Part 1

Dirges of Silence

The week before I turned ten, my grandmother sold her mortuary in the suburbs of Albuquerque and placed me under her wing following the death of my parents. Before the mortuary’s closure, she stole slivers of youth from her untimely dead and ate them with her tea, an act that curried no favors with the divine who saw the youthfulness of the dead as their birthright. To thumb the scales of sin, she would lay awake on cloudless nights as to let the moon confess its sins to her before forwarding its contrition to god. With the rising of every sun, angels would tally her sins while she washed her hair, and even the most captious among the heavens would count the sum as zero.

On long and unwelcome winter nights when the stars carried my weeping from my own lips to her ears, she would come into my room and tell me a tale, one she swore on the name of her mother to be as real as my tears:

Part 1

Synaptic Heterostasis

I arrived home from Las Vegas to find the fledgling miasma of unease hanging in the air. Two days ago, videos began circulating on pro-Ukranian Telegram channels of a Russian soldier, most likely one of Pytor’s “stalkers”, somewhere near the Chernobyl exclusion zone. Per Svoboda, who sent me the link via email:

Part 1

Bodily-Self Neuromatrix

The synchronicities of the past week have proven too uncanny to ignore. The autopsy of the split-head man, as I had come to call him, had momentarily drawn my attention away from XDPH, until I recalled I recalled the notes in Hero’s fMRI data: anomalous activation of the amygdala and pineal gland.

Out of habit I checked her charts again; despite the passage of weeks since her disappearance, someone in the ER, another explorer who had found himself as drawn to her as I, had left a small note: past cEEG data resembles a nightmare? PGO waves suggest sleep, but she was awake at the time. No explanation.

It was another week before I found a specialist who would respond to my emails. Dimakis Katzouros, a doctor of experimental psychosomnology at the University Of Nevada, provided an alternate explanation:

Counter-Insurgency Against The Hyperreal

Part 1

Sestos popped a tab of Aella and downed it with an open can of Red Bull jammed into the center console. He made a face that suggested the drink had spent more time in the car than he assumed.

Hero’s knuckles turned white as she gripped the wheel. “It’s your plug, man. Is that really necessary?”

“They’re everywhere.” He said with a tone that landed somewhere between childhood awe and addict paranoia. He handed another pill to Leander. Hero sighed heavily.

They pulled off of main street and into a decaying corner of Bosque occupied by chain-link fences and pre-recession era Ford pickups nesting in dirt lawns. Hero parked on the curb and cranked the parking brake. She made some comment about keeping the two in line but it was too late, Sestos was up in the stratosphere.

Part 1

Apportioning Of Teleology

Hero stuffed a towel down the bathroom sink before filling it with water and dunking her head under. The cold water gnawed her cheeks, shocking some recalcitrant fragment of her animal brain into submission. It was always momentary—that stinking creature in her head slinking off to dry itself, never leaving, never ceasing. On cold nights it would return to maul her thoughts.

Part 1

Theophany Engineering

Sestos awoke at three AM, showered, and downed 200mg of Modafinil and 70mg of methylphenidate with a can of Red Bull and a protein bar. He had packed a bag the previous night—boltcutters, night vision goggles, a hand-drawn map, and a Beretta M9 fitted with an oil filter suppressor. Just in case.

Part 1

The Infection of Our Ontologies

God beamed an eight-hundred milligram excursus on the writhing of shadows directly into Leander’s brain, between the eyes, and he was suffering. His mouth was as dry as New Mexico itself, his skin no less hot, and he laid spread out on a ratty, dog-eaten couch while he waited for the spectral insectoids outside his window to come in and spear him on their tusks. Grasped by a powerful and silent horror, he wondered what rotting seas could have begot the crawling phantasms that vermiculated from his walls, filling the dark spaces of his rented suburban home normally ruled by ants and cardboard boxes. With great effort he leaned forward, grasping for his vape pen.

Part 1

Anomalous fMRI Activation

My Jon Doe lifted himself from the heavy shackles of death and let the crows carry him to my house. After a dinner that arrived in a Styrofoam box and a few hours of unpleasant dreams, I awoke in the harsh daylight hours—I was still rendered nocturnal by my work—to see him stumbling across my bedroom, his gait torpid with rigor mortis. He was as he appeared to me the previous night, completely naked, a white sheet veiling his head, wearing a beard of coagulated blood that ran from chin to navel. He clambered onto the foot of my bed, where I lay forced onto the mattress as if held by an insurmountable weight; he gazed at me with unseeing eyes, gaped jaw visible against the linen pressed to his face. He raised his arm and pointed to his left, as if asking for something out of his reach. The suffocating weight released itself from my chest and I flailed out of my sheets, but he was gone.

