post #17: The decapitated head of analog horror

      I wrote this mentally earlier in the day (it's been close to a month now), but in the interim, my body and mind have been all over the place, so we'll see how things actually end up turning out.

      I want to talk about analog horror and the body of the camera. Motivating this is that I started watching Dawko's reaction of some whatever the latest FNAF analog horror VHS series is -- Return to Freddy's? I think is what this one is called? Other motivating portions include that I recently finally got around to watching the beginning of the Walton Files -- though I am not caught up and in that vein only have a vague sense of what the style and content are about. And then finally, at some point within the last month, I've watched videos (one each) on FNAF/VHS and trends within the genre of analog horror in general.

      I don't have a super clear sense of what analog horror is. As I mentioned, I watched a video that spoke to something of the genealogy, but outside of / before that, I don't have a solid image. My sense is that it would arc back to connect with the found footage or shaky cam genre of horror films from the likes of The Blair Witch Project, Rec, or whatever that movie I saw about finding the jersey devil was called. Only focusing on the videos posted most recently to YouTube within this genre, it's easy to say that "Analog Horror" is somehow a misnomer -- these videos point back to VHS and radio wave signal technology and yet they are assembled in Blendr and the Adobe Premiere effects tab. Maybe this is true, but my larger sense is that it's not that helpful to take up this line of argumentation. Gatekeeping what "analog" means doesn't seem like that productive of a gesture to me. Additionally, I don't think I should be the person to do so as I don't have a robust understanding of analog versus digital technologies (my loose sense is that media studies people might be using the term analog in a different sense than gen z folx posting to youtube).

      Nevertheless, I think there can be things gained in picking apart the strange inconsistencies or quirks of the analog horror genre as it's developed online over the past 10 or 15 years. I can't speak to the global-ness of how the genre has developed, as my main images come from an America-centric webspace. My sense, though, is that the genealogy for the genre might not be the same everywhere in the world all the same. Naively, I would point to a film like Kurosawa Kiyoshi's Pulse / Kairo from 2001 for a case where a non-American film depicts a different kind of internet x horror ecology than from what I'm familiar being imaged in the US from the same period of time. However, since I don't have the luxary to research these different genealogies, I will write here to the effect of what I'm familiar with.

[^^ drawing of person holding a camera ^^]

      As I mentioned earlier, what I'm most interested in with regard to recent analog horror works is the camera. This interest comes from various places. In general (i.e., for when considering audio visual media), I'm interested in the camera; however, my sense is that the apparatus of analog horror has a different relation to the camera than, say, the apparatus of the Universal monster movie from the 1910s-1950s. From the analog horror videos I've seen, there seems to be almost always an effort to insist that the camera IS the eye. This is contrasted with a more Classical Hollywood understanding (to work off of David Bordwell and others' -- such as Laura Mulvey -- .... of the apparatus) of the camera and its gaze where the camera may incentivize identification, such as by being placed behind the shoulder of figure A, facing toward figure B (thus creating identification with figure A) but less often seeks to emulate the experience of vision itself (point of view shots / eyeline matches exist but their semantic contents differ from the camera of analog horror). I mention Laura Mulvey in my parenthetical accompanying "Classical Hollywood understanding," as she was often linked in my education with her thinking and writing on the Male Gaze -- a concept for to explain power relations of the camera's looking (one which objectified women and placed men as empty inheritors of audience spectatorial position). There's more than likely merit to consider gendered dynamics of the gaze of the cameras in analog horror, but they seem to sell themselves -- at least to my perception -- as more cranially enshrined and indebted vehicles. (One result of this is that direct head-proxy cameras are not as much be able to step outside of a person and act out power structures, as they are thus contingent to persons in different ways and forms).

      The camera has a body. The camera is a thing. It takes up space. It is made of metal and it exhibits an electronic impulse. The camera is held, the camera is on a stand, the camera is attach via gopro, the camera is an entity and that entity is not a human head. But in analog horror, the camera is often presented as if it were the human head -- as if it's oculus were the same as the human eyes, as if it sees the same thing that the person carrying it does. This is not always true and I am probably being reductive as I am not doing close analysis and instead speaking in abstract of how I feel these things have tended to be from a passing observation. At the same time. How could it be anything else? The camera offers a view onto the world. There isn't a way right now to rip out your eye sockets and show someone else exactly what it is you see, and so we use these technological intermediaries. In a crude and horrific sense, we decapitate ourselves for legibility. But I think that this is overly morose, or, rather, I think that human head decapitation is not necessarily a bad thing. The mistaking the camera for flesh is not necesarilly a dangerous mistake to make. While, yes, the camera doesn't often blink and the camera doesn't have a mouth or need to eat and the camera has different faculties governing it's ocular facsimile -- such as how it is or is not stabilized or focus on certain images etc. (The human head has eyes, but it is also the skull and many other organs and systems which play into each other and create a system of mutuality that generally works toward stability or making up for lack in other departments).

