Gothic Fiction And The Evolution Of Media Technology Gothic

gothic fiction and the evolution of media technology gothic fiction and the origins of mass-market media let me open with a story. o

Gothic Fiction and the Evolution of Media Technology
Gothic Fiction and the Origins of Mass-Market Media
Let me open with a story.
Once upon a time, there was a terrible book. This book contained
terrible things, things which Man Was Not Meant to Know; things so
awful that only the wise and strong of heart could read it without
damaging their minds and souls. The great and the good gave orders for
this book to be suppressed, in the interests of the common good; but
such was the perversity of mankind that some copies survived the
purge, circulating illicitly, each attempt to ban them serving only to
enhance their unholy attraction. And so many people read the terrible
book, and were corrupted; its evil warped their minds, making them
wicked and sinful, encouraging unclean lusts and predisposing them to
blasphemy and crime. And some of them became so twisted that they
wrote Terrible Books of their own, so that the danger was multiplied,
and the social fabric threatened to tear asunder....
This is, obviously, a Gothic story. But it’s also a story which has
been told about Gothic, in many times and in many places: by concerned
parents, government censors, journalists, and literary critics. For as
long as Gothic has existed at all, these same accusations have been
levelled against it: that it is evil, it is dangerous, it will corrupt
us, and most surely and especially will it corrupt our children. Just
like the Gothic monsters which appear in such fictions, Gothic can
apparently only be approached safely by those who possess both
sufficient learning and sufficient purity of heart to protect
themselves, Van Helsing-like, from its baleful influence; and if
unleashed upon the excitable lower orders, what harm could it not do?
The damage it caused could propagate through society like an infection
– like vampirism, perhaps, or lycanthropy, or some sort of zombie
plague, turning previously ordinary people into monsters of
criminality and vice. People made these claims about the
German-influenced Gothic novels and melodramas of the 1790s; they made
them about the ‘Newgate Novels’ and penny dreadful of the 1840s; they
made them about the decadent literature of the 1890s, the horror films
and pulp horror stories of the 1930s, the horror comics of the 1950s,
the horror videos of the 1980s, and – most recently – the
horror-themed video games of the last couple of decades. (Crawford
112-7, 284-6, Egan chapters 1-3, Haining 357-71, Joyce 63-95, MacLeod
78-98, Nyberg 109-22, Smith 57-8, 70-3, Springhall passim) In each
case, the claims made have been essentially the same: that while
earlier forms of horror fiction may have been acceptable, this latest
iteration of Gothic media is too horrible, too disturbing, too
mentally damaging for it to be placed in the hands of the public
without inflicting widespread harm.
I want to press this point, because I don’t think it is any sort of
coincidence that this recognisably Gothic narrative keeps getting used
to describe popular Gothic media. Gothic, after all, was one of the
first mass-market genres of fiction the world had ever seen. (The
other credible competitor for the title would be sentimental fiction,
which, like Gothic, was a product of the mid-eighteenth century.) It
is probably more than just historical accident that this new
phenomenon, the popular novel, was so swift to take on Gothic form, or
that Gothic melodramas proved so successful in the newly-expanded
popular theatre of the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth
centuries, because Gothic, as a genre, is so perfectly adapted to such
new and hybrid media forms. Indeed, I’d reverse the question: is it
likely that any new form of mass media technology could fail to
manifest itself in Gothic forms? Any new form of popular media, from
novels to video games, is inevitably going to be a somewhat Gothic
object, at least at first: such forms are always going to provoke a
certain level of anxiety, precisely because their potential is still
unknown, and because they do not yet fit comfortably into any
established formal hierarchy. (Springhall 7) It should thus not
surprise us to find that the fictions expressed via such new media
forms frequently circle around the themes of monstrosity, disruption,
illegitimacy, and disintegration, because these are what they enact,
by their very existence. Every new form of popular media technology is
a kind of monstrous birth, an illegitimate, a usurper, possessed of
portentous and previously unheard-of capabilities, threatening to
disrupt or dissolve the cultural landscape into which it arrives.
Perhaps one reason why every new form of media technology for the last
two hundred years has been so rapidly adapted to the articulation of
Gothic fictions is because it is through Gothic that such media
technologies are best able to express their own natures; and I would
thus argue that both these fictions and the recognisably Gothic
scaremongering about their supposedly fearful potential are, in fact,
two sides of the same coin, both generated by the anxieties to which
each new form of media technology inevitably gives rise.
