverfield monster, Natasha’s
violent presence is both nihilative and redemptive. If Natasha (who is
Dahlia) succeeds in drowning Ceci, then Dahlia will not live her own
nightmare—becoming like her mother—but will instead live Nata-
sha’s; in succumbing to the violence of this recorded image, Dahlia,
and by extension Ceci, will in a sense become a simulation of the

murder of Natasha by her own mother. By sacrificing herself in place
of Ceci, Dahlia saves them both from that fate.
It might be difficult to see Dahlia’s drowning as a victory, were
it not for the fact that the film offers her an interesting afterlife. In
the final scene, Ceci returns to the apartment building to collect her
things. She ends up alone in the elevator. The surveillance camera
shows another figure beside her, who holds her hand and braids her
hair for her. Ceci leaves the elevator smiling and happy. This final
scene hearkens back to an earlier one in which Ceci and Dahlia are
doubled in the mirror as Dahlia braids Ceci’s hair. The mirror scene
is linked to identification, as Dahlia has Ceci practice introducing
herself to her new classmates: “I’m Cecilia!” The parallel between
the two scenes suggests that now she receives her identity through
the technological image. Ceci will from now on relate both to her
mother and to her own image, not through the mirror, neither the
internal mirror of self-reflection nor the external one that provides
its analogue, but through the camera, which has definitively sepa-
rated itself from these other types of image-construction. As Ceci’s
full name, Cecilia (“blind one”), implies, she is a new, female ver-
sion of that other blind(ed) child, Oedipus. As such, she represents a
new relation to self and (m)other. Like Oedipus, one could say that
Ceci in fact has “an eye too many”; she sees more than she should.
Rather than a divine oracle, it is the technological image that makes
this excessive vision possible. Unlike Oedipus, Ceci will not have to
suffer self-mutilation and exile. Her mother’s sacrifice is reparation
for the sins that will not stay in the past, her ghostly image a beacon
of hope for the future. In the final elevator scene, Dahlia’s ghost tells
Ceci, “Whenever you need me, I’m right here.” Here, in the image,
Ceci can always find this maternal presence, protecting her from the
more malignant aspects of the image.
In Dark Water, mother-child relations are determined and medi-
ated by technology. The link between Natasha and Dahlia is established
through the video camera and through the ultrasonic heartbeat: her
link to her past, to her own mother, mediated by these devices. And
now, this ghost of technology has come to claim Dahlia’s relation to
her own daughter. Whereas Rachel and Aidan of The Ring fulfill their
obligation to Samara by making a copy of her video, Dahlia fulfills her
pact with Natasha by becoming an image herself. But it is important to
note that in so doing, she endows the image with motherly qualities in
turn. Dahlia becomes a maternal presence within the image, endowing
it with a spirit that offers comfort and hope rather than abuse and
despair. In Dahlia’s becoming-image, the image also participates in a
becoming, a becoming-maternal. Rather than the monstrous parasitic
image that Natasha presents, Dahlia offers an imagistic presence that
embraces the beholder. On the one hand, there is Natasha’s birth/death
as violent eruption; on the other, there is the calm of floating in the
water of the womb: two ways of understanding and experiencing the
dark water of the image.
While monster and mother/woman are clearly linked in Dark
Water, as they are in both Cloverfield and the Paranormal Activity
series, in all of these cases it is ultimately not the demonic or mon-
strous side that is victorious but rather Beth’s and Alex’s beautiful
images and Dahlia’s maternal one, each redemptive in its own way.
The first two provide a protective veil over a monstrous truth; the
last, a womb in which possibility gestates.
Alienation in The Forgotten
Like Dark Water, The Forgotten also involves the externalization of

internal, psychic memory through the technological archive. It is not
just that external, technologically produced texts and images threaten
the purity and immediacy of internal memory, but another category
all together is introduced: a bodily memory separate from conscious-
ness. Challenging both the metaphysical tradition that has privileged
internal cognitive memory over external signs and archives and the
deconstruction of that dichotomy, The Forgotten posits yet another
mode of retention that is noncognitive and, as I will argue, intimately
linked to the technological archive. It is this type of memory that is
ultimately privileged and that ultimately allows for the “victory” of
the human mother. However, as I will also argue, the mother’s rela-
tionship to the technological agents in the film is not entirely antago-
nistic: she finds herself in league with these agents once she is forced
to access this other mode of memory and experience.
The central conflict of The Forgotten involves memory loss. The
antagonist is an alien force that has the ability to wipe out and rear-
range people’s memories. In this regard, the film might be placed
among other recent sci-fi movies with similar concerns, like Alex
Proyas’s Dark City (1998) and Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall (1990,
remade in 2012 by Len Wiseman). Like Dark City in particular, The
Forgotten calls into question the specific location of memory and
its links to identity and subjectivity. Both films call on the human’s
creative capacities to forge a more authentic existence not against but

within the technologically manipulated worlds they inhabit.
The Forgotten begins with an obsessive mourning ritual. A
mother, Telly (Julianne Moore), pores over photographs and videos
of her son, Sam (Christopher Kovalevski), who supposedly died in
a plane crash more than a year prior to when the film begins. Her
husband, Jim (Anthony Edwards), and her therapist (Gary Sinise)
view this daily ritual as unhealthy behavior. Her therapist even goes
so far as to say that she has a “death grip on the past.” One morn-
ing, Telly finds that there are no photos and that the videotapes are
blank. She confronts Jim, accusing him of taking these tokens away
from her, and Jim tells her that she never in fact had a son, that she
had invented Sam after a traumatic miscarriage, and that she is not
simply depressed but delusional.
In disbelief, Telly struggles to find someone else to corroborate
her story, finally convincing alcoholic ex–hockey player Ashley Cor-
rell (Dominic West) that he too had a child. The two embark on a
journey to uncover the cause of everyone’s forgetfulness and find
that aliens have been experimenting on human beings for some time,
with particular focus on the mother-child bond, their goal being to
see if it can be broken. The aliens have been successful in every case
except Telly’s. Throwing everything they have at her, they manage to
erase all of Telly’s memories of Sam but one, that of having had life
within her. Because she was able to hold onto this memory against
their best efforts, they give her back her son, and they also give Ash
his daughter. The difference between Ash and Telly is that while Ash
will remember nothing of what happened, Telly will remember all.
The alien says to her, “Only you will remember.”
The film suggests that memory exists in multiple locations: (1)
memories are stored in technological archives as recordings of
events; (2) they exist “in” the mind as recoverable (and thus mean-
ingful) images and experiences (this second category split between
those memories that really happened and those fabricated by the
mind to deal with traumatic loss, between conscious and uncon-
scious); and (3) they exist “in” the body as impressions or traces
of previous contact. The film overtly characterizes the last type of
memory as the strongest, the most immediate relation to the event
or experience and thus the most true or authentic. In contrast to the
privileging of internal psychic memory, which, as Derrida points
out in his pivotal essay “Plato’s Pharmacy,” is an integral part of the
metaphysical tradition and its influences on Western culture, this

type of memory in The Forgotten is presented as the least reliable,
the easiest to remove or manipulate. This leaves us with the first
type of memory, the technological recording. In terms of what is
most immediate or most closely linked with selfhood or identity,
this kind of memory would seem the least consequential, the fur-
thest removed from real experience. It is, after all, the first type of
memory that the aliens remove from Telly’s life and thus seemingly
the easiest to part with. However, as I will argue, the technological
recording is intimately linked with the bodily memory that the film
privileges.
The unsatisfactory ending of The Forgotten offers a strong starting
point for examining how traditional notions of memory are chal-
lenged in the film’s subtext. While the end of the film seems to repre-
sent a victory for the human and its ability to hold onto meaningful
relations in the face of an omnipotent alien force, that force, while
disappointed perhaps, has not been vanquished. It is still presum-
ably capable of and likely to maintain control of the memories of
all other humans on earth. And since all other humans are in one
way or another assisting the aliens in their control of memories and
bodies, why should this one woman be any different? What is so spe-
cial about this woman, that she would remember her child when all
other mothers (and fathers) forgot theirs? And further, how can she
be content in the end to live in a world she knows is controlled by
memory-erasing aliens?
To answer these questions, we first have to consider what these
“aliens” might represent. The film overtly portrays them as a non-
human, extraterrestrial force inflicting their cruel experiments on a
human population. However, for the most part, viewers do not see
the aliens, and when they do, the aliens take human form. Some-
times Telly will look up at the sky, as if expecting to see something
there, and at one point she asks Ash if he ever feels like he is being
watched. One does not need to believe in the existence of aliens to
have such feelings. We know that there are satellites in the sky that
are not visible to us, that are put there by our own governments, and
that we are indeed being watched. The aliens’ hypothesis regarding
human relations is also familiar. They have this notion that if they
remove all of the external signs of a person’s existence—photos, vid-
eos, and so forth—then they can easily wipe the memories of him
or her from loved ones’ minds as well; there is virtually no differ-
ence between the two. But we do not need aliens to tell us this. There
is much discussion here on earth about the ways in which technol-

ogy might be altering our relations to others, how “real” relations
might be replaced with virtual ones. At least since Plato, the Western
world has been concerned with the pernicious effects of technologi-
cal archives on memory. One might see the alien-ation presented in
the film not as something imposed on the human world from the
outside but rather representative of the very real shift in our relation
to technology; rather than existing merely as a tool or extension of
the human, it now seems that technology has taken on a life of its
own. The alien takeover is one that we ourselves initiated, the aliens’
ability to whisk people away, to “get them out of the picture,” a form
of photoshopping, image manipulation. As we see over the course of
the film, the “forgotten” can just as easily be brought back. The aliens
could thus be seen as nothing other than technology itself, and the
world of The Forgotten as none other than the extreme of postmod-
ern nihilism, a state in which humans are ruled by Baudrillard’s “evil
genius of technology” that “keeps watch beneath artifacts” and ulti-
mately determines the fate of the human subject (Perfect Crime, 73).
This still does not explain the anomalous status of Telly in the
world the film portrays. She seems to represent the victory of natu-
ral memory over technological archive. But when we consider her
obsession with the technologically produced images of her son, we
seem to reach a contradiction. Ostensibly, if the bodily memory of
having life within her were so strong, she would not remain tied so
tightly to these external signs of her son’s existence, the photos and
the videos. But when these are erased, she becomes violent and hys-
terical. Her ties both to the bodily memory of her son and the tech-
nological memory of him suggest that in her the two are intertwined.
This might also explain why she has such an uncommon name, even
for Hollywood. Her name, Telly, has an interesting homonym, “tele-.”
She is the “tele-” of telephone and television. She represents the tech-
nological transmissibility of images, voices, and messages. Her body,
her being, and her identity are inseparable from the technologies that
more and more determine human being and experience in general.
It remains, then, to determine what the relationship is between
the bodily memory Telly is able to retain despite the best efforts of
the aliens (the world as increasingly autonomous from the human
subject) to erase it and the technological archives with which she is
obsessed from the beginning of the film and which, one might argue
with characteristic postmodern pessimism, represent the erasure of
her “real” son in favor of his simulated image (in other words, right
in line with the very threat the aliens seem to represent). To help
answer this question, I would like to turn to Mark Hansen’s 2000
book Embodying Technesis. In this work Hansen outlines what he
sees as the pitfalls of most contemporary meditations on technol-
ogy, which continue to privilege the subject, the psychic self, and the
semiotics of the social in attempting to understand and deal with the
increasing dominance of technology in all aspects of human life and
experience. Instead, Hansen suggests turning to the later Benjamin
of “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” to what he sees as Benjamin’s
most radical and positive stance on a nonrepresentational, nonpsy-
chic mode of experience proper to modern life. An emphasis on such
experience does not do away with human agency, making us merely
passive recipients of the “shocks” of the “mechanosphere,” but rather
introduces a new form of agency that is itself mimetic and that can
be harnessed toward a “felicitous (nondestructive) form of collective
communion with the cosmos” (254). In this scenario, technology is
not opposed to nature as artificial and derivative but rather “‘obeys’
a (natural or cosmological) imperative that . . . is simply higher than
the human” (61).
By adapting Benjaminian Erlebnis for the twenty-first century,
Hansen poses a challenge to human exceptionalism—asserting that
we need to adopt a more “humble” stance in relation to the world
at large—and at the same time attempts to keep open a space for
the human in an increasingly inhuman world. He shares these
basic goals with other thinkers in “posthuman” studies,3 as well as
many contemporary artists, authors, and filmmakers, who believe
that the way to live a more harmonious and ethical life is to give up
the unsustainable stance that places the human at the center of the
universe, to come to a greater understanding of the ways in which
human being is determined by inhuman forces, and to ascertain how
best to accommodate oneself to and operate among them.
While it may seem paradoxical, Hansen’s argument is that in order
to maintain a space for the human in the increasingly inhuman world,
we must insist on the autonomy of technology from language and on
the autonomy of our experience of technology from consciousness.
The necessity of this divorce arises from the increasing determina-
tion of human experience by technology and the attendant effects
of this—namely, “reproductive technologies functioning as the exte-
riorized (and collective) embodiments of memory” (236)—and the
increasing existence of experiences that never register cognitively
as such, either because they are “subperceptual” and “molecular” or

because they are “incompatible with the capacities and rhythms of
qualitative consciousness” but nonetheless have very real effects on
our “nonpsychic qualitative experience” (165). Hansen contends that
to rescue human experience and agency from the more pernicious
effects of postmodern alienation we must “train” our “mimetic fac-
ulty” to deal with these sensations without requiring recourse to the
shielding and simplifying effects of the cognitive or redemption in
the semiotic. “Rather than introducing a supplementary juncture that
subsumes technological exteriority (back) into thinking memory
. . . Benjamin treats involuntary [internal] memory and voluntary
[external] memory as two modes through which internal duration
either aligns itself or is aligned with external duration” (242–43). As
the latter typifies the relationship between memory and technology
in the modern world, the former has become something of a ghost
of itself, echoing Baudrillard’s description of the will as “phantom
limb,” an appendage whose virtual suffering we continue to endure
despite the fact that the real one is gone (Perfect Crime, 11). If this
is the case, it seems counterproductive to continue to try to operate
in this manner; instead, we might begin to flex other muscles. Han-
sen continues, “For Benjamin, therefore, the disjunction demarcates
two antithetical types of experience: one centered around a reflec-
tive, psychic subject whose powers have been markedly diminished
with the advent of modernity . . . another around a corporeal agency
sensitive to the inhuman rhythms of the mechanosphere” (243). It
is this latter ability that Hansen believes we should foster, and it is
from these experiences that our creative energies can once again flow.
While consciousness may either refuse to register an experience alto-
gether or “neutralize” it the better to accommodate it, the body can
absorb the full impact of the event, appropriating these alien rhythms
and thereby becoming more intimately engaged with the world as
it is. In this way, dealing with postmodern alienation is not a mat-
ter of reestablishing personal or subjective meaning in spite of the
dehumanizing effects of technology but rather removing the psychic
resistances to these effects and taking them on bodily, fully experi-
encing them as it were and thereby becoming part of a new collective,
a “second nature” opened up not despite but through technology.
For Hansen, film plays a central role in this corporeal “train-
ing.” He explains that the move from the semiotic to the mimetic
is reflected in the move from text to image “as the basic medium of
experience” (232). In its most basic structure as separate, discontinu-

ous but moving “shots,” film is the privileged form of modern image.
[Film] functions as an aesthetic analogue to the corporeal impact

of the assembly line and the urban crowd, a homeopathic, “virtual”
experiential space where we can adapt ourselves to the unprecedented
demands of our technologized lifeworld. By soliciting our embodied
adaptation to the alien rhythms of montage, film opens a new nature
to our experience, what B
enjamin calls an “optical unconscious.” (251)
This view of film focuses not on the narrative elements of it but

rather its “tactility,” the ways it involves sensuous contact (literally
touching the eye) with the rapid firing of discontinuous frames that
do not entirely match the way humans perceive the world and that
thus force the viewer to experience, absorb, and retain that which
it cannot process cognitively. These ideas resonate with Deleuze’s
work on cinema and its centrality to the modern world, in which he
too divides the experience of viewing films into a component that is
compatible with consciousness and one that is alien to it, opening
human perception to a different temporality, experienced either as
“undulations of a great wave,” where “we enter into temporality as a
state of permanent crisis” or, “at a deeper level . . . the earth, and its
nonchronological order in so far as each of us is directly from it and
not from parents: autochthony” (Cinema 2, 112, 115). Such experi-
ence is communal precisely because it escapes the personal and the
subjective and places the body in immediate contact with the world,
engaged in what Hansen terms a “becoming-technological” (252).
To return to The Forgotten, Telly is different from the others
because she, like Baudelaire, has fostered this bodily mimetics, and
she has done so through her intimacy with technology. It is only
when she hears the infant heartbeat that she is able to access the
bodily memory of pregnancy, and that heartbeat comes to her and
to the viewing audience via the technological mediation of the ultra-
sound. While the film seems to fall back on subjective mastery and
personal identity in the end—on Telly’s ability to proclaim, “I have a
son. His name is Sam.”—it is not through subjective willpower that
she is able to preserve that bodily experience, which remains sep-
arate from that proclamation. Telly is only able to reclaim her son
once she has access to a different mode of agency altogether, and
she only attains access to this other agency when her subjective will
has been broken, all her cognitive memories erased. It is then that
the technological recording—the infant heartbeat that can only be
heard and shared through its technological transmission—comes in

