MA Major Research Paper

“MIND SAYING THAT FOR THE CAMERA?”: THE TEXTUAL AND INTERTEXTUAL

PRESENCE OF CINÉMA VÉRITÉ IN FOUND FOOTAGE HORROR

MARK BARBER

210386050

SUPERVISOR: Dr. Seth Feldman

READER: Dr. John McCullough

A Major Research Paper submitted

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts in Cinema & Media Studies

York University

Toronto, Ontario, Canada

August 25th, 2015

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Introduction

This major research paper charts a genealogy of the cinéma vérité style from its conceptual

status as an “uncontrolled documentary”1 form to its presence in the contemporary found footage

horror film. As “the current subgenre du jour,”2 found footage horror’s affective use of realism has

been the subject of growing scholarly interest due to its investment in re-shaping the way viewers

perceive and engage with the image in the twenty-first century. While the current scholarship is

rich in the areas of broad historical genealogies and textual analyses, there is still much to discuss

regarding the subgenre’s adherence to the affective and provocative codes of cinéma vérité, a topic

this paper takes up.

Initially, cinéma vérité was conceived by French ethnographic filmmakers as a documentary

method with an aim to “present the truth.”3 While cinéma vérité eludes a singular definition, some

of its proponents were known to make intrusive use of the camera to provoke the subject,

manipulating them into expressing ‘realistic’ emotions and reactions.4 Aesthetically, cinéma

vérité’s handheld cinematography and grainy image quality provide in part the basis for its truth

claim. This aesthetical and philosophical stake to ‘reveal the truth’ has been exploited by numerous

faux-documentaries, many of which appropriate cinéma vérité to provoke the spectator, rather

than the subject of the film, by manipulating them into believing the authenticity of the footage.

I argue that the presence of cinéma vérité in found footage horror is not resolutely textual. It is

also intertextual. This twofold presence has implications on the nature of spectatorship in the

1 Stephen Mamber, Cinéma Vérité: Studies in Uncontrolled Documentary (Cambridge, The MIT Press, 1974): 2. 2 Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Found Footage Horror Films: Fear and the Appearance of Reality (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014): 3. 3 M. Ali Issari and Doris A. Paul, What is Cinéma Vérité? (Metuchen, NJ & London: The Scarecrow Press Inc., 1979): 3. 4 Peter Turner, The Blair Witch Project (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2015): 36.

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digital age, where viewers presumably become users who actively and tactilely interact with the

text. This has consequences for the way in which we ‘view’ and are affected by images in the

twenty-first century. To that end, this paper traces a lineage of cinéma vérité’s phenomenology as

it mutates across three major junctures characterized by: early appropriations of the vérité form in

mock-documentaries (epitomized by Mitchell Block’s 1972 short film No Lies); its presence in the

transmedia narrative of The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick; Eduardo Sanchez, 1999); and its

contemporary presence in online found footage horror projects such as the web-series/alternate

reality game Marble Hornets (Joseph De Lage; Troy Wagner, 2009–2014). In each juncture, the

vérité form and its privileged relationship to the ‘truth’ is appropriated, exploited, and satirized to

engender anxieties about the collapsed barrier between reality and fiction.

The implication that cinéma vérité extends outside of the text and into the paratexts of

marketing, distribution, and exhibition is rooted in Vivian Sobchack’s proposition in her analysis

of No Lies that the cinéma vérité form is used in the film to assault the viewer’s perception of

reality.5 Situating it as a tool of provocation, Sobchack contends that the utilization of the camera

to provoke the subject in the film is symbolic of rape–both of the subject and of the audience.6

Similarly, transmedia projects such as The Blair Witch Project and Marble Hornets use cinéma

vérité artificially to imply authenticity, engender interest, and draws viewers/users into complicity

with the filmmakers by allowing them to take an active part in a game-like investigation. In

provoking this participation with the text, viewers/users become active subjects in these texts as

well.

5 Vivian Sobchack, “No Lies: Direct Cinema as Rape,” in The Journal of the University Film Association 29 (1977): 13-18. 6 Sobchack, “No Lies: Direct Cinema as Rape,” 14.

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This paper is divided into three chapters. Chapter one will concretize cinéma vérité and faux

cinéma vérité’s status as an affective tool of provocation. Reinforcing Sobchack’s analysis of No

Lies, this chapter will expand on the film’s use of cinéma vérité as a metaphor for rape.7 The

chapter will conclude with a theoretical and philosophical discussion of how perception impacts

the image’s truth claim. Chapter two will expand on cinéma vérité’s textual and intertextual

presence in found footage horror. This chapter will have two key components. First, it will explore

the early history of found footage horror, particularly on its transition from an underground

paracinematic movement to a mainstream, financially successful subgenre. It explores some earlier

texts, including the BBC mock-broadcast of Ghostwatch (1992) that helped shape the use of faux-

vérité in later, more popular found footage titles. The second part analyzes The Blair Witch Project,

where found footage horror and transmedia storytelling intersect. The Blair Witch Project used

cinéma vérité intertextually to provoke interest in the film and draw the viewer/user into harmony

with the same hubris and fascination with the paranormal that resulted–in the context of the

project’s fiction–in the filmmaker’s disappearance and probable death. Given the emergence of

transmedia storytelling, here the camera is no longer used singularly to provoke the subject; rather,

it is the entire intertextual structure that constitutes an affect of provocation. The final chapter

explores contemporary mutations of the subgenre by examining online found footage horror

projects and ARGs (alternate reality games), with an emphasis on the YouTube web-series Marble

Hornets. The series has an intimate relationship with the internet, as its mythology was developed

by users on web forums, and its entire narrative played out on various social media platforms. For

the concerns of this paper, Marble Hornets emerges when users theoretically become more active

in their participation with the text, a characteristic of Kristen Daly’s “interactive-image” thesis.8

7 Ibid. 8 Kristen Daly, “Cinema 3.0: The Interactive-Image,” in Cinema Journal 50 (2010): 81.

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Of importance to this chapter is the real-time narrative development of Marble Hornets’ storyline,

which took place over a handful of YouTube channels, a Twitter account, and several online web

forums. Using the same cinéma vérité aesthetic as The Blair Witch Project, Marble Hornets played

itself out entirely on the social structure of the internet, relying on the immediacy and

verisimilitude of social media to provoke interest and ostensibly situate the viewer as an active

agent in the storyline.

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Chapter One – No Lies: Mock-Documentary, “The Rape Experienced,” and Perceptions of

the Real

Although the focus here is concerned with cinéma vérité as a formal tool in fiction, its original

documentary form needs to be historicized and its philosophy expanded upon to understand its

provocative and self-reflexive functions. Cinéma vérité was a movement in documentary

filmmaking that emerged out of France in the 1960s9, with Jean Rouch’s Chronicle of a Summer

(1961) sometimes regarded as the first film in the canon, and with Rouch considered one of the

pioneers of the movement.10 The impetus for Rouch and other early cinéma vérité filmmakers was

a desire to record the truth in all of its immediacy through a filmmaking method that combined

“employing hand-held cameras and live, synchronous sound.”11 Discussing its philosophy,

Stephen Mamber writes,

The essential element in cinema verite [sic] is the act of filming real people in uncontrolled

situations. Uncontrolled means that the filmmaker does not function as a “director” nor,

for that matter, as a screenwriter. In a cinema-verite [sic], no one is told what to say or how

to act. A prepared script, however skimpy, is not permissible, nor are verbal suggestions,

gestures, or any form of direct communication from the filmmaker to his subject. The

filmmaker should in no way indicate that any action is preferred by him or any other. The

filmmaker acts as an observer, attempting not to alter the situations he witnesses any more

than he must simply by being there (along with, usually, another person recording sound).

Cinema verite [sic] has faith in the spontaneous; the unwillingness to assert control goes

so far as to refuse to recreate events, to have repeat actions for the sake of being filmed.

Interviews are not employed, since their use, in effect, is a form of directed behavior.12

In his book, Mamber is concerned with cinéma vérité’s North American equivalent, direct

cinema.13 There are some key differences between the two that are often ignored by documentary

9 Cinéma vérité had been anticipated before its popularization. Many have cited its origins with Russian formalist Dziga Vertov and the Kino-Eye. Issari and Paul also trace its origins in Italian neo-realism, a movement which rejected “any presentation of war subjects packaged in the style of the studio feature film.” See M. Ali Issari and Doris A. Paul, What is Cinéma Vérité? (Metuchen, NJ & London: The Scarecrow Press Inc., 1979): 4. 10 Stephen Mamber, Cinéma Vérité in America (Cambridge, MA and London, UK: The MIT Press, 1974): 2. 11 Ibid. 12 Mamber, Cinéma Vérité in America, 3. 13 Ibid.

