"If You’re Not Documenting Yourself, You Just Don’t Exist": The Digital Slasher
In Eugene Kotlyarenko’s 2020 faux footage slasher Spree, rideshare driver Kurt Kunkle (Joe Keery) is so desperate for digital fame that he murders his customers on a live stream. Kurt’s viewers initially chastise him for providing boring and such “obviously fake” content, prompting Kurt to commit murders that are progressively more horrific and visually spectacular. He learns in real time the exact success of his homicidal performances as each murder is commodified and immediately given a rating out of 100. Using this data, Kurt is able to achieve his ultimate goal of “going viral.”
This presentation argues that the digital slasher film makes use of aesthetics central to what Katherine Zimmer (2015) terms “surveillance cinema” and motifs of the slasher genre to capture and critique the particular anxieties associated with life in the digital age. The digital slasher is a woefully underexplored sub-genre, as studies of digital horror tend to focus on films that present the internet as a haunted space. While these digital ghost films provide fantastic opportunities to explore the physical and psychical haunting that the virtual can enact, the digital slasher film is important for its materialization of internet users’ complicity in surveillance practices, the simultaneous increase in certainty for markets and decrease in certainty for people associated with social media, and the digital image’s unstable and indexical value. This presentation will use Spree as a case study to better define and contend with the important role played by the digital slasher film.
- Caitlin Duffy (Stony Brook University, US)
In Eugene Kotlyarenko’s 2020 faux footage slasher Spree, rideshare driver Kurt Kunkle (Joe Keery) is so desperate for digital fame that he murders his customers on a live stream. Kurt’s viewers initially chastise him for providing boring and such “obviously fake” content, prompting Kurt to commit murders that are progressively more horrific and visually spectacular. He learns in real time the exact success of his homicidal performances as each murder is commodified and immediately given a rating out of 100. Using this data, Kurt is able to achieve his ultimate goal of “going viral.”
This presentation argues that the digital slasher film makes use of aesthetics central to what Katherine Zimmer (2015) terms “surveillance cinema” and motifs of the slasher genre to capture and critique the particular anxieties associated with life in the digital age. The digital slasher is a woefully underexplored sub-genre, as studies of digital horror tend to focus on films that present the internet as a haunted space. While these digital ghost films provide fantastic opportunities to explore the physical and psychical haunting that the virtual can enact, the digital slasher film is important for its materialization of internet users’ complicity in surveillance practices, the simultaneous increase in certainty for markets and decrease in certainty for people associated with social media, and the digital image’s unstable and indexical value. This presentation will use Spree as a case study to better define and contend with the important role played by the digital slasher film.
Empathy and Identification in Postmodern Slasher: The Case of Rob Zombie
The identification process is one of the most powerful tools to create emotions among the audience of horror film. This is especially remarkable in the slasher subgenre. By normally using real scenarios for the locations, and average characters as protagonists, these fictions emphasize the terrible idea that what is shown on screen could happen to any member of the audience. As a result, the identification process is developed towards the victims of the story, also because the killer in slasher films is many times an opaque figure with whom it is almost impossible to empathise. Nevertheless, the killer generates some sort of fascination among the audience, who suffers and at the same time enjoys watching the brutal murder scenes. A postmodern approach to the subgenre could be, thus, to question whether it would work to develop a slasher killer with whom the audience develop their identification process, instead of their victims. This question has been answered by Rob Zombie both in his Firefly trilogy --House of 1000 Corpses (2003); The Devil’s Rejects (2005); 3 From Hell (2019) — in which the antagonist killers become the protagonist heroes throughout the series, and through his reinterpretation of the Halloween cinematic mythology — Halloween (2007); Halloween II (2009) — masterworks about the point of view and the American politics of empathy. In this paper we aim to expose how, probably, Rob Zombie's works offer us the best example of the mutations of the identification process in slasher films since John Carpenter's Halloween (1978).
- Yago Paris (Eötvös Loránd University, HU) & Ignacio Pablo Rico Guastavino (Rey Juan Carlos University, ES)
The identification process is one of the most powerful tools to create emotions among the audience of horror film. This is especially remarkable in the slasher subgenre. By normally using real scenarios for the locations, and average characters as protagonists, these fictions emphasize the terrible idea that what is shown on screen could happen to any member of the audience. As a result, the identification process is developed towards the victims of the story, also because the killer in slasher films is many times an opaque figure with whom it is almost impossible to empathise. Nevertheless, the killer generates some sort of fascination among the audience, who suffers and at the same time enjoys watching the brutal murder scenes. A postmodern approach to the subgenre could be, thus, to question whether it would work to develop a slasher killer with whom the audience develop their identification process, instead of their victims. This question has been answered by Rob Zombie both in his Firefly trilogy --House of 1000 Corpses (2003); The Devil’s Rejects (2005); 3 From Hell (2019) — in which the antagonist killers become the protagonist heroes throughout the series, and through his reinterpretation of the Halloween cinematic mythology — Halloween (2007); Halloween II (2009) — masterworks about the point of view and the American politics of empathy. In this paper we aim to expose how, probably, Rob Zombie's works offer us the best example of the mutations of the identification process in slasher films since John Carpenter's Halloween (1978).
The Queer Woman as Outsider in High Tension and Knife+Heart
While both films center on the focalization of queer women, Knife+Heart (2018, dir. Yann Gonzalez) and High Tension (2003, dir. Alexandre Aja) take different approaches to women’s queerness within the slasher. In the former, the queer woman serves as the film’s heroine in a narrative common to the subgenre, watching as her friends are killed off and investigating to learn the killer’s true identity. In the latter, she is revealed to be the villain herself, a woman whose queer desire drives her to imagine herself as a man as she murders her love interest’s family. Both films, however, position the queer woman as an outsider, even to her own peers. Regardless of whether she is the heroine or villain, she is irreconcilably (or irredeemably) Other.
Taking seminal works on gender and the slasher (including those by Wood, Clover, and Creed) as its theoretical starting point, the paper will explore how the explicitly queer woman-as-focalizer both conforms to and challenges previous typologies in academic treatments of the slasher. Rigid gender roles within the slasher, appropriately studied in these works, are called into question with regard to the 21st century queer slasher. These two films in particular, the paper will argue, demonstrate a need to update the study of queer Otherness within the slasher to include greater academic attention to the nuances of queer identity and community.
- Tosha R. Taylor (Manhattanville College, US)
While both films center on the focalization of queer women, Knife+Heart (2018, dir. Yann Gonzalez) and High Tension (2003, dir. Alexandre Aja) take different approaches to women’s queerness within the slasher. In the former, the queer woman serves as the film’s heroine in a narrative common to the subgenre, watching as her friends are killed off and investigating to learn the killer’s true identity. In the latter, she is revealed to be the villain herself, a woman whose queer desire drives her to imagine herself as a man as she murders her love interest’s family. Both films, however, position the queer woman as an outsider, even to her own peers. Regardless of whether she is the heroine or villain, she is irreconcilably (or irredeemably) Other.
Taking seminal works on gender and the slasher (including those by Wood, Clover, and Creed) as its theoretical starting point, the paper will explore how the explicitly queer woman-as-focalizer both conforms to and challenges previous typologies in academic treatments of the slasher. Rigid gender roles within the slasher, appropriately studied in these works, are called into question with regard to the 21st century queer slasher. These two films in particular, the paper will argue, demonstrate a need to update the study of queer Otherness within the slasher to include greater academic attention to the nuances of queer identity and community.