to offer access to a subrepresentational and inhuman rhythm, one
that resonates within her, that she can retain without remembrance
and without names. This pregnancy relates neither to the person that
Telly is nor the subject her son will become but rather to a different
bodily pro-creativity. Hansen explains:
Far from naming what is most enduring in cognitive, memorial expe-

rience . . . Erlebnis is made to designate what is most fleeting and
transitory—those shocks that impact us immediately and corporeally
without entering the psyche, leaving traces, or producing representa-
tions. If such shocks nevertheless stay with us indefinitely, it is not
because they are cognitively or psychically unforgettable but rather
because they impact us at the deepest level of our embodied experi-
ence, prior to the mediation of memory. (239)
One could thus argue that Telly’s mourning ritual at the beginning
of the film, the repeated viewing of the same images over and over
again, was not so much about retaining conscious memories of her
son but rather training her mimetic faculty to be able to retain the
subrepresentational shocks of a world given over increasingly to an
inhuman force, a training that allows her to recover that repetitive
technologically produced infant heartbeat—infantile in the strict
sense because non- or prelinguistic—and in so doing ultimately to
become more in tune with that alien force itself, to be its human
receiver and transmitter.
The alternate ending of the film, which is available in the extended
version of it on the Revolution Studios DVD, offers even stronger
support for this interpretation of Telly’s experience. In the theater
ending, Telly lies on the floor of the airline hangar as one of the
aliens, played by Linus Roache, erases her memories of Sam one by
one. When he is finished, she hears the infant heartbeat and is able
to reconstitute her memories of Sam from that one. The alien writhes
in pain, his face becomes distorted, and he is whisked away into the
sky. The suggestion is that he has failed in his experiment and that he
will be punished for it. In the alternate ending, Telly runs through the
hangar and finds herself outside a simulation of Sam in his bedroom
at home. The alien tells her she cannot enter the simulation. As she
tries to enter, electricity surges through her body. She manages to
throw herself into the room and then finds herself back out on the
floor of the hangar, where the alien, as in the original ending, erases
her memories of Sam. But this time, when she is able to remember
Figure 4.2 Telly tries to break into the simulated room of her son, Sam, in
The Forgotten.
Sam anyway, the alien does not writhe in pain but seems satisfied.
The suggestion in this ending is that Telly does not represent a failure
but rather a success, and her reward is to get her son back. In this
alternate ending, not only is Sam reborn to Telly but also Telly is born
into the simulated world with Sam. She is reborn as techno-human.
If she is okay with the alien force in the end of the film, it is because
she has incorporated it into herself and realizes that she has no real
bond with her son without it.
In the end Telly gives up the Platonic struggle to preserve inte-
rior, living memory against the pernicious effects of the exterior,
dead simulacrum and the romantic struggle to preserve the prior-
ity of the natural to the technological, having realized that access
to her son was only and most intimately to be had in the fleeting
bodily impression of the infant offered to her (and to the viewer)
only through technological reproduction. The Forgotten seems at
first to present us with Plato’s nightmare—living memory com-
pletely erased in favor of the dead technological archive. Then it
seems to revive living memory through Telly’s victory over the
aliens, at least partially solidifying Plato’s privileging of the internal-
ity of memory over its external signs. (Plato, however, would take
issue with the fact that such a victory was gained through bodily
conception rather than spiritual). Through careful consideration of

what Telly represents and how she comes to “have” her son, how-
ever, a different story begins to reveal itself. Far from sucking the
life out of living memory, technology itself becomes a life-giving
force; it requires, however, an abandonment of the old human-
centered world and a birth to the new world in which the human is
not distinct or excepted from but rather intimately bound up with
those inhuman forces that surround and penetrate it.
* * *
The question remains that if these films are offering us a way of

engaging more authentically with the technologically-dominated
world, then why must these revelations, and the experiences they
represent, be so horrific? As Hansen points out, this is an essen-
tial aspect of both B enjamin’s portrayal of Erlebnis and Baudelaire’s
experience. Citing Benjamin, Hansen writes, “Baudelaire has por-
trayed this condition in a harsh image. He speaks of a duel in which
the artist, just before being beaten, screams in fright” (249). The real
question is then why we continue to experience fright as a negative
thing. It seems Hansen’s answer would be because for consciousness,
it represents an experience that must be blocked, neutralized, that is
too much to take on, too overwhelming. It does not threaten death
so much as systems overload. But the body has no such limitations.
For the body, fright represents the height of stimulation; it is neither
negative nor positive; these are attributions of consciousness and
language. On this plane, fright “triggers a frenzy of creative activ-
ity that transforms the poet’s body into a medium” (Hansen, 249).
Unlike Freudian sublimation, this creative process is not the result of
psychic screening and rechanneling but rather a creative activity that
arises immediately from the unfiltered shocks that make the human
body a medium for modern life. The human does not become a
machine but rather participates in a “becoming-technological” that
is just as dependent on what the human brings to the relation as
it is on the mechanosphere with which it interacts but that does
not “happen” to the human subject as such, who cannot process its
events in any real way.
The status of this techno-human relation as a becoming explains
also why the women who serve as its ambassadors, Telly and Dahlia,
are portrayed as possibly psychotic. Though Hansen’s version of
becoming is slightly different from Deleuze’s, in both there is a cer-

tain madness involved in experiencing the “molecular” and its sub-
perceptual multiplicity: “For example, Salvador Dali, in attempting to
reproduce his delusions, may go on at length about the rhinoceros
horn; he has not for all of that left neurotic discourse behind. But
when he starts comparing goosebumps to a field of tiny rhinoceros
horns, we get the feeling that the atmosphere has changed and that
we are now in the presence of madness” (Deleuze, A Thousand Pla-
teaus, 27). But again, this becoming-molecular need not be seen in
a negative light; in fact, it represents an alternative, possibly fuller
engagement with the realities and rhythms of the modern world.
These women are only “crazy” to those who are stuck, as it were, on
the subjective, cognitive plane. They do not suffer from delusions
but rather experience the world differently, perhaps more fully and
directly. Their becomings are initiatory, as
all becomings begin with and pass through becoming-woman . . . The

question is not, or not only, that of the organism, history, and subject
of enunciation that oppose masculine to feminine in the great dual-
ism machines. The question is fundamentally that of the body—the
body they steal from us in order to fabricate opposable organisms.
This body is stolen first from the girl. (277, 276)
It is thus through the many becomings-woman explored in the pre-

ceding chapters—not only that of Telly, Dahlia, Cecilia, and Natasha,
but also Sydney, Samara, Genie, Terry, David, and many others—
that horror offers us access to a communal becoming-technological,
a rebirth to the world and a renewal of belief in its wonder and
mystery.
Whatever horror there is in these films is thus something that
we viewers bring to the picture because we have not figured out
how to experience our relation to technology as anything other
than a hostile alien takeover that threatens to erase our humanity.
The films suggest that there is another way of reading them, that
“we” are the aliens and that this is not necessarily a bad thing. As
beings-in-the-world, we have just as much access to reality as we
ever had, but because we have not fostered the means to receive
it, we have convinced ourselves that reality is receding and our
humanity with it.
In the films that form the focus of the final chapter, all preten-
sions to human exceptionality are erased, and the viewer is forced
to confront the possibility of a truly alternate future, one in which

the human will have to redefine its relations to both inhuman crea-
tures and to the divine. A new mythology emerges, one in which the
human has only ever been defined through its relation to technology,
and it is through that same relation that the human might reclaim its
divine spark and commune with its own makers.
5
The End of Patriarchy—

Defining the Postmodern
Prometheus in Splice and
Prometheus
T his chapter examines two recent examples of sci-fi horror—

Vincenzo Natali’s Splice (2010) and Ridley Scott’s Prometheus
(2012)—each of which in different ways offers a portrayal of “our”
future as an inhuman one. Despite the horrific aspects of these
portrayals, I would like to suggest that there is room for optimism,
that these films have revelatory qualities and are thus apocalyptic
in the strict sense; they signal an end but in so doing offer the
possibility for the new. Each film suggests that fundamental mythic
and social structures have undergone significant transformations;
new terms have been introduced that require interrogation. The
inhuman antagonists in these recent films challenge conceptions of
human being that have held sway since the Enlightenment, some
since the beginning of written history, which position the human
as exceptional, dominant, or superior. As Niles Tomlinson notes of
The Ring, “The human itself has become ‘ponderous,’ an ossified relic
trapped by its own conservative ontological categories and traditions,
and made vulnerable by its insistence on its own exceptionality”
(188). The films suggest that only if we free ourselves from this state
of conceptual petrification, will we be able to adopt a new mythos
and found a new human community.
Instead of reinforcing these longstanding structures, Splice and
Prometheus offer counternarratives that ultimately eclipse the more
traditional ones. Splice presents itself as a story about a family trying
to deal with an Oedipal crisis only to undermine the gendered basis

of the Oedipal narrative and to put a multisexed corporate mon-
ster in place of the murdered patriarch. Prometheus reinvents and
hybridizes the story of Creation but without the notions of perfec-
tion and the good that offer validation for its more violent and dis-
turbing aspects. Moral perfection and the ideal are replaced with
sublime spectacle and genetic code. In both films, patriarchs are vio-
lently dispatched; the categories male-female and human-inhuman
are radically called into question; replication replaces creation and
(re)production; and the human finds itself subservient to inhuman
forces that will ultimately determine its destiny.
These films suggest that family relations are no longer deter-
mined by the “natural” link between the biological and the social
or the religio-mythic link between divine will and its material
manifestation. In fact, the family is no longer the microcosm to
the macrocosm of the social. Rather, the social is determined by
the transmission and replication of images and genetic code, their
manipulation and their mutations. In Splice and Prometheus, sexual
reproduction is replaced with technological reproduction, children
born through technological wombs, “related” to their parents only
through technological media and mechanisms. These new relations
bring unprecedented violence into the nuclear family; offspring kill
their fathers, and parents murder their own children. As A. Samuel
Kimball points out in his essay “Conceptions and Contraceptions
of the Future: Terminator 2, The Matrix, and Alien Resurrection,”
narratives that offer true alternatives to the metaphysical/patri-
archal order whose rule is as old as written history are necessarily
horrific, representing as they do “another ‘species’ of thought . . .
In relation to the philosophical ideal of thought as conception, such
a thought will appear to be contraceptive, abortive, infanticidal” (73).
As Kimball also points out, most films that entertain this new form
of thinking and maternity fall back on conception in the end, unable
or unwilling to figure the alternative. Like Alien Resurrection, which
Kimball holds up as one film that does leave open a space for the
contraceptual, Splice and Prometheus offer up the real possibility of a
nonhuman future. In both films, the human is the inseminator of a
technological womb that births monsters. These monsters, however,
are not completely inhuman; they share a certain genetic code with
humanity. They are thus not an alien species come to wipe us out but
rather our own descendants and progenitors.
The End of Patriarchy 113
In Splice and Prometheus, the end of the order of patriarchy

manifests itself both within the nuclear family and within the larger
system of patriarchal capitalism. In the latter, the corporation rep-
resents the patriarchal head. The theme of the evil megacorporation
whose exploits threaten to destroy humanity has been a staple of
science fiction films at least since Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979).1 Such
films, which include the Alien series (Scott, 1979; Cameron, 1986;
Fincher, 1992; Jeunet, 1997), Blade Runner (Scott, 1982), the Ter-
minator series (Cameron, 1984, 1991; Mostow, 2003; McG, 2009),
Robocop (Verhoeven, 1987), Total Recall (Verhoeven, 1990), The
Island (Bay, 2005), District 9 (Blomkamp, 2009), Avatar (Cameron,
2009), Repo Men (Sapochnik, 2010), Splice (Natali, 2010), and Pro-
metheus (Scott, 2012), have generated some of the most impor-
tant and complex visions of the relationship between humans and
techno-science. As bleak and dystopic as the worlds portrayed in
these films are, and as much as the identity of the “natural” human
may be called into question, in almost all of them a certain concep-
tion of the uniquely human is victorious in the end. At the ends of
Total Recall and Blade Runner, for example, Doug (Arnold Schwar-
zenegger) may be dreaming and Decker (Harrison Ford) may be
an android, but it is okay because at least they have preserved their
morality and their sympathetic relations to other human(oid) crea-
tures. In The Island, Terminator Salvation, and Avatar, it is not the
biological humans that are the films’ human heroes, but rather the
clones, robots, and avatars. The essence of humanity is transposed
onto these nonhuman creatures; they are the ones who rebel against
the dehumanizing corporation and sustain through their struggles
certain notions of the uniquely human capacity for freedom, ratio-
nality, higher emotions, and morality that gained currency dur-
ing the Enlightenment and that continue to dominate our image
of humanity. However, in the most recent of these films, Natali’s
Splice and Scott’s Prometheus, there is no human victory in the end.
The significance of modern humanity in each film is emphatically
undermined, as is the patriarchal edifice on which it has always
stood. Both films position themselves in an Oedipal framework only
to violently shatter that frame, suggesting that the founding myth
for posthumanity might be more Promethean in nature. Attempts
to unnaturally evolve humanity lead to monstrous creations that
threaten to supplant it. Multigendered, inhuman corporate powers
reign and threaten to recreate all of humanity in their image.
Splice: A Postmodern Prometheus
Whereas many of the films treated in previous chapters portray inhu-

man reproduction in the form of the (genetic) replication of images,
Splice links such replication to corporate power, suggesting not only
that genetic engineering has interfered with the process of sexual
reproduction but also that the individuals produced are linked to the
“mother” not through the biological or the social but rather through
the technological and the corporate. Further, corporate power is not
what it used to be; unmoored from the nuclear family and the types
of gendered individuals it produced, the corporation takes over as
the guarantor of social cohesion, not by imposing hierarchical order
but rather through an acceleration of the hegemony of consumer
“needs.”
Splice presents itself as a contemporary version of Frankenstein,
and indeed it does share many narrative elements with its nine-
teenth-century predecessor.2 In the film, two brilliant geneticists
and lovers, Clive (Adrien Brody) and Elsa (Sarah Polley), have been
requisitioned by a pharmaceutical company whose research divi-
sion is known by the acronym N.E.R.D. to create animal hybrids;
the proteins from these creatures are to be harvested to improve the
health of farm animals and thus to stimulate production in the meat
industry. Clive and Elsa ignore the commands of their corporate
supervisors, and obvious ethical issues, and decide to go ahead and
mix human DNA with the hybrid animal DNA to create a human-
animal hybrid whose proteins might be able to cure human genetic
disorders like Alzheimer’s and cancer. Like Victor Frankenstein,
however, Clive’s and Elsa’s true intent is not altruistic: they seek the
fame and glory that would come from being the first to produce
such a creature. Their ambition is already a perfect match for cor-
porate greed, despite the apparent refusal of the corporation to fund
this aspect of the project when the film begins.
In this context, Splice performs one more turn of the screw on the
Prometheus myth. A mythic symbol of the acquisition of technol-
ogy through superior intelligence, Prometheus, by giving humanity
the divine gift of fire, transformed the species, raising the human
above the other struggling brutes, but also giving it more power to
destroy itself. Prometheus’s transgression won him eternal punish-
ment from Zeus, whose fire it was that he stole. Mary Shelley may
have had several reasons for subtitling her novel Frankenstein “The
Modern Prometheus,”3 but applicable to this context is the notion
that, through the use of modern technology and scientific knowl-

edge, Victor, like Prometheus, procures a secret that man was never
meant to know, a secret that threatens to alter and perhaps even
destroy humanity altogether. Splice could quite fittingly be subtitled
“the postmodern Prometheus,” but this epithet does not apply to
the mad scientists, Clive and Elsa. It may be the scientists’ knowl-
edge and labor that produce the human-animal hybrid, but it is
the economic power of the corporation that funds and will distrib-
ute the product. In Natali’s version of the Prometheus myth, Zeus
(N.E.R.D.) is thrilled that Prometheus (Clive and Elsa) stole the fire,
and he will make sure that he, Zeus, ultimately profits from it. Clive
and Elsa are Prometheus Bound from the very beginning of their
story: the corporation owns them, their ideas, their labor, and its
product. They are not free to distribute their ideas or their product
to the human public without the corporation’s sponsorship. It is ulti-
mately Zeus who gives humanity fire in this scenario, and for that
reason, fire does not symbolize freedom from the condition of mere
beast, but rather a more insidious form of control by the corporate
“gods.” Moreover, what we find in Splice is that the corporate gods
do not answer to the tyrannous patriarch Zeus but rather to a mon-
strous Gaia-Tartarus hybrid.
Our first sign that the postmodern version of the Prometheus
myth involves a shift in gender comes with the successful “birth” of
Clive’s and Elsa’s human-animal hybrid creature. Unlike Franken-
stein’s monster, this one is at first gendered female, and she is not
a hideous amalgam of dead body parts but a disturbingly attractive
woman with animal features and mannerisms. Played by actress Del-
phine Chanéac, the creature is hairless and possesses hinged legs,
hooved feet, and a barbed tail. Elsa names her “Dren,” the anagram
of the corporation’s research title. While Elsa in particular is not
disgusted with her creation, as Frankenstein is, the problem Clive
and Elsa face once the creature exists is similar to the plight of Fran-
kenstein. In each case, the monstrous creation has too many human
traits to be treated otherwise, but it has too many monstrous traits
to be assigned a place in the biologically human category. A central
question in each narrative is, what is the status of such a being, given
its origins and makeup, and how should it be treated? This question
is ultimately rendered moot in each case because of the threat that
the creature poses to humanity. In Frankenstein, this threat is seem-
ingly vanquished with the death of both Frankenstein and his crea-
ture. Splice does not allow for such closure. While the father-creator
Figure 5.1 “Imprinting”: The genetically engineered hybrid baby of Splice