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scholars. Although both are used interchangeably to describe related documentary styles that are

beholden to uncovering the ‘truth’, they arguably have different praxes. Direct cinema (key texts

of which include Robert Drew’s 1960 film Primary, D.A. Pennebaker’s 1967 film Dont Look

Back, and The Maysles’ 1970 film Gimme Shelter) resonates with Mamber’s understanding of

cinéma vérité: it employs observational codes–or non-intrusive ‘fly on the wall’ cinematography–

to preserve and encourage a natural reality. Cinéma vérité–itself an “elastic term”14–is considered

sometimes to be self-reflexive and provocative, using interviews (despite Mamber’s assertion

otherwise), handheld, grainy cinematography, and the noticeable presence of the filmmaker as an

active agent in the way the events unfold.15 However, even this distinction is not universally agreed

upon, as there are different variations even within the cinéma vérité canon.

Given this disagreement over its definition, I will be employing an understanding of cinéma

vérité as a provocative, self-reflexive style. I will also move away from Mamber’s understanding

of the filmmaker as inherently non-intrusive. Rather, there is much evidence that pioneering

filmmakers in the canon, such as Rouch, took active roles to reveal the ‘truth’ behind their subjects.

In order to represent the ‘truth’ cinematically, cinéma vérité filmmakers “intervene, probe, and

14 According to James C. Lipscomb, “…the term ‘cinéma-vérité’ [sic] has been used ‘loosely,’ [sic] particularly by European writers who now call almost any film with a camera jiggle a new experiment in cinéma-vérité [sic]. They lump together all sorts of fictional experiments, interviews, and standard documentaries if the technique seems to resemble direct cinema technique. Most of these films have absolutely nothing in common except celluloid.” See James C. Lipscombe, “Correspondence and Controversy: Cinéma Vérité,” Film Quarterly 18 (1964): 62. Quoted in M. Ali Issari and Doris A. Paul, What is Cinéma Vérité? (Metuchen, NJ & London: The Scarecrow Press Inc., 1979): 4. 15 “The camera is often used to provoke subjects and the interaction of the filmmaker and subject is seen as a method of increasing the perceived realism of the situation. The observational documentary route to realism attempted to make subjects feel as though they were not being filmed and also tried to make audiences feel they were witnessing real life, edited very little and presented as it was filmed. The filmmakers of cinéma vérité instead recognised that subjects will likely always be aware of the camera’s presence and therefore, the documentary would be more real if it drew attention to this. The camera and documentary makers’ presence should be noticeable to the viewer as it creates a different sense of realism where viewers are more aware that what they are watching is a construction. Audience awareness of the assembly of the film makes them more transparent and therefore arguably more real. See Peter Turner, The Blair Witch Project (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2015): 36.

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provoke situations that could reveal something.”16 According to Eric Barnouw, filmmakers such

as Rouch “maintained that the presence of the camera made people act in ways truer to their nature

then might otherwise be the case.”17 Thus, the camera was employed by the filmmaker as a

provocative agent.18 Furthermore, these filmmakers often drew attention to the artifice of

cinematic production.19 “They were not interested, as the Americans were, in preserving the

natural order of the reality.”20

Cinéma vérité’s verisimilar style not only had tremendous influence on global documentary

practices, but also became a noticeable aesthetic presence in fiction films as well. Mock-

documentaries, in particular, “mocked” the search for the truth in cinéma vérité and direct cinema.

While most mock-documentaries indicate their fictionality, some films have been shown to

audiences under the pretense that they were authentic. One of the most well-known examples of

this practice is Mitchell Block’s 1972 faux-vérité short film No Lies. As a result of this film, in her

analysis, Vivian Sobchack argues that the film “cinematically…demonstrates and commits rape”

by appropriating and exploiting cinéma vérité’s truth claim.21 In the film, a student filmmaker

(Alec Hirschfield) interviews a woman, Shelby (Shelby Livingston) about her recent experience

as a victim of sexual assault. According to Sobchack, No Lies uses cinéma vérité to subvert the

16 Bernice K. Schneider, “Direct Cinema: Filmmaking Style and its Relationship to Truth” (MSc Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1990): 12. 17 Eric Barnouw, Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film (London, UK: Oxford University Press, 1974): 253. Quoted in Bernice K. Schneider, “Direct Cinema: Filmmaking Style and its Relationship to Truth” (MSc Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1990): 12. 18 Schneider provides the example of Chris Marker’s Le Joli Mai (1963), where “the camera is clearly the provocative agent–one which not only records events but also creates them.” See Bernice K. Schneider, “Direct Cinema: Filmmaking Style and its Relationship to Truth” (MSc Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1990): 12. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 Vivian Sobchack, “No Lies: Direct Cinema as Rape,” in The Journal of the University Film Association 29 (1977): 13. Emphasis in original.

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hegemonic confrontation with cinematic representations of rape that frequently encourage passive

reception.22 Instead, Block abuses the documentary form to confuse viewers into believing the

film’s authenticity and positions them as both rapist and rape victim.23 Accordingly, Sobchack

stresses three important instances of ‘rape’ (both symbolic and literal) that occur in the film. The

first instance is the unseen physical rape of Shelby that occurs before the events of the film.24 The

second instance is the cinematic rape of Shelby by the intrusive filmmaker; this instance

symbolizes the use of the intrusive, intervening camera in cinéma vérité documentaries to provoke

the subject as a tool of rape.25 The third and most important instance is the ‘rape experienced’ by

the audience upon learning that the film is fiction.26 As a result, the reception of No Lies was

infamously divisive. Many viewers responded negatively to the film’s artifice, and the film’s

22 Sobchack contends that identification with the victim of sexual assault in a traditional western narrative is possible (and that this identification does not discriminate along gender lines; a male can identify with a female rape victim, and vice-versa), although inherently “the very shape of traditional narrative cinema forces us to become helpless passers-by.” Drawing on Siegfried Kracauer, Sobchack also suggests that such viewing conditions “allow for an indulgence in fantasy, the very privacy of the darkness and the passivity of viewing experience conducive to the dream state in which Siegfried Kracauer says we watch feature films.” See Vivian Sobchack, No Lies: Direct Cinema as Rape,” The Journal of the University Film Association 29 (1977): 14. 23 Ibid. 24 Sobchack, “No Lies: Direct Cinema as Rape,” 16. 25 Sobchack, “No Lies: Direct Cinema as Rape,” 16-17. 26 “Using unorthodox methods–and, to some, unethical and offensive–means, [No Lies] shakes us into a first person encounter with rape and betrayal and forces us to confront our customary voyeurism and passivity as it is evoked by our usual cinematic experience. Unlike traditional films about rape, No Lies shifts the emphasis from the physical and sexual nature of the assault to its intellectual and emotional nature; there is no onscreen sexual attack (suggested or explicit) to overpower and delimit the film’s broader definition of rape. As well, while pretending to support and maintain the viewer’s comfortable and safe role as voyeur, the film actually undermines it, so that by the end of No Lies the viewer is revealed not only as voyeur but also as victim. All this upheaval is accomplished in 16 minutes and through a method which–like all things brilliant–is deceptively simple. Block has found an ideal metaphor for the physical act of rape in the methods and effects of cinéma vérité, what we now call direct cinema. The sexual assault discussed by the film’s two characters on the screen has found an experimental analogue in the filmic assault on both the movie’s female subject and its audience. Rape becomes interchangeable with an act of cinema. The film, thus, provides us with an exploration and an experience of both. See Vivian Sobchack, “No Lies: Direct Cinema as Rape,” in The Journal of the University Film Association 29 (1977): 14-15.

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situating of the spectator as both rapist (in the voyeuristic sense) and rape victim was similarly ill-

received.27

The believability of No Lies is resultant of problematic assumptions about how we respond to

seemingly authentic images. As the basic property of cinema, photography and realism are

inextricable from the concept of indexicality. Tom Gunning defines the photographic index as “the

physical relationship between the object photographed and the image finally created,” ostensibly

proving that the imaged event took place at that time in that space.28 Problematically, some

theorists equate the indexicality of a photograph with inherent truth. Discussing photography’s

adherence to the object it depicts, Bazin argues in “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” that

photography’s ontological status is predicated on its ability to mechanically reproduce reality.29

Bazin never engages directly with the Peircian-semiotic notion of indexicality, but his

promulgation of photography’s objective status resonates with Gunning’s definition. Most

alarmingly, Bazin’s argument marginalizes the impact photographic manipulations have on the

photograph’s truth claim.30 In photography, according to Bazin, the photographer’s creative

license is displaced by the medium’s automatisms that give the photograph “a quality of

credibility,” “mummifying” a moment both temporally and spatially.31 However, although the

27 The film, however, did receive praise for “[revealing] a dimension which is extremely satisfying to an intelligent and receptive audience.” Furthermore, Block himself noted its postmodern self-reflexivity when he claimed that the film represented “a statement on documentary films.” See Vivian Sobchack, “No Lies: Direct Cinema a Rape,” in The Journal of the University Film Association 29 (1977): 18. 28 Tom Gunning, “What’s the Point of an Index? Or, Faking Photographs,” in Plenary Sessions II: Digital Aesthetics, 40. 29 André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in Film Quarterly 13 (1960): 9. 30 Bazin does argue, for instance, that surrealism does not disrupt the photography’s truth claim: “For [the surrealist], the logical distinction between what is imaginary and what is real tends to disappear. Every image is to be seen as an object and every object as an image. Hence photography ranks high in the order of surrealist creativity because it produces an image that is a reality of nature, namely, an hallucination that is also a fact.” See André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in Film Quarterly 13 (1960): 9. Emphasis mine. 31 “For the first time, between the originating object and its reproduction there intervenes only the instrumentality of a nonliving agent. For the first time an image of the world is formed automatically, without the creative intervention of man. The personality of the photographer enters into the proceedings only in his selection

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most manipulated photograph may retain some aspect of the original event, many of these

alterations complicate its truth claim.

