Dissections Horror E-Zine

painting 'death sentence' by deena warner

(Painting 'Death Sentence' by Deena Warner)

Scary New Media

Michael A. Arnzen

Facelifts of Death
When I began thinking about this essay, I wondered whether or not ‘new media horror’ – that is, horror stories that make use of emergent electronic media technologies like wireless cell phones, internet web pages, and podcasting – was really substantially any different than horror stories at any other time in history. After all, whether you're listening to Stephen King read fiction over an iPod or listening to your grandfather telling a ghost story over a campfire, they're really, at bottom, both the same thing: a scary story, meant to thrill an audience. The medium of delivery might be new, but we're essentially getting the same old story, dressed up in fashionable garb.

So instead of pulling my hair out about what to write for this essay, I sat in my living room and watched one of my favorite television programs – Nip/Tuck – a story about two unlikable plastic surgeons who discover what really matters in life through the reconstruction of their patient's bodies. Although Nip/Tuck features all sorts of beautiful models and grapples with the same domestic issues you'd find on any soap opera, it's actually more akin to a horror show, riffing on such classic tales of disfigurement and medical nightmare as The Hands of Orlac (1924), Eyes Without a Face (1959), Circus of Horrors (1960), Dead Ringers (1988), or even Frankenstein (1931). In Nip/Tuck, the horrors of the body are probed, exposed and sutured back inside during the gross-out special effects scene that serves as the centrepiece to each episode – a gory montage of surgical procedures disturbingly cut to the upbeat tempo of a pop song (what Faces of Death would be if it were a music video). The past two seasons (2004-5), in fact, have been dominated by the horror icon of the serial killer, in the form of a masked slasher called ‘The Carver’, an effeminate sort of Jason from those Friday the 13th films, complete with china doll mask and surgical blades, who says ‘Beauty is a curse on the world’, whenever he carves picture-perfect models new faces.

As I watched Nip/Tuck, I began to wonder if maybe I should write a paper about the motif of plastic surgery in horror narratives instead of new media horror. But then a commercial came on that surprised me. Like the opening sequence to television's The Outer Limits (1963-5), static came out of the speakers and snow filled the TV screen, followed by a choppy image of a blurred white face. Then ‘The Carver’ himself came into focus, leering in close up as if adjusting a webcam before backing away from the lens and sitting down for a chat. The masked killer directly addressed the camera, chiding the audience that we could never guess who he is, and that he is always one step ahead of us all. Then he dared us to find out more about his mission to cure mankind of its hedonism on his weblog at myspace.com, before returning us to our regularly scheduled broadcast. (1)

You know something is seriously changing in a genre when a masked serial killer invites you to check out his ‘blog’. Such a gesture is obviously a solicitation of interactive engagement – a marketing scheme intended to solicit an investment of attention and to mollify a fan base, with the promise of giving a web-savvy audience member ‘something extra’ for free online. Such publicity stunts are everywhere online in the horror genre, from author's self-promotional web pages to blockbuster film websites, where anyone can watch films, play free games, upload fan art, learn more about the artists and creators, and download everything from advanced excerpts in e-book form to ‘ring tones’ and instant message icons to desktop wallpaper and printable posters. It is a very good time to be a genre fiction fan, because, online, we seem to be living in what business strategists like Michael Goldhaber term the ‘attention economy’ – a publicity-saturated era where the consumer's attention is itself the most valuable commodity. If you have an affinity for a genre, new media publishers big and small, conglomerate and independent, will shower you with electronic gifts as a reward for your concentration, for they know they have to fight against a tsunami of other media messages to earn it. (2) Horror entertainment – because of its inherently alarming and cautionary nature, as well as its affinity with youth culture – naturally lends itself to participate in this ‘attention economy’. Moreover, as the ‘index’ (or category) of horror falls out of favour with mass market publishing, many of the genre's practitioners and fan cultures are by necessity vying for ‘attention’ online to survive, leading to new and possibly renewing approaches to the form.

One question at issue for me is how these technologies are changing the way audiences relate to the stories of our era, and how the horror genre – one of the most physically interactive of genres – in particular, participates in this new relationship. After all, when ‘The Carver’ breaks ‘the fourth wall’ to directly address, nay dare, the audience to visit his weblog, there's more going on than just a marketing gimmick. It is a boundary violation across media lines, as well as a narrative disruption to the episodic structure of the series, which very well may enhance his ability as a character to frighten. His ‘anonymous’ presence on the web, furthermore, could even be said to underscore and embody our cultural fears about ‘real’ cyberspace issues, like anonymous predators and paedophiles lurking online. For all its immersion in crass consumerism and technology fetishism, new media technology also offers an avenue for horror storytellers to potentially transgress narrative conventions and tap into cultural anxieties in meaningful new ways.

The New Media Tie-In
‘The Carver’'s weblog is one example of what I would call a ‘new media tie-in’, which, much like standard ‘media tie-ins’ seeks to develop an already existing popular text by supplementing it with texts from a different medium. In many ways, these are currently the dominant forms of new media horror, because they are mainstream commercial enterprises that are widely distributed. In traditional publishing, ‘media tie-ins’ are supplementary texts, like a book series based on the characters and situations from a popular genre-oriented television program, like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Such series have a limited, but already ‘tied-in’ (ergo ‘attentive’) audience, guaranteeing a modicum of financial returns, while also solidifying that audience's relationship with its parent text. They add an extra dimension to a story world, often explored by a new creator. What I am terming ‘New Media Tie-Ins’ are similar in that they accessorise a story by utilising electronic media to market or develop a narrative – but they rarely offer themselves as anything more than an extra-diegetic – that is, non-narrative – accessory to the parent text itself. While they may also ‘dimensionalise’ a story world and make it more participatory and interactive for its audience, they rarely add very much to that story's experience. Instead, they are part of a larger, multi-tiered media ‘package’, a commercial process which is becoming normalised in contemporary genre publishing, but also leading to some genre dissonance, since the appeal of different media are often at odds with one another.