interacts with its “mother,” Elsa.
is destroyed, the mother-creator is not, nor is the corporate CEO

who funds her research.
While Splice received mixed reviews upon its release, those critics
who appreciated it agree that the reason it stands out from other sci-fi
horror films is not simply because of its bioethical themes but rather
because of its disturbing implications for the future of the human
family. More overtly than the films in the previous chapter, Splice
presents us with a nuclear family not only broken but completely per-
verted by the technology that at first makes it possible. Lisa Kennedy
of The Denver Post writes that Natali is “not simply pondering the
ethics of bioengineering—that’s rather tired—but also looking at the
moral challenges of parenthood in a tweaked context. And because
Natali plays with questions—but doesn’t settle on answers—Splice
raises uncomfortable gender notions it doesn’t resolve” (para. 4).
For the first half of the film, the critical focus seems to be on Elsa,
not only on her obsessive monomania with regard to the experiment
but also on her perverse maternal relation to her experimental sub-
ject, Dren. It seems that the viewing audience is supposed to identify
with Clive, whose moral stance with regard to the experiment and
the creature is as uncertain as the viewing audience’s. Like Clive, the
viewing audience is supposed to feel that the experiment never should
have taken place. Also like him, we are curious to see its outcomes.
Figure 5.2 Dren and Elsa of Splice.
However, once Dren is born, both Clive and the audience are per-
plexed as to whether she should even continue to live. When Clive
attempts to drown Dren while she is still a child, his agony matches the
viewer’s, who can already see that the creature is likely to be dangerous
the older and stronger she gets, but the fact that it looks so much like a
human child gives us pause. Elsa, on the other hand, seems to care for
Dren much as one would care for a human child. She shields and pro-
tects Dren, coddles and nurtures her, all in a laboratory setting where
she is also studying her. So while Elsa seems blinded by both ambition
and emotion, Clive seems doubly like the voice of reason. The film
even suggests that Elsa’s perverse maternal relation to Dren has to do
with her own upbringing by an abusive and neglectful mother.
The film thus overtly characterizes the creation of Dren and her
subsequent destructiveness as a result of Elsa’s (female) psychologi-
cal complex, a complex that it seems will be repeated with the child
Dren. The film continues in this vein, leading the audience to believe
that Dren experiences some version of the Electra complex, that
she begins to covet Clive sexually and begins to resent Elsa as her
rival. Not only does Elsa have destructive psychological issues, but it
seems she has also passed these on to her progeny, Dren. However,
like many of the films treated earlier in this work, the effectiveness
of Splice comes largely from the way the film leads the viewers into
misreadings based on traditional narrative structures and plotlines

and then pulls the rug out from underneath them in a shocking way.
Just as the children of the films treated in chapters 2 and 4 are not
simply human and do not suffer from human complexes, so Dren is
not and does not either. Dren may have a complex, but if she does, it
is not an Electra complex—not only is Dren not totally human, but,
as it turns out, she is also not totally female.4
Ironically, it is precisely when Dren seems most female that her
sexuality comes into question. In a scene that destroys all of the moral,
psychosexual, and social categories the film has set in place for the
viewing audience, Clive and Dren have sex, and Elsa walks in right
in the middle of it. Michael Ordoña of the Los Angeles Times offers a
very accurate prediction of the audience reaction to this scene: “Per-
haps the film’s most interesting and nerve-jangling component is the
evolving dynamic among the childless couple and their experiment-
pet-baby-monster. The authenticity of that triangle is sure to gener-
ate some of the most uncomfortable laughter you’ll hear at a movie
this year” (para. 5). The viewing audience of which I was a part when
I first saw this film uttered all sorts of expletives at this point. No one
could believe it was happening. On so many levels, it seems wrong. It
is incestuous, bestial, and pedophilic all at once, which of course is to
see everything from Clive’s side and to forget that Dren seemed very
much to want it, a mistake based on the anthropomorphism that the
viewing audience cannot help but adopt with regard to the creature
Dren and how she is portrayed in the first half of the film. Despite
her animality, the film asks us to see Dren as a female human child
and to apply the appropriate psychosexual formula to her. However,
after she has sex with Clive, all previous interpretations are blown
to smithereens. Dren is not a human child but rather a new type of
being, made possible by human-created technology but ultimately
surpassing the human in its adaptive capabilities.
The sexual act between Clive and Dren is radically unsettling,
but the aftermath is even worse. It seems at first as if Dren sickens
and dies. Clive and Elsa even bury her. As it turns out, however, she
was really going through a metamorphosis. When it is complete, she
emerges from her grave, this time in a male form. This metamor-
phosis forces us to revise all previous interpretations of both Dren’s
character and Clive’s. At this point, the viewer begins to suspect that
it is not only Dren’s psychosexuality or her status as a human being
that is at issue, but also Clive’s, whose position the audience has iden-
tified as its own.
Once Clive begins to be seduced by Dren and finally has sex with
her, the audience can no longer identify with him, at least not con-
sciously, for he has broken the most primal of taboos, consummating
the Oedipal crime in a much more overt fashion even than The Ring.
Elsa’s transgression—the experiment itself—seems to pale in com-
parison to his. Throughout the first portion of the film, the audience
sympathizes with Clive because he is led to his misdeeds by Elsa,
the overly ambitious female who leads her man into dangerous ter-
ritory. As does The Ring, Splice calls upon the Judeo-Christian origin
story, linking the woman to the evil technology that will sever the
human from its own nature. The creation of Dren, like the watching
of the viral videotape, seems to be a reenactment of the Fall.5 As it
turns out, it is really more of a bookend. As Paul Virilio points out
in Ground Zero, the death of God at the hands of reason/science was
the end result of the “Luciferian bargain” struck up between Eve and
the serpent in the garden, the promise that Eve would be “like God,”
that she would become immortal and gain the knowledge reserved
for the divine (9). Both Virilio’s works and Natali’s film suggest that
techno-science has begun to offer the fulfillment of that promise,
the human without limits, which is, of course, necessarily no longer
human. It is thus fitting that Dren, with her barbed tail and hooved
feet, so closely resembles Lucifer. She is the result of a Luciferian pact
that has taken thousands of years to come to fruition.
That being said, it seems at first as if the film will attempt to
restabilize the moral order after the fateful union of Clive and Dren.
Clive’s guilt, Elsa’s horror, and the fact that it seems like Dren dies
after the sex act, seem to offer such a restabilization, but this is only
momentary. When Dren is reborn as male, he rapes his mother, Elsa,
repeating both Clive’s transgression against the incest taboo and Elsa’s
transgression against the laws of nature. Concerning the latter, ear-
lier in the film, Elsa attempts to explain Dren’s origin to her by telling
her, “I am inside you. A part of me is in you.” When Dren rapes Elsa,
he repeats, “Inside you.” He then kills Clive, and Elsa in turn kills
him. With both Clive and Dren dead, it seems that things should go
back to normal. The monstrous progeny is dead, as is everyone who
knew about its existence, except Elsa. But Elsa will not give up her
project. Moreover, Elsa is pregnant, and the audience suspects that
the child may have two fathers; we have seen her have unprotected
sex with Clive, but we have also seen her raped by Dren. In the end,
a pregnant Elsa sits at the table with the female corporate executive
who had initially forbade her from continuing her research. The two
have struck a deal. Elsa will create another Dren for the corporation.
In the final scene, Elsa and the female CEO stand silhouetted in the
window of a skyscraper, Elsa with her pregnant belly and the female
CEO behind her, much taller, her androgynous silhouette looking
strangely like the hairless, monstrous Dren.
This final scene suggests that the future will involve a new family
structure. Like Frankenstein, it does seem at first that Elsa’s goal is
to be able to create life without the use of a human womb, except
the family that emerges from her experiment will not be the moth-
erless family of Frankenstein but a fatherless one. Early in the film,
when Clive mentions to Elsa the possibility of their having a child,
she responds that that will not happen until men can carry the chil-
dren themselves. Once Clive realizes that Elsa has used her own
DNA to create Dren, he believes Elsa has never wanted to have a
child with him, that she wants instead to create her own child with-
out him and without having to go through pregnancy. However, in
the end we see that Elsa is quite willing to carry Clive’s child. She
has not disavowed pregnancy or biological conception altogether,
but it is clear that human pregnancy comes only after technological
conception. Rather than natural pregnancy coming before techno-
logical pregnancy, the technological womb reflecting the natural
one, Elsa’s human pregnancy in the end becomes a projection of the
technological pregnancy that resulted in the birth of the human-
animal hybrid previously. This reverses and thus radically calls into
question the natural/unnatural dichotomy, as well as the priority
of the natural human over the technologically produced hybrid.
The human becomes a reflection of the techno-human monster
and not the other way around. Creator and creation have switched
positions.
In addition, this techno-human pregnancy seems to require the
death of the Father and all he represents. Not only does the father,
Clive, break the incest taboo in a sort of regressive techno-primi-
tivism, he is also murdered by the phallus of that same “daughter”
with whom he broke the taboo. After the male Dren rapes Elsa, Clive
attacks him, and Dren plunges his tail into Clive’s chest. The one who
takes over the father’s position is the corporate mother, a hermaph-
roditic creature like Dren, with her skyscraper, her financial power,
and her technological womb. It was her prohibition that led to the
creation of Dren, and yet that assault on her authority does not kill
her but only serves to make her stronger. Just like Dren’s regenera-
tive tail, one can cut off her phallus, but it will just grow back again.
The creation of Dren becomes just another source of income for the
corporation. It does not care about the death of the three males at
the hands of its creation (Clive, his brother, and the male supervisor
are all murdered by the male version of Dren). In fact, one might say
that Elsa, the other perverse mother, does not mourn them either.
Unlike Prometheus or Victor Frankenstein, one could not say for
sure that Elsa suffers for her transgression. She is raped by her cre-
ation and must kill it, but one cannot help but think that she is tri-
umphant in the end. After all, all obstacles to the unfettered pursuit
of her research have been removed. One might think that she would
be mourning the death of her lover, Clive, but there are several rea-
sons why his death might be a relief to her. It was his pesky outdated
moralism that kept getting in her way; he tried to pressure her into
motherhood; and he betrayed her with her own creation. In the end,
she has exactly what she has wanted all along: permission to continue
her experiments using human DNA in the light of day with full cor-
porate sponsorship, unimpeded by ethical questions that lag behind
the steps already taken, the lines already crossed.
Clive, and the modern human perspective that he represents,
finds the seamlessness with which Elsa combines science and moth-
erhood very disturbing, and I think the viewing audience does too.
But perhaps this is a backward-looking attitude, one not suited to the
creatures we now are and are able to create/become. We may not be
ready to confront the reality that the Elsa-corporate mother-Dren
triad represents, but that does not mean it has not already to some
extent replaced the old mother-father-child triad of the modern
family. Clive is still bound to a certain tension, bred by the Enlight-
enment, between the purity of reason and the equally human capac-
ity for sympathy and emotion. These two are the same for Elsa. It
is not the case that she has no feeling or passion for Dren. In fact,
she emphatically exclaims that she loves Dren, but this passion is
not purely maternal. It is the passion of both the mother and the
(technologically enabled) creator in one. Dren is both Elsa’s biologi-
cal child and her scientific creation; two forms of conception are
involved here, each with its own corresponding passion. This may
seem like a futuristic vision of motherhood, but in truth it is not far
from our current reality. With pregnancy becoming more and more
of a technologically mediated event, and the raising of children more
and more of a technological experiment (we immediately hook them
up to video, audio, Internet, Skype, etc.), today’s mothers have more
in common with Elsa than we might wish to admit.
While we may cringe at Elsa’s relationship to Dren, there can be

no doubt that the end of the film asks us to consider the future that
Dren represents as our own. As Donna Haraway noted over fifteen
years ago, “By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we
are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and
organism; in short, we are cyborgs” (8). Like Dren, we are hybrid
creatures, part human and part nonhuman. Dren does not represent
the takeover of the human by an alien species but the transformation
of the human into something else, a process that has already begun.
What we see when we look in the mirror that Dren holds up to us
is a beautiful monster, a multisexed creature with a totally different
relation to birth and death, but yet totally embodied. She is sensible,
intuitive, and conceptual, but not in any ways that we can interpret
according to old Enlightenment models of humanity and modern
notions of the structure of human consciousness and cognition.
When we try to apply such models to a creature like Dren, we find
ourselves immediately in error. We find, as Clive does, that Dren’s
desires shatter the very structure of law/transgression upon which
we base our understanding of human desire. Dren’s coupling with
Clive is radically disruptive in two ways. On the one hand, as view-
ers we instinctively think it is wrong, that a line (or more than one)
has been crossed that ought never to be crossed. But on the other
hand, since we cannot identify exactly what type of creature Dren
is, we also cannot locate where the line is that has been crossed. She
is Clive’s child in name but not biologically, so it is technically not
incest. She seems to be a child, and yet she grows and learns at such
an accelerated rate that we cannot be sure what her age in human
years would be, so we cannot rightly call the act pedophilia. She is
part animal, but seems so human that one could not rightly call the
act bestial. And so we are forced to reassess our initial judgment
against Clive. Perhaps it is not the case that Clive desires her because
she is off-limits, but rather because she has no limits.
For example, death takes on a new meaning in the body of Dren.
It is not a limit but always a passage to something else, to a new way
of being embodied. Elsa and Clive believe Dren to be dead four sepa-
rate times in the film, and each time she is instead in a transition
phase, metamorphosing into something else. It starts from the time
she emerges from the techno-womb as an inert cocoon. From this
first death, she becomes a human-like child. When she appears to
be about four or five, she gets a high fever. As they dip her in cold
water to bring her fever down, Clive attempts to drown her, only to
find that she begins to breathe with gills. After Clive has sex with her,
Dren appears so dead that they actually bury her, only to have her
emerge from her grave as a male. Finally, after his/her mother brains
him/her at the end of the film, we know that some part of Dren will
live on in Elsa’s future experiments, if not in the child she carries in
her womb. Like the Titan Prometheus, Dren is immortal, capable of
dying again and again.
We see Dren cry and we see her laugh, but we have no way of
gauging joy or suffering in such a creature. Dren conceptualizes, but
she does not speak, in spite of the fact that she apparently has the
capability. This is another indication that she refuses, or does not
have to, enter the symbolic system that structures human meaning
and desire. Because she does not speak, she does not give us much to
go on in terms of interpreting her desires, her experience, her inten-
tions, or her reasoning. Since we know that she can speak if she wants
to, it seems that she willfully keeps herself a mystery. In so doing,
she holds onto her inhumanity as an equally important, if not more
important, aspect of her being. She refuses the humanity offered to
her, which is most evident in the scene in which Elsa brings back to
her the cat that she had wanted to keep earlier in the film. Elsa had
taken it away from her because she did not know if Dren might have
some allergies she did not yet know about. When she returns the cat,
Dren stabs it with her barbed tail. At this point in the film, the viewer
is still in the process of anthropomorphizing Dren, and so the first
interpretation of Dren’s act is that she is rebelling against Elsa because
she sees Elsa as a rival for Clive’s attentions. However, once this inter-
pretation is shattered, we have to go back to such scenes with a new
lens. Her killing of the cat, like her refusal to speak, is one more sign
of her refusal to be known and categorized. If she is rebelling against
Elsa at this point, it is not against Elsa the modern mother but rather
Elsa the scientist-mother, the one whose parenting is based not on
the desire to procreate and raise but to produce and study.
The family triad that is set up in the beginning of the film—Clive
(father), Elsa (mother) and Dren (child)—is quickly undone. Dren’s
way of being cannot allow for it. The end of the film suggests that
the future has nothing to do with God-the-Father’s or man-the-
patriarch’s laws, nor about the transgression of those laws. Both
patriarchal figures are dead by the end of the film, and the future lies
in the hands of two perverse mothers. The first is Elsa, whose fetus
is probably a human-monster hybrid. The second is the female CEO,
whose silhouette mirrors the figure of the monstrous Dren, who is
neither male nor female, neither human nor inhuman. Unlike the
father’s paternal no, the monstrous female CEO’s nos can easily turn
into yeses, just like the corporation’s progeny can turn from male
to female. It is the corporation that owns the technological womb
from which Dren was born, as well as the research Elsa has done,
and perhaps by the end even Elsa’s own womb. All forms of concep-
tion have in this way been incorporated. In this regard, Toronto Star
film critic Peter Howell’s suggestion that “parentage has broader and
scarier implications here than in monster movies of yore” is a bit of
an understatement (para. 3).
The violent disruption of the traditional family structure in Splice
occupies so much of the viewing audience’s attention that what
should be the more disturbing implications of the film are somewhat
veiled. Dren’s problematic status foregrounds another issue that the
film explores—namely, the changing face of corporate being and the
extension of that mode of being into all aspects of human existence.
A comparison to Frankenstein is helpful here to illuminate the dif-
ference between the modern struggle to contain the paradoxes of
human being under capitalism and the postmodern issue that Splice
portrays: the corporate takeover of humanity that constitutes con-
sumer culture.
In her article “A Troubled Legacy: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and
the Inheritance of Human Rights,” Diana Reese argues that Franken-
stein’s monster embodies the paradoxes of Enlightenment thought
and, more importantly, the Rights of Man derived therefrom. The two
major strains of Enlightenment thought, the romantic and the ratio-
nalist,6 while sharing many of the same tenets, are at their core contra-
dictory; the romantic privileges the capacity for sympathy and pity in
its definition of the human, and the rationalist privileges the capacity
for pure rational judgment untainted by the claims of the senses. Hav-
ing to fit both of these models to be considered human, Frankenstein’s
monster faces a grave challenge. According to Reese, while he is able to
elicit sympathy and pity, his nonresemblance to the human makes the
romantic, who relies on the senses, unable to accept him as a human
being (52–53). It is only in the rationalist conception of the human
that the monster can find a place, and then not as a human but as an
“other rational being” (54–55).7 As Reese argues, the problem with this
positioning is that he asks for this status in the name of the subjective
and the empirical—he wants to be happy and he wants a mate—so the
nature of his request goes against the objective purity of the rationalist
human (57). Further, because his request is “politicized,” the monster
comes to embody the paradox of capitalist being: individual interests

