The Glitch Dimension: Paranormal Activity and the Technologies of Vision

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Shaviro
Keyword(s):  
Actual World ◽  
Temporal Delay ◽  
Special Effects ◽  
Found Footage ◽  
Consumer Video ◽  
The Demonic

The six Paranormal Activity movies (2007–15) explore a variety of methods for creating ‘found-footage’ horror. Produced on extremely low budgets, they devise a number of ways to generate scares and thrills without resorting to complicated, high-end special effects. They make use of sound, of temporal delay, and of the limitations and affordances of consumer video products that are both used to create the films, and actually used within the films. This self-reflexivity points up the ways that our actual world is permeated with recording and surveillance devices. The Paranormal Activity films eschew most formal principles of commercial filmmaking; their low-budget, unconventional technologies present us with a new sort of post-cinematic – and post-phenomenological – media apparatus. The last film in the series, in particular, uses glitches and breakdowns of the image in order to convey how the demonic realm it is ostensibly concerned with corresponds with new technical devices that extend outside the actual human sensorium

Un/re/production of Old Age inThe Taking of Deborah Logan

Somatechnics ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 178-194
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Kotwasińska
Keyword(s):  
Alzheimer’S Disease ◽  
Old Age ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Loss Of Control ◽  
Found Footage ◽  
Progressive Loss ◽  
The Face ◽  
Female Embodiment ◽  
Main Protagonist

The article offers a re-examination of abjected femininity and old age through a close reading of The Taking of Deborah Logan (2015), a found footage horror movie centered on spectral possession. While to a large extent the movie replicates an infamous monstrous old woman trope, it also effectively questions typical Alzheimer's disease (AD) narratives, which tend to portray life with AD as a story of unmitigated loss and debility. In The Taking of Deborah Logan, potentially destabilizing moments occur when in the face of progressive loss of control, memory, and bodily functions, the main protagonist is momentarily experienced as resisting the dehumanisation and loss of agency conventionally associated with AD and possession alike. The aim of this article is thus three-fold. The first part sketches the processes through which possession narratives generate a highly ambivalent space for aging femininity in horror film, and how aging, disability, and AD intersect both in popular understanding and in film. In the second part, the author examines how The Taking of Deborah Logan, as a found footage horror, shapes a discussion about selfhood, agency, and monstrous embodiment. Finally, the author argues that it is through the concept of transaging that one can find ways to destabilise traditional understandings of old age, female embodiment, and AD, and offer new narratives that highlight monstrous, if ambivalent, agency.

Special Effects

CFA Magazine ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 56-57
Author(s):  
Susan Trammell
Keyword(s):  
Special Effects

Os Jovens Baumann e o cinema de horror brasileiro contemporâneo: singularidades e diálogos

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 163
Author(s):  
Laura Loguercio Canepa
Keyword(s):  
Found Footage

Este artigo tem como objetivo discutir o filme paulista Os Jovens Baumann, de Bruna Carvalho Almeida. Em meio a um número significativo de filmes de fantasia e horror lançados no Brasil em 2019, nossa escolha deriva do fato de que Os jovens Baumann foi o único a optar pelo estilo conhecido como found footage [filme encontrado]. Além disso, Os Jovens Baumann tem outras singularidades que nos interessam: o fato de tratar-se (em parte) de um filme “de época”, passado durante a década de 1990; o caráter enigmático e fragmentário das imagens em VHS que compõem o núcleo da trama; a narração, em voice over, em primeira pessoa. Buscaremos investigar essas opções temáticas e estilísticas do filme, baseando-nos em observações relativas ao chamado found footage de ficção e ao cinema de horror brasileiro.

Subversive Satanic Women in Decadent Literature and Art

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Per Faxneld
Keyword(s):  
New Woman ◽  
Free Love ◽  
Ambivalent Attitude ◽  
The Demonic

Chapter 7 discusses Decadence as a highly visible counter-discourse, which popularized tactics of counter-reading. Félicen Rops’s enthusiastically debauched engravings and paintings of Satanic women are examined. Next, J.-K. Huysmans’s novel Là-bas (1891) is considered, especially the female Satanist Mme Chantelouve who is portrayed in it. She is a self-governing woman with modern ideas about free love and described as hysterical. Hysteria carried connotations of feminism, and the independent Chantelouve can be seen as a caustic caricature of an emancipated New Woman. Certain bohemian females were undaunted and approached her as an object of identification. Finally, Stanislaw Przybyszewski’s highly ambivalent attitude towards the demonic feminine is read in view of his œuvre at large, which makes it difficult to understand his at times quite ghastly descriptions of female Satanists as a simple condemnation. At times unwittingly, Decadents contributed to a destabilization of gendered categories and ideals.

Witches and Succubi: Male Sexual Fantasies

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Serinity Young
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Intercourse ◽  
Sexual Fantasies ◽  
Medieval Church ◽  
The Face ◽  
Ancient Times ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Over Time ◽  
The Demonic

Witches, women believed to have supernatural powers, have been with us since ancient times. Often they were beautiful, highly sexual women whom men bedded at their own risk. They had magical powers (including that of flight), communed with the dead, and did not conform to patriarchal ideas of womanhood. Their sexuality led them to be classified as succubi, or female spirits who visited men at night and had sexual intercourse with them while they slept. In medieval Christian Europe, witches were refigured as ugly over time, and they became the face of evil. They were believed to fly to their unholy Sabbaths, where they participated in orgies with Satan and sacrificed babies. In truth, most people who were accused of being witches were women caught up in the changing mores and beliefs of the medieval Church, which began to view women as more susceptible to the demonic than men, a Church that needed evidence of their unholy activities, even if extracted by torture.

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