There has been a successful little horror movie about a haunted Zoom call. But Zoom's live video gives a sense of authenticity.
In general, I think, texts and WhatsApp messages are too easily spoofable to give a gothic frisson. In a world where you can now livechat with AI recreations of dead loved ones (as I'm sure you read in the LRB), who needs ghosts?
Possible argument here: voice technologies are haunted by ghosts of the past until the point that reliable recording is invented for each of them. Only in the absence of prosaic, ordinary playback is it spooky to imagine a voice out of the past speaking on your exciting new telephone/coming through in Morse on your telegraph key. And perhaps there's an ambiguous zone when recording technologies *have* been invented but are still rare, expensive and remarkable. A haunted Edison cylinder is easier to imagine than a haunted WhatsApp text. But – corollary – ghosts of the future are invoked instead by the spooky time-defying quality of infinite reproducibility. After all, cyberspace was invented by Gibson to be haunted from the first moment he thought of it. The ghost of *sentience*, an anticipation of the spookiness now realised in LLMs, is there already in his AI loas, being tended by actual voodoo priests in Count Zero.
I agree computers don't usually work in horror. An exception, there is a horror podcast called The Magnus Archives. Episode 65 called Binary is about a computer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToIJ1uqulmI
It's an interesting question. Why not a haunted cell phone tower? AI seems like it would be ripe for the horror treatment, except that AI horror goes back at least to "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream." Although Ben Aaronovich has worked eldritch horror into something that's more in line with contemporary AI technology in one of the Rivers of London novels.
"I Have No Mouth ..." is a nightmarish story, certainly; but I don't know if it relies upon the notional computer technologies that trap its characters. The tech stuff isn't really spelled out; it's a premise for the story.
What Ring's about isn't even TV - a technology that was pretty mature by the 1980s - but the brand new technology of videotape. The film captures the eeriness of mechanical reproduction - in this case, being able to rewind and watch the same thing over and over again - just as effectively as MR James did in The Mezzotint; and it is, as you say, pretty bloody scary.
I guess there have been a few "new technology" horror and horror-adjacent films - Host, Unfriended, Countdown - but nothing to touch Ring, or indeed The Signalman. Odd.
There has been a successful little horror movie about a haunted Zoom call. But Zoom's live video gives a sense of authenticity.
In general, I think, texts and WhatsApp messages are too easily spoofable to give a gothic frisson. In a world where you can now livechat with AI recreations of dead loved ones (as I'm sure you read in the LRB), who needs ghosts?
Possible argument here: voice technologies are haunted by ghosts of the past until the point that reliable recording is invented for each of them. Only in the absence of prosaic, ordinary playback is it spooky to imagine a voice out of the past speaking on your exciting new telephone/coming through in Morse on your telegraph key. And perhaps there's an ambiguous zone when recording technologies *have* been invented but are still rare, expensive and remarkable. A haunted Edison cylinder is easier to imagine than a haunted WhatsApp text. But – corollary – ghosts of the future are invoked instead by the spooky time-defying quality of infinite reproducibility. After all, cyberspace was invented by Gibson to be haunted from the first moment he thought of it. The ghost of *sentience*, an anticipation of the spookiness now realised in LLMs, is there already in his AI loas, being tended by actual voodoo priests in Count Zero.
I agree computers don't usually work in horror. An exception, there is a horror podcast called The Magnus Archives. Episode 65 called Binary is about a computer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToIJ1uqulmI
It's an interesting question. Why not a haunted cell phone tower? AI seems like it would be ripe for the horror treatment, except that AI horror goes back at least to "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream." Although Ben Aaronovich has worked eldritch horror into something that's more in line with contemporary AI technology in one of the Rivers of London novels.
"I Have No Mouth ..." is a nightmarish story, certainly; but I don't know if it relies upon the notional computer technologies that trap its characters. The tech stuff isn't really spelled out; it's a premise for the story.
Jeanette Winterson tried it, not totally successfully, in Night Side of the River.
I haven't read that one: I'll seek it out.
What Ring's about isn't even TV - a technology that was pretty mature by the 1980s - but the brand new technology of videotape. The film captures the eeriness of mechanical reproduction - in this case, being able to rewind and watch the same thing over and over again - just as effectively as MR James did in The Mezzotint; and it is, as you say, pretty bloody scary.
I guess there have been a few "new technology" horror and horror-adjacent films - Host, Unfriended, Countdown - but nothing to touch Ring, or indeed The Signalman. Odd.
Yes, you're right: video tape + telly.