Hauntological screenwriting: Reflections on writing Render

Abstract

A hauntological reflection on the theoretical and practical approaches to developing Render, a feature-length conspiracy screenplay written to discern whether and how it is possible to present viable justice in a conspiracy film amidst a twenty-first-century technological and conspiracy culture. Alongside the introduction of new narrative techniques such as ‘corruption of the protagonist’, ‘emergence of the inner voice’, ‘many-headed monster’, and genre-appropriate classifications such as the ‘seen/unseen threat’ and surveillance capitalism as the logic behind the conspiracy genre’s new behemoth ‘Big Technology’, this article blends academic analysis with personal reflection to involve the reader in the liminal space between theory and practice, the tension between objective and subjective and the intuitive and at times designless process that perpetuates each subsequent draft of a feature screenplay. Here, the application of hauntology as a lens through which to view the screenwriting process is explored to characterize the ebb and flow between that which is no longer (the previous draft) and that which is still not yet (the next draft).