Due to its historical position as one of the very first forms of
mass-market fiction, as well as its preoccupation with evil,
criminality, and vice, Gothic was regarded with particular suspicion
by the cultural authorities of the day. Of course, concerns about the
potentially damaging effects of fiction were nothing new; indeed,
throughout most of history, there has been a strong assumption that
the strict regulation of the production and consumption of fiction was
a moral and social necessity. (McKeon, Merton, and Gellhorn 39-51) But
by the 1790s, when the popularity of Gothic novels and German-style
Gothic drama was at its height, many writers seem to have considered a
much larger section of the population to be at risk of being corrupted
by the unwise consumption of fiction. Burke, for example, argued that
the moral fabric of France had been dangerously undermined by
Rousseaus's Nouvelle Heloise, which he saw as having helped to prepare
the way for the French Revolution; Wordsworth famously worried that 'sickly
and stupid German Tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant
stories in verse' were swiftly reducing the populace to 'a state of
almost savage torpor', and Coleridge worried over the damage which
could be done to young readers by works of licentious Gothic fiction
such as The Monk, which he described as ‘a poison for youth’ and ‘a
romance, which if a parent saw in the hands of a son or a daughter, he
might reasonably turn pale’. (Burke 31-6, Wordsworth 746, Coleridge
374)
For many people, the events of the French Revolution served to confirm
the dangers of a free press. In the censorship debates of the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the threat posed by the
uncontrolled circulation of texts, including fictions, was repeatedly
articulated via the same metaphors of poison and contagious disease
which Coleridge had used to condemn The Monk: bad fiction was
described as poisoning the body politic, damaging the mental, moral,
and emotional health of its readers, in terms almost identical to
those which would later be used to attack decadent literature, penny
dreadfuls, and horror videos. (MacLeod 80, Springhall 9, 58, Barker
100-2, Egan 88) And it was in precisely this cultural context that
Gothic fiction, with its stories of infection and corruption, truly
came of age, at once drawing upon and contributing to the very same
conceptual vocabulary of shock, contagion, degeneration, monstrosity,
and threat which has been used by its critics to condemn it ever
since.
Gothic and New Media Technologies: The Shock of the New
The moral panic over Gothic novels and melodramas did not persist for
very long; and by the mid-nineteenth century the Gothic literature of
the 1790s had come to seem more quaint than threatening. The formal
and generic hierarchies which had initially viewed popular Gothic
fiction as an anomalous outsider had reshuffled themselves, making
space for the new arrival - at the bottom of the heap, of course, but
none-the-less part of the system. The very qualities which had once
marked the Gothic novel as monstrous and illegitimate - its use of
supernatural incidents, its improbable plots full of violence and
adventure, its unashamed appeal to a popular audience – were all
assimilated, to various degrees, into the mainstream fiction of the
Victorian era; only the unconventional sexual content of novels such
as The Monk or Vathek remained unacceptably beyond the pale. But by
this point, new media technologies had evolved, generating new waves
of Gothic fiction and new moral panics over their probable effects
upon their readers: innovations in printing had made it possible to
distribute fiction more quickly and cheaply than ever before, leading
to the serial fiction boom of the 1830s and 40s, and the Gothic 'penny
blood' and 'penny dreadful' fiction of the early Victorian era.
(Springhall chapter 2) Reaching a much wider (and younger, and poorer)
audience than the Gothic novels of the previous generation had ever
been able to do, the penny dreadfuls, with their lurid stories of
blood, crime, and horror, soon found themselves at the centre of a
fresh controversy. Once again, in magazines and newspapers, the
argument was made that this latest form of fiction went too far: its
audience was too impressionable, its content too extreme. Society
might have been able to weather the Gothic novels and plays of the
past with its cultural values intact - but the ‘penny dreadfuls’ and
‘Newgate novels’, by training a generation of working-class boys to
revel in crime and violence, would surely be its undoing. (Haining
357-71, Springhall chapter 3)
Naturally, these penny fictions accomplished nothing of the sort. But
they set a pattern which was to recur repeatedly over the decades to
come: each new media technology gave rise to a new wave of Gothic
material, re-igniting the controversy over the acceptable limits of
fiction in the process. Each wave generally had the side-effect of
making the previous wave seem relatively innocuous by comparison; so
by the 1930s, when horror pulps and films were the new foci of
controversy, few cared any longer about the penny dreadfuls which had
seemed so threatening a hundred years before. (Springhall 99)
Subsequent examples included the moral panic over horror comics in the
1950s, the 'video nasty' controversy of the 1980s, and the
contemporary debates over internet media and violent computer games.
