The Ghosts in the Machine: Screened Reality and the Desktop Film

Since the rise of both found footage horror films and ghost-hunting reality TV in the 1990s and early 2000s, these two forms have traded in many of the same conventions in order to communicate a sense of realism alongside a sense of the otherworldly. Both depend on the use of documentary aesthetics to create a sense of verisimilitude, yet also employ self-reflexive strategies to alert viewers to their constructed natures. Both use manufactured defects to help construct realism as well as imply paranormal interference, and both often position viewers in the same spaces as diegetic character(s) and/or camera(s), sometimes going so far as to mirror the audience’s viewing position in the diegesis itself. In other words, both forms evoke the fuzzy boundaries between the real and the fictional, and the viewer and the viewed, that exist across media today. In found footage horror and ghost-hunting reality TV shows, claims of authenticity are partly tied to their documentary aesthetics—using handheld cameras and available lighting, for instance—but these aesthetics also self-reflexively display the technology used to record the text itself. On the one hand, these forms work to craft a sense of reality by showing their construction, but on the other, showing this construction ironically works to conceal the myriad other ways this “reality” is manufactured. Adam Daniel further suggests that found footage films’ claims to authenticity based on their documentary form “have . . . been problematised by a postmodern society that questions the notion of the visual record ever holding a stable claim to indexical truthfulness. The anxiety that belies this potential inconsistency between authenticity and the documentary form plays a vital role in the power of found footage, opening up a space for the ‘unreal’” (41). Yet, Mark Andrejevic notes, “In promising to move beyond or to get behind the constructed façade of representation,” reality TV shows “cater to a reflexively savvy audience familiar with the understanding that all representations are constructed” (170). Thus, depending on the context, audiences may have made peace with a highly fabricated screen