JAMES, MARSH, WILDE: UNCANNY KINETICS IN THE 1890S

Old media can be scary – much scarier, ceteris paribus, than other objects of comparable antiquity. Film and television directors, as well as writers of fiction, who traffic in chills know that few things can insert a palpable sense of dread into a mise-en-scène more economically than a strategically placed daguerreotype (its dour or baleful inhabitants staring out from their world of sepia), a tinny voice issuing from an ancient radio, or the needle of a Victrola bobbing cracklingly in grooves of black vinyl. On the other hand, it is at least as much of a truism to say that new media, too, come freighted with anxieties as well as exhilarations: otherwise we would be less susceptible to narratives about being enslaved by a transpersonal Matrix, zombified by our cell phones, and so on. It should not surprise, then, that in our own media-saturated age a host of tropes and topoi derived from information technologies have tended to recur again and again in works of horror film and fiction. Many of these involve interactions between and among media: old technologies acting like new ones, and vice versa; categorial blurrings and hybridizations involving different media within a particular ecology, or the sense of an uncanny partnership or cooperation between them; and so on. Also common are tableaux of trans- or extra-medial transgression: e.g., the figure of dread escaping the representational field and entering the “real world” of the story. Then, too, there is the figure of prodigious or preternatural (and usually unasked-for) perceptual extension or augmentation, the trope of the technology that enables, or compels, one to see and/or hear more than is good for one.