Sobchack offers a more compelling explanation for this believability. Building on Jean-Pierre

Meunier’s phenomenological study of cinematic identification with the ‘real’32, she discusses in a

later essay the fluidity of identification in the modes of documentary, fiction, and the home

movie.33 She further situates the documentary as an “intermediate form” between the home movie

and the fiction film.34 In the latter, the spectator is confronted with a cinematic object that is

“unknown to us in its specificity,” as it does not and cannot coexist in the same temporal and

spatial situation with the spectator.35 More complicated is the home movie, which appeals to our

personal and cultural knowledge.36 In the appropriate viewing context, the home movie is

‘indexical’ to the viewer’s reality insofar as her memory of the events can determine its “existential

specificity” (i.e. where, when, and what that occurs in the footage).37 Without this knowledge, the

footage is simply treated by the viewer as an unsubstantiated documentary of someone else’s

of the object to be photographed and by way of the purpose he has in his mind. Although the final result may reflect something of his personality, this does not play the same role as it is played by that of the painter. All of the arts are based on the presence of man, only photography derives an advantage from his absence.” See André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” Film Quarterly 13 (1960): 13. Emphasis mine. 32 Sobchack draws heavily on Meunier’s Les Structures de l’experience filmique: L’Identification filmique (1969). Sobchack characterizes the volume as “[drawing] upon both Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology of embodied perception and European filmologie.” Summarizing the main argument of the book, Sobchack writes that “Meunier not only addresses the necessary conditions that make the cinematic image what it is in general, but also lays out the sufficient conditions that distinguish, in particular, three modes of spectatorial consciousness and their correspondent objective cinematic forms.” These three modes are documentary, home movies, and fiction films. See Vivian Sobchack, “Toward a Phenomenology of the Nonfictional Film Experience,” in Collecting Visible Evidence, eds. Jane M. Gaines et al. (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999): 242. 33 In contrast to the Meunier’s somewhat fixed categories of cinematic identification (home movies, documentary, and fiction), Sobchack proposes a more fluid and lived experience of the image. She argues that “a fiction can be experienced as a home movie, or documentary, a documentary as a home movie or fiction, [and] a home movie as a documentary or fiction.” See Vivian Sobchack, “Toward a Phenomenology of the Nonfictional Film Experience,” in Collecting Visible Evidence, eds. Jane M. Gaines et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press): 249. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid.

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reality.38 The documentary, then, complicates its indexical relationship to our subjective notions

of the real by providing images that are ambiguous in their “existential specificity.”39

Paradoxically, we do not question the documentary’s authenticity because we may lack the

personal and cultural knowledge bias to challenge the veracity of these images; thus, we submit to

the evidence the documentary offers through its presupposed, nonfictional images.40

As an intermediate form, the documentary constitutes a cinematic object that even in its most

equivocal instance simply refers to a temporal or spatial “elsewhere” in the real world.41 Mock-

documentaries use this contingent distanciation to exploit the viewer’s misidentification of

appropriated documentary codes. Hiding its fictionality, mock-documentaries employ handheld

home and digital video aesthetics to interrogate our own perceptions of the cinematic index by

marrying both the subjective truth claim of home video and the uncertainty surrounding the

“existential specificity” of the cinematic object in documentary. Similarly, No Lies uses the truth

claim of cinéma vérité codes to provoke the spectator into complicity with its assaulting point-of-

view, further provoking (and expressing) a commentary about the ethicality of his spectatorial

position and the ethicality of the intrusive cinéma vérité style. No Lies can be considered among

the more successful attempts to ‘dupe’ its audience, a practice that would continue well past the

film’s premiere. In the following chapter, the phenomenological response to cinematic hoaxes and

38 Ibid. 39 “In the spectrum’s “intermediate” position is the documentary, which entails not only our existential and cultural knowledge, but also our partial lack of it–a lack that modifies the nature of our identification with the image. That is, as we watch images of Fala or John F. Kennedy or the Gulf War, aspects of what we see are taken up by us as unknown in their existential specificity, yet because we have some general knowledge of them, their past or present experience is posited by us nonetheless–if, however, always in a way qualified by our lack of personal knowledge.” See Vivian Sobchack, “Toward a Phenomenology of the Nonfictional Film Experience,” in Collecting Visible Evidence, eds. Jane M. Gaines et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press): 243. 40 Sobchack, “Toward a Phenomenology of the Nonfictional Film Experience,” 244. 41 Ibid.

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its appropriation of cinéma vérité will be explored by examining the early ancestors of found

footage horror.

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Chapter Two – Cinéma Vérité Goes Viral: The Evolution of Found Footage Horror and

Media Intersectionality

This chapter is divided into two sections. The first section will outline the early history of found

footage horror up until its popularization in the late 1990s. The second part will cover the emergent

intersection of transmedia storytelling and found footage horror in the late 1990s. In particular, it

will examine how the marketing tactic of media intersectionality was used in The Blair Witch

Project to engender interest in the film and provoke the spectator into believing the authenticity of

the footage, as well as provoking them into active participation with the text. Rather than merely

textually emulating cinéma vérité, The Blair Witch Project inaugurated the diffusion of the style

across its transmedia narrative. In this sense, the entire intertextual structure, rather than the

camera, acted to provoke the spectator. Furthermore, because of the interactive opportunities

offered by this intertextual structure, the spectator–as a participant–becomes a subject as well.

Birth of the Subgenre

The horror film’s potency is derived from social and cultural anxieties. It order to retain its

social and cultural relevance, the horror film is in a constant state of reinvention. From the

vertiginous and evocative production designs of German Expressionism in the 1920s to the

graphically violent torture porn boom of the 2000s, the genre has come in distinct cycles and

subgenres, each with its own set of codes, conventions, and iconographies. The most important

and recurrent aspect is the implication of a ‘monster’ as embodying that which is inherently

repressed in society.42 Robin Wood set the foundation for this when he argued that the horror genre

brings about a “return of the repressed,” wherein that which has been cathartically purged returns

42 Robin Wood, “The American Nightmare: Horror in the 70s,” in Horror, the Film Reader. Ed. Mark Jancovich (London & New York: Routledge, 2002): 27.

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to destabilize and disrupt dominant society.43 Repressed anxieties about the source of horror are

thus binarized; some prominent examples of this include the Red Scare of the 1950s and The

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956) and the heightened fear of paedophilia in the

1980s and A Nightmare on Elm Street (Wes Craven, 1984).

With the increasing self-awareness of the horror film, these anxieties have taken on abstract

and thematic forms–as opposed to simply being monsters–to resonate in our heavily mediated

technological culture. The pervasiveness and prevalence of media has been frequently situated as

one of society’s greatest threats.44 The contemporary found footage horror film is discursively and

historically entangled with the digital age, which is itself characterized by a facilitation of the

immediacy, accessibility, permeability and most crucially manipulability of information. Given

the potential for an indistinguishable referent, the digital age problematizes our notions of what

constitutes the ‘real’. It is this collapse between reality and fiction that thematically grants the

postmodern horror film its affectual potency.

The postmodern horror film lacks a singular formal characteristic, ranging from formally

conventional features such as Scream (Wes Craven, 1996) to hybrid films such as The Fourth Kind

(Olatunde Osunsanmi, 2009).45 According to Isabel Pinedo, “one of the defining features of

postmodernism is the blurring of boundaries.”46 She further characterizes postmodern horror as

43 Ibid. 44 Nearly every facet of our mediated culture has been scrutinized to some degree by the horror genre. Some examples include television (1986’s TerrorVision, 1984’s Videodrome, 1982’s Poltergeist), cinema (1985’s Demons), video games (2006’s Stay Alive), home video distribution (1998’s Ring and its 2002 U.S. remake), and even literature (1994’s In the Mouth of Madness). Many of these examples are ironic and self-critical: Lamberto Bava’s Demons links reception of horror cinema to teenage hedonism and John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness implicates horror fiction as disrupting the boundaries between reality and fiction. 45 The Fourth Kind, a fiction film, uses a mix of re-enactment and found footage horror. 46 Isabel Pinedo, “Recreational Terror: Postmodern Elements of the Contemporary Horror Film,” Journal of Film and Video 48 (1996): 17.

