The semester is winding up, so I don’t have much to say. Keeping my eyes focused on Gaza and New York City for the moment. Not a lot of room for anything else, but fiction helps. Fiction helps.
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Rereading it in preparation for the class, I was struck by a simple but surprisingly deep question: what does it mean for something to be haunted? Not on the surface, but as part of a deeper cultural question. What does it make sense to think of as being haunted?
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What seems obvious to me is that, around the time that film was emerging as an art form, the construction of prose fiction changed rather dramatically. The primary difference of most 20th Century literature from 19th Century and earlier literature is the filmic quality.
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In the McLuhanian read, an adaptation is just the old medium being placed in the new medium wholesale. To an extent, this is true: all adaptations are going to have baggage from their original version. The number of people who declared that they would leave the theater if the sound effects of Wolverine’s claws in the first X-Men movie didn’t match the “snikt” noise used in the comics was mind boggling. Of course, that was stupid. Because “snikt” is a nonsense word and English orthography isn’t 1:1 – if you don’t believe me, just google “ghoti.”
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That’s because the genre of internet horror isn’t about the horror in a vacuum – it’s about the confusion of boundaries, the uncanny invasion of horror into a completely different kind of story. In our terminology, it might be better to call it an unheimlich invasion than an uncanny one, though. It’s not a lying thing but a lying context.
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