Take, for example, Stephen King's latest novel, Cell (2006), a book which overtly critiques our growing dependency on new media technologies like the wireless telephone and the internet. King's story dramatises the apocalyptical results of a mysterious ‘pulse’ that is sent over the wireless networks, turning every cell phone user into something akin to a ‘networked’ zombie, leaving the few unaffected ‘Normies’ who don't have phones seeking survival from the psychically bonded hoard. This is a novel whose social allegory is clearly hostile to new media culture, yet its publisher, Scribner – a division of Simon and Schuster, itself a division of CBS (who will soon be selling downloadable television programs) – utilised a number of unique, if not contradictory, new media tie-ins to help pitch the book to its audience. If readers joined a Stephen King VIP club online, they were able to receive text messages and audio files of ‘King saying spooky things...like, “Beware, the next call you take may be your last.”' (Wyatt). For about $2, they could load the book cover on their mobile phone screens or turn King's voice into a ring tone (Trachtenberg). (3) On the novel's website, any visitor can e-mail an audio file of a ‘pulse’ to their friends – a bass-laden effect mixed over the sound of a modem trying to ‘handshake’ with a server. Oddly, you'd have to be online already to receive it – and what's more, you probably wouldn't be listening to it on your phone but on your mp3 device. I find this contradictory use of media puzzling, because it suggests that new media is good only for new media's sake, which is, of course, precisely what King is critiquing.

A similarly ambitious new media marketing campaign was undertaken in support of the recent teenage slasher film, Cry_Wolf (2005). In this story, a student e-mails an urban legend about a masked killer to everyone on a prep school's campus network, and before he knows it, the killer seems to have come to life: and he makes his presence known by Instant Messaging (IM) the protagonist about his murder victims before and after he takes their lives. The film cleverly makes use of the ‘instantaneous’ nature of IM technology to generate mystery and suspense in the narrative's present tense, while also exploiting the youth market that actively IMs on a daily basis. Indeed, its multimedia marketing campaign aggressively reached out to the mobile-savvy teenage culture by hosting a weblog, a cell phone game, AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) ‘buddy’ icons, and an online multiplayer game that mimics the ‘find the wolf hiding among the sheep’ game dramatised in an early scene in the film. The director, Jeff Wadlow, teamed with America Online to promote the film's many new media tie-ins – which required users to belong to their service and be willing to receive advertisements for sponsors like Chrysler, for the chance to play (‘An IM Wolf in Web Sheep’s Clothing’). (4) Despite all these attempts to draw an audience into the story, the film was considered a flop. Reviewing the film for HollywoodReporter.com, Frank Sheck put it succinctly: ‘the film seems less interested in suspense than in providing a primer for parents as to what devices their teens are fiddling around with all day.’

There is much merit to Sheck's latent assumption that the film is an eye-opener for an older generation, and those who need a ‘primer’ in new media technology. Like King's Cell, Cry_Wolf belongs to an emergent subgenre of ‘New Tech Horror’ stories, which seem to demonise new media or represent it as a spectral or perverse Other – a subgenre which includes films like Dario Argento's The Card Player (2004), FearDot.com (Malone, 2002), and Stay Alive (Bell, 2006). As much as these texts treat the Internet as a frightening locus for chaos, they still centre their narratives entirely on technology as a selling point. Clearly, they reflect our ambivalent relationship to New Media – mirroring both our cultural fascination and fear of it – but perhaps they also embed other ambivalences stemming from both generational differences between young and old, and presentational differences between traditional media and new media technology.

But even beyond their contradictory messages and latent subtexts, one of the other obvious reasons these new media tie-ins and marketing gimmicks fail is because their hype outstrips the power of the story they are selling. Indeed, Cell and Cry_Wolf give us examples of new media elements being employed to construct a media event, rather than to develop the originating story in a meaningful way. Nevertheless, because all media must compete in the ‘attention economy’, many resources continue to be steered into this pseudoevent-making, even at risk of competing with one another. Book publishers, who are suffering in face of the enormous competition presented by visual media, seem especially keen on borrowing heavily from film marketing's multi-tiered approach to publicity. The trend is particularly evident – and legitimate – in horror storytelling, where hype is quite at home. The reason for this is that horror has such a longstanding sideshow tradition of playfully teasing an audience, in the huckstering vein of someone like William Castle. The ‘magic show’ of new media, moreover, provides this approach with a particularly uncanny and fantastic aura – even if it is as gimmicky as a stage magician waving a wand. Many new media tie-ins in the genre are today's electronic forms of ‘Illusion-O’ (3D glasses with a score card for noting the appearance of hidden ghosts in 13 Ghosts) or the ‘Punishment Poll’ voting booths in the lobby for Mr. Sardonicus (Law 82, p. 102) – specious games of interactivity. And just as Castle turned the movie theatre into a sort of interactive carnival space, so too has cyberspace been carnivalised by new media horror.

