“You Can’t Stop Picturing that Beautiful Handset”: The Found Phone Trope in Twenty-First-Century Media

Abstract

Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, popularly held to be the first gothic text, also offers one of the first examples of the found document trope, the story revolving around a manuscript that, within its own fiction, is claimed to be an “authentic” document from the twelfth century. Since then, this trope has been enthusiastically reimagined in cinema as “found footage.” Although found footage has a rich history stretching back to silent cinema, Alexandra HellerNicholas credits its modern beginning with The Blair Witch Project (loc. 105), which Adam Daniel also acknowledges as “ignit[ing] the rebirth” of the found footage subgenre (39). Found footage films continued into the twenty-first century with the Paranormal Activity franchise, Cloverfield, and many others. The “found” trope has once again transformed in the twenty-first century into what might be termed “found phone.” Many of the devices that rule twenty-first-century life in heavily technologized societies—laptops, tablets, smartwatches, smart house devices, and so on—have become inextricable from our personal identities. Lindsay Hallam notes that “[o]ur identity and sense of self, and certainly our fears, are now bound to the digital realm” (117), while Steen Christiansen agrees that “human subjectivities are dispersed across media technologies, entangling the sense of self with those same technologies” (43). If, as Adam Hart argues, “our ghosts take on the forms and qualities of our media” (3), then it only makes sense that as society has become more dependent on the smartphone, it would serve as the perfect talisman for contemporary gothic haunting. The phone’s portability compared with other devices means that it can be easily carried in a pocket or purse, and one seldom leaves the house without one’s phone; this cannot be said of the majority of the other devices. A phone app is necessary in order to set up smart home products such as the Amazon Echo, and many apps and sites, like banking apps, PayPal, and Steam, require text message or two-factor phone verification in order to log in or carry out transactions. The phone not only holds the most personal information about an individual, but it also acts as a sort of extension of that individual. Furthermore, the extent to which the smartphone has