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featuring: “the presentation of violence as a constituent of everyday life, the inefficacy of human

action, and the refusal of narrative closure.”47 For the concerns of this essay, I will be highlighting

how postmodern horror blurs the boundary between reality and fiction. Indeed, as Roscoe and

Hight remind us, “at the heart of postmodernism is a crisis of representation, an implosion of

meaning and a collapse of the real.”48

Of the variations in the postmodern horror film, among the most popular is the found footage

style49, which Alexandra Heller-Nicholas has designated as “the current subgenre du jour.”50

Found footage horror is typically defined by its use of a first person narrative (as most are shot

with a handheld camera51) that employs “a specific brand of amateur aesthetics [that] is crucial to

its construction of its verisimilitude.”52 Furthermore, found footage horror films are often granted

a certain false legitimation by their intertextual structures. Films such as The Blair Witch Project

and Cloverfield (Matt Reeves, 2008) are well known for their intertextual–or ‘viral’–marketing

structures that promote a film by implying its veracity.

In addition to outlining found footage horror’s prehistory, this section explores the foundation

of found footage horror’s status as a postmodern text that blurs the boundaries between reality and

fiction. Current writing on this notion persuasively examines how the found footage text’s

47 Ibid. 48 Jane Roscoe and Craig Hight, Faking It: Mock-Documentary and the Subversion of Factuality (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2001): 28. 49 Despite their misleadingly mutual etymology, found footage horror does not share any salient similarities with found footage cinema. The latter typically refers to experimental or documentary films that appropriate, re-contextualize and reconstitute found or archival images to re-present and re-historicize them as artistic expressions or reflections of contemporary society, culture, and politics. 50 Ibid. 51 Early found footage horror films were technologically limited to using handheld cameras as a means to appropriate the truth claim of cinéma vérité documentaries of the 60s and 70s. As the subgenre grew in popularity, found footage horror films managed to use other ‘authentic media’ to their advantage, including security camera footage (2003’s Columbine-inspired Zero Day) and Skype (2015’s Unfriended). 52 Ibid.

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verisimilitude–that is achieved through the employment of a first person perspective, an

amateurish aesthetic that mimics the stylistic features of cinéma vérité, and the transmedia

marketing campaign–collapses the boundaries between reality and fiction. Through this

verisimilitude, the found footage text inscribes anxieties regarding the crisis of the ‘real’ in a

heavily mediated age.

First, it is instructive to distinguish found footage horror from similar subgenres and styles. In

a confusion reminiscent of the distinction between cinéma vérité and direct cinema (and also the

lack of a concrete definition for both), there is disagreement over the distinction between mock-

documentary and found footage, both within and outside of the horror genre.53 It is commonly

assumed that horror films that invoke pseudo-documentary codes and conventions–whether or not

they appropriate cinéma vérité–all fall under the category of ‘found footage’. For instance,

Wikipedia’s article for “found footage (genre)” dubiously lists both found footage and mock-

documentary films.54 Roscoe and Hight describe mock-documentary as “a particular group

of…fictional texts [that] are distinctive in that they appropriate documentary codes and

conventions and mimic various documentary modes.”55 While found footage film arguably falls

under this definition, Heller-Nicholas suggests that it “is not a hybrid form that straddles horror

and mockumentary, but rather a distinct category with its own readily identifiable features, some

of which stem from documentary traditions and associated evolving trends in the field of

53 It is important to note that the found footage style has permeated many genres, with horror being the clearly dominant genre. However, found footage as also been used in comedy (2012’s Project X and 2010’s The Virginity Hit), drama (2003’s Zero Day), science fiction (2014’s Earth to Echo) and action (including the 2012 superhero film Chronicle and the 2014 environmental disaster film Into the Storm). Horror still exercises a dominance over the style, however. Even films that are not necessarily explicitly horror films still harbour elements of the genre with some examples including 1992’s Man Bites Dog (a crime film), 2010’s Trollhunter (Fantasy), 2013’s A Haunted House and its 2014 sequel A Haunted House 2 (a parody of numerous found footage horror films), and 2013’s Europa Report (science fiction). 54 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Found_footage_(genre) 55 Jane Roscoe and Craig Hight, Faking It: Mock-Documentary and the Subversion of Factuality, 1.

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mockumentary.”56 It is thus suggested here that found footage horror has evolved to such a degree

that it has crafted its own distinct identity, which Scott Meslow–in agreement with David

Bordwell57–states is:

The found-footage genre is built on the conceit that the movie was filmed not by a

traditional, omniscient director, but by a character that exists within the film’s own world–

and whose footage was discovered sometime after the events of the film.58

Heller-Nicholas offers Meslow’s definition as the foundation for her understanding of the

subgenre.59 To some degree, this essay adopts this understanding as well. However, Meslow

neglects to mention that, with the use of transmedia marketing campaigns, the film’s diegesis and

our world have the tendency to “overlap,” a topic discussed in the second part of this chapter.

We turn now to an archaeology of found footage horror that will situate realism in horror and

para-cinema as some of the sub-genre’s key ancestors. Heller-Nicholas traces the intertwining

roots of faux-authenticity and horror to a variety of origins in media history: besides the dominant

media of film and television, this intertwining of realism and horror is demonstrated in painting,

theatre, literature, and radio.60 Outside of television and film, she traces it as far back as the realist

56 Heller-Nicholas, Found Footage Horror Films: Fear and the Appearance of Reality, 19. 57 In Heller-Nicholas’ words, Bordwell has argued that “the “found” of the contemporary found footage subgenre pertains to plot (footage is discovered) rather than to the experimental and avant-garde traditions the name implies.” See David Bordwell, “Return to Paranormalcy,” David Bordwell’s Website on Cinema (November 13, 2012) http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2012/11/13/return-to-paranormalcy.” Quoted in Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Found Footage Horror Films: Fear and the Appearance of Reality (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014): 15-16. 58 Scott Meslow, “12 Years After ‘Blair Witch’, When Will the Found-Footage Fad End?” The Atlantic (January 6, 2012) http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/12-years-after-blair-witch-when-will-the-found-footage-horror-fad-end/250950/. Quoted in Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Found Footage Horror Films: Fear and the Appearance of Reality (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014): 16. 59 Heller-Nicholas does challenge the ambiguously defined “discovery” of the footage. She provides the example of Ring (Hideo Nakata, 1998) to identify the potentiality for this “discovery” to occur in non-found-footage films. “The problem with this translation of ‘found footage horror’ to simply apply to genre films where ‘footage is discovered’ does not do justice to how crucial the subgenre’s playful appropriation of documentary codes and conventions are to the pleasure it offers.” See Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Found Footage Horror Films: Fear and the Appearance of Reality (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014): 16. 60 Heller-Nicholas, Found Footage Horror Films: Fear and the Appearance of Reality, 29-30.

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representations of “death, torture, and bodily trauma” in renaissance painting.61 She also traces it

back to theatre, particularly Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol in Paris: “Running from 1897 to 1967,

Grand Guignol [sic] specialized in the creation of realistic horror performances… With many

plays re-enacting contemporary faits divers (sensational and often lurid news stories) Grand

Guignol [sic] performances were renowned for their emphasis on gore.”62 In literature, the realist

approach took the form of the epistolary novel, with Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1892) being a seminal

example.63 Finally, in radio, Orson Welles’ infamous 1938 broadcast of H.G. Wells’ War of the

Worlds was another early realist instance of “using media’s powers of social control” to confuse

audiences about the authenticity of the text.64 Famously, the broadcast, narrated by Welles, took

the form of a ‘news report’ that supposedly resulted in panic among listeners, ostensibly causing

“everything from heart attacks to car wrecks to suicide attempts.”65

The Mercury Theater’s broadcast successfully66 convinced some of the public of its

authenticity. Jeffrey Sconce locates the panic over the broadcast in relation to “the audience’s