In each case, the controversy has centred on bodies of Gothic fiction
which have arisen to take advantage of newly-popular media
technologies: pulp magazines, cinema, comic books, VHS, and so on.
Gothic, it would seem, thrives in those media forms which have yet to
be rendered culturally safe.
The shock of the new, however, never seems to endure. Yesterday’s
shocking horror media is today’s high camp and tomorrow’s neglected
classic; in fact, the previous wave of Gothic media sometimes becomes
the yardstick against which the newest arrivals are measured and found
wanting. Yet no matter how many times the prophecy of doom went
unfulfilled, still the alarm went up with each new wave, with worried
critics insisting that surely this, now, has finally gone too far.
Cultural commentators who had come to terms with the fact that the
general public could read novels without turning into monsters still
objected to film, which they viewed as much more dangerous; indeed,
the Hays Code formally recognised as much, by placing far stricter
rules about what could be shown in films than those which then
governed what authors were permitted to describe between the covers of
a book. (Moley 241-8) Or consider the American Comics Code of 1954,
which was principally aimed at suppressing the lurid horror comics of
the period, and which dictated the following:
1. No comic magazine shall use the word 'horror' or 'terror' in its
title.
2. All scenes of horror, excessive bloodshed, gory or gruesome crimes,
depravity, lust, sadism, masochism shall not be permitted
3. All lurid, unsavourary gruesome illustrations shall be eliminated.
4. Inclusion of stories dealing with evil shall be used or shall be
published only where the intent is to illustrate a moral issue and in
no case shall evil be presented alluringly nor so as to injure the
sensibilities of the reader.
5. Scenes dealing with, or instruments associated with walking dead,
torture, vampires and vampirism, ghouls, cannibalism, and werewolfism
are prohibited. (Nyberg 167)
Now, cannibalism was relatively unusual in the American cinema of the
1950s, as was explicit sado-masochism or gore; but the rest of the
elements on this list had, by 1954, been relatively uncontroversial
features of mainstream cinema for decades - and entirely
uncontroversial elements of mainstream novels for even longer. Once
again, this newest, latest form of popular media technology was seen
as uniquely dangerous, presenting yet more extreme material to a yet
more vulnerable audience, and thus possessing a monstrous capacity for
corruption which has been absent from earlier forms, requiring it to
be subjected to much more vigilant censorship if it was not to become
a source of evil in the land.
As I have emphasised, much of the rhetoric which has been used over
the years to critique Gothic media owes a substantial imaginative debt
to the very fictions which it condemns. But this process has not by
any means been all one way; for if there was ever a genre within which
the rhetoric of corruption, contagion, degeneration, and infectious
criminality employed by such critics was likely to flourish, then
surely it was Gothic, which has from its earliest origins been
preoccupied with these very themes. Thus the trope of the Terrible
Text - a form of media so evil that it damages and corrupts all those
exposed to it - is found not only within critiques of Gothic fiction,
but also within Gothic fiction itself. The oldest version of this
trope is the Evil Book, which admittedly predates both Gothic fiction
and the critiques levelled against it - although it is within Gothic
fiction that it has achieved perhaps its most definitive expression,
in the form of Lovecraft’s fictional book of dark magic, the
Necronomicon. The trope of the Evil Book draws upon pre-Enlightenment
anxieties about heresy and witchcraft; but the tropes of the Evil
Play, or the Evil Game, or the Evil Videotape, all of which can be
found in more recent Gothic media, are more strongly reminiscent of
the kind of moral panics over new media which I have been discussing
than of these older fears. When Chambers wrote in 'The Repairer of
Reputations' (1895) of a fictional play, The King in Yellow, which was
capable of leading its readers and viewers to madness and despair, he
drew upon the same rhetoric of corruption that contemporary critics
were then using to condemn works of 'decadent' literature such as The
Yellow Book (1894-7), to whose title The King in Yellow surely
alludes: his imaginary play, which so rapidly destroys and
destabilises the lives of its readers, simply makes literal what had
been (mostly) metaphorical in the writings of the critics of decadent
literature. (MacLeod 78-98) When H.P. Lovecraft invented the
Necronomicon in his short story 'The Hound' (1922), he was obviously
drawing upon older fears of the dangerous powers which might reside in
grimoires of black magic; but the effect of this fictional book upon
its readers, who are left mentally scarred by the horrors within it,
is also reminiscent of the sort of effects which contemporary critics
worried that pulp horror fiction such as Lovecraft's stories might
have upon their impressionable readers. (Davies 262-8) The
Necronomicon has since reappeared in many other Gothic works,
represented sometimes as a repository of knowledge about evil, and
sometimes as an actual source of evil power in and of itself; the most
famous example of the latter is probably the Evil Dead films (1981,
1987, 1992, 2013), in which the simple act of reading from the
Necronomicon proves to be sufficient to unleash evil forces upon the
world, confirming yet again that some books really are better left
unopened.
