What Is Horror Poetics? Part 666: The Medium Is the Monster

by J †Johnson

We get stuck in the media we love. It can be a pleasurable feeling, like watching a comfort film or going back to an album we associate with times in our lives that we don’t mind revisiting. Ah, but there’s where we open ourselves up to being haunted and even mishandled by the media we visit—or the media that visits us. That album you can’t listen to anymore because it reminds you of someone you don’t want to know or be. The movie with That Scene you never want to see again. But you might not be able to remove those memories, or the media that attend them. Get a song stuck in your head and relive a feeling that nauseates and horrifies you. It could happen at a grocery store (uncanny!), thrift shop (poignant!), or bar (on the nose?): song comes on, you cringe, you spend the next few days trying to shake it along with whatever it recalls that you have tried to let go. Worse, maybe, the song can come from nowhere. At least a proper haunting comes from going someplace you shouldn’t have gone: some grody old house, or a restaurant where you once had an OK date that turned into a life episode you would like to erase. But when the malevolent spirit of some cursed song visits you out of nowhere: that’s just bad luck.

Of course, a cherished piece of media can be soiled by subsequent experience, or ruined for you by a horrible thing someone involved in making it does. Or you just get over it. Those feelings cursed media can elicit are affects genre can work with. We’re thinking about a few related themes here, and a set of loosely associated and often conflated subgenres of horror. First, there’s the object you should not have touched. That’s of course related to the ghost story and the haunted house motif. It’s a bad object because it has a troubled history. But maybe also it’s something you found in a place where you did not belong. Going there was a bad idea, and taking something with you when you leave is a big mistake.¹ It might not matter what you took, though it’s a more powerful story, a more dynamic motif, if the object is well chosen by the storyteller if not by the character. ² When the specificity of the object doesn’t really matter, that very arbitrariness might itself be unsettling, but it might also feel more like an empty symbol or a cheap metaphor. As Jack Halberstam reminds us in Skin Shows: when we get overly fixated on one reading of a text, the text gets less powerful.³ Horror really gets hold of us when it is both specific and ambiguous. The monster might represent one thing or another, but if it’s not also a fucking monster, we’re back in high school english class writing “monster=trauma” in the margin of a story that’s more exciting if we stop trying to be so literary. The thing itself is both scary and difficult to square with reality, which is literally literally (sic) disturbing.

A presence, though, which will not stay put, or will not let us leave once we visit it, can scare even a monster (or a monster lover). And when the medium is the monster, it finds us where we live.

Consider two related horror subgenres: found footage and haunted media. For example, The Blair Witch Project and Lake Mungo, respectively. It doesn’t matter if you haven’t seen the former, because if you are reading this you probably know what you need to know about it: kids try to make a horror documentary and get swallowed by the horror, and we watch them slip back into the frame and become the subject and victims of that horror. And maybe it really happened! (No it didn’t.) (Except those actors really did get swallowed by the film.) If you haven’t seen Lake Mungo, what you need to know for our purposes is that it is a multimedia feature where the monster—or in this case, ghost—is the text itself. The process of combining materials from different sources and technologies summons that ghost, rather than capturing it. Editing and haunting are intimately related to memory and myth: it’s how we make monsters and ghosts. This process is extended technique for found footage. We don’t fixate on the found recording, nor do we simply build a narrative around it, as in Ring. Though of course Ring makes other moves that make us feel cursed for watching. Notice, though, that the basic technique for that is to walk us through watching the cursed tape. We do what the doomed characters do. We sit down and watch the video, then we hear the phone ring, then we freak out and worry we will be haunted for the rest of our lives by this cursed media image/object. Where this stream of horror becomes something else, something like mixed media horror, is when we start to conflate the media we are watching with media objects embedded within it—and also when we start to lose track of which metaleptic level of mediated reality we are on. As with Lake Mungo, it’s not just that we start seeing things in the mirrors, windows, and screens around us; we also lose our place among the media textures of the film. Ring and its remakes and sequels play with this as well, building a set of visual motifs—like that hazy ring that recalls the flickering celluloid cue to switch reels—that mark the films and trouble our viewing. Whether you catch the visual artifact, it haunts you and threatens to dissolve the frame, or draw it around you. The medium is the monster; the monster is the media.