61 “The search for authentic artistic depictions of death, torture and bodily trauma has a long history, spanning far beyond the cinematic image. Drawings of cadavers were once the primary method for studying the human body for would-be-medical practitioners and the body has been just as central a subject in the arts. As Deanna Petherbridge noted, the body “has been central to Western Art for most of its history, and to represent bodies in all their expressivity artists have needed to study anatomy: dissecting the dead to depict the living.” Both Michelangelo and Leonardo Da Vinci produced anatomical sketches based on dissections, and Caravaggio was rumored to have used the bloated body of a drowned prostitute as a model for his painting “Death and the Virgin” (1606). The 18th century French painter and engraver Jacques Gautier D’Agoty is renowned for his vivid and highly detailed anatomical drawings of opened bodies, and Théodore Géricault painted highly detailed studies of severed heads and limbs in the early 20th century, keeping body parts from a local hospital in his studio and studying them as they decayed. These examples demonstrate a historical fascination with verisimilitude in regard to the human form and its representation.” See Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Found Footage Horror Films: Fear and the Appearance of Reality (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014): 29. 62 Heller-Nicholas, Found Footage Horror Films: Fear and the Appearance of Reality, 29. 63 Heller-Nicholas, Found Footage Horror Films: Fear and the Appearance of Reality, 30. 64 Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000): 111. 65 Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television, 110. 66 The broadcast’s success is somewhat overstated in popular culture. Heller-Nicholas notes that a “survey CBS found that 42 percent of listeners who believed that the broadcast real tuned in late, while only 12 percent of

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relationship to the institution of radio itself.”67 Sconce argues that the broadcast exploited the

listener’s pre-conceptions of radio codes and conventions; unlike a traditional fictional broadcast,

War of the Worlds interrupted “programmatic music” and took a ‘breaking news’ format.68 The

broadcast successfully exploited the listener’s social conditioning, at least in terms of their

traditional experience of radio programmes.69

In cinema and video, Heller-Nicholas situates the Highway Safety Foundation films as another

ancestor to found footage horror. Road safety films such as Signal 30 (1959) and Wheels of

Tragedy (1963) “combined pantomime-like re-enactments of small town Americana with grisly

footage of actual car accidents and their mangled, bloody victims.”70 The Highway Safety

Foundation was also concerned with training videos, such as Camera Surveillance (1964)71, which

was “designed to educate police about technology and the way it assisted them with their

investigation,” and the more controversial The Child Molester (1964), which “directly engages

with the real-life double homicide in 1963 of two young girls, Jean Burtoch and Connie Hurrell.”72

The latter film featured actual images of the young girls’ corpses.73 Heller-Nicholas argues that

people who listened to the entire program believed the same thing.” See Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Found Footage Horror Films: Fear and the Appearance of Reality (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014): 39. 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid. 69 “The “panic broadcast,” in other words, exploited a certain social knowledge in the audience to create its realistic effect by skillfully mimicking the already conventionalized features of the emergency news broadcast. The play thus successfully orchestrated the medium’s qualities of “simultaneity” and “presence” as experienced through the relatively newfound control of the networks, playing on the public’s new familiarity with radio as an extensive net and on the new social phenomenon of disaster as an instantaneous, mass experience.” See Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000): 112. 70 Heller-Nicholas, Found Footage Horror Films: Fear and the Appearance of Reality, 42. 71 Camera Surveillance is famous for featuring footage of the Mansfield tearoom bust in accordance with U.S. anti-sodomy laws. This footage was notably appropriated by queer media artist William E. Jones in his found footage experimental film Tearoom (1962/2007) shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 2008. See Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Found Footage Horror Films: Fear and the Appearance of Reality (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014): 42-43. 72 Heller-Nicholas, Found Footage Horror Films: Fear and the Appearance of Reality, 42-43. 73 Ibid.

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the use of real photographs (with their evidentiary claim) in Highway Road Safety films were used

to shock the viewer into complacency with the conveyed moralism, whether it be road safety or

maintaining a safe distance away from paedophiles.74

The mythology of snuff films is also important in this genealogy. Snuff films are an urban

legend; they do not exist. According to David Kerekes and David Slater, snuff films are by

definition depictions of “the killing of a human being; a human sacrifice for the medium of film.”75

While this definition has some problems76, most agree with Julian Petley’s assessment that snuff

films must be commercialized in order to be considered ‘official’.77 Though Petley also notes that

real, non-commercialized footage of death does exist.78 For instance, Canadian serial killers Paul

Bernardo and Karla Homolka recorded videos of the murders they committed between 1990 and

1992.79 In another recent Canadian example, Luka Rocco Magnotta taped his murder, mutilation,

and necrophilic penetration of Lin Jun and posted the video online, on websites such as

74 Ibid. 75 David Kerekes and David Slater, Killing for Culture: A History of Death Films from Mondo to Snuff (London: Creation, 1995): 4. Quoted in Alexandra Heller Nicholas, Found Footage Horror Films: Fear and the Appearance of Reality (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014): 59. 76 Heller-Nicholas elaborates that there is some tension over the constitution of the snuff film. Besides the definition provided by Kerekes and Slater, Eithne Johnson and Eric Schaefer suggest that the definition is more fluid and gendered: a snuff film is “a pornographic movie that culminates in the actual murder and mutilation of a woman.” Such a definition ties snuff film to feminist activism in the 1970s and their ideological protest against the patriarchal dominance expressed in pornography. See Eithne Johnson and Eric Schaefer, “Soft Core/Hard Gore: Snuff as a Crisis in Meaning,” Journal of Film and Video 42 (1993): 40, 56. Quoted in Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Found Footage Horror Films: Fear and the Appearance of Reality (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014): 59-60. 77 “The commercially made ‘snuff’ movie is an entirely imaginary creature…this is definitely not…to deny the possibility that real murders may have been filmed or otherwise recorded by their perpetrators for purely private purposes.” See Julian Petley, “Cannibal Holocaust and the Pornography of Death,” The Spectacle of the Real: From Hollywood to Reality TV and Beyond (Bristol: Intellect, 2005): 174. Quoted in Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Found Footage Horror Films: Fear and the Appearance of Reality (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014): 60. 78 Ibid. 79 Joel Black, “Real(ist) Horror: From Execution Videos to Snuff Films,” Underground U.S.A.: Filmmaking Beyond the Hollywood Canon. Eds. Xavier Mendik et al. (London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2002): 69.

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RealGore.com, titling it 1 lunatic, 1 ice pick. There is also accidental death footage, such as

Zapruder video of the Kennedy assassination in 1962.80

The potential for snuff films to exist became an anxiety in dominant society. From there, a

number of fictional horror and exploitation films in the 1970s and 1980s were at the centre of

contentious accusations that they contained real images of human deaths. For example, these

allegations prompted authorities to judiciously examine Ruggero Deodato’s 1980 exploitation

horror film Cannibal Holocaust, which aesthetically combined traditional formal features and

documentary codes. The film’s inclusion of “actual newsreel footage of a military death squad at

work” reinforced this accusation.81 Additionally, the controversy resulted in several litigations, as

many legal officials argued actual human murders were committed on-screen during the

production of the film.82 While these allegations later proved to be apocryphal, Cannibal

Holocaust was banned in several countries, including Deodato’s native Italy.83

Television also used artificialized reality to produce mass-panic. The BBC mock-broadcast of

Ghostwatch (Lesley Manning, 1992) was a fictionalized investigation into the paranormal

happenings in a suburban London home. Ghostwatch is notorious for its implication in the first

documented case of television-induced post-traumatic stress disorder in children, and is also

80 Black, “Real(ist) Horror: From Execution Videos to Snuff Films,” 73. 81 “Far from reinforcing the distinction between fiction and reality, the inclusion of this archival material thoroughly blurs any such distinction because the fictional deaths in the film are presented as being more than the documentary footage of actual killings, the latter of which are dismissed by characters within the film as ‘fake’.” See Joel Black, “Real(ist) Horror: From Execution Videos to Snuff Films,” Underground U.S.A.: Filmmaking Beyond the Hollywood Canon. Eds. Xavier Mendik et al. (London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2002): 72. 82 “The French magazine Photo’s 1981 article “Grand Guignol Cannibale” claimed that people were actually murdered in the making of the film, and much of the movie’s notoriety stemmed from similar beliefs.” See Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Found Footage Horror Films: Fear and the Appearance of Reality (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014): 33. 83 Heller-Nicholas suggests that Italy’s banning of the film was due to the actual killing of animals purposefully during production. See Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Found Footage Horror Films: Fear and the Appearance of Reality (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014): 33.