In a similar vein, the killer videotape in Ringu / The Ring (novel
1991, film 1998, American remake 2002) is reminiscent of the more
extreme claims which were made during the 'video nasty' controversy of
the 1980s. In this decade, with VHS players becoming widely available
for the first time, video started to be used as an alternate means of
distribution for horror films which would never have been commercially
viable in cinemas. This, in turn, sparked a moral panic over the
potentially harmful effect of such films on their viewers, with
critics asserting that exposure to such horror videos could cause
serious psychological damage, especially to children, and/or encourage
their viewers to engage in violent crime. (Egan 78-95) Ringu, like
Lovecraft and Chambers before it, simply literalises the metaphor,
describing a video so freighted with evil power that it actually kills
its viewers. When the witch Sadako crawls out of the television in
Ringu to murder those who have dared to watch her tape, she becomes
the very incarnation of that malevolent power which critics of horror
videos had initially ascribed to them, scaring her victims to death
and leaving their corpses, faces contorted with terror, as proof of
the efficacy of this ultimate 'video nasty'. A yet more recent example
would be the 'Slenderman' vlogs, which I shall discuss in more detail
later, in which the act of watching or creating internet media serves
to summon evil forces, as though confirming that all those cultural
commentators who have warned us of the potential dangers of the
internet have been right all along. In 'Slenderman' narratives,
visiting the wrong webpage or watching the wrong Youtube videos really
can destroy your life.
The relation of these works to the critiques which they thus
hyperbolically restage is complex. They both reinforce and undermine
the critiques whose rhetoric they re-appropriate, stressing the
potential dangers of unguarded exposure to new media while also
presenting those dangers in such fantastical forms as to make them
seem improbable and remote. Within these fictions, the safest path is
often one of ultra-conservatism: burn the book, destroy the video,
don’t click the link, don’t watch the play, don’t risk exposing
yourself to psychic and ideological corruption. Yet the works
themselves only exist because people don’t behave in such ways, and
the very harmlessness of their ongoing distribution attests to the
fact that, in reality, the sort of threats that they depict belong
largely or exclusively to the domain of fantastical Gothic fiction.
The critiques of Gothic media upon which they draw are thus revealed
as being, themselves, just another form of Gothic story-telling,
perfectly suited to the very fictional forms which they supposedly
exist in order to combat, but ultimately inapplicable to reality.
Within Ringu, which is a work of fiction, watching the wrong horror
video really can scare you to death; but, in reality, the act of
watching Ringu has no such effects upon its viewers, thus serving to
emphasise that such extreme anxieties over the baleful effects of
horror media ultimately belong to the realm of fantasy rather than
real life.
