On December 18, 2018, I will be giving a public lecture titled “Desktop Horror” at the Merz Akademie in Stuttgart, as part of the Welcome to the Real World lecture series organized by Kevin B. Lee. I’m very excited to share this work, and hope to see friends in Germany!
Desktop Horror
Shane Denson
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.