can only be declared through identification with a social group and
so exist in the same way that the general interest does. Therefore, the
monster’s demand that Victor create for him a female so that he could
become a species, a social group and not a lone individual, poses too
much of a threat to the “unreal universality”8 of rights-bearers, and
Victor must refuse (65). And although he is gendered male, Reese sees
in his maker’s rejection of his petition for reproduction the abjection
of the material substrate of nineteenth-century capitalist society, peo-
pled by all of those who resembled human beings but who could not
claim human rights (women, children, slaves, servants, etc.) and upon
whose existence the production and reproduction of modern society
nonetheless depended (58).
Dren would seemingly face many of the same problems that con-
front Frankenstein’s creature. In spite of the fact that she has human
parts, she was not naturally born, she does not resemble the human
physically, and the creation of a species for her might spell the end
of humanity. However, unlike Frankenstein’s creature, Dren does not
wish to be human; she does not ask anything of her maker. Instead,
she remains mute in the name of her inhumanity, embodying in a
much more radical fashion the inhumanity of objectively univer-
sal reason and its projects on the one hand and the inhumanity of
the empirical, embodied individual on the other hand, which in her
case is never repressed in an Oedipalizing process. Unlike Franken-
stein’s creature, Dren does not represent the problematic status of the
human individual under patriarchal capitalism. Her similarity to the
corporate CEO, the fact that it is the corporation whose product she
truly is, and the fact that both she and the CEO are at least initially
gendered female, suggests that she represents a multigendered cor-
porate individuality, a melding of individual and general will. While
Dren is not human, she embodies the general will of the corporation,
as well as the power that goes along with that, and is thus not subject
to the same laws as Frankenstein’s creature. The corporation could
in fact be considered another manifestation of the monstrous other
rational being to which Enlightenment rationalism must extend its
hand, one who, unlike Frankenstein’s creature, can claim the rights
of man and of the citizen despite not being human. Like Dren, the
corporation is a unified though protean multiplicity, and, at least in
Splice, its form of power is no longer linked to the patriarch but is
actually patricidal. Unlike Frankenstein’s monster, Dren will not be
destroyed but will instead be reproduced and inserted into human
bodies. The existence of corporate individuality, embodied by Dren,

does not bode well for the future of humanity in general.
Elsa’s problematic maternity, linked with the death of the Father,
is only one stage in the process whereby the social is transformed
into the corporate and the human is transformed into something
else. The next stage is the assumption of the maternal role by the
corporation. The resemblance of the corporate CEO to the hybrid
monster, its own product, symbolizes the “genetic” inheritance of
the one from the other. Elsa may have contributed her DNA to the
production of Dren, but it is the CEO whom Dren most resembles.
Elsa becomes merely a wet nurse in this scenario, and her version
of reproduction without human womb is overtaken by the corpora-
tion’s still more disturbing intent: to insert Dren DNA into various
human beings, ostensibly to extend human life, but really to extend
the life of the corporation into the bodies of its consumers. It is no
longer, then, a question of general versus individual will; the indi-
vidual will becomes the general in a process of incorporation that
will connect the individual umbilically to the corporate mother.
The results of such a possible future are summed up in Elsa’s ending
statement: “What’s the worst that can happen?” The only thing that
can happen when proteins with such potential for metamorphosis
and regeneration are inserted into human beings is that humans
become something other than human. Further, both Elsa and the
corporate mother know that when two male Drens meet, they are
liable to rip each other apart.9 The future of humanity looks bleak
indeed.
Splice is not the only film to figure the corporation as a perverse
mother, but of the ones that do, there are very few that follow the
more radical implications of this shift in power relations. Miguel
Sapochnik’s 2010 film, Repo Men, for example, seems as if it will,
but ultimately stops short. In Repo Men, a corporation aptly named
The Union has developed the technology to create artificial organs,
as well as prosthetic devices to enhance hearing, vision, speed, and
so forth. While it seems that the corporation’s intent is a benevolent
one, it charges such exorbitant fees for the implants that no one who
gets them can ultimately afford to pay. Once they lose the ability to
make payments, they have 96 days before the “repo men” come after
them to repossess their organs, the repossession of which of course
kills them in the process. A huge percentage of the population, it
seems, has one or more of The Union’s products inside them and are
thus bodily owned by the corporation. Very literally, no one can live
without the corporation’s products, and The Union keeps track of its
“children” through the use of scanning devices that detect the pres-
ence of its organs in their bodies, in addition to registering whether
they have made their payments on time and, if not, how much time
they have left before they are repossessed. The drama turns on when
one of the repo men (Jude Law) receives an artificial heart, finds he
can no longer perform his function as a repo man now that he him-
self has faced death and has one of these artificial organs, and thus
defaults on his loan. The film allows you to believe at first that he
finally escapes the corporation with his organ, his life, and the life of
the woman he loves, but we find out that in fact his brain is attached
to some machine that produces these lovely dreams of freedom,
when he himself is more enslaved to the corporation than ever.
Despite its pessimistic ending, Repo Men, like so many other sci-
fi apocalypse films, sustains the notions of humanity and free will
developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The future it
envisions is bleak, but it is still peopled with humans. Further, while
the corporation may be implicitly female in body, it is undoubtedly
male in mind, its CEO played by Liev Schreiber. In fact, all of the
action of Repo Men, like the much older film Blade Runner (1982),
involves the struggles of male characters to come to terms with their
identities in relation to the corporate Father, on the one hand, and
their artificial female counterparts on the other. The female leads in
both films, Rachel (Sean Young) in Blade Runner and Beth (Alice
Braga) in Repo Men, are hybrid creatures whom the men in each
film have been taught to despise. Rachel is an android, and Beth’s
body is enhanced in several ways by The Union’s products. Decker
(Harrison Ford) of Blade Runner is trained to track down and kill
androids, and Remy, to murder Union children through reposses-
sion. The women in each case, though themselves partially inhuman,
call upon the men’s humanity to save them from the inhuman cor-
poration. Despite their status as manufactured beings, the women
possess all the essential traits of modern humanity and ultimately
serve to support the continuation of that human ideal.
The future that Splice envisions, in contrast, is an inhuman one,
and perhaps this is why the film must end at the threshold of this
future. Dren’s inhumanity is too radical to allow for a human victory.
The female in Splice is not reduced to an embodiment of otherness
created by and always ultimately under patriarchal rule. She does not
serve as a vehicle for the reestablishment of masculine identity nor
the return of those human values associated with modernity. Rather,
her existence signals the end of such logics and the impossibility of
the narratives traditionally associated with them.
However, Dren is not completely inhuman. She is a human prod-
uct; she does have human DNA, and her human appearance suggests
that she represents not a future in which the human has been elimi-
nated by an alien takeover but one in which it has been transformed
into another kind of being. This transformation has already begun;
we are already corporate individuals, connected to the corporate
Mother through satellites and digital cables and through the desires
that she manufactures for us. In this sense, Dren’s future is our future,
and she is correct when she claims, in the only words she ever utters,
that she is “inside you.”
In the future that Dren represents, production and reproduc-
tion are combined in such a way that the product becomes not just
something the corporation will use to assume more power and con-
trol over its humans workers and consumers but which will radi-
cally alter its human constituents to resemble the corporation’s own
monstrous mode of being. Consumers will literally be incorporated,
perhaps the end and ultimate goal of corporate logic. Everyone will
be reborn as a part of corporate individualism: one no longer repro-
duces, one replicates; one is no longer sexed, one is multisexed; one
is not an individual, one is a product. It will be a brave new world
in which no one will do without the refinements that enslave them
to the Queen Bee; they will all be her children, and they will make
their payments on time or they will be eradicated. These refinements
will not make them ideal humans; instead, they will become shape-
shifting multiple beings who may rip each other apart. But since they
can be replicated, death will no longer be what it was. And since the
corporation itself is inhuman, what does it care for the human race?
The future of the corporation does not depend on whether or not it
is destructive of any or all of humanity. It is Dren who controls the
future, and Dren does not care about destruction, even her own, nor
about ends or means or values. This is why her future, and our future,
remains open in the end.
Splice does not offer much hope to the world within its diegetic
reality but perhaps more to the one who views it. While the violence
of Splice does not cross over to the viewer’s world in the same way
as it does in The Ring, the viewer’s encounter with the creature Dren
is in many ways more profound. Through the wonders of computer
animation, the filmmakers created one of the most effective mon-
sters in movie history, not because she is physically imposing but
because her image is so profoundly disturbing. In her more vulner-

able moments, she appears to us with all of the innocence of the child
or the animal: a state we seek to protect, an ideal impossible to (re)
acquire. When she rises up against her human makers and captors,
she is the divine animal, sublime in her powers of adaptation and
transformation. It is perhaps her nonhuman tendencies more than
her human ones that call to what is more than human in us to move
beyond the limiting categories by which we have defined and con-
fined our humanity and to encounter the sublimity of the nonhuman
other.
Another Postmodern Prometheus
Ridley Scott’s Prometheus (2012), as its title suggests, offers us yet

another version of the story of the creation of humanity, its transfor-
mation from a “natural” being to a technological one. While the plot
involves the search for origins, the ultimate purpose of the film is to
offer the twenty-first century a creation story of its own, complete
with all of the sound and fury of myths of old. Prometheus celebrates
the wonders of modern technology by offering a breathtaking spec-
tacle, combining this celebration with a creation story assembled
from origin myths from around the world. The film contains ele-
ments of Genesis, the Prometheus myth, Oedipus Rex, and Franken-
stein, as well as Incan, Mayan, and Egyptian mythology, in addition
to a few twists of its own. Prometheus also pays tribute to Scott’s
earlier portrayals of the human-inhuman relation in Alien (1979)
and Blade Runner (1982), moving beyond these earlier challenges to
human supremacy to an otherworldly setting in which the human
is decidedly not at the top of the food chain and suggesting that the
origin story of the twenty-first century is not only transnational but
also transhuman.
Prometheus deals with many types of inhumanity, embodied in
four distinct entities: the corporation, the android, the “engineer,”
and the alien. All of these entities are inhuman but ultimately rea-
soning beings. While the first two are presented as human creations
and the latter two not, the human is inextricably linked to them all,
their destinies and ours intimately intertwined, so that the search
for the origins of humanity is necessarily also a search for theirs. At
the heart of this search for the human, if it wishes to hold its unique
status among reasoning beings, is the issue of soullessness and what
type of immortality one can hope for without one. Full of children,
human and inhuman alike, searching for the Father, the ultimate
meaning and truth of their existence, Prometheus has one big daddy
complex. While it seems at first that the hero of the film is the human
Dr. Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace), it is instead the android, David
(Michael Fassbender), who emerges as the film’s hero, embodying
the film’s true conflict. With no human pretensions towards higher
emotions, moral feeling, or idealism, David grins mirthlessly as his
human creators learn that they are as soulless and artificial as he. He
knows that the search for origins is futile and will likely lead to the
destruction of humanity, his own creator, in whose image he was
made but to whom he feels no sense of obligation.
In keeping with its colossal theme, Prometheus begins and ends
in sublime spectacle. The opening scene takes us to the edge of a
magnificent cataract above which hovers a huge black spacecraft.
A (male) being similar to a human but obviously much larger and
stronger ingests a black fluid; his body disintegrates, breaking down
into the smallest of elements, into strands of DNA, and mixes with
the river at the base of the waterfall. This marks the birth of human-
ity, derived not from apes but from superior beings and not from
natural processes but artificial ones. Combining themes from cre-
ationism and evolutionary theory, the film posits a maker, referred
to as an “engineer,” who is not so different from common mythic
figurations of God or gods—superior beings, more knowing and
powerful than the human, who live above, in the sky, and who cre-
ated the human in his/its likeness—except that these creators lend
not their will, word, or command to their creations but rather their
DNA. Makers and progenitors, they do not create the human in
their image but from their genetic sequence. But unlike “natural”
evolution, which, despite its emphasis on random mutation, is still
couched in terms of forward movement, there is no sense of progress
here. Humans are not the more complex descendants of simpler pro-
genitors but rather an inferior race manufactured by superior engi-
neers. The engineer, with its perfectly muscled physique and marble
skin, represents the ideal of male beauty and virility that inspired
the statues of ancient Greek gods and heroes. The human race has
apparently not attained this level of perfection. As in the Genesis
story, the human in Prometheus is a disappointment to its makers,
and they apparently decided to destroy us, not by flood but by bio-
logical weapon: a parasite that would infiltrate our bodies, transform
us into monsters, turn us against ourselves, and ultimately destroy
us. Fortunately or unfortunately, the engineers’ weapon apparently
Figure 5.3 The engineer of Prometheus.
turned against them, and the mission to destroy humanity failed.

