Affective Intensities and Evolving Horror Forms: From Found Footage to Virtual Reality

✍ Scribed by Adam Daniel

• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• Year: 2020
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 241
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Horror cinema is a genre that is undergoing constant evolution, from the sub-genre of ‘found footage,’ to post-cinematic new media forms such as Youtube horror, horror video games and cinematic virtual reality horror. By investigating how these new forms alter the dynamics of spectatorship, this book charts how cinema’s affective capacities have shifted in relation to these modifications in the forms of cinematic horror. It applies a rich theoretical synthesis of phenomenological and Deleuzian approaches to a number of case studies, including films like The Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity and Creep as well as video games such as Alien: Isolation and new media forms such as Youtube horror and virtual reality horror.

✦ Table of Contents

List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Evolving Forms, Evolving Affects
Affect and Horror Media
Horror Media and the ‘Lived Body’
Deleuze, Embodiment, Neuroscience and Horror: A ‘Machinic Assemblage’
The Book
1 From the Semantic to the Somatic: Affective Engagement with Horror Cinema
Cognitivist Frameworks of Spectatorship
Towards the Somatic
The Phenomenology of Horror
2 From Identification to Embodied Spectatorship in the Found Footage Horror Film
To Look (or Not to Look)
Technologies of Perception in Horror Film
Bleeding Binaries: When a Screen Becomes a Portal
The Birth and Emergence of ‘Found Footage’ Horror Cinema
The Unreal Reality of Found Footage
Found Footage and the Embodied Spectator
3 Camera Supernaturalis
The Out-of-Frame of Found Footage
Into the Woods: Willow Creek and The Blair Witch Project
The ‘Empty’ Frame of Found Footage Horror
Cinematic Dread and the Camera of Paranormal Activity
The Monster as Visual and Aural Intensification
4 Perception and Point of View in the Found Footage Horror Film: New Understandings via Deleuze’s Perception-Image
How Do We Get ‘Inside’ a Movie?
‘Becoming-with’ the Film
Deleuzian ‘Spectatorship’
The Perception-Image
Found Footage Horror and ‘Camera Consciousness’
Deleuze and Representation
5 Horrific Entwinement: Affective Neuroscience and the Body of the Horror Spectator
The Question of Empathy
Empathic Identification and ‘Embodied Simulation Theory’
Mimetic Innervation
Foraging through Found Footage: Panksepp’s SEEKING Instinct
6 What Hides behind the Stream: Post-Cinematic Hauntings of the Digital
The Affect of Apocrypha: Suicidemouse and 11bx1371
The Soundscapes of Post-Cinematic Horror
Denson and the ‘Horror of Discorrelation’
7 The Evolving Screen Forms of New Media Horror
Always Watching: The Evolving Screen Form of Horror and Marble Hornets
The Embodied Experience of New Media Artefacts
The Aesthetics of Distortion: Synaesthetic Qualities of Sound and Image
New Modalities, New Tensions
‘Screenlife’ Horror and Unfriended
On the Threshold
8 The Embodied Player of Horror Video Games
Fear in the First Person
Lo-fi, High Tension: Marginalia and Anatomy
Deleuze and the Video Game
Spatial and Temporal Apertures in Alien: Isolation
9 The Spectator-Interactor of Virtual Reality Horror
The Meeting Place of Virtual Reality and Horror Cinema
Virtual Reality and Presence
Virtual Reality and Cinema: Strange Bedfellows?
The Melding of Spectator and Interactor
The Radical Potential of Virtual Reality
What Cinema Can Return to VR
The Future of Cinematic VR
Conclusion
Bibliography
Books, Articles and Websites
Videos
Films
Television
Games
Index