The massive enterprise that social media horror undertakes, then, is to display anxiety, ambivalence,. As a symptom of this ongoing innovation, chronicling the rise of the social media horror film is particularly challenging. As the technology of recent decades remains in constant flux, so has our definition of social media itself.
The yoke of social media, and consequently social media horror, is as dominant as the deliberate communicative ambitions of a given app or website. In this sense, social media horror is part of those cinematic narratives that depict websites or applications based on the principles of social interaction. In a marked departure from other contemporary technology-based horror films, these films deal specifically with the challenges social media poses to our accepted understanding of the rules and regulations of social interaction.
Moreover, these social media horror films use their preferred technology in a purposefully diagnostic manner. The metafictional qualities of social media horror are thus part of the mechanism by which the films make clear the conceivable dangers of rapidly changing technologies.
Unfriended and the Deterioration of Privacy
It is by way of Blaire's desk that the viewer can see how the horrible circumstances of Laura's death are networked. Rather, the viral, communicative nature of social media serves to heighten the publicity of the spectacle that is Laura's cyberbullying. Laura's pain and deterioration become part of the public canon because there is no longer a.
Through the social media form of Unfriended, the cyberbullying that led to Laura's suicide exists as a narrative reflection of the threat to privacy that these sites may actually pose. In response to these risks, Laura's eventual suicide can similarly be read as a representation of society's concerns about privacy when using social media. With the announcement of Laura's suicide, social media seems to be reshaping the social norms we've come to expect when it comes to privacy, agency, and death.
This kind of live-streamed death is again reminiscent of the LiveLeak video of Laura's own suicide. Regardless of the gruesome nature of their deaths, both Adam and Ken were involved in the events that led to Laura's death. While Blaire curses and screams with the ghost via Facebook and Skype, Laura's profile posts an extended version.
The viewer immediately feels this fear when Laura's ghost slams into Blair's laptop, forcing the audience into a first-person visual narrative for the first time in the film.
Sickhouse and the Horrors of Mediated Spectatorship
Consequently, it is the film's reliance on spectatorship – through the app – that captures the horror of Sickhouse. It is when the film slowly interjects the fantastical images of the Sickhouse legend that this relationship is disrupted, drawing attention to the viewer's position as spectator and the risks that position can entail. By temporarily transforming “the unreal space” of the story into the real space of Snapchat, Sickhouse “effectively convinces viewers to place themselves in the film.”
Similar to other works of observational horror, the camera in Sickhouse exists again in the diegetic space of the film. By publishing the entire film on Snapchat, Sickhouse is committing to this promise. Since the application is integrated into the narrative fabric of the film, it is also.
In other words, Hospital and its characters are deliberately aware of their viewer and, in fact, recognize him as an integral part of the film. The use of the term diary specifically serves to create notions of privacy and secrecy. In fact, the film's incredibly complex treatment of the viewer and spectatorship has resulted in a true horror film, Sick House.
While the film's spooky storyline is admittedly creepy, the actual cinematic horror doesn't come from such images. Horror thus arises from the implication of the terrifying in a film, and not from the viewer's confrontation with the terrifying itself. In his treatment of spectatorship, Sickhouse introduces a much broader consideration of human anxieties surrounding social media.
In particular, the film implores the viewer to examine those cultural and personal concerns of voyeurism, surveillance, and stalking as they relate to being part of the Snapchat community. When you understandthat the entire film was published live over Snapchat, any of Sickhouse's initial viewers have a similar ability to find Russett in person. Intending to play a practical joke, the "followers" surprise Russett and Taylor while they are inside the haunted house at the height of the film's drama.
Ergo, it's through Sickhouse's idiosyncratic use of Snapchat to evoke the fears of its own viewers' social media audience that the film's true horror emerges. In this way, social media can be understood as a kind of horror theory – an analytical tool through which the horrific qualities of the film are elucidated.
Social Media as Horrific
While to some extent these promises are being fulfilled by our use of mediated networks, presented in Unfriended and Sickhouse is a consideration of the terrifying alternative potential of social media. The films suggest that, by placing a digital recreation of the self in exchange with the communicative networks of social media through an online profile, the user exposes himself to the dangers of a confused self, the creation of a double. Using an online profile is, thus, an essential step in the process of engaging with social media itself, and as such, an equally essential step.
In the film, Blaire uses social media both as a means of "self-presentation" in her public Facebook profile and as "self-disclosure" on the private, anonymous YouTube account used to bully Laura Barns. Of course, these processes of self-presentation and self-disclosure are not exclusive to social media. Thus, it is when self-presentation is accomplished through social media profiles that it may actually be involved in creating moments of horror.
Compounding this terrifying power, the form of self-othering afforded by profile creation could certainly be considered a method of social media survival. Through the immense power of Laura's spirit—which is actually a cinematic representation of the power of social media as a whole—the perfect self is revealed as a complete impossibility. The horror of social media thus serves as a reaffirmation of demanding sociocultural and political boundaries that supposedly.
Although the Snapchat account retains much of the same rigidity of the Facebook profile as far as one's posts on it. In this way, the ideal or acceptable self is created on Snapchat in the apparent normativity of the pictures that are posted. The user is allowed, through the application, to produce a kind of live act that shows his idealized self in the lead role.
In this way, the social media horror most evident in Sickhouse's attention to the Snapchat profile is related to the viewer's own identity. Through celebrity accounts like Russett's and other interactive features, Snapchat is trying to connect its users who already have a confused sense of self with the larger social media audience. Although many of these perimeters have had to be rearranged, and due to the disruptive nature of social media, many have.
These moments of horror stand in bold defiance of the quixotic space social media was meant to create. The limits of the digital revolution: How mass media culture endures in a social media world.