Indeed, any casual survey of new media tie-ins reveals that these texts are dominated not by ring tones or mobile text messages, but by gaming – a strategy which allows fans to directly interact with plots, settings and characters. The commercial PC and Xbox game tie-ins are already evident on the software aisle. But concerning New Media tie-ins, most are available free online. Typically using Macromedia Flash programming available to anyone, these games range anywhere from ‘first person shooters’ – where you might role-play a shotgun-toting character in a zombie film (like ‘Blackout’ – available at the website promoting the re-released Dawn of the Dead) – to ‘dungeon crawl’ explorations of haunted spaces (like the interactive ‘urban spelunking’ of the deadly ‘Paragon Hotel’, featured at horrorworld.org, in promotion of David Morrell's recent book, Creepers). Often, these highly interactive forms of promotion seek to reward consumers loyal to the story proper, both concretely (sending prizes to winners) and abstractly (by knowingly winking at the fans who recognise trivial story elements built within the game, or otherwise use strategies from the story to succeed at playing it). These are the cyberspace equivalent of the carnival dart game.

When I compare these new media tie-ins to the carnival, I mean this both literally and figuratively. An online ‘haunted house’ functions much like a carnival attraction, but it also is ‘carnivalesque’ in the Bakhtinian sense – that is, these forms are a cyberspace version of a ‘folk’ art that ostensibly emerges from the masses, politically transgressive in nature, mocking highbrow aesthetics. Not only are the scenarios for these games often lowbrow, but, often, the art is patently bad, composed of clip art and other publicly shared (and occasionally plagiarised) artifacts. The carnivalesque aesthetics of new media horror often are folk art proper, since their technologies are available to the masses, and in some cases – thanks to the ‘open source’ community – freely available online. This makes the media a level playing field, where anyone can participate in the ‘attention economy’. Indeed, it might very well be the case that the lower the budget and the less a sales force is involved, the more authentic and meaningful these tie-ins seem to be to their end users: horror fans.

Authors as Folk Artists
Fan culture has always spawned its own tie-ins, whether in the form of fan fiction or card games, and this type of ‘folk’ art is now also widely available online. But what is, perhaps, genuinely ‘new’ about this trend is the way that established authors themselves are utilising these same ‘open source’ technologies to both provide a variety of authoritative ‘tie-in’ texts and even in some cases use them to originate new narratives. Horror creators seem to be turning more and more into their own ‘William Castles’ for self-promotion, with mixed results, ranging from overblown self-endorsements to thoughtful hypertext essays about the craft, to artful applications of new media experiments. I'll conclude with a brief survey of a few of the more remarkable experiments, as examples of where new media horror is at its most authentic, and where horror might be going in the future.

One promising example is a new weblog-based fictional experiment called ‘Muy Mal’ (at muymal.com). Here, three dark fantasy writers – Weston Ochse, John Urbancik, and Mike Oliveri – are designing a ‘shared world’ horror story, where each writer adds an episode as easily as posting a new blog entry. Remarkably inventive, behind the scenes, these writers keep track of character names and shared settings by using ‘Wiki’ programming – a multi-user glossary of sorts, that allows any of the writers to add, edit or delete entries, building a ‘bible’ for the story world they can each consult. Likewise, the authors use freely licensed fantasy art from various online sources, for the price of a traded link. Here, new media technology is being artfully applied to generate a unique form of narrative. The hype of the event is built into the act of creation, rather than a supplementary element as in other new media tie-ins, audiences are invited to participate actively, and collaboration is embraced over individual ownership.

In the multimedia arena, horror writers David Wilbanks and Mark Justice run their own mock radio show as a monthly podcast, called ‘Pod of Horror’. This is an example of underground genre journalism combining new and old technologies, in the successful tradition of trade electronic newsletters like Jobs in Hell, Hellnotes, the ‘Goreletter’ and many author-based e-letters, in addition to fanzines. However, the podcast also takes advantage of the form in creative ways. Its format often mimics old radio plays, offers guest authors a chance to read or be interviewed ‘on the air’, and in its most popular department employs a zombie advice columnist named ‘Grim Rictus’ who – in a manner reminiscent of ‘The Cryptkeeper’ from Tales from the Crypt – answers questions e-mailed to him in an often funny, always dark, manner.

In the realm of online video and animation, the pop-surreal filmmaker David Lynch offers a website – davidlynch.com – that, for a very reasonable fee of $10/month, gives visitors an intimate look at Lynch's life and work. Subscribers can watch short experimental films, follow a new animated series, view scanned paintings, drawings and storyboards, play puzzles and generally explore the director's world in a highly entertaining and intimate, but always offbeat, manner. In this site, the author's creative workspace becomes the primary text, and the auteur becomes the center of a highly decentred and meandering space. Graphics of telephones appear here and there, offering users a ‘site within the site’ if they can decode their puzzles. He also offers ‘Oddio’ – an offbeat talk show, with original music. Indeed, Lynch is a sort of character in his own universe, appearing daily in a streaming video to give a simple weather report. He creatively plays off the convention of the news by filming these reports in different locales, or with creative camera angles, but there is always some element that ensures the viewer that this is not pre-recorded, but live (say, a newspaper on the table before him). Lynch has approached the site as something akin to a film student project: ‘I never know what I'm going to do, so I can't farm it out to someone else. I only get ideas by doing’ (Gaslin). Here the open form of the filmmaker's creative process mimics the very exploration of cyberspace – web exploration becomes a creative endeavour into the unknown for both fan and author.