I have written so far as though the rise of each wave of Gothic
fiction, and its attendant moral panics, was an almost automatic
process, generated reflexively by each new media technology in turn,
but remaining essentially the same each time. But while the pattern is
strong, it is hardly unchanging; and Gothic, like those monstrous
families upon which it has always been so fixated, tends to mutate
further in every generation, taking advantage of the possibilities
offered by each new form of media technology for the articulation of
monstrosity, instability, and disruption. Each new form of media
allows us, in some ways, to come closer to mimetically representing
the lived experience of reality than ever before: cinema, for example,
is capable of directly communicating visual experience in a way which
is simply impossible for purely verbal media. Yet this fidelity is
always imperfect, a mixture of accuracy and distortion, and in other
ways they simultaneously take us even further from that reality than
ever, permitting and perhaps even necessitating the creation of new
varieties of the uncanny. The world we see on the cinema screen is not
the same as the world we see through our eyes; in some respects it is
even less like it that the world we 'see' through the medium of the
printed page. Each new wave of Gothic media has exploited this
tendency, destabilising the assumption that new and better media
technology can or should straightforwardly lead to more faithfully
mimetic representations of reality. By demonstrating the ways in which
this latest form of media technology can, in fact, be manipulated to
stage new forms of disorientation and disintegration, Gothic media has
always helped to demonstrate exactly why such media might be something
which we should regard with distrust and fear.
Gothic media is famous for its reflexive self-destabilisation. In a
tradition that goes all the way back to the original Gothic fiction of
the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Gothic novels have
often aggressively undermined their own textual authority, presenting
readers with texts which are unreliable, incomplete, or
self-contradictory, exposition which explains and communicates
nothing, and passages of description which merely gesture, helplessly,
at their own inability to describe their subjects. If the implicit
claim of the novel, as a form, is that it is able to provide its
reader with a full, intelligible, and reliable account of the events
with which it is concerned, then the Gothic novel has frequently
served to demonstrate how easily such novelistic narratives can
instead be used to distort and obscure, especially when their
narrators happen to be terrified, superstitious, or insane: think of
Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), or Hogg's Private Memoirs and
Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824). The promise of the movie
camera is that it will faithfully reproduce whatever is placed in
front of it, making it incapable of direct deception; so Gothic
cinema, from The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920) onwards, has always
traded upon distortion, illusionism, misdirection, tricks of the
light, and the hundred other ways in which cinema can be used to
deceive its viewers. (More recently the ‘found footage’ subgenre, in
which the film actually exists as an object within the fictional world
it depicts, has allowed the trope of the unreliable narrator – a
staple of Gothic fiction for centuries – to be directly embedded in
Gothic cinema, too, in the form of the unreliable cameraman, who
cannot be trusted to direct his camera or edit his footage in such a
way as to show the viewer the true story of what is happening around
him.) The computer game is supposed to create a direct and transparent
connection between player and fiction, such that every input by the
player corresponds directly to an event within the game-world; but
Gothic computer games such as Eternal Darkness (2002) deliberately
break this implicit contract between game and player, systematically
presenting the player with false data – including false computer error
messages – in order to simulate the increasingly incoherent mental
state of its protagonist.
Each new media technology offers new opportunities for such
distortions. The Gothic possibilities of cinema are different to those
of prose: this is surely one reason why Gothic has always been so
swift to migrate to each new form of media in turn, its creators
eagerly taking advantage of the new set of tools which each new
technology offers them to disturb and disorientate their audiences.
These new possibilities, in turn, help lend credibility to the moral
panics which tend to follow them, despite the fact that previous waves
of Gothic media have since come to be regarded as largely harmless.
The experience of watching a film is qualitatively different from the
experience of reading a book; so just because it has been demonstrated
that it is possible for people to read about horror and madness
without being morally corrupted, it does not follow that the same will
be true if they sit down to watch them, instead. For a public which
has become jaded by each previous form of Gothic media, so familiar
with the forms of distortion which they offer that they no longer even
regard them as credible threats to public order, such new technologies
can offer, once again, the reassuring shock of the new.
The Infection is Spreading: The Case of the ‘Slenderman’ Video Logs
For a contemporary example of the rapid adaptation of Gothic fiction
to new forms of media technology, and the ways in which it exploits
the formal possibilities of those technologies to stage hyperbolic and
fantastical versions of the anxieties which such media have aroused,
one need look no further than the ‘slenderman’ video logs and their
associated media. The origins of the ‘slenderman’ mythos are
well-documented: it began in 2009, with a competition amongst users of
the ‘Something Awful’ forums to modify real photographs so that they
appeared to contain supernatural entities. One user submitted two
black and white photographs of groups of children to which he had
added a tall, thin, faceless humanoid figure – ‘The Slender Man’ – in
the background, along with a few snippets of text which linked the
photographs to (fictional) instances of fires and child abduction;
other users soon began submitting further stories and images employing
similar themes and images, so that ‘The Slender Man’ became the centre
of a rapidly developing crowd-sourced online mythology. Fans began to
edit the figure of ‘The Slender Man’ into other existing images,
videos, photographs, stills from computer games, and so on, as part of
an increasingly ambitious attempt to deliberately engineer a new urban
myth; new stories of the creature’s activities were written, many of
them initially presented as factual, and ultimately a fake Wikipedia
page was compiled for it, gathering much of this material together in
order to assert that stories about and sightings of ‘The Slender Man’
could be found going back hundreds of years. (A detailed account of
this process can be found at
http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/slender-man#fn2. The fake Wikipedia
page, which was swiftly removed from Wikipedia itself, can still be
found at
http://maskofreason.wordpress.com/2011/03/30/the-lost-slender-man-wikipedia-page/.)
