Emerging Trends in Horror Film and Television: Part 2

Abstract

In the introduction to Part 1 of “Emerging Trends in Horror Film and Television,” I described the essays gathered there as encouraging us to “rethink a range of presumptions and practices that may limit horror criticism.” The four pieces included in this issue do the same. The issue begins with Vicky Brewster’s “‘You Can’t Stop Picturing that Beautiful Handset’: The Found Phone Trope in Twenty-First-Century Media.” Brewster presents the “found phone” trope as an extension of the “found manuscript,” common to gothic fiction, including Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, often credited as being the first of its kind. Brewster identifies significant successors of found manuscripts in found footage and desktop horror (the focus of Chera Kee’s essay in part 1) but considers “found phone” a distinct incarnation due to the particular nature of the cell phone and its role in our lives. Unlike desktop computers and laptops, cell phones are uniquely portable, making them function almost like an extension of the body. This sense is furthered by the fact that cell phones are so often used to access social media, which Brewster also considers “an extension or projection of the individual” (250-51). Brewster examines a range of texts, including fiction (e.g., Nathan Ballingrud’s “The Visible Filth” and Jason Arnopp’s Ghoster), video games (e.g., Sara is Missing, A Normal Lost Phone, and unrd), as well as film (Searching, Unfriended, and Wounds, an adaptation of Ballingrud’s short story) in order to uncover the common plot elements in these stories. Prominent among them is the ability of the supernatural presences that haunt these narratives “to not only access the characters’ private digital information but also pose as the characters disseminating it, leaving apparently no trace of the supernatural entity itself” (245). Brewster argues that “these entities stand in for the corporations that can access this data and potentially sell it or utilize it for profit, as happens with targeted advertising” (245). As the title of Mikal Gaines’s essay, “After Peele: Get Out’s Influence on the Horror Genre and Beyond,” suggests, its focus is Jordan Peele’s 2017 genreredefining film. In Gaines’s own words, his essay offers “a cartography of