[^^ drawing of figures with video cameras ^^]

      One way in which the horror of having your head transplanted into the machine is that this gesture, as it shows up in analog horror, indicates how filming is never innocent. Because the camera is inseparable from a person who is there perceiving what it perceives, the act of filming (and our act of spectating) means that something is there, happening. (I messed up saying that a little bit I think, but I hope that it is still legible). To come at this from another direction, I'll put it this way: you can't have filming that is preeminent is analog horror -- annihilated is the illusion or imagined possibility of a tabula rassa -- a clean slate. There is a person who turns on the camera at some point. Disembodied filming can intrude into nature as if some objective observer (this is the tactic of documentary filmmaking, for example), but embodied filming is eternally linked to the reminder that there is a human there who is the cause of this all. You (video) must always have a reason for being.
*(Written in my notes for the above paragraph is "what does that say for people? Can video speak to people? Questions of "illegal" immigrants, for example-- what is a person without paperwork? ;; I no longer remember what I meant to write for this, but I trust myself that I meant something by it;; in the hopes that someone will be able to make sense of it in the future, I leave it here)

      Another potential positive reading of the decapitating camera could be to view it that the camera has become a part of the body. Rather than that the body has lost something in speaking to the camera, perhaps we can imagine that the camera is a protuberance that has been mended onto the body. Even though the camera produces the same effect as the head and vision, it does not inherently siphon off the ability of the head to perceive onto the world -- rather, it opens up an avenue through which to perceive in a different, more outwardly legible way. Part of the horror of a film like Rec, for example, is that the camera is so thoroughly combined with the body. When the camera is threatened, the body is too and vice versa. The horror is transmitted corporeally and in a felt manner (in my opinion). Even if there is no body there, the camera's vision can translate as corporeally horrific. Perhaps, therefore, there is a sense in which the camera *is* the body. Perhaps the camera's clunkiness speaks to the clunkiness embedded always in being human and in being a human merging with a machine -- see Akira, see Videodrome (see techno/biological/body horror).

[^^ drawing cords and wires and videography ^^]

      To continue to corrupt McLuhan's oft cited "the medium is the message," I think it's easily arguable that for analog horror -- as the name suggests -- this is precisely the point. The medium (the camera-ness -- the analog-ness) *IS* the message (the horror ; the art and beauty and emotion being transcribed and rended by the text). For analog horror, the fact of analog which is inseparable from the content and narrative of the text [what is probably true for all texts, but I mention it here because it's imminently visible]) -- you have to say why you exist (give a message; message for why you are x medium).

      At the same time, to return to what I mentioned at the beginning, about the meaning of "analog" being potentially contestable, I would like to point to how many analog horror texts from the past decade are constructed for the most part digitally (that is, outside of the camera) -- such as with 3D software or just all in the editing software and via the use of overlaid analog-aesthetic effect interventions. I don't bring this up to dash the prospects or legitimacy of the medium, though. I think it's just an interesting circumstance. Now even the body has been substituted, and all that we have is the camera which claims that it once stood for a body and head which held vision onto the world. The Walton Files is so interesting in this regard, as the series frequently uses express 2D animation. The 2D characters are trapped in the medium of recorded technology -- of the camcorder etc. There is an important and powerful asynchroneity here -- the medium shears against itself and this is precisely the message, in my opinion.

[^^ drawing of the decapitated camera ^^]

      I'll close out on this. In the video I watched about tropes and shortcomings of analog horror, the youtuber talked about how some more recent analog horror texts are comparatively more constrived and/or ridiculous than earlier entries. I've noticed this in ways as well. Because analog horror is inherently clunky, in a certain way -- analog technology is antiquated-- because of this, in order for analog technology to be the medium of a text, there needs to be sufficient justification (seems to be the general logic to these texts). Usually this is some permutation of "my employer required that I film my journey." While this IS often ridiculous, it again returns to the ineffible non-innocence. There is a relation of power which has called for this to be. Even looking back at The Blair Witch Project, the text cannot exist by itself -- it must be justified as a student film or some such. Analog horror is text which exists within the diegesis as it exists on the screen. There is something so critical about this I cannot properly put it into words. Why are we making art? What is the meaning of life? Why even go on any more? It is an existential dread which pulses invisibly underneath. MY EYES ARE UP HERE. you cant even look at the world anymore thats how bad it is

[^^ bonus drawing of the decapitated camera via legos ^^]