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known for ostensibly leading to the suicide of at least one viewer.84 Despite having been marketed

as a fictional programme, many viewers believed it to be authentic, resulting in over “500,000

calls” that were made in panic to the BBC during the airing.85 Ghostwatch was believable for a

number of reasons, including in part due to the familiar cast of BBC personalities that included

host Michael Parkinson, Sarah Greene, Craig Charles, and Mike Smith.86

Ghostwatch literalized the cultural notion that spirits and technology are somehow

ontologically intertwined through electricity. Indeed, communications technology shares an

intertwining discursive history with occultism; Jeffrey Sconce has argued that modern Western

conceptions of haunting and spirituality originated around the invention of the telegraph in 1844.87

Four years after its invention, the American Spiritualist movement was initiated by a purported

haunting in the Fox estate in upstate New York.88 Two sisters, Margaret and Kate Fox,89 convinced

believers across the nation that their home was being haunted by a “murdered peddler,” with whom

they communicated through an alphabetized and numerized system of ‘rapping noises’ that

mirrored the functions of telegraphy (i.e. one rap equalled A, two raps equalled B, and so on).90

From there, within the cultural discourse of American Spiritualism, electronic technologies–

including photography, radio, and television–were believed to be able to visualize and

communicate with spirits. In Ghostwatch, this cultural assumption is literalized: by the broadcast’s

84 Murray Leeder, “Ghostwatch and the Haunting of Media,” in Horror Studies 4 (2013): 174. 85 The volume of these calls made to the BBC was so extraordinary that it overwhelmed the studio’s switchboards. See Murray Leeder, “Ghostwatch and the Haunting of Media,” in Horror Studies 4 (2013): 174. 86 Leeder, “Ghostwatch and the Haunting of Media,” 174-175. 87 Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television, 22. 88 Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television, 12. 89 Leeder proposes that the Fox haunting is referenced in Ghostwatch: “[Writer Stephen] Volk has admitted to thinking of ‘the Fox Sisters of Spiritualism fame’ in conceiving of Ghostwatch: one expects the name of the fictional street where its events occur, Foxhill Drive, was chosen in tribute.” See Murray Leeder, “Ghostwatch and the Haunting of Media,” in Horror Studies 4 (2013): 176. 90 Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television, 22-24.

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end, the entire BBC studio is destroyed by the spirit, implying that in opening up the airwaves, the

broadcast has performed a séance that activated and invited the spirit to permeate through the

electrical currents and invade the homes of viewers.91

The realism of Ghostwatch and its resonance in cultural assumptions about haunting perturbed

many viewers–mainly children. Leeder notes that a report in British Medical Journal described

two ten-year-old boys92 that suffered from “anxiety, panic attacks, insomnia, nightmares, daytime

flashbacks, and other phenomena typical of PTSD, including a tendency in one to ‘[bang] his head

to remove the thoughts of ghosts.”93 Also, “five days after the programme, a Nottingham 18-year-

old named Martin Denham, described as a nervous young man with the mental age of 13, hanged

himself from a tree”; a note94 was left by his body, which led to the boy’s mother to blame the

BBC’s broadcast of Ghostwatch for his suicide.95

91 Leeder, “Ghostwatch and the Haunting of Media,” 175. 92 Furthermore, the report details that, after viewing the broadcast of Ghostwatch, the first boy (case 1) reportedly “expressed fear and ghosts, witches, and the dark, constantly talking about them and seeking reassurance.” Case 2 reportedly “felt sick, and cried easily, and refused to go into his bedroom, complaining of someone watching him there.” See D. Simons and W.R. Silveira, “Post-traumatic stress disorder in children after television programmes,” in British Medical Journal 308 (1994): 389. 93 D. Simons and W.R. Silveira. “Post-traumatic stress disorder in children after television programmes,” in British Medical Journal 308 (1994): 389 Quoted in Murray Leeder, “Ghostwatch and the Haunting of Media,” in Horror Studies 4 (2013): 178-179. 94 The note in its entirety: “Mother do not be upset. If there is ghosts I will now be one and I will always be with you as one. Love martin.” See Anon., “Parents blame BBC spoof for son’s suicide,” The Guardian. 23 December, 1992. Quoted in Murray Leeder, “Ghostwatch and the Haunting of Media,” in Horror Studies 4 (2013): 179. 95 There is an implicit link between television’s impact on the cognitive development of children and Ghostwatch’s authentic emulation of “the conventions of a live television broadcast.” “Children are socialized from a young age to think of television as a porous entity that looks out as at the spectator as surely as the spectator looks back. The presence of a children’s presenter like Sarah Greene helps emphasize these connections, and Greene’s perverse fate, sucked into the ‘glory hole’ where Raymond Tunstall committed suicide and was subsequently devoured by her cats, must have been a stressful sight indeed for children weaned on her presence on Blue Peter (on which she was a presenter from 1980–1983) and Going Live! (1987–1993). Several young spectators reported watching the programme only because of the presence of a familiar presenter whose presence suggested an altogether different kind of programming.” See Murray Leeder, “Ghostwatch and the Haunting of Media,” in Horror Studies 4 (2013): 179. Heller-Nicholas, Found Footage Horror Films: Fear and the Appearance of Reality, 88-89.

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These examples emphasize media’s articulation of realism to ‘provoke’ audience reactions and

responses. These examples took the form of authentic media such as documentary and news

broadcasts, relying on the cultural assumptions of spectators regarding the look, feel, and structure

of these media platforms. These examples share with No Lies an abstract use of cinéma vérité’s

truth claim to provoke audiences into questioning not only the distinction between reality and

fiction, but also the ethical nature of viewing such content, however fabricated.

The Blair Witch Project

Faced with a decrease in popularity in the 1990s, horror cinema was forced to reinvent itself.96

Unable to properly emulate the success of the genre’s then-recent prominence on television,

particularly with the success of The X-Files (Chris Carter, 1993–2001) and Buffy, the Vampire

Slayer (Joss Whedon, 1997–2003), horror cinema started implicating its typical target audience–

teenagers and young adults–as embodying a repressed societal anxiety.97 Accordingly, Scream and

The Blair Witch Project are the primary successes for 90s horror cinema, as both critically engaged

with their target audience through a self-reflexive and satirical lens.

Both films accomplished this in different ways. Released in 1996, Scream used self-reflexivity

as a satirical device to lambast “Generation X” spectators and their aggressive and active

consumption of slasher films.98 Andrew Schopp states that “Generation X” is defined as a cynical,

subversive, and technologically oriented collective.99 Scream posits that the two killers’

designation as horror fans is linked to Generation X’s active cinematic consumption.100 The two

96 Heller-Nicholas, Found Footage Horror Films: Fear and the Appearance of Reality, 89. 97 Ibid. 98 Andrew Schopp, “Transgressing the Safe Space: Generation X in The Blair Witch Project and Scream,” in Nothing That Is: Millennial Cinema and the Blair Witch Controversies, eds. Sarah L. Higley et al. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004): 125-127. 99 Ibid. 100 Schopp, “Transgressing the Safe Space: Generation X in The Blair Witch Project and Scream,” 133.

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killers literalize their consumption by creating the narrative for a horror movie in their own

reality.101 For Schopp, this obliterates the conventional theory of a “safe space”–where there is a

clear demarcation between the diegesis and the world of the viewer–to a space where such comfort

does not exist.102 Scream, then, paralleled a prevailing anxiety of the 1990s by conjecturing what

would happen if “Generation X took control.”103

The Blair Witch Project’s relationship to Generation X is more complicated, and will be

unpacked over the next several paragraphs. In 1999, The Blair Witch Project obliterated this safe

space in a way that resonated with “the tech boom” of the 1990s. Being marketed as the found

footage of three missing student filmmakers who supposedly disappeared in a rural Maryland

forest in 1994, The Blair Witch Project became a prominently discussed topic following its

successful screening at the Sundance Film Festival.104 Beginning in the summer of 1999, the film

was marketed through a transmedia structure that attempted to ontologically overlap our world

with its diegesis. This marketing tool contained a website (www.blairwitch.com), a televised

mock-documentary on the Sci-Fi Channel (The Curse of the Blair Witch), and a book on the

mythology of the Blair Witch titled Blair Witch: A Dossier. The marketing campaign also included

other novelties, such as having listed the three actors–Heather Donahue, Michael Williams, and

Joshua Leonard–as “missing” on their IMDb.com profiles.

Although fictional, the film is presented as a traditional if imperfect and incomplete cinéma

vérité documentary. The film was mostly shot with handheld digital video camera interspersed

101 Schopp, “Transgressing the Safe Space: Generation X in The Blair Witch Project and Scream,” 132, 102 Schopp, “Transgressing the Safe Space: Generation X in The Blair Witch Project and Scream,” 129. 103 Schopp, “Transgressing the Safe Space: Generation X in The Blair Witch Project and Scream,” 135. 104 Sanchez and Myrick, according to James Keller, promoted the film by handing out “Missing Persons” flyers in Par City, UT. See James Keller, “Nothing That Is Not There, and the Nothing That Is: Language and the Blair Witch Phenomenon,” Studies in Popular Culture 22 (2000): 74-75.

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with 16mm film stock footage. Paratextual material suggested that the ‘director’ of the film,

Heather Donahue, intended for the documentary to be shot in 16mm, with the handheld digital

video footage serving as a behind-the-scenes documentary.