In all three of these examples, horror creators employ new media technologies autonomously in a quest for original storytelling. This, of course, is analogous to what keeps any genre fresh and meaningful: bringing invention into concert with convention. While multimedia conglomerates sell their tie-ins on the scientific ‘invention’ of technology markets, underground artists artistically use those tools to invent narratives and explore ideas with the new technology. Because literary horror in particular is experiencing something of an ‘identity crisis’ in traditional print publishing – leading some pundits in the pages of Locus magazine (5) and elsewhere to suggest that the horror genre is going the way of the Western – more writers, as I hope I've shown, are turning away from Publisher's Row to invent and propagate new media strategies in order to generate new and exciting work on the margins that may very well even redefine or renew the genre, if not publishing itself.

Presented at ICFA-27
‘New Directions in Horror’ Panel
March 16, 2006
Fort Lauderdale, Florida
USA

Endnotes
(1) ‘The Carver’'s weblog (http://blog.myspace.com/thecarver) appeared throughout December 2005, featuring brief videotaped commentary and written messianic rants about the ‘curse of beauty’ interspersed with post-episode comments about the developing plot of the series. The site is as tongue-in-cheek as it is serious, listing the killer's favorite TV shows (According to Jim), foods and bands (80s hair metal), the way a teenager might in his ‘profile’ page. The final entry bids goodbye to the audience with the promise that the villain could return again at any moment: ‘Kit and I will always be out here, somewhere, maybe on the other side of the world, maybe hiding in your closet... Until we meet again, my beauties...’

(2) ‘Diminishing returns to attention,’ writes Bubblegeneration.com's Kashif Asan, ‘are at the root of falling newspaper circulation, magazine subscriptions, TV ad revenue, radio listenership, and book sales – at the heart of the [media] industry’s current malaise.’

(3) Normally, such promotional materials are given away freely by publishers, but often such ‘open source’ sharing hides an insidious form of market research and the hope for future profit. A marketing director at Simon and Schuster notes that Cell's media ploy provided ‘an opportunity to offset the cost of our ad campaign by creating a potential revenue stream’ (Trachtenberg).

(4) Indeed, the film was originally a winner of the Chrysler Million Dollar Film contest.

(5) In ‘Tribal Stand’, Paula Guran not only presents a eulogy for the genre, but locates part of the problem in author-based New Media communities and the rise of self-publishing online.

Works Cited
Asan, Kashif. ‘The Attention Economy’. Weblog. Bubble Generation. Nov. 8, 2005.
(http://www.bubblegeneration.com/2005/11/attention-economy-across-consumer.cfm). March 9, 2006.

‘Blackout’. Online Game. Dawn of the Dead: The Movie.
(http://www.dawnofthedeadmovie.net/experience/blackout.htm). March 9, 2006.

The Card Player. Dir. Dario Argento. Anchor Bay Entertainment, 2004.

‘The Carver’. Weblog. MySpace.com. Dec 2005. (http://blog.myspace.com/thecarver). March 9, 2006.

Cry_Wolf. Dir. Jeff Wadlow. Universal/Rogue Pictures, 2005.

Fear dot Com. Website. (http://feardotcom.warnerbros.com). March 9, 2006.

Fear dot Com. Dir. William Malone. Columbia-TriStar Films, 2002.

Gaslin, Glen. ‘A Site to Behold’. Entertainment Weekly. (Jan. 11, 2002), p. 73.

Goldhaber, Michael H. ‘The Attention Economy and the Net’. Online. First Monday. 1997. (http://www.firstmonday.dk/ISSUES/issue2_4/goldhaber/). March 9, 2006.

Guran, Paula. ‘Tribal Stand’. Online. Locus. 9 Sept 2002.
(http://www.locusmag.com/ 2002/Commentary/Guran09_Standard.html). March 9, 2006.

‘An IM Wolf in Web Sheep’s Clothing.’ Online. iMedia Connections Showcase. Sept. 15, 2005. (http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/6747.asp). March 9, 2006.

King, Stephen. Cell. New York: Scribners/Simon & Schuster Books, 2006.

Law, John W. Scare Tactic: The Life and Times of William Castle. New York: Writer's Club Press, 2000.

Lynch, David. Online. DavidLynch.com. (http://www.davidlynch.com). March 9, 2006.

Ochse, Weston, Urbancik, John, and Oliveri, Mike. MuyMal. (http://www.muymal.com/) March 9, 2006.

Nip/Tuck. TV Series. fX Network. Warner Home Video. Aired 2003-5.

‘The Paragon Hotel’. Online Game. HorrorWorld. (http://www.paragonhotel.com) March 9, 2006.

‘Pod of Horror’. Podcast. August 2005-Present.
(http://www.horrorreader.com/horror_reader/pod_of_horror/). March 9, 2006.

‘The Pulse’. Audio file. Stephen King's Cell: A Novel. 2006.
(http://www.cellthebook.com/pulse.mp3). March 9, 2006.

Sheck, Frank. ‘Cry Wolf’. Online. Hollywood Reporter. Sept. 19, 2005.
(http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr/reviews/review_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001138790) March 9, 2006.

Stay Alive. Dir. William Brent Bell. Buena Vista, 2006.

Trachtenberg, Jeffrey A. ‘Stephen King Tries to Ring Up Sales through Text
Messages’. Wall Street Journal. Online syndicate. Post-Gazette.com. Jan. 17, 2006.
(http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/pp/06017/639371.stm). March 9, 2006.

Wyatt, Edward. ‘Pull Up the Covers, Your Cellphone is Ringing’. Online. The New York Times. Jan. 25, 2006.
(http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/25/technology/techspecial2/25cell.html). March 9, 2006.

