#Selfveillance: Horror’s Slut Shaming through Social Media, Sur- and Selfveillance

Abstract

This chapter investigates the recent surge of social media (mis)use in horror films including The Cabin in the Woods (2012), Unfriended (2015) and #Horror (2015) and how young women’s relationship to social media in these films often pillories females for existing under, and delighting in, an anonymous, ubiquitous gaze. In these narratives, women are slut shamed both in the plot and through the threat of social media’s panoply of screens, sur- and selfveillance. In my discussion, I will utilize feminist film theory including the writings of Laura Mulvey, Linda Williams and Barbara Creed, while also including contemporary cultural criticism from writers and journalists like Nancy Jo Sales and Leora Tanenbaum to explore the horror genre from a more contemporary, multi-discourse perspective. The technology in these films serve as harbingers, intimating the figurative and literal dangers to come for their female protagonists, ultimately suggesting that the horror in these films is the medium itself and the patriarchal social media culture that these devices cultivate.