Forty-two years after it started, the life of Nabû-zuqup-kēna unraveled under the Babylonian sun, returning to the cool waters of the Tigris in a spray of crimson. The man in question, a priest who hung his head before the idol of Marduk, heard a distant god whisper to him in a dream, a god whose name passed into history before mortal men laid the first bricks of Ur. After this fitful vision, Nabû-zuqup-kēna copied seven words onto a clay tablet moistened with the urine of a virgin sow, covered the tablet with another layer of clay to serve as an envelope, then sent it north on the back of a horse. His oneiric promise was thus fulfilled. The priest, hearing nothing but the bruit of the first three words calling him to the desert of his ancestors, used a stolen blade to peel the skin from his chest and sever the sanguine cords of his beating heart, as one would pluck a pomegranate from a tree.

Outside Sippar, at the borders of the Babylonian kingdom, the tablet demanded new custodianship. The young messenger dropped it onto the bricks of the city gate, shattering the unfired outer envelope. Sunlight cut deep shadows into the next three words, syllables that owed their heritage to a thousand dead scribes, to the first merchants and their tallies, to the laments for Ur wailed at a mourning moon in the languages of antiquity. The messenger extended his tongue from his mouth before falling chin-first onto a rock as to sever the organ from his head. He swallowed the resulting blood, then ran through the streets of Sippar before impaling himself upon the horns of a bull.

A priestess, Šima-ilat, saw the grizzly death unfold and covered the tablet with a linen cloth before placing it under her arm. Šima-ilat, one-third a woman and two-thirds a demon following a night in her adolescence when the northern winds clawed their way into her spine, heard the tellurian words whisper to her like the tuneful cry of a shorebird. How could something so wicked sing such honeyed songs?

She knew she should cast the thing into the Tigris, but its chant was too loud, her curiosity too desperate. She had to witness it. After reading the seventh word, the remaining third of her soul carved by Ištar fled from her liver and drowned itself in her stomach, taking her voice with it. She stumbled past the city gates, and flung herself upon a priest; Šima-ilat then bit off the fifth finger of her left hand, split the bone between her teeth, and used the shard as a stylus to press her prophecy into clay. The priest, reading words glazed by blood, did not know if confusion or horror came to him first.

Above the meek cradle of the Earth, Šamaš, daylight and justice incarnate, pulled himself from his divine throne and mournfully threw a lion's hide over the sun. Somewhere in the north of the world, a million tongues tasted the terroir of Šima-ilat's fear. They draped themselves in a shroud of tears before pouring down the mountains.

Note: Contains spoilers for Martyrs, The Ring, Demonlover, Red Rooms, Possessor, Feardotcom and Suicide Club.

We are the Witnesses

In the 2008 French horror film Martyrs, protagonist Anna Assaoui finds herself kidnapped by a cult of aging gentry and bourgeoisie socialites who believe in divine enlightenment through pain; the head of the cult, known only as Mademoiselle, subjects Anna to a regimen of of beatings, deprivation, torture and abuse in the hope that she will become a kind of divine witness—literally, a Martyr—who, in her final moments, will transmit her knowledge of the afterlife to the cult and its adherents.

At the end of the film Anna is flayed alive, and whispers the sacred knowledge of her enlightenment to the Mademoiselle. With the secret revealed to her, the Mademoiselle tells no one else, and instead takes her own life.

We have all become witnesses. Spend an hour scrolling on TikTok. Cat videos. Clips from Twitch of streamers reacting to the new KSI song. People arguing about the election. Discourse about Halsey's new album. Footage of a Palestinian man burning alive in a hospital. A Woman with a pet raccoon. Talk of North Korea and Wold War III.

Go On Reddit. Visit the porn subreddit, see porn. There's a subreddit for people to post pictures of their badly-made meals. Laugh at someone's catastrophically overcooked brownies. Go on the news subreddit, it's North Korea, Russia, and Ukraine again. There's at least three subreddits specifically for the Ukraine war; see a helicopter tumble to earth in a ball of flame. See a Ukrainian soldier alone in a ditch eat his rifle, his helmet tumbling across the dirt, head jerking back with a quick spray of red. See a drone drop a grenade on a Russian, his skull splitting in two like a watermelon. Have you ever seen a person with half a head? Go back to the food subreddit, see someone's dangerously undercooked chicken. You don't laugh this time.

The nightmares of the modern world are no longer filtered through journalists or hidden behind gonzo VHS snuff tapes. The era of Faces Of Death is far behind us, as old and innocent as the rest of our childhood memories. When the computers in our pockets can show us every detail of war, death, rape, and genocide, all uncensored, where does that leave horror cinema? What can be more horrifying than this? We begin to make films about what it means to be a witness, of course.