Unlike most mythic representations of God or gods, these creators,
though superior, are not immortal. Immortality, or at least a certain
type of it, is instead reserved only for the human-created android (a
point I will return to).
After presenting us with the creation story, Prometheus brings
us to “modern” times (2089), in which pioneering archaeologist
Dr. Elizabeth Shaw and her boyfriend, Charlie Holloway (Logan
Marshall-Green), have located an ancient cave drawing, a star map
left by the engineers, presumably to lead us to them. Shaw manages
to secure funding from the Weyland Cybernetics Corporation to
launch a space mission to what they believed would be the engineers’
home planet. It is ironic that the mission to discover the origins of
humanity is funded by a manufacturer of artificial humans, as this
will turn out to be the truth of humanity as well; not carved out of the
earth by a divine creator, the human was ultimately an experiment.
Like Elsa in Splice, the engineers apparently decided to mix their own
DNA with other material to see what would happen, and humanity
was the result.
Dr. Shaw wants to believe that these “first humans” love their cre-
ation and will embrace us as their children. While in hibernation
on board the USS Prometheus, we discover Dr. Shaw’s true motiva-

tions, as she dreams of her own late father trying to explain to her
as a child why she should believe in God. It is not really humanity’s
origins with which Elizabeth is concerned but rather her own; it is
her own individual existence she needs to validate. The head of the
corporation, Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce), also has selfish motives,
ultimately desiring his own personal immortality, which he believes
the engineers will grant him and which he clearly does not plan to
bequeath as his legacy to his own biological child, Meredith Vick-
ers (Charlize Theron). Vickers heads the interplanetary mission, not
because she wishes to see her father gain immortality but because
she wants to be there when he fails/dies, to know that she will be able
to take over as head of the Weyland Corp. in her own right. She tells
her father, “A king has his reign, and then he dies. That is the natural
order of things.”10
As in Splice, corporate relations in Prometheus replace familial
ties, and the nuclear family is a site of open antagonism, even and
especially when it is made possible through artificial means. Like
Vickers, the android David, manufactured by the Weyland Corp. and
thus in a strange way Vickers’s brother, also has a father complex. The
two participate in a form of sibling rivalry. Their father, Weyland,
favors David over Meredith but also bemoans his lack of humanity:
“He [David] is the closest thing to a son I will ever have. Unfortu-
nately, he is not human . . . The one thing that David will never have
is a soul.” Despite his soullessness, David is closer to being Weyland’s
heir than Meredith. Meredith is not only relegated to a lower position
on the family totem pole than the “son,” but to add insult to injury,
the son is not even human. David is not thrilled with his position
either. Despite his purported lack of human emotion, he is scornful
of his human creators and resentful of his own soullessness. David is
repeatedly reminded of his inferior status by his human shipmates.
Charlie Holloway snipes, “We made you because we could.” David
replies, “Can you imagine how disappointing it would be for you
to hear that same thing from your creator?” David’s reply not only
evinces his own resentment but also the lack of sympathy he finds
in his supposedly “human” makers. Like Dren, David’s inhumanity
excludes him from the rights granted human beings. While Dren
is kept in a barn and treated like an animal, David is ridiculed and
treated like a servant. Each one’s revolt against this treatment ulti-
mately leads to the death of his or her father-creator.
David’s case is complex, though, because while he clearly resents

his human makers, he is also “programmed” to emulate them as
closely as he can. While the human crew members hibernate on the
two-year voyage to the engineers’ planet, David “mans” the ship. He
spends his time perfecting his imitation of Peter O’Toole in Lawrence
of Arabia. The film choice is interesting not just because of its nod
to classic movie greats but also because of the divided loyalties of
the main character. It supposedly serves in Prometheus as David’s
guide to acting as human as possible, a necessity for an android if he
wants to work peaceably with humans. When the crew members are
donning their space gear in preparation for their first venture onto
the engineers’ planet, Holloway asks David why he bothers to wear
the helmet, “You don’t breathe, remember?” David replies, “I was
designed this way because you people are more comfortable inter-
acting with your own kind.” Holloway says, “They make you guys
pretty close, huh?” These constant gibes and reminders of his inhu-
manity cause David to quip, “Not too close I hope.” In fact, David is
not taught to emulate “real” humanity but rather a movie character;
David represents what humanity believes it is or how it would like to
be. For actual humans he has only scorn, suggesting that they rarely
live up to those qualities they pretend to possess.
It would thus seem that David pilots the Prometheus into space
not only at the pleasure of his maker, Weyland, but because he is
hoping that his human creator will fall prey to the engineers, whom
David regards as the more “superior species” and the one he would
rather serve. When Elizabeth asks him if he wants to be free of his
creator, David replies that he is not familiar with the feeling of want,
and he asks, “Doesn’t everyone want their parents dead?” David is
more correct than he perhaps realizes, as it turns out that everyone
in this film does, in fact, want their parents dead, and that wish is ful-
filled time and again. Weyland is killed by one of the engineers, and
Elizabeth is responsible for the death of the very maker she was hop-
ing to find. Not only do children want their parents dead, but parents
have murderous intent toward their children as well. The engineers
want to destroy humanity, and when Elizabeth finds that she has
been impregnated with an alien fetus, she performs an abortion/C-
section on herself, violently removing the alien from her body even
at the risk of her own life. Of course, as we know from Scott’s previ-
ous film, Alien, such fetuses are always matricidal, breaking through
the host’s body in the most gruesome of fashions.
The familial violence of Prometheus goes beyond the ultimately

unconscious patricide of the Oedipus myth to include not only non-
human heroes but also ones whose gender is ambiguous at best. This
is the point at which reading a film called Prometheus in terms of
the Oedipus myth becomes problematic. Despite the fact that on the
surface the film seems to ask to be read in terms of Oedipal conflict,
such an analysis meets with insurmountable roadblocks.
First, the search for origins in Prometheus, unlike Scott’s earlier
film, Blade Runner, stems predominately from a female father com-
plex rather than a male one. Similar to the CEO-Elsa-Dren triad of
Splice, it is Elizabeth who prompts the Weyland Corp. to undertake
the mission, Meredith who heads the mission, and David who pilots
the ship. While David is a male android, if we follow Žižek’s asser-
tion in his reading of the human-android relation in Blade Runner as
equivalent to sexual difference, then the android becomes the female
to the male human, its defining derivative, its “synthetic comple-
ment” (173n3). David’s apparent obsequiousness and resentment
of his status in the eyes of humans confirms his position as passive
object to the active human subject. All three “women” have some-
thing at stake in locating the source of the Father’s power and, at least
in the case of David and Meredith, something at stake in snuffing out
that power source, revealing it to be ultimately impotent.
To further complicate matters, these “females” are all nonrepro-
ductive, emphatically nonmaternal. They may be daughters, but they
will never be (human) mothers; for the nuclear family, the buck stops
here. As an android, David is not designed to reproduce, though he
can be replicated. Meredith Vickers is not only childless but appar-
ently frigid, the captain of the ship going so far as to ask her, “Are you
a robot?” Elizabeth Shaw cannot reproduce with another human; she
is barren. However, the alien has no problem inseminating her. As
in Splice, human sexual reproduction has been replaced by the inhu-
man and the technological. The only human sex act in the film hap-
pens after Charlie himself has been inseminated by the alien parasite,
which he then passes on to Elizabeth, in whom the inhuman fetus
gestates. Like the baby Elsa carries at the end of Splice, this child has
two fathers, the human one dispatched before its birth.
Unlike the sex acts of Splice, the Oedipal triangle does not even
provide a starting point for understanding the ways in which the
sex acts of Prometheus are transgressive because the lines between
“parents” and “children” are far from clear, and there is no natural
connection or origin to serve as a pattern. Perhaps this is why, unlike
Elsa, Elizabeth will not or cannot embrace her own status as mother
of an inhuman child. Instead, she chooses to abort it. However, this
fetus is infinitely adaptable and can live just fine outside her womb.
As in Splice, the alien is ultimately born not from a human womb but
from a technological one: the medical capsule within which Eliza-
beth ensconces herself in order to surgically remove the alien fetus.
This technological uterus corresponds with the violent rending of the
human one, its fertility contrasted with Elizabeth’s sterility. Interest-
ingly, the medical capsule is designed only for a male body, a body
without a uterus. This “womb” is emphatically to be distinguished
from the female human one. Further, the chamber within which the
medical capsule is ensconced was supposedly designed for Meredith
Vickers, again calling her status as female human into question.
The only successful forms of reproduction in the film, the ones
that produce viable offspring, are the artificial creation of the android
and the asexual, parasitic reproduction of the aliens. It is in fact
David who inseminates Holloway with the alien DNA, slipping it
into his drink after asking him, “How far would you go to find the
answers you’re looking for?” Yet even David’s viability is called into
question, as he is only a decapitated head by the end of the film. It
is the alien—the absolutely inhuman—that emerges as the true sur-
vivor, its success as a life form highlighted in the very last scene of
the film, in which one of them bursts from out of the dead body of
the engineer. In this version of creation, the aliens seem to represent
the chaotic Lilith: a destructive feminine element totally outside the
patriarchal order. Like Dren, the alien is a human product but cares
nothing for its creator nor its father nor those who serve as its prena-
tal hosts. It does not speak and does not seem to require meaning or
validation for its existence. Whether the engineers succeed in wip-
ing out humans or vice versa, Prometheus suggests that the future
will ultimately belong to the alien. At the end of the film, Elizabeth
attempts to assert the dominance of the human, claiming, “My name
is Elizabeth Shaw, the last survivor of the Prometheus.” But in fact she
is not the sole survivor—David is with her—and it is not her voice
that we are left with in the end of the film but rather the alien’s inhu-
man, inarticulate wail.
Presenting itself as the final chapter of human history or the last
act of the human tragedy, the end Prometheus prophesies seems fated.
Like Oedipus, the characters seek out their fate and, in so doing,
bring it about. The father/creator is destroyed, and the mother/
alien has been “bedded.” The tragic flaw of blindness—“we were
so wrong”—leads to near destruction, but the hero’s sacrifice saves

humanity just as Oedipus saves Thebes. The problem is, the reader of
Oedipus Rex is not forced to ask, so what? Prometheus suggests that
humanity might not be worth saving. In fact, it might be better if it
were not saved, as its own creators were obviously bent on wiping it
out and probably had a good reason for it. While the human’s search
for its origins propels the plot, the film portrays humans, with all
of their pretensions to uniqueness and dominion, as weak, infantile,
pathetic creatures, easily dispatched by the more powerful species. In
contrast to the strength and durability of the bodies of the engineers,
the aliens, and the android, the human body is excessively fragile,
vulnerable, and permeable. Our heroic mission is piloted by sterile
females looking to confront and ultimately destroy their creators:
truly a mission bound for nowhere. Yet to the bitter end, Elizabeth
refuses to believe that humans are not special creatures with a unique
relation to their makers. She will not entertain the possibility that she
has anything in common with the android David or the aliens, who,
like the human, were also created by the engineers.
Despite Elizabeth’s protests, humans in Prometheus are, like Fran-
kenstein’s creature, soulless abominations who cannot elicit sympa-
thy even from their own makers, who would prefer to tear us limb
from limb. In this film, we are the monstrous creation that must be
destroyed. We are forced to look at the equation from the other side.
From the engineers’ perspective, the human seems monstrous, purely
destructive, lacking in empathy and any regard for other beings or its
own planet. From the perspective of the film’s human creations, the
engineers have no gods or godlike status either; they worship only
themselves, their error and arrogance reflecting our own. They are
no more master of their own being or their creations than we are and
sought to destroy us perhaps not because we were a disappointment
but because we were a threat to them.
Prometheus returns us to the narratives of patriarchy only to sug-
gest that it was all one big error. Despite such narratives’ failure to
provide validation for the human’s existence as a special or superior
creature, the film further suggests that there is no escape from this
futile search. Dr. Victor Frankenstein’s creation may have been a fail-
ure, but his sacrifice in the end remains a testament to the heroic
qualities of the human, and his narrative serves as a reality check
for Walton, who turns back toward home rather than lead his men
to certain death in the unknowns of the Arctic north. In contrast,
despite ample evidence that the engineers mean to destroy them,
Figure 5.4 David encounters the wonders of creation in Prometheus.
Prometheus’s Waltons, Dr. Shay and David, proceed on their mis-

sion despite its futility, using the engineers’ own spacecraft to shuttle
them to their home planet rather than returning to earth. Dr. Shay,
clutching the crucifix around her neck in one hand and carrying the
decapitated but still speaking head of the android in the other, her
womb still torn and bleeding, represents our final image of human-
ity. Neither irony nor tragedy properly describes this figure. Obsoles-
cence is perhaps a better word. Deprived of its ability to reproduce,
its special relation to its own maker, and its dominion over its own
creations, the human has no real place in whatever transaction will
follow. It was David who was able to reawaken the sleeping engineer,
to pilot its ship after it had been destroyed, and ultimately to learn its
language: the language of creation. It is not the human that will pos-
sibly form a covenant with this maker. The human has no place and
no power in this relation, usurped by its own humanoid creation.
Only David has access to the wonders and mysteries of creation, and
only he expresses true appreciation of it, no matter the source.
In Prometheus, the answer to the question—what is the human
and where did it come from?—seems to be, who cares? There appears
to be no ultimate truth, no reason or purpose, for its existence. This
is what the creation story looks like without notions of the good,
the beautiful, and the ideal. It is spectacular, even sublime. But what
are we, we humans, to take from this? Wait for the sequel and hope
it gets better? Or perhaps shift our expectations a bit with regard to

heroism? After all, the hero is not supposed to be the human Oedi-
pus but the Titan Prometheus. Perhaps the film is asking us to adjust
to a new mythology, one that does not set up the nuclear family as the
natural origin of social structures of power and identity. Perhaps Dr.
Shay’s vision of humanity is flawed, outdated, not the one we should
adopt if we want to preserve some “hope” for its future.
In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche privileges Prometheus over
Oedipus based on the fact that he sees Prometheus’s transgression as
the more active, willful one. While Oedipus’s transgression is largely
done unconsciously, subjecting him to lifelong punishment based on
the sins of his parents, Prometheus knows full well what he is doing
and, in fact, chooses to do it again at the risk of eternal punishment.
While both are heroes, sacrificing themselves for the human race,
Prometheus is the Titan, Oedipus merely mortal.
The distinction that I would like to emphasize between the two
myths is the fact that in the Promethean myth, the human is a tech-
nological being from its creation; there is no humanity before fire,
simply a faceless entity who, in the divvying up of divine gifts, gets
the short end of the stick.11 Zeus wanted to obliterate the human race;
it is Prometheus who stops him and proceeds to steal his fire to give
to humanity. Humanity is not defined outside of technology. “Natu-
ral” humanity is a loathsome creature who grovels in the dust. It is
only through the gift of technology that the human stands upright
and gains its dignity. The gift of dignity through technology is what is
divine in humanity, its divine spark, its soul. (One could thus hardly
claim that the android does not have a soul simply because it is arti-
ficial, a point I develop further below). The theft of this divine spark
breaches the boundary between divine and mortal, a transgression
for which Prometheus suffers eternal torment; an eagle comes to eat
his liver every day, and because he is immortal, every night it heals
again. And humanity gets Pandora, the first woman. Fashioned by
the gods, she too is artificial. She is beautiful and irresistible to Pro-
metheus’s brother, Epimetheus, who forgets his brother’s warning
and allows her to unleash her box of horrors upon the world. At the
bottom of the box is apparently “hope”: one last meager gift for all
humanity will have to suffer.
In the previous section, I mentioned that Mary Shelley subtitled
her novel, Frankenstein, “The Modern Prometheus.” The position
of title and subtitle would suggest that Victor is the modern Pro-
metheus, the one who defies the gods and offers the divine spark to his
creation, both of them incurring lifelong suffering as a result. But is

not the monster also a Prometheus, a superhuman titan who chooses
to sacrifice himself to save humanity? Likewise, there are many Pro-
metheus figures in Scott’s film, the first, interestingly enough, being
the spaceship, Prometheus, that delivers the crew to the engineers’
“planet.”12 Spaceships, or at least their computers, their “conscious-
ness,” are significant in the Alien films, the ship’s computer in Ridley
Scott’s original named “Mother” and the one in Jeunet’s Alien Res-
urrection named “Father.” These computers are often responsible
for the lives of the crew members, providing womb-like capsules
in which the crew members “hibernate” for light years, overseeing
their nourishment and safety, as well as the logistics of space travel.
David takes over this role in Prometheus, but it is ultimately the ship
that destroys the engineers’ spacecraft and ostensibly saves human-
ity from their “weapons of mass destruction.” This reversal of the
roles between creator and created can be seen throughout the film,
technological creations ultimately becoming “mothers and fathers”
to human and inhuman progeny alike.
There are other Prometheus figures in the film, most obviously of
course the engineers, who gave humanity the spark of life. Depending
on how one reads the film, which offers many possible interpretations
in this regard, if the engineers did in fact mean to destroy humanity,
then they are also the Zeus figure of the myth. It is possible that the
engineer who “sacrifices” himself so that his DNA might form the
human race could be a rogue engineer, going against the wishes of
those in power, or it could simply be, as the characters in the film
interpret it, that “they changed their minds.” Another possibility is
that the engineers did not mean to destroy humanity at all but rather
to “evolve” them.13 As director Ridley Scott explains in his inter-
view on the film with SlashGear, the aliens have “galloping DNA . . .
so powerful, each molecule is like a timebomb.” Like Dren’s DNA, this
genetic material, when inserted into human beings, has immediate
drastic effects, morphing the human into something quite different. It
is possible that rather than attempting to outright destroy the human
race, the engineers wanted to make them more adaptable. As I stated
above, the film does highlight the fragility of its human characters.
In some ways, they seem more like pre-Promethean humans when
compared with the capabilities and adaptability of the other human-
oid creatures in the film, definitely in need of an evolutionary boost.
Yet these fragile creatures have in fact created a more adaptable
creature on their own: the android, David. David’s creation story
Figure 5.5 “In the desert there is nothing” (Prometheus).
seems particularly cruel, however. His creator gave him a human

appearance and the desire to emulate the human as perfectly as pos-
sible, but where the human, like Dr. Shaw, finds “hope” at the bot-
tom of Pandora’s box, David finds nothing. On approaching LV-223,
David characteristically quotes Lawrence of A rabia: “In the desert
there is nothing. And no man wants nothing.” When his creator,
Weyland, dies, he says to David, “There is . . . nothing,” and David
replies, “I know.”
In Nietzsche’s terms, however, this knowledge would make David
the perfect tragic hero. While Shaw announces victoriously to David
in the end that hope is what makes her human (as opposed to him),
perhaps David realizes that hope, like Pandora, is just the beautiful
Apollinian veneer over the nothing that really lay at the bottom of
her box of horrors. David knows this, and yet, like Prometheus, he
is forced to go on. This makes sense of the quote he repeats over and
over again from his favorite film: “The trick, William Potter, is not
minding that it hurts.” David is the only one who is immortal, the
only one who could, like Prometheus, suffer infinitely (for example,
continue to live after his head is severed from his body). This is the
one thing that David possesses that none of the other characters does,
including the engineers: the capacity for infinite suffering, inflicted
on him by “god” in his service to humans. Of all of the Prometheus
figures in the film, David might be the most important with regard
to the future of humanity.
And yet the film leaves us with both David and Shaw, wonder-
ing about the curious relationship between the two. It is David who
makes the relationship interesting. As screenwriter Damon Linde-