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	(Painting 'Death Sentence' by Deena Warner) Scary New Media Michael A. Arnzen Facelifts of Death When I began thinking about this essay, I wondered whether or not ‘new media horror’ – that is, horror stories that make use of emergent electronic media technologies like wireless cell phones, internet web pages, and podcasting – was really substantially any different than horror stories at any other time in history. After all, whether you're listening to Stephen King read fiction over an iPod or listening to your grandfather telling a ghost story over a campfire, they're really, at bottom, both the same thing: a scary story, meant to thrill an audience. The medium of delivery might be new, but we're essentially getting the same old story, dressed up in fashionable garb. So instead of pulling my hair out about what to write for this essay, I sat in my living room and watched one of my favorite television programs – Nip/Tuck – a story about two unlikable plastic surgeons who discover what really matters in life through the reconstruction of their patient's bodies. Although Nip/Tuck features all sorts of beautiful models and grapples with the same domestic issues you'd find on any soap opera, it's actually more akin to a horror show, riffing on such classic tales of disfigurement and medical nightmare as The Hands of Orlac (1924), Eyes Without a Face (1959), Circus of Horrors (1960), Dead Ringers (1988), or even Frankenstein (1931). In Nip/Tuck, the horrors of the body are probed, exposed and sutured back inside during the gross-out special effects scene that serves as the centrepiece to each episode – a gory montage of surgical procedures disturbingly cut to the upbeat tempo of a pop song (what Faces of Death would be if it were a music video). The past two seasons (2004-5), in fact, have been dominated by the horror icon of the serial killer, in the form of a masked slasher called ‘The Carver’, an effeminate sort of Jason from those Friday the 13th films, complete with china doll mask and surgical blades, who says ‘Beauty is a curse on the world’, whenever he carves picture-perfect models new faces. As I watched Nip/Tuck, I began to wonder if maybe I should write a paper about the motif of plastic surgery in horror narratives instead of new media horror. But then a commercial came on that surprised me. Like the opening sequence to television's The Outer Limits (1963-5), static came out of the speakers and snow filled the TV screen, followed by a choppy image of a blurred white face. Then ‘The Carver’ himself came into focus, leering in close up as if adjusting a webcam before backing away from the lens and sitting down for a chat. The masked killer directly addressed the camera, chiding the audience that we could never guess who he is, and that he is always one step ahead of us all. Then he dared us to find out more about his mission to cure mankind of its hedonism on his weblog at myspace.com, before returning us to our regularly scheduled broadcast. (1) You know something is seriously changing in a genre when a masked serial killer invites you to check out his ‘blog’. Such a gesture is obviously a solicitation of interactive engagement – a marketing scheme intended to solicit an investment of attention and to mollify a fan base, with the promise of giving a web-savvy audience member ‘something extra’ for free online. Such publicity stunts are everywhere online in the horror genre, from author's self-promotional web pages to blockbuster film websites, where anyone can watch films, play free games, upload fan art, learn more about the artists and creators, and download everything from advanced excerpts in e-book form to ‘ring tones’ and instant message icons to desktop wallpaper and printable posters. It is a very good time to be a genre fiction fan, because, online, we seem to be living in what business strategists like Michael Goldhaber term the ‘attention economy’ – a publicity-saturated era where the consumer's attention is itself the most valuable commodity. If you have an affinity for a genre, new media publishers big and small, conglomerate and independent, will shower you with electronic gifts as a reward for your concentration, for they know they have to fight against a tsunami of other media messages to earn it. (2) Horror entertainment – because of its inherently alarming and cautionary nature, as well as its affinity with youth culture – naturally lends itself to participate in this ‘attention economy’. Moreover, as the ‘index’ (or category) of horror falls out of favour with mass market publishing, many of the genre's practitioners and fan cultures are by necessity vying for ‘attention’ online to survive, leading to new and possibly renewing approaches to the form. One question at issue for me is how these technologies are changing the way audiences relate to the stories of our era, and how the horror genre – one of the most physically interactive of genres – in particular, participates in this new relationship. After all, when ‘The Carver’ breaks ‘the fourth wall’ to directly address, nay dare, the audience to visit his weblog, there's more going on than just a marketing gimmick. It is a boundary violation across media lines, as well as a narrative disruption to the episodic structure of the series, which very well may enhance his ability as a character to frighten. His ‘anonymous’ presence on the web, furthermore, could even be said to underscore and embody our cultural fears about ‘real’ cyberspace issues, like anonymous predators and paedophiles lurking online. For all its immersion in crass consumerism and technology fetishism, new media technology also offers an avenue for horror storytellers to potentially transgress narrative conventions and tap into cultural anxieties in meaningful new ways. The New Media Tie-In ‘The Carver’'s weblog is one example of what I would call a ‘new media tie-in’, which, much like standard ‘media tie-ins’ seeks to develop an already existing popular text by supplementing it with texts from a different medium. In many ways, these are currently the dominant forms of new media horror, because they are mainstream commercial enterprises that are widely distributed. In traditional publishing, ‘media tie-ins’ are supplementary texts, like a book series based on the characters and situations from a popular genre-oriented