Another powerful example of mixed media horror that is also haunted media is Noroi: The Curse. Along with Ghostwatch, it plays with the idea that viewing this media releases or circulates the curse into the world at large, or at least the world of the viewer. That last distinction can be extra unsettling, as we try to parse whether we have ruined the world or just fucked ourselves up. The documentary (or mockumentary) impulse is only one layer that invites horror. While this plays on the fundamental fear that watching horror movies can irreversibly distort reality (and invade our dreams), we also come to question how we formulate a coherent and consistent sense of reality at all. If we are already stuck in media, whether or not we love it, our sense of reality is already inextricably tied to films, novels, songs, paintings, etc. They haunt us, sure, but they also make us in the sense that they comprise our consciousness. Noroi has moments that make the screen feel both permeable and scratched at by something the film can barely contain. Or let’s reframe the scored surface of old media forms, and imagine a haze over the film that is the breath of the demon fogging the other side of the screen. Or it’s our own heavy breathing clouding this side. Or we’re already on the other side, already the demon, tracing a message in the residue we leave on that surface.

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In preparation for this installment of What Is Horror Poetics? we watched the films mentioned here, and read contemporary haunted media horror novels like J.M. Tyree’s Haunted Screen and Gretchen Felker-Martin’s recent gem Black Flame. Once we start thinking about and talking with friends about haunted media (thanks to Kayte Terry for using that term in conversation) and mixed media horror, all sorts of texts slip out of the shadows. That moment in It (film and book versions) where Pennywise starts moving in a photograph or jumps out of a film. The overstuffed, hyper-annotated manuscript box in John Darnielle’s Devil House, or the talkshow rerun in Wolf in White Van where guests do things they didn’t do last time you watched it. Shit, Darnielle wrote a whole novel explicitly about haunted media called Universal Harvester, though we could argue about whether people adding things to the ends of video rental cassettes qualifies as haunting. Anyway the way we misremember whether the talkshow scene is in Wolf in White Van or Universal Harvester or both is part of the horror effects—unstable flashbacks that could be all in our heads, or might have hopped from the media into our heads, leaving no trace but permanently marking us. And then there’s Late Night With the Devil, which plays with embedded multimedia, found footage, and metaleptic metanarrative (what exactly are we watching—a broadcast or someone’s fantasy or an AI generated nightmare?). Alison Rumfitt novels like Brainwyms and Tell Me I’m Worthless borrow and adapt pastiche and bricolage strategies from Mary Shelley to create a frankentext of diary entries, message boards, song lyrics, stage script, and authorial interruptions that make us wonder again what a novel is and what it could be. They also make a monster of the text, in the gothic tradition. Paul Tremblay’s A Head Full of Ghosts is haunted by the hypermedia it samples, and his recent novel Horror Movie is a cross-mediated film script. Jordy Rosenburg’s picaresque Confessions of the Fox burrows into an underground labyrinth of footnotes that unground the textual body and trouble reader and editor (as do all good footnotes), who find themselves reflected and refracted in the compromised text. Stephen Graham Jones’ Buffalo Hunter Hunter tracks a poison letter manuscript that might carry the foundational curse of our nation (speaking as an American motherfucker). Every Jordan Peele film is a frame within a frame within a frame, the bloody history of cinema haunting itself. 

We could go on, and so could you. Drop us a line (culdesacofblood@gmail dot com) and let us know some of your favorite examples. And also stay tuned at Cul-de-sac of Blood, where we’ll continue to explore these subgenres in Friday Features. One of our initial concepts for this installment was to stitch together pieces on the films mentioned in the first section of this essay. Instead, we started from scratch. But we’d love to share those pieces, so we’ll sprinkle them throughout Cycle 666. Hopefully some of our contributors will send us their own related Friday Features, and we can make an ongoing Halloween party of it. So take this as another invite to send us your horrors, along with a reminder that Friday Features can be about movies, books, songs, albums, cursed objects, or any horror media that shivers your spine and messes with your mind.

¹ Media itself can be both place and object, which returns us to that creeping haunt. Consider Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows,” where two people go where they are not welcome, fuck around and find out. The landscape itself menaces them, and while they take no cursed artifact, the story—or is it a novel, or a myth?—is haunted media, and the reader carries that ill omen as memory and dis-ease.

² The book is the willows, and maybe we should not have gone there.

³ Perhaps what is truly unsettling about “The Willows” is that the forms it takes as image and media never settle. Even that strange plural resists our reference to it, disturbing grammar as well.

Read What Is Horror Poetics? Part I , Part II, Part III, Part IV, and Part V.