The Blair Witch Project abuses the documentary image’s privilege to authenticity through a

combination of self-reflexive formal techniques and handheld digital videography. Given that

digital technologies have drastically changed the way the image’s truth claim is understood and

experienced in our visual culture, Ohad Landesman has argued that digital technologies

aesthetically and indexically raise “a challenging interplay between reality and fiction.”105 He

writes, “Digital technology, often perceived as complicating evidential claims about the

representation of the world, has been playing a significant role lately in formulating new aesthetic

grounds for the hybridity between fact and fiction in cinema.”106 Digital media is specified by both

its immediacy in production, circulation, and consumption and its facilitation of manipulability,

resulting in a rupture between digital and analog images.107 Citing William Mitchell, he states that

“computerized images [are] no longer guarantors of visual truth or even signifiers of stable

meaning and value.”108 As a horror film passing off as found, incomplete documentary footage,

Blair Witch exploits the digital image’s destabilization of meaning and value, as they “self-

105 Ohad Landesman, “In and Out of this World: Digital Video and Aesthetics of Realism in the New Hybrid Documentary,” in Studies in Documentary Film 2 (2008): 34. 106 Ibid. 107 “In so far as mechanically reproduced visual images are considered to be indexical, providing some truth-value of their referent, digital technology is characterized as an innovative modification allowing for a radical break with traditional image qualities.” See Ohad Landesman, “In and Out of this World: Digital Video and the Aesthetics of Realism in New Hybrid Documentary,” in Studies in Documentary Film 2 (2008): 34. 108 Ibid.

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reflexively manifest their artifice, exposing the production process and cinematic apparatus to

deconstruct their effect on the viewer.”109

The Blair Witch Project, per Landesman, exposes and satirizes the production, consumption,

and circulation of cinéma vérité documentaries.110 For Landesman, digital technologies have

facilitated the artifice of faux-documentaries, since digital cameras “obscure the boundaries

between reality and fiction.”111 As James Keller reminds us, the believability of the film’s grainy

digital video style is attributable to the “same unsteady images that reveal the presence of the

camera,” a self-reflexive technique commonly employed in cinéma vérité documentaries. Keller

ignores cinéma vérité as a possible point for comparison, instead comparing The Blair Witch

Project to reality television (which owes much of its truth claim to appropriated cinéma vérité

codes): “The muted colors, the grainy and unedited imagery, and the poor lighting imply the

immediacy of actual events in which the filmmakers did not have the opportunity to construct and

plan their scene adequately or to make expected alterations in the footage that wold constitute the

imposition of artistic order.”112

109 Landesman, “In and Out of this World: Digital Video and the Aesthetics of Realism in the New Hybrid Documentary,” 36. 110 Ibid. 111 Landesman is concerned with hybrid documentaries that involve a mix of both real and fictional material. The hybrid documentaries he considers–all released in 2002–are Michael Winterbottom’s In this World, Abbas Kiarostami’s Ten, and Hany Abu-Assad’s Ford Transit. He argues that these films do not “[surrender] entirely to the mockumentary mode” (which is entirely fictional), but appropriate digital aesthetics to “exemplify how technologically oriented aesthetic variations have become signifiers of an artificial generic distinction.” He continues: “The spectator watching these recent hybrids is invited to welcome and embrace aesthetic hybridity as a formal strategy meant not much to dupe, mislead or mock, but to offer a different documenting tactic.” Some of these ideas are discussed in chapter three concerning the phenomenological implications of the self-imposed “suspension of disbelief” when encountering the transmedial nature of found footage ARGs. See Ohad Landesman, “In and Out of this World: Digital Video and the Aesthetics of Realism in New Hybrid Documentary,” in Studies in Documentary Film 2 (2008): 36. 112 Keller’s claim that reality television “lacks the polish of cinematic realism, but signifies the authenticity of the events depicted,” is unsupported elsewhere in the paper. Despite the broad comparison to the equally broad genre of reality television, it is likely that Keller is referring to shows such as Cops (John Langley; Malcolm Barbour, 1989–ongoing). See James Keller, “Nothing That Is Not There, and the Nothing That Is: Language and the Blair Witch Phenomenon,” in Studies in Popular Culture 22 (2000): 74.

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The sense of immediacy and lack of an artistic formalism in Blair Witch are resultant of the

contingency of unscripted action and dialogue, these contingencies also being a characteristic of

cinéma vérité. The actors in Blair Witch were given few instructions and rarely interacted directly

with the filmmakers.113 Heller-Nicholas describes “the method filmmaking process” undertaken

during the film’s production:

Using hand-held GPS technology they were able to direct their cast between predetermined

locations, although it was up to the actors to work out how to get to these points. Without

the presence of a crew, the actors were able to remain in character much more than they

could with a traditional stop-and-start filmmaking process, and it allowed them to respond

more directly with the unknown elements of their circumstances. When arriving at each

checkpoint, the cast would find fresh supplies for their cameras and notes from the directors

regarding character development and upcoming scenes. The actors would deposit their

tapes and these points, and it was through regular viewings of these–as well as by

physically following the cast but remaining out of sight–that Myrick and Sanchez directed

the film.114

Myrick and Sanchez’s “method filmmaking” (a mutation of method acting) practice resembles the

cinéma vérité practice of provoking the subject into demonstrating realistic actions or emotions.

Thus, during production, The Blair Witch Project took philosophical cues from cinéma vérité.

The presence of cinéma vérité in Blair Witch is not just textual. Its presence extends outside of

the film text and into its marketing paratexts. Blair Witch thus functions as an intertextual example

113 Heller-Nicholas notes Myrick as saying that, “It’s just an approach from both the actors’ side and the filmmaking side of reducing the process of the filmmaking technique. Basically, it’s; when you look around you, there are no filmmakers…there are no crewmembers…there are no cameras shooting the actors; they are shooting it themselves, so the process of filmmaking is as much a character as the actors themselves, and that was what our goal was. It was not to make the actors aware of the filmmaking process around them, and then we just kind of dubbed in the method filmmaking approach.” Scott Dixon McDowell, “Method Filmmaking: An Interview with Daniel Myrick, Co-director of The Blair Witch Project,” in Journal of Film and Video 53 (2001): 140-147. Quoted in Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Found Footage Horror Films: Fear and the Appearance of Reality (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004): 97. 114 This method supposedly problematizes Myrick and Sanchez’s claim to authorship, since the majority of the content was filmed and performed–with only limited directions–by the three actors. As such, Myrick and Sanchez were criticized as “little more than bystanders.” Heller-Nicholas defends them as the authors of the film, comparing the two directors’ obscured presence during production as comparative to the illusory presence of the Blair Witch. This is supported by the two directors being responsible for several of the “branch breaking” scenes at night that supposedly legitimately terrified the actors. See Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Found Footage Horror Films: Fear and the Appearance of Reality (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004): 97-98.

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of the affective provocation of faux-vérité films such as No Lies. Broadly, the truth claim of cinéma

vérité becomes intertextual and intersectional: the narrative’s diffusion across the ancillary texts

collectively functions to provoke the viewer’s interest and investigation into the case of the three

missing filmmakers, sparking a conversation around Generation X’s active fascination with real,

morbid narratives. As a result, Blair Witch’s relationship to interactivity and agency has

consequences on fandom and cinephilic consumption in the digital age.

The Blair Witch Project serves as a key text in the history of transmedia storytelling as an

industrial practice in Hollywood. Henry Jenkins’ pioneering work on transmedia storytelling and

its implications on Hollywood in the 1990s is useful for my purposes here:

A transmedia story unfolds across multiple media platforms, with each new text making a

distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole. In the ideal form of transmedia

storytelling, each medium does what it does best–so that a story might be introduced in a

film, expanded through television, novels, and comics; its world might be explored through

game play or experienced as an amusement park attraction. Each franchise entry needs to

be self-contained so you don’t need to have seen the film to enjoy the game, and vice-versa.

Any given product is a point of entry into the franchise as a whole.115

Offering a medium-specific understanding of transmedia storytelling, Jenkins argues that each

medium provides its own unique addition to the narrative, and that any media text acts as a

serviceable entry point into the narrative.116 While Jenkins does not hierarchize the texts that make

up a transmedia story, his stipulation that each text needs to be a “self-contained” experience needs

to be problematized, particularly in the case of Blair Witch.117

In The Blair Witch Project, all the texts are inherent to each other and only together do they

provide a wholesome experience. The experience of Blair Witch is predicated on the interplay

115 Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York and London: New York University Press, 2006): 95-96. 116 Ibid. 117 Ibid.

