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Blake, Linnie and Xavier Áldana Reyes, eds. Digital Horror: Haunted Technologies, Network Panic and the Found Footage Phenomenon. London: I.B. Tauris, 2016. Hardcover. 224 pp. 978-1784530259. $99.00.
Linnie Blake and Xavier Aldana Reyes's collection, Digital Horror: Haunted Technologies, Network Panic and the Found Footage Phenomenon, is certainly a much needed book. It has been clear for at least a decade that the horror films of the digital era have aesthetic and thematic peculiarities that need to be addressed on their own terms, linked to but distinct from the longer history of horror films. A collection of essays devoted to this turn is long overdue, and Digital Horror fills that void admirably.
Broadly speaking, Digital Horror concerns itself with those films that are not simply produced, exhibited, and distributed digitally (as virtually all films now are), but with those that thematize the dangers and anxieties of digital media as a strategy for commenting on contemporary fears. Furthermore, the collection is interested in the political/ideological implications of the digital world. As the introduction spells out, "a global flow of information promotes a culture of consumerist individualism that has refashioned global subjectivity itself-the neoliberal subject being presented as a fluid, motile and hybridized entity whose traditional markers of identity ... have largely been deemed irrelevant" (5). Indeed, the consideration of the intersection of technological, political/ideological and generic factors runs through most of the essays in Digital Horror, much to the benefit of the project as a whole.
Digital Horror is divided into three sections. In Part 1, "Haunted Technologies and Network Panic," Steffen Hantke constructs a prehistory of digital horror in the narratives of Cold War science fiction/horror films and in particular the "network" metaphor that expanded beyond its military context to provide the "digital infrastructure" (22) of our era. Hantke closes out by reading The Cabin in the Woods (2012) as a commentary on surveillance, consumption, and control. This essay is useful for its sense of historical sweep, locating these debates about the digital within a...