lof remarks in a Time Entertainment interview about the film, David
has a “curious crush” on Shaw. A strange love story, no doubt. David
begins by hacking into Shaw’s dreams while she is in hibernation
on their way to LV-223. This is how the viewer learns about Shaw’s
true motivations. It also implicates the viewer in what amounts to a
form of cognitive “rape”: the violation of Shaw’s internal thoughts
and dreams. David stands over her nearly naked sleeping form, his
hand on the glass bubble that protects her, gazing down at her as she
dreams. She is completely vulnerable, and he takes advantage of that.
It is David who puts the alien DNA in Holloway’s drink so that he
might inseminate Shaw with an alien fetus, and David who wants to
put her in stasis so that she can carry the fetus to term back on earth.
Shaw’s self-performed abortion is ultimately a rejection of David’s
“seed,” but he does not seem to mind that. In the end, when Shaw
decides, “I don’t want to go where we came from, I want to go where
they’re from,” David says, “I’ll take you anywhere you want to go.”
Of course, at this point Shaw has “Prometheus bound,” so to speak;
David is relatively helpless unless she reattaches his head to his body.
At this point, it is not clear who is the man and who the woman in
this relationship; neither could rightly be placed in either category.
Yet this is the “couple” we are left with, the “man and woman” who
will journey to the place of origin, to the proverbial Garden to meet
their maker—a mythic journey, no doubt, but not quite as anyone
has envisioned it before.
There is much talk of a possible sequel to Prometheus, one in
which Shaw and David perhaps find “paradise,” the engineers’ home
planet. Will Prometheus be unbound in the sequel? Or will “para-
dise,” as its etymology suggests, be another prison, an enclosed hunt-
ing ground, where they will be the prey? All evidence suggests that it
will not be the Garden of Eden, or else that the Garden is not as we
have long imagined it.
Whatever the case, we can expect that the film will be sublime,
like its predecessor, because of course the film itself is the ultimate
Prometheus, offering us the wonders of technology. Every image,
every scene, is an end in itself. Like the colorless, sublime landscapes
of the Arctic and the Alps in Frankenstein, Prometheus’s scenes
forego the color, warmth, and verdure of the organic for the dark
sublimity of technology and outer space. Towering spaceships mov-
ing through the cold sterility of space to the inhuman roar of the
nonmelodic soundscape, Prometheus justifies its existence through
its own wondrousness. It does not need a human hero; the hero of
the story is the movie itself. The film is the monster; larger than life, it
offers the spectacle of the end of humanity. At the same moment that
we can imagine our end at the hands of our own creations, we can
also produce a spectacle worthy of that end, something truly sublime
and awe-inspiring.
Like Splice, The Ring, and Feardotcom, in Prometheus it is through
our own (re)productions that we will again have access to something
like gods. But the technological divine does not offer us models of
perfection, either moral or aesthetic. Our relation to them is not ori-
ented by modern notions of progress and ends, notions that provided
the power structures for patriarchy to entrench itself. Unlike popu-
lar end-of-the-world action films like Armageddon (1998), The Day
After Tomorrow (2004), and 2012 (2009), in which a strong father
figure rescues his own child and ultimately humanity from total
destruction by feminized natural and sociopolitical forces, there are
no fathers left to save humanity at the end of Splice and Prometheus,
and the ultimate survivors are Dren and the aliens: miracles of com-
puter animation, infinitely adaptable, prolific and parasitic, sublime
images that serve to convince us that the end of humanity is some-
thing to see.
Conclusion
A New Mythology for

Techno-Humanity
T aken as a whole, the films studied here offer a new mythology

for the twenty-first century, redrawing the lines between gods
and mortals, creators and creation, origins and ends, human and
nonhuman. This new mythology is one that places the human, or at
least a certain understanding of the human that has prevailed since
the Enlightenment, in a position of inferiority, even of obsolescence,
in relation to new beings or modes of being that the human has had
a hand in producing, indeed whose DNA we sometimes completely
share, but who, in their infinite adaptability, have outstripped us.
These narratives reveal the fragility of the human—its body and
biology, its reason and mind, its hold on the world—and its inevitable
replacement by something else, something stronger and more
adaptable. Both our horror of and fascination for these creatures
stems from the resemblance between them and us; they represent
a true evolution in the sense that they are human and not human,
human and beyond human. Since Immanuel Kant proclaimed at the
end of the eighteenth century that the human is an end in itself, a
certain attitude of exceptionalism has prevailed. Even in Darwin’s
works, there is a sense that the human represents the pinnacle of
evolution. There is nothing after the human; how could there be?
The end of the human would mean the end of the world, or so we
used to believe.
Indeed, these films suggest that the human is an end in itself,
that all along it has carried its own end within it. How many species,
after all, have been witness to their own passing, have indeed been
its authors, brought it about through their own “free will”? As H. G.
Wells’s Time Traveler knew over a hundred years ago, in the journey
to discover the origins and ends of humanity, one risks becoming

inhuman. That is why the Time Traveler left late-Victorian England
after delivering his tale and never came back. Unlike even Nietzsche’s
over-human prophets, the Time Traveler and his Promethean ante-
cedents do not return to or remain on earth; they are no longer
bound to the human race. We have moved beyond Enlightenment
and Romantic notions of the human and its monstrous underside
exemplified by Frankenstein’s monster. The latter ultimately served
as the sign or portent that would not allow the narrator’s ship to go
any farther toward the North Pole, its sublime icy climes represent-
ing not only the end of the earth but also the limits of pure reason.
Unlike Walton’s ship, the Prometheus will not return home but will
keep moving ever farther into the inhuman sublimity of outer space.
Despite the fact that the Prometheus crew has apparently saved
earth from (what they interpret to be) the engineers’ “weapons of
mass destruction,” one wonders whether there is a home to which
one can return. Perhaps it is not so much the human-inhuman
beings portrayed in these films that are horrific but rather what they
represent: that we, we humans, fear that in our attempts to human-
ize the world we have rendered it uninhabitable, that the world has
become alien to us, refuses to accommodate itself to our minds and
bodies. Perhaps earth has become as strange to us as Prometheus’s
LV-223, not even a planet but a desert moon whose only life forms
are not what one would call friendly. The films suggest that if we are
to inhabit the desert that we have created, we will have to learn to
adapt to its rhythms. Instead of donning space gear to protect our-
selves from its inhospitable climes, we must instead expose ourselves
to them, force our bodies to adapt, to evolve. These monsters and
the deserts they spring from need not represent the end of humanity
but rather its future. In this, these films are responding to a call for a
new human body and a new aesthetics, offering not only figures for
these new modes of being but also access to them through the image.
Indeed, it seems that it will be only through the technologically pro-
duced image that we will be reborn to the world.
The uninhabitable has been given many names: the “hyperreal,”
the “desert of the real,” the “megalopolis,” the “mechanosphere.”1
Technological media, and more specifically the technologically pro-
duced image, is often demonized in these formulations, blamed for
coming to replace the real, for the end of authentic communica-
tion, the end of imagination and fantasy. However, this perception
is something of an illusion, as theorists like Žižek, Baudrillard, and
A New Mythology for Techno-Humanity 145
Hansen have pointed out, an illusion that is sustained because we are

not properly attuned to the world as it is, particularly with regard
to the ubiquity and increasing autonomy of technology. As Giorgio
Agamben contends, “It is this non-translatability into experience that
now makes everyday existence intolerable—as never before—rather
than an alleged poor quality of life or its meaninglessness compared
with the past” (Infancy, 14). This is why many theorists are now call-
ing for a new understanding of embodied being and of humanity’s
place in the world. Like Hansen, Agamben sees image technology
as redemptive, containing the only possibilities for evolution and
rebirth. He writes,
To appropriate the historic transformations of human nature that cap-

italism wants to limit to the spectacle, to link together image and body
in a space where they can no longer be separated, and thus to forge
the whatever body, whose physis is resemblance—this is the good that
humanity must learn how to wrest from commodities in their decline.
(The Coming, 50)
Agamben’s “whatever”-ness is not an anything-goes or a meaning-

lessness but rather a “being-such”: not being in a particular way,
with a particular set of qualities or characteristics, but rather “the
singularity exposed as such is whatever you want, that is, lovable” (2).
The whatever body would be in tune with the whatever image, the
image without archetype, not in the sense that it is a perfect replica
of a reality it has therefore come to replace but because it is “what-
ever,” in the way that the loved one is; it offers pleasure by its being as
such, as whatever it is. Like Hansen’s bodily m imesis—the liberation
of embodied experience from consciousness and from language so
that it might adapt to the world as such—Agamben proposes that
the new nature (physis) of the body be resemblance, not to anything
in particular but to the world as such, as it is. It is by fusing with
the technologically produced image that this new body will become
possible because the image contains the secret of resemblance freed
from the weight of a profound divine reality or origin, a freedom-
for-resemblance that the body must take on in its own way: concrete,
material, real.
It might seem strange to talk about love and pleasure in relation
to monsters, horror, and the end of humanity, but it has been my
intention to demonstrate the ways that these films offer possibilities
for new experiences, not just horrific but also pleasurable, and how
these monsters are appealing to us, asking to be recognized, perhaps

even to be loved, though outside of the Oedipal structures that have
tended to funnel or limit our love choices in the past. In this regard, it
can hardly escape notice that so many of these monsters are children:
Dren, Samara, Genie, Natasha, and let us not forget the alien fetus.
They are difficult to love, not exactly warm and fuzzy, but they all
also have moments in which they are appealing, even strangely cute
or endearing. But it is nonetheless in their least human, least articu-
late moments, when these babes represent a new relation to a more
fundamental in-fancy, one that is not just a phase of development
that the human passes through but one that persists through every
age and every experience.
The notion of infancy as an enduring part of human experience
is fully developed both in the work of Agamben and in that of Jean-
François Lyotard. The term infancy and that part of human expe-
rience to which it refers is invoked by both thinkers in relation to
the sense that the world is becoming increasingly inhuman, inhospi-
table, or uninhabitable. For both, human experience is constitutively
split; there is that part of experience that belongs to the human sub-
ject in language, to consciousness and to the fully formed self, and
then there is that part that belongs to the infant, that inarticulate
unformed part of our being that, as they argue, never leaves us. For
Lyotard, infancy names an unconscious body that experiences all that
does not enter consciousness, all that is never articulated, the non- or
preconceptual. It is prehuman in the sense that it is never “schooled”
in the art of being human and superhuman in the sense that it is
not limited by such determinations. Always haunted by this inhu-
manity, Lyotard calls on infancy as resistance to the other inhuman,
the inhumanity of the world under what he terms the “metaphysics
of development.” Development names the increasing autonomy of
technology, the extent to which it now seems to endlessly proliferate
itself independently of human subjects, ideas, wills, or desires. In The
Inhuman, Lyotard writes,
Since development is the very thing which takes away the hope of
an alternative to the system from both analysis and practice . . . the
question I am raising here is simply this: what else remains as “poli-
tics” except resistance to this inhuman? And what else is left to resist
with but the debt which each soul has contracted with the miserable
and admirable indetermination from which it was born and does not
cease to be born?—which is to say, with the other inhuman? (7)
The sense that this “miserable and admirable indetermination” repre-

sents a site of power rather than helplessness resonates with the work
of Agamben and Hansen. But unlike Lyotard, Hansen and Agamben
seek recourse to this other body not in resistance to but in response
to the technologized world, the sense being that the two inhumans
might be (made) compatible and that, in their intimate interrela-
tions, the human might find a place, a new definition or rebirth.
The question is, how will we come to believe in the possibility for
such fusion? How will we become capable of such experience? These
films and theorists suggest that it will be through a new mythology
and new mythic figures, through the myths of techno-humanity and
the figure of the techno-human infant. But the process will not hap-
pen all at once. As Agamben relates it, first we must go through the
current phase, where nature speaks and “man . . . is struck dumb”:
“the sign that nature is once more about to enter the fairy tale, that
once more it asks history for speech, while man—bewitched by a
history which, for him, again assumes the dark outline of destiny—is
struck dumb by a spell” (Infancy, 131). Of course, this nature that
speaks is not the nature that lies before or outside of technology but
rather the “second nature” to which Hansen refers and which tech-
nology offers to us. And we will not be struck dumb forever because
soon a new infant will emerge: “Until one night, in the shadow-light
where a new crib will light up figures and colours yet unknown,
nature will once again be immured in its silent language, the fable
will awaken in history, and man will emerge, with his lips unsealed,
from mystery to speech” (Infancy, 131). What this speech will look
or sound like, we do not yet know, but it will be initiatory, pregnant.
Because what we do know, or at least what these films suggest, is that
this rebirth will not be possible for “man” alone, but will also require
“woman,” or something like her.
Many of the films discussed here deal with birth, pregnancy,
maternity, and the ways that our understanding of the social role of
the mother, the biological or natural processes of birth and gesta-
tion, have been altered by the increasing integration of technology
into these processes and identities. While conception, gestation, and
birth are no longer “natural” occurrences in the way this term has
traditionally been understood, they all still exist or subsist in the
postmodern technological age. They remain in fact not vestigials but
rather important concepts in the attempt to confront humanity with
the new realities of the twenty-first century: a film like The Ring for
example operates, itself, as a techno-womb that offers a site of birth
for its viewers. The Forgotten separates bodily gestation from cogni-
tive conception, freeing the bodily variety from its debasement in the
history of metaphysics and placing the emphasis not so much on the
content of the womb but rather on the “white noise” that character-
izes our relation to the “insides” of our bodies in general. Cognitively
unaware most of the time of our own heartbeat, the movement of
air, blood, and molecules in and across and throughout our bodies,
the new relation to our bodies opened up by technology would allow
us to experience these alien rhythms more fully, to be in tune with
our own bodies, to be more capable of bodily retention and creation.
Many of these films thus link the technologically produced image
with birth and with gestation, not just as something available to nat-
ural or biological females but to all techno-human beings.
For many contemporary theorists, the cinematic or filmic image
plays a central role in the evolution of humanity. Agamben figures
this relation in terms of “gesturality.” In Infancy and History, he
writes, “In the cinema, a society that has lost its gestures seeks to
reappropriate what it has lost while simultaneously recording that
loss” (137). Strangely enough, in a book on infancy, Agamben does
not relate cinematic gesture with gestation, its etymological corre-
late. However, Agamben’s cinematic gesture does take us out of the
discourse of ends that characterizes the projects of modernity and
into the sphere of the infant body: “In gesture, there is the sphere not
of an end in itself, but of a kind of mediation that is pure and devoid
of any end that is effectively communicated to people . . . it is nothing
but the physical tolerance of bodily movements and the display of
their mediating nature” (140). In the gestures of cinema studied here,
something indeed gestates.
These films do not merely “display” their gestures but rather alter
our relation to the media portrayed in them. In The Ring and Feardot-
com, we are confronted with the violent birth of the technologically
produced image into the real world, the collapse of the reality-image
divide not in the sense that reality is now merely image but rather in
the sense that the image attains the status of reality. In other words,
the image becomes the site of birth, origin, surprise, and anticipa-
tion. In The Forgotten and Dark Water, the power of the image as a
site of birth is reinvested in the body; technology becomes the basis
for the experience of concrete reality, of the world in which we live.
In Paranormal Activity, the invisibility and profound boredom of
bourgeois existence is again rendered visible and alive, not because
of the powers of human perception, but rather because perception
has been taken in by the image itself. In both Paranormal Activity