Today, stories and images featuring slenderman can be found across the
internet, and there have been two popular slenderman-themed indie
horror computer games, Slender: The Eight Pages (2012) and Slender:
The Arrival (2013). But it is on Youtube, in a series of amateur,
zero-budget video logs, that the slenderman seems to have found its
most congenial home.
The first, and still the most influential, of the slenderman vlogs is
‘Marble Hornets’, which began in June 2009, and is still running as of
the time of writing. Other examples include ‘Dark Harvest’,
‘EverymanHYBRID’, ‘TribeTwelve’, and ‘CaughtNotSleeping’, all of which
have broadly followed the same formula as ‘Marble Hornets’: they
present what are ostensibly ordinary vlogs uploaded by real people for
various mundane purposes, only to gradually develop into slow-burn
found-footage horror stories as the material they present gets more
and more bizarre. The plot of each vlog is fairly similar: one or more
young people chance across the slenderman, or cross paths with someone
who has already attracted its attentions, and are subsequently haunted
by it and its minions. Two ‘rules’ of the slenderman mythos from which
these vlogs rarely deviate are that the slenderman inflicts memory
loss upon its victims, and that it induces distortion in any video
recordings which are made while it is nearby. Once the protagonists
grasp these facts and realise that their memories are unreliable, they
generally start carrying handheld video cameras everywhere, recording
as much of their lives as possible: both so that they can check their
now dangerously compromised memories against an objective record of
events, and so that they can check for the tell-tale distortion which
tells them that the slenderman is nearby. As a result, once a
character has attracted the attention of the slenderman and has
grasped the nature of his or her predicament, they have a standing
excuse to carry on posting further video footage to YouTube more or
less indefinitely.
As a monster, the slenderman has a number of obvious attractions for
amateur makers of zero-budget horror films. A faceless figure in black
is easily staged, especially as in most cases it will only have to be
glimpsed briefly amidst severe video distortion. Similarly, distortion
effects are easy to create using even very basic video editing
software – and with nothing more than a few volunteers, a mannequin,
and a distortion effect, it is eminently possible to create a horror
epic which runs for years on end. In most vlogs, the extreme proximity
of the slenderman makes cameras shut down entirely, so exactly what it
does when it gets its hands and/or tentacles on its victims never
needs to be shown on-screen; all that needs to be depicted is the
aftermath. But, in addition to these technical advantages, the
slenderman mythos is a perfect fit for the Youtube format in other
ways. In most vlogs the slenderman first becomes entangled with its
victims through a process of contagion, which seems to be most often
triggered either by the act of recording it on video, or by watching
such recordings made by others; and once the slenderman has begun its
persecution of a new victim, the only way in which they can retain
some kind of control over their lives is, as I have mentioned, by
recording themselves constantly, thus endlessly generating more of the
same kind of slenderman footage which started the problem in the first
place. As well as providing a fictional justification for why their
protagonists keep filming themselves, even under the most extreme
circumstances, this conceit also allows the slenderman vlogs to
literalise the metaphor of the ‘viral video’. In the vlogs, slenderman
videos are viral in two senses; they propagate themselves, each video
prompting the creation of others, and they infect those who make and
watch them, exposing them to the predations of evil forces. They thus
enact precisely the sorts of anxieties which, over the last decade or
so, have been repeatedly expressed about online media: that the
internet is a space in which harmful media can propagate freely,
impossible to censor or control, turning the online world into a
perilous place where a single incautious click can expose us to
something horrible, or to someone dangerous, leaving us changed and
damaged forever after.