television program, like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Such series have a limited, but already ‘tied-in’ (ergo ‘attentive’) audience, guaranteeing a modicum of financial returns, while also solidifying that audience's relationship with its parent text. They add an extra dimension to a story world, often explored by a new creator. What I am terming ‘New Media Tie-Ins’ are similar in that they accessorise a story by utilising electronic media to market or develop a narrative – but they rarely offer themselves as anything more than an extra-diegetic – that is, non-narrative – accessory to the parent text itself. While they may also ‘dimensionalise’ a story world and make it more participatory and interactive for its audience, they rarely add very much to that story's experience. Instead, they are part of a larger, multi-tiered media ‘package’, a commercial process which is becoming normalised in contemporary genre publishing, but also leading to some genre dissonance, since the appeal of different media are often at odds with one another. Take, for example, Stephen King's latest novel, Cell (2006), a book which overtly critiques our growing dependency on new media technologies like the wireless telephone and the internet. King's story dramatises the apocalyptical results of a mysterious ‘pulse’ that is sent over the wireless networks, turning every cell phone user into something akin to a ‘networked’ zombie, leaving the few unaffected ‘Normies’ who don't have phones seeking survival from the psychically bonded hoard. This is a novel whose social allegory is clearly hostile to new media culture, yet its publisher, Scribner – a division of Simon and Schuster, itself a division of CBS (who will soon be selling downloadable television programs) – utilised a number of unique, if not contradictory, new media tie-ins to help pitch the book to its audience. If readers joined a Stephen King VIP club online, they were able to receive text messages and audio files of ‘King saying spooky things...like, “Beware, the next call you take may be your last.”' (Wyatt). For about $2, they could load the book cover on their mobile phone screens or turn King's voice into a ring tone (Trachtenberg). (3) On the novel's website, any visitor can e-mail an audio file of a ‘pulse’ to their friends – a bass-laden effect mixed over the sound of a modem trying to ‘handshake’ with a server. Oddly, you'd have to be online already to receive it – and what's more, you probably wouldn't be listening to it on your phone but on your mp3 device. I find this contradictory use of media puzzling, because it suggests that new media is good only for new media's sake, which is, of course, precisely what King is critiquing. A similarly ambitious new media marketing campaign was undertaken in support of the recent teenage slasher film, Cry_Wolf (2005). In this story, a student e-mails an urban legend about a masked killer to everyone on a prep school's campus network, and before he knows it, the killer seems to have come to life: and he makes his presence known by Instant Messaging (IM) the protagonist about his murder victims before and after he takes their lives. The film cleverly makes use of the ‘instantaneous’ nature of IM technology to generate mystery and suspense in the narrative's present tense, while also exploiting the youth market that actively IMs on a daily basis. Indeed, its multimedia marketing campaign aggressively reached out to the mobile-savvy teenage culture by hosting a weblog, a cell phone game, AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) ‘buddy’ icons, and an online multiplayer game that mimics the ‘find the wolf hiding among the sheep’ game dramatised in an early scene in the film. The director, Jeff Wadlow, teamed with America Online to promote the film's many new media tie-ins – which required users to belong to their service and be willing to receive advertisements for sponsors like Chrysler, for the chance to play (‘An IM Wolf in Web Sheep’s Clothing’). (4) Despite all these attempts to draw an audience into the story, the film was considered a flop. Reviewing the film for HollywoodReporter.com, Frank Sheck put it succinctly: ‘the film seems less interested in suspense than in providing a primer for parents as to what devices their teens are fiddling around with all day.’ There is much merit to Sheck's latent assumption that the film is an eye-opener for an older generation, and those who need a ‘primer’ in new media technology. Like King's Cell, Cry_Wolf belongs to an emergent subgenre of ‘New Tech Horror’ stories, which seem to demonise new media or represent it as a spectral or perverse Other – a subgenre which includes films like Dario Argento's The Card Player (2004), FearDot.com (Malone, 2002), and Stay Alive (Bell, 2006). As much as these texts treat the Internet as a frightening locus for chaos, they still centre their narratives entirely on technology as a selling point. Clearly, they reflect our ambivalent relationship to New Media – mirroring both our cultural fascination and fear of it – but perhaps they also embed other ambivalences stemming from both generational differences between young and old, and presentational differences between traditional media and new media technology. But even beyond their contradictory messages and latent subtexts, one of the other obvious reasons these new media tie-ins and marketing gimmicks fail is because their hype outstrips the power of the story they are selling. Indeed, Cell and Cry_Wolf give us examples of new media elements being employed to construct a media event, rather than to develop the originating story in a meaningful way. Nevertheless, because all media must compete in the ‘attention economy’, many resources continue to be steered into this pseudoevent-making, even at risk of competing with one another. Book publishers, who are suffering in face of the enormous competition presented by visual media, seem especially keen on borrowing heavily from film marketing's multi-tiered approach to publicity. The trend is particularly evident – and legitimate – in horror storytelling, where hype is quite at home. The reason for this is that horror has such a longstanding sideshow tradition of playfully teasing an audience, in the huckstering vein of someone like William Castle. The ‘magic show’ of new media, moreover, provides this