and Cloverfield, the monster of the image has usurped the power of
the gaze, becoming itself a voracious eye.
The monsters of each film represent an end of the image inso-
far as it has been dependent on human perception, perspective,
and consciousness to invest it with depth and meaning, insofar as it
has allowed itself to be the reflection of these human faculties. This
revenge of the image is like Baudrillard’s “revenge of the mirror peo-
ple”: “We dreamed of passing through the looking-glass, but it is the
mirror peoples themselves who will burst in upon our world . . . So,
everywhere, objects, children, the dead, images, women, everything
which serves to provide a passive reflection in a world based on iden-
tity, is ready to go on the counter-offensive. Already they resemble us
less and less” (149). My only argument with Baudrillard’s formulation
here is that in it, the image is just one element in the list of “others”
that will rise up, whereas it is my contention that the rest will rise up
only in and through the image. These films suggest that now we do not
birth the image but are born through it. The image offers us access to
our bodies and to new modes of experience. The eye (I) and the gaze
are now oriented by the image, now endowed with its own spirit, its
own will, whether divine or demonic. These latest installations of hor-
ror and science fiction move us beyond the virtual highways of cyber-
punk, which privilege consciousness to the point of leaving the body
behind as so much “meat.”2 The new aesthetic places us fully back in
our bodies, suggesting not only that the answer to Lyotard’s question
in The Inhuman—“Can thought go on without a body?”—is emphati-
cally no, but further, that the limiting function and the resistances of
consciousness might be overcome through its link to a techno-human
body, not one that is a combination of meat and machine but rather
one that is a material support, receiver, and transmitter of experiences
only accessible through technological mediation.
Unlike Burke’s and Kant’s Enlightenment aesthetics, the new aes-
thetic is not divided into the experiences of the beautiful and the
sublime. Instead, we have the wonder of technologically produced
or induced artifice (sometimes verging on a sort of beauty and often
culminating in sublime spectacle) and, on the other side of the coin,
the absolutely monstrous. Neither of these experiences is to be found
most authentically in “nature,” which no longer serves in these nar-
ratives either to anchor beings in their proper sites of origin nor as
the conceptual opposite of artifice. Likewise, this new aesthetic is
not based on notions of perfection or ideality; the ends and limits
of reason do not apply to it, except perhaps as a reference to what

it has surpassed. In the films, we see the wonders of artifice in the
android David, in the hybrid Dren, indeed in the production of
the human itself. Even a film like The Cabin in the Woods, which
seems to deride the artificial and the manipulated, also celebrates
it. Everyone, including the savvy Fool, is completely taken in by the
scene in which Jules, in full whore mode, on a dare pretends to woo
a wolf ’s head on the wall of the eponymous cabin, finally kissing
it full on, with tongue. The pre-med student here plays the role of
whore so much better than the corporate execs intended that even
these “producers” are momentarily baffled by the display. There is
a certain beauty in these moments when the image becomes more
than we hoped, indeed more than we could have created in our still
vast imaginations. In the more extreme of these moments, the films
achieve sublimity, the image becoming more than we can even fully
experience or comprehend. And then there are the moments when
the image becomes threatening and intrusive, when the safe dis-
tance that is supposed to characterize the experience of the sublime
is surpassed and the image gets too close; it is then that the viewer
experiences the absolutely monstrous. These experiences are often
bewilderingly combined, as in the beauty, sublimity, and monstrosity
of Splice’s Dren. At once, sometimes even in the same instance, she is
adorable, beautiful, and terrifying: a being we would never encoun-
ter without the computer animation that transforms the cute little
girl or beautiful model into our more secret techno-human fantasies.
These analyses have thus emphasized the relationship in the films
between visible and nonvisible elements, between narrative and
non-narrative elements, not only because the two cannot be rigor-
ously separated but also because it is in their interrelations that the
new techno-human mythology links up with the new bodies and
new aesthetics to which it introduces us. This approach is slightly
different from that of theorists like Deleuze, Stiegler, Hansen, and
Agamben, among others, who recognize the importance of film in
ushering us into a new age of human experience and new human
bodies, but who all tend to privilege the non-narrative aspects of
film over its plot and themes, focusing on those films in which non-
narrative elements dominate plot, as in montage. Further, while film
has been theorized as a medium that replicates thought—that brings
about, for example, an artificial synthesis of otherwise chaotic or
distinct shots, images, or elements—this analysis goes one step fur-
ther, to suggest that thought itself has been externalized. Experience
now takes place outside the self, memories are stored in and accessed
through technological archives, and technological devices provide
access to our own bodily processes, so that it is not that film repli-
cates thought; it produces thought. And it is not just those films that
are conscious of these effects—like art films and m ontage—but also
those that are popular, commercial, and common.
Though these films may be popular and common, they are not
the “same old story.” If, as Jameson suggests, we are no longer able
to conceive of a true alternative future outside of the current eco-
nomic-political system, then these films open access to what Kimball
has labeled the “contraceptual”: “To contraceive of the future is to
begin to apprehend what the trope of conception conceals about the
deathliness within life . . . It is to approach what from the perspective
of conception is literally inconceivable about the (near or distant)
time to come” (81). As Kimball notes, our tendency in popular nar-
ratives is to continue to repress these preconceptual, nonarticulated
possibilities, killing off the infants that embody them. Our fears and
anxieties about technology, our designation of technology as a threat
to authentic human experience, and our desire to prevail as authori-
tative human subjects and masters of the world mask infanticidal
tendencies. We might prefer to destroy the counterconceptual pos-
sibilities of techno-human infancy in favor of a narrative of human
redemption, but these films will not allow us that luxury. Instead,
the techno-human infants they portray demand that the human
exist otherwise, and they offer a medium in which it can. The tech-
nologically produced image plays a central role in this redefinition of
human and world, no longer simply a passive medium nor imitation
but now the site where whatever comes after modern humanity is
born and likewise where these new relations are forged.
To return to one of David’s memorable Lawrence of Arabia quotes
from Prometheus: “In the desert there is nothing, and no man needs
nothing.” One might interpret this line pessimistically, David assert-
ing the meaninglessness of the voyage and the human’s futile search
for its origins. However, as all of these films suggest, there is great
possibility, even in the “desert of the real.” In fact, it may only be in
this virtual desert that we find our way out of the structures that limit
our way forward:
The nomads are there, on the land, wherever there forms a smooth
space that gnaws, and tends to grow, in all directions. The nomads
inhabit these places; they remain in them, and they themselves make
them grow, for it has been established that the nomads make the des-
ert no less than they are made by it . . . there is no line separating
earth and sky . . . and yet there is an extraordinarily fine topology
that relies not on points or objects but rather haecceities, on sets of
relations (winds, undulations of snow or sand, the song of the sand or
the creaking of ice, the tactile qualities of both). The nomad, nomad
space, is localized and not delimited. (Deleuze and Guattari, 382)
In the desert opened up by technology, in the fine undulations of

sight and sound and touch offered therein, lies a possible dwelling
place for a new humanity. It is, in fact, a dwelling that we made, and
we already inhabit it.
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 ulti-
mately 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 real-
ity” (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’s The 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
ronenberg’s Videodrome (1983), in which a videotape itself is liter-

C
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 mod-
ern 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 mil-
lion (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. Both of these concepts assume a world/
object oriented toward/around the perceiving human subject, a view
that Paranormal Activity radically disrupts.
11. Interestingly, this reading does not work for Paranormal Activity 3. I
would argue that this is because, whether he meant it or not, the (dif-
ferent) director too perfectly rendered the 1980s home, which had
not yet attained the hyperreality of the twenty-first-century home. In
Notes 157
Paranormal 3, there is plenty for the viewer to see, and the experience
of viewing the film is much more in line with a classic ghost story. The
presence of the camera is not as threatening precisely because the abili-
ties of the 1980s camera were not what they are now. The camera was
not more powerful than human viewing; the camera or surveillance was
not yet ubiquitous.
12. See Foucault’s The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume 1.
13. While researching demon possession, Alex finds that there are three
stages to the process. The third stage involves the sacrifice of an “invio-
late,” or virgin.
14. There is a dog in P2, but the dog partakes of the same inactivity as the
humans, and he does become one of the demon’s victims.
15. When the film begins, writing on the screen suggests that the camera
was later found and became a classified document in a government file
named “Cloverfield.” This would mean that the military had ultimately
been successful in destroying the monster.
Chapter 4
1. See Kimball’s The Infanticidal Logic of Evolution and Culture.

2. Additionally, in the Japanese version, the mother’s death scene takes
place in the elevator. In her final scene, she embraces the dead ghost-
child as water fills the elevator, and her biological daughter watches.
3. Notably, Donna Haraway, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatarri, Cary
Wolfe, and Katherine Hayles, among many others.
Chapter 5
1. To which Scott’s Prometheus was originally supposed to be something

of a prequel.
2. Writer and director Natali makes this perfectly clear, as he names his
two protagonists Clive and Elsa, after Colin Clive and Elsa Lanchester,
the costars of James Whale’s 1935 film The Bride of Frankenstein.
3. Mary’s Prometheus is much more pessimistic than that of her husband,
Percy, who, in his Prometheus Bound, makes his hero the symbol of
rebellion against tyranny and oppression.
4. A motif that also appears in Koji Suzuki’s novel Ring, in which Sadako
(Samara) is hermaphroditic, but which does not make it into the Amer-
ican film The Ring.
5. The Ring likewise explores this religious motif. In one significant scene,
Rachel goes out on the terrace while Noah watches Samara’s tape. She looks
disturbed as her gaze scans the rows of apartment windows across from her,
each with one isolated individual watching TV, talking on the phone, and
158 Notes
so forth. Interestingly, this whole scene is overtly linked with original sin,
as Noah grabs an apple from the kitchen table after having watched the
video, which Rachel gave to him. Combined with their biblical names, it
is hard for the audience to miss these allusions to a patriarchal tradition in
which the feminine represents or is in collusion with a corrupting presence
that moves the human away from its nature and origin.
6. The former exemplified in the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau; the lat-
ter, in those of Immanuel Kant.
7. This is an accession Kant is forced to make if he is to maintain the ratio-
nal purity of the moral imperative.
8. A phrase that Reese borrows from Karl Marx’s Declaration of the Rights
of Man and the Citizen.
9. Earlier in the film, Clive and Elsa’s first hybrid animal creations, Fred
and Ginger, turn on each other and rip each other apart once Ginger
metamorphoses into a male.
10. In the deleted scenes made available on the DVD version of the film,
the one scene between Meredith and her father is extended, and we see
a slightly different dynamic emerge, one in which it is not so much that
Vickers has been passed over by her father but rather that she despises
him for succumbing to old age. She states, “You used to have so much
grace. I respected you, looked up to you. You’re nothing but a scared
old man.”
11. While there are many portrayals of the Prometheus myth, I have relied
here primarily on the two most read: Hesiod’s and Aeschylus’s.
12. It is actually a moon, LV-223.
13. One of the writers of the screenplay, Damon Lindelof, offers this pos-
sible interpretation in an interview with SlashGear.
Conclusion
1. See Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, Žižek’s Welcome to the Des-

ert of the Real, Lyotard’s The Inhuman, and Hansen’s Embodying Tech-
nesis, respectively.
2. For a thorough analysis of the relationship between meat and machine
in cyberpunk, see Fred Botting’s Sex, Machines, and Navels: Fiction,
Fantasy, and History in the Future Present.
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Index
Agamben, Giorgio, 145–48, 150 Blade Runner, 113, 127, 129, 134
AI: Artificial Intelligence, 31–32, 87 Blair Witch Project, The
Alien series, 26, 112–13, 129, 133, camera and, 6, 38, 55–56
139 controversy surrounding, 57
American Horror Film, 3 creation of, 56–62
Apocalyptic Dread, 3 criticism of, 56–58
art family and, 85
experience and, 1, 151 gaze and, 58–60
media and, 4 gender and, 57–60, 62
memory and, 5 importance to horror genre, 12,
Nietzsche and, 82 56
reproduction and, 53 marketing of, 57
social reality and, 74 paranormality of image and,
62–67, 70–72
Baudrillard, Jean, 7–8, 19, 21, 38, popularity of, 56–57
67–68, 75, 79, 101, 103, 144, technology and, 84
149 body
Benjamin, Walter, 102–5, 107 corporation and, 127
birth dismemberment, 46–47, 115
Blair Witch Project and, 66 divinity and, 44–45
Cloverfield and, 79 fear and, 107–8, 143
Dark Water and, 91–93, 98 gender and, 64, 89, 135
humanity and, 112 humanity and, 143–44
image and, 66, 69, 82, 98, 147–49 image and, 44–46, 145
memory and, 107 infancy and, 146–48, 151
Paranormal Activity series and, memory and, 99, 103
63, 66 mind and, 32–33, 149
Prometheus myth and, 115 possession of, 64, 77
rebirth, 52–53, 88–89, 91, 145, Prometheus and, 130, 133,
147 135–36, 140–41
Splice and, 115, 120, 122, 134 sexuality and, 64, 89
technology and, 88–89, 108, 112, technology and, 101–4, 146–47,
145 149
Birth of Tragedy, The (Nietzsche), violence and, 40
82, 138 Botting, Fred, 154n2
168 Index
Briefel, Aviva, 3, 8 gender and, 58

Brophy, Philip, 11 memory and, 96
paranormality of image and, 62
Cabin in the Woods technology and, 85
artifice and, 150 Conrich, Ian, 3
blood and, 90–91 consumer, 5, 8, 21, 24, 28–29, 114,
corporation and, 23–24 124, 126, 128
end of humanity and, 21–30 corporations
as metahorror, 1, 6, 12 in Cabin in the Woods, 22–28
power in, 26–27 humanity and, 113
simulation and, 21–30 in Prometheus, 113, 129, 131–32
technology and, 33, 50, 150 in Splice, 114–15, 120–21, 124–29
camera Craven, Wes, 1, 6, 12, 14–16, 31,
Blair Witch Project and, 6, 38, 56, 85
55–56 Creed, Barbara, 58, 64–65
Cloverfield and, 7, 55–56, 76–84 Cronenberg, David, 31, 155n4
Paranormal Activity and, 1, 6, Crossing of the Visible, The
55, 73 (Marion), 4, 44, 156n10
simulation and, 67–68
viewer and, 38, 55–56 deconstruction, 7, 11–21, 98
see also gaze; image Deleuze, Gilles, 5, 104, 108, 150,
Cameron, James, 31, 113 152
Carpenter, John, 12, 16, 31 Demme, Jonathan, 12, 56, 155n7
children Derrida, Jacques, 16, 99
Blair Witch Project and, 57 divine
Dark Water and, 91–98 blood and, 91
demonic/ghostly, 42, 89, 91, 146 creation and, 131, 138
Final Girl and, 50 family and, 7–8
Forgotten and, 98–100 gaze and, 149
mother-child relationship, 85, horror and, 27
87–91 iconography and, 44
Paranormal Activity series and, image and, 4–5
63–64, 68–70, 72 invisible, 44, 50
Prometheus and, 129, 131–35 knowledge and, 119
Repo Men and, 127 nature and, 112
Splice and, 112, 117–25, 128–29 reality and, 145
technology and, 52, 85, 112 Ring and, 50, 52
Christine, 31 Splice and, 119, 129
cinema verité, 6, 55, 77 technology and, 138–29, 142
Clover, Carol, 50, 58, 65 truth, 4
Cloverfield violence and, 44–45
9/11 and, 73–76
camera and, 7, 55–56, 76–84 Egginton, William, 37–38
gaze and, 56, 73, 76–78, 149 Eller, Claudia, 15
Index 169
Embodying Technesis (Hansen), 102 gender