Like earlier forms of Gothic media, the slenderman vlogs also make
ample use of the opportunities created by their format - in this case,
short videos recorded on handheld cameras. The disadvantages of such
technology for film-making are well-known: their field of view is
narrow, their sound and image quality is often poor, they do not
function well in very dark or very bright conditions, and, above all,
any swift or sudden movement on the part of the cameraman will turn
their recordings into nothing more than a blur. In the vlogs, however,
these drawbacks are used to very deliberate effect. In theory, we see
what the protagonists see, because they take their cameras with them
everywhere. But, in practise, the world we see through the handheld
camera lens is a far more fearful and confusing place than that same
world would be if we could see it through our own eyes. To be forced
to see the world through a handheld camera means having poor eyesight,
terrible night vision, and no peripheral vision whatsoever; one is
only able to look at one thing at a time, with no idea what might be
lurking just outside the camera's angle of vision. Scenes which would
normally be simply dull - an uneventful walk through the woods, for
example - can thus become almost unbearably tense, as the viewer
strains to see whether any of the slightly blurry trees glimpsed in
passing is, in fact, a tall, slender figure, or cringes in
anticipation of what might be about to leap out into the camera's
painfully restricted field of view; and when something does leap out,
the viewpoint tends to be lost almost entirely, as the character
holding the camera jumps back and the picture dissolves into
wildly-blurring images and distorted sound, providing a visual
representation of the sense of shock and disorientation which the
characters themselves experience. The handheld camera perspective thus
works to induce a sense of claustrophobia and helplessness, one which
mirrors the feelings of the protagonists themselves as they start to
realise how inescapable the slenderman's grip really is.
Many of the slenderman vlogs have also made ample use of their online
format, working the fact that they are posted as youtube videos into
their ongoing fictions. Most of them initially present themselves as
vlogs posted by real people, and while this pretence usually wears
thin sooner rather than later, they often maintain it long after it
has become obvious to their audience that the vlog is a work of
fiction: their creators will respond ‘in character’ to comments made
on their videos, or maintain in-character websites or Twitter feeds on
which they post additional information and story material, or upload
threatening and cryptic videos to Youtube before logging on to
complain that these videos are not theirs, and that their Youtube
accounts must have been hacked into by minions of the slenderman. Some
viewers of the vlogs have taken to posting responses to them ‘in
character’, writing to their makers with suggestions about what they
should do next as though their protagonists were actually real people
uploading a record of their increasingly bizarre experiences to the
internet; and some of the vlogs have even started acknowledging one
another's existence, with characters working other slenderman vlogs
into their ongoing narratives as ‘proof’ that the creature exists and
that they are not its only victims.
A single video from the end of the first 'season' of the original
'Marble Hornets' vlog – ‘Entry #26’, which can be viewed at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLIpL26ztFo - neatly illustrates how
all of these elements come together. In it the protagonist, Jay, is
sent a videotape with ‘WATCH THIS’ written on its case. Playing it, he
discovers that it is a handheld camera tape recorded by Amy, the
girlfriend of his friend, Alex, whom he believes to have been a
previous victim of the slenderman. The video shows – or rather
implies, as we never actually see the woman holding the camera – Amy
pointing the camera at Alex, telling him that she found it in a
cupboard and asking him why he had claimed not to own one. At first
Alex is evasive; then, as he realises that the camera is actually on,
he becomes anxious, asking her to turn it off. Baffled, she refuses –
but then cries out in alarm, swinging the camera in a wide arc which
allows us to glimpse the slenderman advancing down the corridor
towards them, having apparently been summoned by the mere act of using
the same camera on which it had previously been recorded. Alex yells
at her to run, and the footage gives way to blurred images as Amy runs
frantically through the house, only to freeze on one final frame as
the slenderman appears in front of her again – and then the image
gives way to a final onscreen message, written in black on a red
background: ‘HELP’. Having watched the video, Jay – who is also
notionally the person editing and uploading these videos to Youtube –
adds a set of intertitles which read: ‘The package also had a return
address. Alex is still alive and I’m going to find him. I don’t know
the next time you’ll see me after this. I thank you for the help.’
After this, the screen goes black, and no further videos were posted
for the next six months.
