Desktop Horror

The shift from a cinematic to a post-cinematic media regime has occasioned a great deal of anxiety for theorists and spectators alike, and the horror genre has been adept at channeling this unease for its own purposes, as is evidenced in movies that revolve around the proliferation of digital devices and networks as new media for ghosts, demons, and other forms of evil. In this presentation, I focus on “desktop horror” in particular and argue that the fears elicited in post-cinematic horror are deeply rooted in the upheaval that viewers experience in the face of a thoroughly computational lifeworld.

Shane Denson is Assistant Professor of Film & Media Studies in the Department of Art & Art History at Stanford University. He is the author of Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface (2014) and co-editor of several collections, including Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives (2013) and Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film (2016). His current book project, Discorrelated Images, is under contract with Duke University Press.