Erlebnis (Benjamin), 102, 105, 107 Blair Witch Project and, 57–60,
62
family, 3–4, 7, 63, 85–87, 112–16, body and, 64, 89, 135
132, 134, 138 Cloverfield and, 58
Fassbender, Michael, 130 Forgotten and, 87–88
fathers, 7, 42–43, 61, 68–69, 85, inhuman and, 127
87, 90, 92, 100, 112, 119–21, monsters and, 50–51, 58–59,
123–24, 126–27, 130, 132, 64–65, 73, 87, 112, 115
134–35, 139, 142 power and, 7–8, 86–88, 134, 142
Feardotcom, 6, 12, 31–36, 38–41, reproduction and, 8, 77
43, 45, 48–53, 89–91, 142, 148, Scream and, 6, 153n3
154–56 Splice and, 115–18, 134
feminism, 58 ghosts, 18, 31, 33–37, 39, 42–43,
feminine, 61, 65, 70, 77–78, 87–88, 47–48, 51, 57, 67, 72, 88–89,
108, 135 91–97, 103
Final Girls, 16, 19, 24–26, 35–36, Gibson, William, 32
50, 52, 65, 154n6 Goddard, Drew, 1, 6, 12
Forgotten, The Gramophone, Film, Typewriter
alienation in, 98–107 (Kittler), 34
birth/pregnancy and, 7, 90, 148 Greven, David, 2, 86
family and, 4, 85, 87–88 Ground of the Image, The (Nancy),
gender and, 87–88 4, 90
memory and, 7, 91, 98–100 Ground Zero (Virilio), 75, 119
paternity and, 85, 87–88
technology and, 101, 104–7 Halloween, 15
Frankenstein (Shelley), 114–15, Hansen, Mark, 5, 102–5, 107, 145,
120–21, 124–25, 129, 136, 147, 150
138–39, 141, 144 Hantke, Steffen, 3
Friday the 13th, 13 Haraway, Donna, 122
Frost, Laura, 74, 77 “haunted media,” 6, 33
Future of the Image, Haunted Media (Sconce), 33, 87
The (Rancière), 4 Heidegger, Martin, 80
Hemsworth, Chris, 21
gaze Higley, Sarah, 57–58, 62, 66–67
Blair Witch and, 58–60 Hills Have Eyes, The, 85
Cloverfield and, 56, 73, 76–78, Hills, Matt, 13, 15
149 Hooper, Tobe, 31, 85, 88
divine and, 149 Horror After 9/11, 3
invisible, 44–49, 51, 53, 55–56, Horror Zone, 3
58–59, 61 humanity
monsters and, 55–56, 58–62, 68 body and, 143–44
power and, 58–66, 78, 82, 149 monsters and, 1–2, 52, 144–46,
viewer and, 44–48 149
170 Index
humanity–continued Forgotten, The and, 105

mothers and, 7–8 future and, 111, 144
power and, 136–38 gender and, 127
Prometheus and, 7, 111–13, Hansen on, 5
135–39 human and, 102–3, 105–7, 109,
science fiction and, 1, 3 111–14, 144
Splice and, 111–13, 121–22, 124–27 infancy and, 146–47
women and, 127 memory and, 7
see also inhuman; nonhuman Paranormal Activity and, 63
Hunger Games, The, 23, 28–29 Prometheus and, 129–30, 132–35,
hyperreal, 8, 17–18, 21, 38–40, 144, 139, 141
156n11 reproduction and, 111–14
Ring, The and, 89, 96
iconography, 44–52 Splice and, 114, 123–25, 127–28
ideal, 73, 80, 112, 127–30, 137, 149 technology and, 32
idol, 38, 44–45, 47, 49, 51 Time Machine and, 144
image see also human; nonhuman
birth and, 66, 69, 82, 98, 147–49 Inhuman, The (Lyotard), 149
bleeding, 35–39, 41 Internet, 2, 18–20, 34–36, 41, 45,
body and, 44–46, 145 49, 51–52, 57, 121
Cloverfield and, 62 intimacy, 32–35, 39, 41, 48–49, 53,
divine and, 4–5 69, 94, 104, 147
memory and, 80, 91
mothers and, 61, 69 Jameson, Fredric, 3, 83, 151
Paranormal Activity and, 55, Jesus Christ, 44–45
62–71, 84, 148–49
paranormality of, 62–67, 70–72 Karlyn, Kathleen Rowe, 153n3
power and, 7, 19, 43, 47–48, Kimball, A. Samual
55–56, 68, 70–74, 84, 148 King, Homay, 74, 77
reproduction and, 1, 4, 6, 83, 91 King, Stephen, 31
Ring, The and, 32–33, 36 Kittler, Friedrich, 34
simulation and, 4, 101–2
viewer and, 35, 37–39, 42, 44–47 Lacan, Jacques, 56
imagination, 3–4, 8, 76, 80–83, 144, Lewis, John, 87
150 Lindelof, Damon, 141
In the Mouth of Madness, 12, 16, Lowensohn, Elina, 96
31–32 Lowenstein, Adam, 3
infancy, 4, 145–48, 151 Lyotard, Jean-François, 146–47, 149
infection, 6, 35–37, 42, 45, 47–48,
52, 76–77 Malone, William, 6, 12, 31
inhuman Marion, Jean-Luc, 4–5, 38, 40,
Cabin in the Woods and, 29 44–45, 50–51, 156n10
children as, 89 Matrix series, 31–32, 112
family and, 89, 123–24 Maximum Overdrive, 31
Index 171
mechanosphere, 5, 102–3, 107, 144 113–15, 119–20, 123–25, 128,

memory 136, 144, 149–50
art and, 5 montage, 4–5, 104, 150–51
Cloverfield and, 80 Moss, Stephanie, 58, 61, 156n7
collective, 5 Mostow, Jonathan, 31, 113
Forgotten and, 7, 91, 98–107 mothers
image and, 80, 91 Blair Witch Project and, 66
inhuman and, 7 Dark Water and, 91–98
internal/external, 91, 93–94 family and, 7–8, 68, 85, 87–88, 90
location of, 99–100 Forgotten and, 98–100
monster and, 80, 82–83 humanity and, 7–8
reality and, 91 identity and, 147
reproduction and, 85 image and, 61, 69
technology and, 151 killers and, 13
metahorror Prometheus and, 134–35, 139
genre construction and Ring, The and, 36, 41–43
deconstruction, 12–21 Splice and, 114, 116–17, 119–21,
overview, 11–12 123, 126, 128
reality and, 1, 6 Munch, Edvard, 14
see also Cabin in the Woods; Myrick, Daniel, 12, 55
Scream series Myth, mythic
Miller, Sam J., 3
Miller, T.J., 76 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 4–5, 90
Mind at the End of Its Tether Natali, Vincenzo, 1, 7, 111, 113,
(Wells), 2 115–16, 119, 157
monsters nature, 53, 102–4, 113, 119, 145,
Cabin in the Woods and, 26–30 147–49
Cloverfield and, 73–84, 96 Neuromancer (Gibson), 32
Dark Water and, 96, 98 New Nightmare, 12, 16, 31–32
gaze and, 55–56, 58–62, 68 Nietzche, Friedrich, 68, 82, 138,
gender and, 50–51, 58–59, 64–65, 140, 144
73, 87, 112, 115 9/11, 3, 73–75, 83
humanity and, 1–2, 52, 144–46, Nixon, Nicola, 88
149 nonhuman, 31, 36, 48, 58, 100,
Prometheus and, 130, 139, 142 112–13, 122, 129, 134
Prometheus myth and, 112, 115 see also human; inhuman
Splice and, 115, 118, 120, 122–26, North, Daniel, 56, 77
128
symbolism of, 2, 9, 27–29 One Missed Call, 32–35, 85, 87, 89
technology and, 52, 68, 120 Outer Limits, 33, 42, 87–88
unseen, 38, 50–51
monstrous/monstrosity, 1, 3, 28–29, painting, 14, 44, 50–51, 56
50–51, 55–56, 61–67, 70, 73, Paranormal Activity series
77–78, 82–84, 86–87, 98, box office, 156n8
172 Index
Paranormal Activity–continued humanity and, 7, 111–13, 135–39

camera and, 1, 6, 55, 73 inhuman and, 129–30, 132–34
family and, 4 Lawrence of Arabia and, 151
paranormality of image and, 55, patriarchy and, 136
62–71, 84, 148–49 as postmodern myth, 129–42
paternal authority and, 85 reality and, 151–52
perspective and, 156n10 reproduction and, 112, 134–35,
women and, 58, 73, 77, 98 142
patriarchy, 3–4, 7, 26, 58, 61–62, 69, sexuality and, 134–35
86–90, 112–15, 123, 125–127, technology and, 1, 113, 144,
135–36, 142 151–52
perspective, 29, 44, 58, 61–62, Psycho, 13
65–66, 76, 136, 149 Pulse, 32–34
see also camera; gaze
Phillips, Kendall, 13, 86 Rancière, Jacques, 4–5
Plato, 91, 99, 101, 106 reality
Poltergeist series, 31, 85, 88 divine and, 145
posthuman, 102, 113 memory and, 91
see also human; inhuman metahorror and, 1, 6
postmodernism, 2, 11–13, 18, 20, Prometheus and, 151–52
40, 44, 53, 67, 82, 101, 103, 147 simulation and, 8, 12, 23, 27,
Prometheus and, 129–42 33, 72
Splice and, 114–29 viewer and, 15–17, 33, 37–38,
poststructuralism, 2 108–9
power reality TV, 21, 39
corporations and, 26–27, 113–15, Repo Men, 113, 126–27
125–26, 128 reproduction
gaze and, 58–66, 78, 82, 149 art and, 53
gender and, 7–8, 86–88, 134, camera and, 67–68
142 children and, 8
humanity and, 136–38 family and, 4, 8, 86, 89
identity and, 14, 23, 58, 87, 138 gender and, 8, 77
image and, 7, 19, 43, 47–48, icons and, 44
55–56, 68, 70–74, 84, 148 image and, 1, 4, 6, 83, 91
metahorror and, 6, 12, 22 infection and, 80
reproduction and, 39 inhuman and, 111–14
society and, 1–2 memory and, 85
technology and, 34, 50, 68, 87, Prometheus and, 112, 134–35,
147 142
visible and, 47 Splice and, 112, 114–29, 134–35,
Prometheus 142
capitalism and, 132 technology and, 93, 96, 102, 106,
creation in, 130–31, 139–40 112
family and, 4, 113, 132–34 video, 39
Index 173
Ring, The “master narrative” and, 22

bleeding images and, 35–39, 41 as metahorror, 1, 11–12
Dark Water and, 94–95, 97 simulation and, 22, 24, 29
family and, 4, 85, 87–91 technology and, 33, 50
Feardotcom and, 154n3, 155n5 Seltzer, Mark, 40
film vs. novel, 157n4 serial killers, 15–16, 35, 39–40,
humanity and, 111, 128, 142, 147 45–46, 48, 57, 60–61, 90
iconography and, 45, 47–53 Sharrett, Christopher, 90
image and, 32–33, 36 Shelley, Mary, 114, 124, 138
metahorror and, 12 Shocking Representation, 3
religion and, 119, 157n5 Silence of the Lambs, 12, 56,
technology and, 1, 6, 31–39 156n7
time and, 35 simulation
transcultural nature of, 154n3 Cabin in the Woods and, 21, 23,
violence and, 128, 148 27
Ruben, Joseph, 7, 85 camera and, 67–68
Forgotten, The and, 105–6
Sánchez, Eduardo, 12, 55 image and, 4, 101–2
Saw series, 90 metahorror and, 6
Sawyer, Diane, 18 reality and, 8, 12, 23, 27, 33, 72
Schopp, Andrew, 14, 62, 66 Scream and, 6, 18–21
Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 32, 113 simulacra and, 67
science-fiction technology and, 12, 52
alienation and, 98–99 slasher films, 13, 22, 47, 56, 64
body and, 149 snuff films, 38
evil corporations and, 22, 113 Sonzero, Jim, 32
humanity and, 1, 3 Spielberg, Steven, 31
horror, 111, 116 Splice
see also Prometheus; Splice capitalism and, 125–27, 132
Sconce, Jeffrey, 33, 39, 87–88 death and, 122–23
Scott, A. O., 27 family and, 4, 7, 111–12, 115–17,
Scott, Dougray, 94 120, 123–25, 132, 134
Scott, Ridley, 1, 7, 111, 113, 129, Frankenstein and, 114
133–34, 139, 157 gender and, 115–18, 134
Scream of Nature paintings, 14 humanity and, 111–13, 121–22,
Scream series 124–27
box office, 153n1 morality and, 119
Cabin in the Woods and, 22, 24, patriarchy and, 7, 113
29 as postmodern Prometheus,
gender and, 6, 153n3 114–29
genre construction and Prometheus and, 131
deconstruction in, 12–21 religion and, 119
image/reality in, 38 reproduction and, 112, 114–29,
importance to horror genre, 56 134–35, 142
174 Index
Splice–continued videotapes, 34, 36–37, 41–43, 45,

sexuality and, 118 48, 89, 99, 119
sublime and, 150 Videodrome, 31–32, 155n4
technology and, 1, 112–13 viewer
Stiegler, Bernard, 5, 150 birth and, 147–48
Blair Witch Project and, 56–62
techno-horror, 31–32 camera and, 38, 55–56
technology Cloverfield and, 77–83
birth and, 88–89, 108, 112, 145 Feardotcom and, 37–42, 48–49
Blair Witch and, 84 gaze and, 44–48
body and, 101–4, 146–47, 149 images and, 35, 37–39, 42,
Cabin in the Woods and, 33, 50, 44–47
150 infection and, 6, 38
children and, 52, 85, 112 metahorror and, 16–17, 26, 29,
Cloverfield and, 85 33
divine and, 138–29, 142 monstrous and, 55–56, 158
Forgotten and, 101, 104–7 Paranormal Activity and, 62–69
Prometheus and, 1, 113, 144, reality and, 15–17, 33, 37–38,
151–52 108–9
Ring and, 1, 6, 31–39 Ring, The and, 43, 46–51
Scream and, 33, 50 Splice and, 118, 122–23, 128
Splice and, 1, 112–13 technology and, 1, 35, 37–39, 84,
technological archives, 7, 98–99, 89, 104
101, 106, 151 virtual and, 71
technological production, 8, Virilio, Paul, 75, 119
31–32, 39 virtual, 2, 22, 27, 32–33, 40–41, 46,
telephone, 33, 101 48–49, 52, 68, 70–71, 100–4,
television, 18, 21, 23, 33, 37, 39, 151
46, 75 virus, 34–38, 49–50, 52, 154n4
Telotte, J.P., 57
Terminator series, 31–32, 87, Walker, Joseph S., 57–58, 61
112–13 Weaver, Sigourney, 26
Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The, 85 Wee, Valerie, 15–16
Thompson, Kirsten Moana, 3, 86 Weinstock, Jeffrey, 57, 62, 66
Tietchen, Todd, 12, 14–15, 22 Wells, H.G., 2, 29, 143
Time Machine, The (Wells), 29 Westfahl, Gary, 89
Tomlinson, Niles, 111 Whedon, Joss, 24, 28
torture, 35, 38–39, 41, 45–47, 90 will
Trencansky, Sarah, 154n3 free will, 21–22, 26, 29, 127,
Twilight Zone, 33, 87 143
illusory will, 8
Valette, Eric, 32 Williams, Linda, 1, 58, 64
VCRs, 89 Williams, Ted, 1, 55
Verbinsky, Gore, 1, 6, 12, 31 Williams, Tony, 86
Index 175
women as objects, 58, 62

becoming and, 108 Paranormal Activity and, 64,
birth and, 147 72–73, 98
Cabin in the Woods and, 26 patriarchy and, 134
Cloverfield and, 62, 73, 98 Ring, The and, 49
Dark Water and, 98 technology and, 107–8
family and, 7–8, 134 television and, 88
Feardotcom and, 36, 39, 45–46 violence and, 40, 45
horror films and, 7–8, 58 womb, 8, 89, 95, 98, 112,
humanity and, 127 120–24, 126, 135, 137, 139,
image and, 36, 49, 62, 73, 149 147–48
mythological imagery and, 119,
138, 141 Žižek, Slavoj, 75–6, 144

Technology, Monstrosity, and Re - Kimberly Jackson

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Technology, Monstrosity, and Re - Kimberly Jackson

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Technology, Monstrosity,

All rights reserved.

First published in 2013 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a

The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

Jackson, Kimberly, 1975–

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.

First edition: November 2013

Printed in the United States of America.

Introduction: Imagining the Ends of Horror

1.1 Dewey, Gale, and the “actors” that portray them

The following represents previously published material:

Excerpted by permission of Sage Publications from “The Resurrec-

Excerpted by permission of Post Script, Inc. from “The Contagion of

Excerpted by permission of Ashgate Publishers from “Techno-

Excerpted by permission of Intellect Ltd. from “Splice: The Postmod-

I am truly grateful for all of those who have supported me on the

Imagining the Ends of

T his project examines the ways that the technologically produced

like the Internet, television, smart phones, and social networking.

and spoofs, but, as Steffen Hantke remarks, “The vanishing of the

great cycles of human existence” freed from the need to reference a

My intention in these analyses is to highlight the ways in which cer-

2010, 2011, 2012) and Cloverfield (2008) self-consciously employ

woman can no longer be positioned as (1) biological origin/womb,

In the readings that follow, I have attempted to highlight both the

technologized world, it has simply been transformed. We may not

Metahorror and Simulation

I n this chapter I want to focus on several recent instances of

Genre Construction and Deconstruction in the Scream Series

notes in Projected Fears, drawing on the work of Greenblatt: “The

(Tietchen 103). Layers of mediation are produced in the process. Not

Throughout, we are posed an interesting question: Is Craven con-

as opposed to a series, which involves some notion of progression

to see what goes in to a horror production. The plot unrolls on this

he wears all the time; Randy is replaced by Charlie (Rory Culkin),

portrayed “reality” sliding into simulation, what are we to make of

The End of Humanity Is a Horror Film

corporation to appease those “downstairs.” Like Scream, The Cabin

do not know they are part of a horror production. The corporation

Figure 1.3 A giant hand breaks through corporate headquarters in The

of production itself. So what we are witnessing is indeed the end of

downstairs, waiting to be set loose, kept down by sacrifices of its

the end of humanity is a horror film. It seems laughable to suggest

The Image Goes Viral—

T his chapter deals with films in which technology and

in our relationship to technology manifests itself as nostalgia for old

Both films begin as mystery/detective stories that morph into super-

what seems to be a hemorrhagic virus; they bleed from every ori-

Their particular brand of haunting has several interrelated effects:

“innocuous medium framing the represented reality” that remains

is the status of hyperreality as a flat field that Feardotcom challenges

tells his victim, “We have a great responsibility . . . to them,” and he

example), and the audience’s desire is in turn created by the virtual

demanded by the invisible God but rather a manifestation of the

The unseen takes up the visible [l’invu remonte au visible]: it climbs

This figuration of the painter’s encounter with the monstrous nature

replies, “Actually, Terry Huston, Department of Health.” Yet she may

What the age of mechanical reproduction extracted from the work

The Image as Voracious

I n this chapter I extend my discussion of the demonology of the

image, nor is it a reflection of the will/gaze of the subject/viewer. It

Projecting the Blair Witch

between “factual discourse and factual means of representation,” a