In this video, all the key characteristics of the slenderman vlogs can
be seen. There is the deliberate use of handheld cameras to turn their
weaknesses into advantages: the handheld footage prevents us from
getting a clear look at the slenderman, and allows the fear and
disorientation of Amy’s attempt to escape to be eloquently
communicated by the blurred and disconnected images which are thrown
up onto the screen as she runs, swinging the camera in her hand as she
does so. There is the manipulation of the online context: using a
device which goes back at least as far as ‘The Cave’ (http://www.angelfire.com/trek/caver/index.html),
a hoax blog posted in 2001, the narrative breaks off abruptly and
allows the long gap between entries to imply that the reason the
protagonist has not posted anything new is because he has come to some
horrible end. Above all, there is the fear of spiritual contagion
through viral online media, of calling up dangerous forces by the
simple act of viewing or making videos; Alex was infected by recording
the slenderman, Jay by watching Alex’s infected tapes, and Amy by
using Alex’s infected camera - and by watching the videos which ‘Jay’
uploads to Youtube, presumably we, the viewers, have now been infected
as well. Its narrative is hyperbolic and anti-realist, but still
recognisably a variant on fears about the internet which really have
been expressed: the idea that getting involved in online media will
make monsters appear inside your house and murder you is only an
exaggerated version of the widely-expressed anxiety that using the
internet might expose vulnerable young people to the predations of
deviants and criminals. As with the other works discussed above, these
fears about new media are at once drawn upon by the fiction whilst
simultaneously being revealed as absurd by the very fact of its
distribution. Within the vlog, watching the wrong videos can be very
dangerous indeed; but the fact that the ‘Entry #26’ video has been
viewed on Youtube 1.3 million times serves to demonstrate its actual
harmlessness. If slenderman, or his real-world equivalents, had
murdered 1.3 million people since 2010, we’d probably have heard about
it by now.
New media makes Gothic possible, perhaps inevitable; and Gothic, in
turn, has provided much of the idiom through which the fearful
hybridity of such new media has be articulated, both in the form of
Gothicised moral panics over such media and – usually rather more
playfully – within those media themselves. Fortunately for us,
however, those set of Gothic fictions which masquerade as fact
generally seem to have much less staying power than those which admit
to being fictions; we still read and watch 1980s horror media, but who
now reads the notionally non-fictional literature of the Satanic Panic
which accompanied it? The moral panics die away; the fictions turn
out, yet again, to be no more or less dangerous than those generated
by any previous form of mass media technology, and indeed the best of
them often become much-loved classics a couple of generations down the
line. It is the cultural critiques, and not the new media cultures
themselves, which turn out to collapse, Otranto-like, into confusion,
their Gothic prophecy of doom going unfulfilled once more. Over the
last two centuries, the public has proven over and over again to be
more morally and psychologically resilient in these matters than any
of the classical theorists of censorship could ever have guessed – and
yet somehow this story of our susceptibility to corruption through
media never seems to die, for, as the history of Gothic has
demonstrated, one can always find an audience for a good horror story.
It is the myth of our vulnerability to spiritual contagion through
monstrous new forms of media technology which has proven to be the
most pernicious Gothic fiction of all.
Bibliography
Burke, Edmund, A Letter From Mr Burke, to a Member of the National
Assembly (Dublin, 1791)
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, Miscellaneous Criticism, ed. Thomas
Middleton Raysor (London, 1936)
Crawford, Joseph, Gothic Fiction and the Invention of Terrorism
(London, 2013)
Davies, Owen, Grimoires: A History of Magic Books (Oxford, 2009)
Egan, Kate, Trash or Treasure? Censorship and the Changing Meanings of
the Video Nasties (Manchester, 2007)
Haining, Peter, ed., The Penny Dreadful (London, 1975)
Joyce, Simon, Capital Offences (Charlottesville, 2003)
MacLeod, Kirsten, Fictions of British Decadence (Houndmills, 2006)
McKeon, Richard, Merton, Robert, and Gellhorn, Walter, The Freedom to
Read (New York, 1957)
Nyberg, Amy Kiste, Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code
(Jackson, 1998)
Smith, Sarah, Children, Cinema, and Censorship (London, 2005)
Springhall, John, Youth, Popular Culture and Moral Panics (Houndmills,
1998)
Wordsworth, William, Lyrical Ballads, ed. James Butler and Karen Green
(Ithaca, 1992).