approach with a particularly uncanny and fantastic aura – even if it is as gimmicky as a stage magician waving a wand. Many new media tie-ins in the genre are today's electronic forms of ‘Illusion-O’ (3D glasses with a score card for noting the appearance of hidden ghosts in 13 Ghosts) or the ‘Punishment Poll’ voting booths in the lobby for Mr. Sardonicus (Law 82, p. 102) – specious games of interactivity. And just as Castle turned the movie theatre into a sort of interactive carnival space, so too has cyberspace been carnivalised by new media horror. Indeed, any casual survey of new media tie-ins reveals that these texts are dominated not by ring tones or mobile text messages, but by gaming – a strategy which allows fans to directly interact with plots, settings and characters. The commercial PC and Xbox game tie-ins are already evident on the software aisle. But concerning New Media tie-ins, most are available free online. Typically using Macromedia Flash programming available to anyone, these games range anywhere from ‘first person shooters’ – where you might role-play a shotgun-toting character in a zombie film (like ‘Blackout’ – available at the website promoting the re-released Dawn of the Dead) – to ‘dungeon crawl’ explorations of haunted spaces (like the interactive ‘urban spelunking’ of the deadly ‘Paragon Hotel’, featured at horrorworld.org, in promotion of David Morrell's recent book, Creepers). Often, these highly interactive forms of promotion seek to reward consumers loyal to the story proper, both concretely (sending prizes to winners) and abstractly (by knowingly winking at the fans who recognise trivial story elements built within the game, or otherwise use strategies from the story to succeed at playing it). These are the cyberspace equivalent of the carnival dart game. When I compare these new media tie-ins to the carnival, I mean this both literally and figuratively. An online ‘haunted house’ functions much like a carnival attraction, but it also is ‘carnivalesque’ in the Bakhtinian sense – that is, these forms are a cyberspace version of a ‘folk’ art that ostensibly emerges from the masses, politically transgressive in nature, mocking highbrow aesthetics. Not only are the scenarios for these games often lowbrow, but, often, the art is patently bad, composed of clip art and other publicly shared (and occasionally plagiarised) artifacts. The carnivalesque aesthetics of new media horror often are folk art proper, since their technologies are available to the masses, and in some cases – thanks to the ‘open source’ community – freely available online. This makes the media a level playing field, where anyone can participate in the ‘attention economy’. Indeed, it might very well be the case that the lower the budget and the less a sales force is involved, the more authentic and meaningful these tie-ins seem to be to their end users: horror fans. Authors as Folk Artists Fan culture has always spawned its own tie-ins, whether in the form of fan fiction or card games, and this type of ‘folk’ art is now also widely available online. But what is, perhaps, genuinely ‘new’ about this trend is the way that established authors themselves are utilising these same ‘open source’ technologies to both provide a variety of authoritative ‘tie-in’ texts and even in some cases use them to originate new narratives. Horror creators seem to be turning more and more into their own ‘William Castles’ for self-promotion, with mixed results, ranging from overblown self-endorsements to thoughtful hypertext essays about the craft, to artful applications of new media experiments. I'll conclude with a brief survey of a few of the more remarkable experiments, as examples of where new media horror is at its most authentic, and where horror might be going in the future. One promising example is a new weblog-based fictional experiment called ‘Muy Mal’ (at muymal.com). Here, three dark fantasy writers – Weston Ochse, John Urbancik, and Mike Oliveri – are designing a ‘shared world’ horror story, where each writer adds an episode as easily as posting a new blog entry. Remarkably inventive, behind the scenes, these writers keep track of character names and shared settings by using ‘Wiki’ programming – a multi-user glossary of sorts, that allows any of the writers to add, edit or delete entries, building a ‘bible’ for the story world they can each consult. Likewise, the authors use freely licensed fantasy art from various online sources, for the price of a traded link. Here, new media technology is being artfully applied to generate a unique form of narrative. The hype of the event is built into the act of creation, rather than a supplementary element as in other new media tie-ins, audiences are invited to participate actively, and collaboration is embraced over individual ownership. In the multimedia arena, horror writers David Wilbanks and Mark Justice run their own mock radio show as a monthly podcast, called ‘Pod of Horror’. This is an example of underground genre journalism combining new and old technologies, in the successful tradition of trade electronic newsletters like Jobs in Hell, Hellnotes, the ‘Goreletter’ and many author-based e-letters, in addition to fanzines. However, the podcast also takes advantage of the form in creative ways. Its format often mimics old radio plays, offers guest authors a chance to read or be interviewed ‘on the air’, and in its most popular department employs a zombie advice columnist named ‘Grim Rictus’ who – in a manner reminiscent of ‘The Cryptkeeper’ from Tales from the Crypt – answers questions e-mailed to him in an often funny, always dark, manner. In the realm of online video and animation, the pop-surreal filmmaker David Lynch offers a website – davidlynch.com – that, for a very reasonable fee of $10/month, gives visitors an intimate look at Lynch's life and work. Subscribers can watch short experimental films, follow a new animated series, view scanned paintings, drawings and storyboards, play puzzles and generally explore the director's world in a highly entertaining and intimate, but always offbeat, manner. In this site, the author's creative workspace becomes the primary text, and the auteur becomes the center of a highly decentred and meandering space. Graphics of telephones appear here and there, offering users a ‘site within the site’ if they can decode their puzzles. He also offers ‘Oddio’ – an offbeat talk show, with original music. Indeed, Lynch is a sort of character in his own universe, appearing daily in a streaming video to give a simple weather report. He creatively plays off the convention of the news by filming these reports in different locales, or with creative camera angles, but there is always some element that ensures the viewer that this is not pre-recorded, but live (say, a newspaper on the table before him). Lynch has approached the site as something akin to a film student project: ‘I never know what I'm going to do, so I can't farm it out to someone else. I only get ideas by doing’ (Gaslin). Here the open form of the filmmaker's creative process mimics the very exploration of cyberspace – web exploration becomes a creative endeavour into the unknown for both fan and author. In all three of these examples, horror creators employ new media technologies autonomously in a quest for original storytelling. This, of course, is analogous to what keeps any genre fresh and meaningful: bringing invention into concert with convention. While multimedia conglomerates sell their tie-ins on the scientific ‘invention’ of technology markets, underground artists artistically use those tools to invent narratives and explore ideas with the new technology. Because literary horror in particular is experiencing something of an ‘identity crisis’ in traditional print publishing – leading some pundits in the pages of Locus magazine (5) and elsewhere to suggest that the horror genre is going the way of the Western – more writers, as I hope I've shown, are turning away from Publisher's Row to invent and propagate new media strategies in order to generate new and exciting work on the margins that may very well even redefine or renew the genre, if not publishing itself. Presented at ICFA-27 ‘New Directions in Horror’ Panel March 16, 2006 Fort Lauderdale, Florida USA Endnotes (1) ‘The Carver’'s weblog (http://blog.myspace.com/thecarver) appeared throughout December 2005, featuring brief videotaped commentary and written messianic rants about the ‘curse of beauty’ interspersed with post-episode comments about the developing plot of the series. The site is as tongue-in-cheek as it is serious, listing the killer's favorite TV shows (According to Jim), foods and bands (80s hair metal), the way a teenager might in his ‘profile’ page. The final entry bids goodbye to the audience with the promise that the villain could return again at any moment: ‘Kit and I will always be out here, somewhere, maybe on the other side of the world, maybe hiding in your closet... Until we meet again, my beauties...’ (2) ‘Diminishing returns to attention,’ writes Bubblegeneration.com's Kashif Asan, ‘are at the root of falling newspaper circulation, magazine subscriptions, TV ad revenue, radio listenership, and book sales – at the heart of the [media] industry’s current malaise.’ (3) Normally, such promotional materials are given away freely by publishers, but often such ‘open source’ sharing hides an insidious form of market research and the hope for future profit. A marketing director at Simon and Schuster notes that Cell's media ploy provided ‘an opportunity to offset the cost of our ad campaign by creating a potential revenue stream’ (Trachtenberg). (4) Indeed, the film was originally a winner of the Chrysler Million Dollar Film contest. (5) In ‘Tribal Stand’, Paula Guran not only presents a eulogy for the genre, but locates part of the problem in author-based New Media communities and the rise of self-publishing online. Works Cited Asan, Kashif. ‘The Attention Economy’. Weblog. Bubble Generation. Nov. 8, 2005. (http://www.bubblegeneration.com/2005/11/attention-economy-across-consumer.cfm). March 9, 2006. ‘Blackout’. Online Game. Dawn of the Dead: The Movie. (http://www.dawnofthedeadmovie.net/experience/blackout.htm). March 9, 2006. The Card Player. Dir. Dario Argento. Anchor Bay Entertainment, 2004. ‘The Carver’. Weblog. MySpace.com. Dec 2005. (http://blog.myspace.com/thecarver). March 9, 2006. Cry_Wolf. Dir. Jeff Wadlow. Universal/Rogue Pictures, 2005. Fear dot Com. Website. (http://feardotcom.warnerbros.com). March 9, 2006. Fear dot Com. Dir. William Malone. Columbia-TriStar Films, 2002. Gaslin, Glen. ‘A Site to Behold’. Entertainment Weekly. (Jan. 11, 2002), p. 73. Goldhaber, Michael H. ‘The Attention Economy and the Net’. Online. First Monday. 1997. (http://www.firstmonday.dk/ISSUES/issue2_4/goldhaber/). March 9, 2006. Guran, Paula. ‘Tribal Stand’. Online. Locus. 9 Sept 2002. (http://www.locusmag.com/ 2002/Commentary/Guran09_Standard.html). March 9, 2006. ‘An IM Wolf in Web Sheep’s Clothing.’ Online. iMedia Connections Showcase. Sept. 15, 2005. (http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/6747.asp). March 9, 2006. King, Stephen. Cell. New York: Scribners/Simon & Schuster Books, 2006. Law, John W. Scare Tactic: The Life and Times of William Castle. New York: Writer's Club Press, 2000. Lynch, David. Online. DavidLynch.com. (http://www.davidlynch.com). March 9, 2006. Ochse, Weston, Urbancik, John, and Oliveri, Mike. MuyMal. (http://www.muymal.com/) March 9, 2006. Nip/Tuck. TV Series. fX Network. Warner Home Video. Aired 2003-5. ‘The Paragon Hotel’. Online Game. HorrorWorld. (http://www.paragonhotel.com) March 9, 2006. ‘Pod of Horror’. Podcast. August 2005-Present. (http://www.horrorreader.com/horror_reader/pod_of_horror/). March 9, 2006. ‘The Pulse’. Audio file. Stephen King's Cell: A Novel. 2006. (http://www.cellthebook.com/pulse.mp3). March 9, 2006. Sheck, Frank. ‘Cry Wolf’. Online. Hollywood Reporter. Sept. 19, 2005. (http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr/reviews/review_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001138790) March 9, 2006. Stay Alive. Dir. William Brent Bell. Buena Vista, 2006. Trachtenberg, Jeffrey A. ‘Stephen King Tries to Ring Up Sales through Text Messages’. Wall Street Journal. Online syndicate. Post-Gazette.com. Jan. 17, 2006. (http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/pp/06017/639371.stm). March 9, 2006. Wyatt, Edward. ‘Pull Up the Covers, Your Cellphone is Ringing’. Online. The New York Times. Jan. 25, 2006. (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/25/technology/techspecial2/25cell.html). March 9, 2006. Home Next
*Website maintained by Michelle Bernard - Contact m.bernard@anglia.ac.uk - last updated October 17, 2006*