Horror and Technology

Traditionally, horror about technology falls into two camps: we create a new thing, and that thing comes to destroy us, or we create a new thing, and it becomes a vector for pre-existing evil. The former gives us Frankenstein, Mimic, M3gan, and countless monster films, while the latter has given us Poltergeist, The Ring, One Missed Call, Demonlover, Feardotcom, Pulse, and numerous others.

With the arrival of the internet came a whole new generation of corresponding horror films. Some, such as Kiyoshi Kurosawa's magnum opus Pulse, and Jane Schoenbrun's unsettling thesis on online adolescence We're All Going To the World's Fair, deal with the loneliness and alienation of the internet. Others, such as Demonlover, Suicide Club, and Feardotcom, are instead more interested in the horror of what we might find on the internet—and what happens when it finds us. For the purposes of this discussion, those latter three are worth examining in detail.

Demonlover and Feardotcom, both from 2002, are remarkably similar films. In Olivier Assayas's tense and postmodern Demonlover, a pair of ruthless and conniving corporations battle to monopolize the flow of hentai into the European market. The rules of corporate espionage fall apart when protagonist Diane De Monx discovers that one of the hentai sites is a front for an interactive torture porn business. The film's final half hour passes in a dreamlike haze of paranoia, murder, and intrigue, until Diane ends up in front of the torturer's camera. In the critically panned Feardotcom, a group of NYPD detectives trace a number of unexplained deaths to a snuff film website—and anyone who views the website will die 48 hours later. After visiting Feardotcom themselves, they race to find the website's source: the vengeful spirit of a serial killer's first victim, spreading her rage and suffering through the wires.

Sion Sono's Suicide Club, from 2001, bridges the thematic gap between the clades of internet alienation horror, and evil website horror. A rash of blood-soaked suicides in Japan catch the interest of police detective Kuroda and hacker Kiyoko. Their respective investigations lead them to a mysterious website, populated by red and white dots, representing the victims. The catch? The dots appear before the suicides happen. As they struggle to close in on the bizarre organization behind the website, death closes in on them: Kiyoko is kidnapped by a fame-obsessed rock star who considers himself to be the head of the "Suicide Club", while Kuroda's family, and finally Kuroda himself, all die by their own hands. It should be noted that there's a similar thematic angle in Kiyoshi Kurosawa's 2001 film Pulse: A grad student's research project, where dots bounce around on a computer screen. If two dots collide, they disappear, but a dot will never stray too far from another; the dots serve as a metaphor for the film's core idea of loneliness among both the living and the dead. To Sono and Kurosawa alike, there's something strange and tragic in seeing human life as pixels on a screen.

This was the state of our anxieties about the internet in the early 2000s; we were afraid of what we might find lurking on the dark corners of the web, and what might find us. This makes sense, as it's an extension of a common narrative device in horror. Someone must first discover the monster, and the monster discovers them. Characters knowingly travel to the haunted woods, perform the seance, visit the haunted house, take possession of the cursed object, and then suffer the consequences.

It's not the early 2000s anymore, though. The internet is no longer a new and mysterious frontier. There is no more fear of what we might find, because too many of us have found it. So, horror is beginning to move on. The horror is the experience itself.

Doomscrolling Horror

Brandon Cronenberg's 2020 film Possessor is one of the best sci-fi horror films of the last ten years. At the center of the tragedy is Tasya Vos, a corporate assassin whose employer has a unique set of technologies that allow her to remotely pilot another human being, usually selected to be someone already close to their intended target. However, as Tasya's emotional state begins to deteriorate, her own psyche starts to clash with the psyche of the man she's piloting.

Possessor is a film about voyeurism and emotional invasiveness in the social media age. Tasya doesn't merely puppet a random stranger, she lives their life, experiences their heath problems and addictions, sleeps with their partners, and inhabits their body as if it was her own.

While Tasya is piloting the body of Collin Tate, low-level employee at a Facebook-esque tech company, Collin's friends discuss his job combing over and categorizing footage from webcams, an obvious parallel to Tasya's own, more direct, form of voyeurism:

"I feel like a certain type of mind must get off on violating people's lives like that. I mean, seriously, how much pussy do you see at work everyday?"

"Well, I can only imagine the stuff he sees over there. I jerk off every day in front of my webcam so that Zoothroo knows which brand of vibrator I'm using."

This level of invasiveness is paralleled in the debrief Tasya's manager gives her before she plugs in to Collin's body:

"Tate's girlfriend is 'Ava' not 'Ahva'. His irritable bowel syndrome has intensified, so moderate to severe pain in your lower right abdomen will be considered normal."

In another scene, we see Collin, piloted by Tasya, at his work. He clicks through webcam feeds, watching people going about their lives, getting undressed, having sex, while he selects images of curtains for AI categorization. The camera cuts away from the webcam view and onto Collin's face as he selects the next feed. Collin staggers away in horror, disgusted by whatever it is the camera is showing him. Tasya becomes increasingly erratic, enacting violence with numb, chaotic brutality as her time in Collin's body extends into dangerous territory. By the end of the film, everyone is dead, and Tasya is a shell of her former self.

Possessor warns us that we are seeing too much of other people's lives, and they see too much of ours, and the result is destructive to everyone involved. This message is far from theoretical. We have created a small army of Tasya Voses, and Facebook is now paying out to content moderators who were diagnosed with PTSD. What do we even make of a nightmare such as this? Is the human spirit simply an abyss into which no one should delve? Is social media just an inherently bad idea? Possessor does not have a philosophical answer, but it has a more direct suggestion: Do not look. Your gaze was not meant for the mind of another.

2023 saw the release of the Quebecois Red Rooms, a profoundly disturbing psychological horror that aims at both the social media age and true crime. The films opens on the trial of a serial killer, Ludovic Chevalier, AKA le Démon de Rosemont, a man who filmed the rape, torture, and murder of three young women, and put the footage on the internet. However, we quickly realize that the film isn't about Ludovic himself, but his groupies, the two women so obsessed with Ludovic that they sleep on the streets so they can be first in line to attend his trial. Clémentine is manic, and resolutely believes in Ludovic's innocence. Kelly-Anne's motives and emotions are far murkier.

The narrative core of Red Rooms are the snuff films themselves. The viewer never sees them, but we see the reaction of those who do. People collapse in the courtroom. Screams of horror. In one of the most gripping scenes in the film, we learn that Kelly-Anne has a copy of one of the snuff films, and she watches it with Clémentine. We see their faces, bathed in red from the computer monitor. Kelly-Anne's expression is as blank as always, but Clémentine's shifts through anguish, disgust, and terror. Tears roll down her face. The act of witnessing is too much for her, and she leaves for home the next morning.

Red Rooms derives much of its tension from Kelly-Anne's behavior, she's a near-perfect execution of the "monster with motives we cannot comprehend" trope. The film's horror—the scenes that stick with the audience hours after the credits roll—all derive from the act of witnessing. We do not see the footage, because that's not the point. The point is what it does to us.

Possessor and Red Rooms are both members in a nascent clade of technology horror: through the internet we are witnessing what we shouldn't, and it's driving us mad. We are traumatized and broken, and we cannot look away.

Alienation is also a theme in both of these movies: Red Rooms draws a parallel between Kelly-Anne and Lady Shalott, the character from Tennyson's poem of the same name, who lives alone in a tower on an island. Collin Tate spends his working days with a VR set strapped to his head, completely isolated. By the end of the film, everyone close to Tasya Vos is dead.

In an act of hubris or pretense, I'm calling this genre Doomscrolling Horror: films where the source of fear is the alienation, anxiety, trauma, and mental distress associated with the age of algorithm-driven social media and surveillance capitalism. Although not a film, Black Mirror is an important predictor of this genre, particularly the series pilot The National Anthem, where the prime minister is forced to sodomize a pig on national TV, while the entire population watches on in disgust.

Demonlover comes remarkably close to predicting the nightmare 20 years ahead of time: the film ends with Diane De Monx trapped in the torturers' chambers, but we zoom out to see her on the computer monitor of a high school student. He pays a few dollars to send his requests to the website's producers, then returns his attention to his chemistry homework while she awaits her fate on his monitor. It is a normal day for a normal suburban family.

Inescapable Shock

To quote Bessel Van Der Kolk's The Body Keeps The Score:

[Two researchers] had repeatedly administered painful electric shocks to dogs who were trapped in locked cages. They called this condition "inescapable shock." [..] After administering several courses of electric shock, the researchers opened the doors of the cages and then shocked the dogs again. A group of control dogs who had never been shocked before immediately ran away, but the dogs who had earlier been subjected to inescapable shock made no attempt to flee, even when the door was wide open—they just lay there, whimpering and defecating.

What a perfect metaphor for the petty atavism of Twitter, Reddit, and the rest. Broken and pathetic creatures, whimpering, defecating, trapped only by ourselves and our trauma. The Russian man with half a skull. Revenge porn. Civilians burning alive. The door is open. We do not run. Why? To an outsider we must seem insane.

In a scene from the 2002 horror film The Ring, journalist Rachel Keller tracks down the only living guardian of Samara, the ghostly girl who created the cursed VHS tape that kills its viewers. He tells her:

What is it with reporters? You take one person's tragedy and force the world to experience it. Spread it like a sickness.

Rachel soon realizes this is a clue—Samara created the tape to force her anguish upon the world, and spread it.

Welcome to hell. Are you a Samara, Tasya, or Clémentine? You see a cop shoot a man fifteen times in the back. Is the cage locked? A corpse in the mud in Donbas. Is the cage locked? The Gaza strip reduced to ruin. Is the cage locked? Is the cage locked? Is the cage locked?