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between the texts, rather than experiencing them individually. Keller notes that before the

popularization of transmedia storytelling in Hollywood cinema, audiences “could count upon a

movie remaining a self-contained whole.”118 Keller refers to Blair Witch as “one of the film

industry’s first truly intertextual productions.”119 Both Keller and J.P. Tellotte dislodge the film

text as the locus of the Blair Witch intertext. However, while both argue that the project’s success

is contingent on the marketing texts to provoke and engender interest in the film, they disagree on

the nature of the project’s primary text: Tellotte situates the website as the primary text, stating

that “we see the film not as film, but as one artifact, along with the materials gathered together at

the Web site [sic], which we might view in order to better understand a kind of repressed or hidden

reality.”120 For Tellotte, then, the website acts as the project’s archive, and thus its locus.121 Keller

disagrees, citing the filmmaker’s original intent to produce a televised mockumentary to claim that

The Curse of the Blair Witch is the primary text.122 Regardless of this disagreement, I assume a

position where most of the texts are expected to be experienced holistically rather than

independently, as Jenkins suggests.123

The combined Blair Witch narrative contains a film (and a sequel released a year later)124, a

television mockumentary, a book (Blair Witch: A Dossier, written by pseudonymous D.A. Sterne),

118 Keller, “Nothing That Is There and the Nothing That Is: Language and the Blair Witch Phenomenon,” 70. 119 Ibid. 120 J.P. Tellotte, “The Blair Witch Project Project: Film and the Internet,” in Film Quarterly 54 (2001): 35. 121 Ibid. 122 Keller, “Nothing That Is There and the Nothing That Is: Language and the Blair Witch Phenomenon,” 71. 123 “[The] selling of The Blair Witch Project and the telling of that film, its narrative construction, were from the start a careful match or “project,” one that better explains both the film’s success and why that success was not so quickly and easily laid at the door of the now almost famous Web site.” See J.P. Tellotte, “The Blair Witch Project Project: Film and the Internet,” Film Quarterly 54 (2001): 34. 124 The film’s sequel, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (Joe Berlinger, 2000), was not a found footage horror film. Its narrative operated under the assumption that the preceding film was a work of a fiction. It depicts a group of fans of the first film who take part in a Blair Witch tour of Burkittsville, Maryland, in a way mirroring the fandom of the first film. The film was a critical and commercial failure.

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a website, and a trilogy of video games released in 2000, a year after the film was released.125 The

success of Blair Witch’s transmedia campaign is somewhat mythicized in popular culture. During

the Blair Witch sensation of the late summer/early fall 1999, many viewers were reportedly duped

by the artificial reality of the webpage and the television mockumentary, although many were

skeptical that even an independent studio such as Artisan Entertainment would breach obvious

ethical practices about the commercial distribution of video footage related to an ongoing police

investigation. Margrit Schreier found in her survey of the film’s reception that, when queried on

the film’s authenticity, “39 percent [of the respondents] are at least temporarily somewhat

uncertain as to the film’s ontology.”126 Of this thirty-nine percent, “the discussants refer most often

to information they have gathered from other media products, such as the so-called documentary

[The Curse of the Blair Witch] that aired on the Sci-Fi Channel.”127 Regardless, Schreier’s results

conclude that the perceived authenticity of the Blair Witch was one of ambiguity rather than

outright belief.128 Furthermore, as James Castonguay notes, many online forums were dominated

by discussions “concerning the film’s generic status as fiction or documentary.”129 Castonguay

concedes that while some users were clearly “duped into believing that the film was an actual

documentary,” several other users suggested many were “active and creative spectators rather than

125 The video games are: Blair Witch Volume 1: Rustin Parr, Blair Witch Volume 2: The Legend of Coffin Rock, and Blair Witch Volume 3: The Elly Kedward Tale. Because of their release date a year later, I do not seriously consider the computer games as offering the same kind of provocative and inherent experience as the other texts, which were used to market and generate buzz around the film in addition to provide a necessary context for the released ‘found footage’. The video games, however, do not expand the story in some way. Each game serves as a prequel to the 1994 disappearance of the three filmmakers. Volume 1 takes place in 1941, and constitutes a crossover with the 1999 computer game Nocturne; Volume 2 takes place during the American Civil War; and Volume 3 is set in 1785 and tells the formative story of Elly Kedward, the supposed identity of the Blair Witch. 126 Margrit Schreier, “’Please Help Me; All I Want to Know is: Is It Real or Not?’: How Recipients View the Reality Status of Blair Witch Project,” in Poetics Today 25 (2004): 325. 127 Ibid. 128 Ibid. 129 James Castonguay, “The Political Economy of the Indie Blockbuster: Fandom, Intermediality, and The Blair Witch Project,” in Nothing That Is: Millennial Cinema and the Blair Witch Controversies, eds. Sarah L. Higley et al. (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2004): 69-70.

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passive, uncritical consumers,” with some users adding their own elements to the Blair Witch

mythology.130

Irrespective of these sociological findings, it is important to examine Blair Witch’s status as a

‘hoax’ by examining how its verisimilar, intertextual structure used the truth claim of cinéma vérité

to provoke curiosity and active interest in the film. For instance, the website (which remains mostly

the same in terms of appearance as it did in 1999, with only the forum missing) consisted of two

purposes: one, convince users that the missing persons case of the three filmmakers was legitimate

and two, engage users in participating in a game-like investigation. The website built a narrative

around their disappearance, and in doing so also constructed the narrative’s mythology. In its

‘mythology’ section, the website provides a timeline for Blair Witch-related events, starting in

February 1785 when alleged witch Elly Kedward was accused of luring children “into her home

to draw blood from them.” The timeline covers much of the same ‘historical’ material provided by

the television mockumentary. There are several embedded clips in the timeline (including footage

of Rustin Parr’s trial from a newsreel131) and information that was also featured prominently in the

130 Castonguay provides the example of user “Cmurder,” who “participates in the film’s blurring of boundaries between the fictional and actual by mimicking the rhetorical strategies of the film and its creators, thus providing further “evidence” of the film’s authenticity and contributing in his or her own way to the legend of the Blair Witch.” In its entirety, Cmurder’s post on the Sci-Fi Channel message board is as follows: “For all of you people who only got tosee the TV show [Curse of the Blair Witch] I can tell you that I live about 20 minutes form Burkitsville [sic], MD and I attended Montgomery College (the school that the three amatuer [sic] film makers attended. The story is not fiction. No one says much about it but everyone seems to know that something erie [sic] and godless is happening in those woods in Frederick County. You cannot determine whether the story is fiction simply by hitting a few keys on your stuper computer!!! E-mail me.” See James Castonguay, “The Political Economy of the Indie Blockbuster: Fandom, Intermediality, and The Blair Witch Project,” in Nothing That Is: Millennial Cinema and the Blair Witch Controversies, eds. Sarah L. Higley et al. (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2004): 70-71. 131 Rustin Parr, in the universe of the Blair Witch, was a child killer in Burkittsville (formerly Blair), Maryland in the 1940s. His name is mentioned at the beginning of the film during the interviews with the townspeople. Furthermore, the missing filmmakers’ footage was found at the foundation of his home in the woods. Rustin Parr’s importance to the Blair Witch universe is twofold. Firstly, it is implied that Parr was possessed by the Blair Witch. Secondly, the final scene in the film is set in his home in the woods: the final scene shows Josh standing in the corner of the basement as ‘something’ attacks Heather. In the beginning of the film, a townsperson mentions that Parr would send one child to the corner of the basement while he killed another one of them.

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mockumentary. The film’s website emerged in the nascent period of online marketing for feature

films, and its ability to differentiate itself from those websites–which Keller insists were only

“adjuncts” to the film132–is important to its affect of provocation. Tellotte agrees with Keller,

noting that blairwitch.com was indeed different from other official film websites, such as the ones

for Deep Blue Sea (Renny Harlin, 1999) and Star Wars: Episode I–The Phantom Menace (George

Lucas, 1999).133 Most official film sites at the time were “largely advertisements with little

animation, offering basic data about the story, opening dates, and advanced ticket-ordering

information.”134 In addition, most featured (and continue to feature) cast and crew biographies, a

plot synopsis, a trailer, and occasionally an Adobe Flash game.135 Blairwitch.com, however, not

only acted to promote the release of the film, but also played an integral part in extending the

realism of the footage to the broader media climate, thus blurring the lines between reality and

fiction, and vaulting its status from mere paratext into an integral role as one of the first alternate

reality games (ARGs).

The site succeeded in generating hype for the film, but served its own unique purpose outside

of promoting the film. Tellotte notes that there is a certain pleasure derived from interacting with

the website, one that is owed to the extension of cinéma vérité’s affect of provocation. Drawing

on Janet Murray, he argues that the site epitomized the three terms of user interactivity with

“electronic narrative forms”: immersion, agency, and transformation.136 Altogether, the Blair

Witch intertext succeeds in immersing the viewer/user by virtue of collapsing the boundaries

between reality and fiction through its verisimilitude. Agency refers to “our ability to participate

132 Ibid. 133 Tellotte, “The Blair Witch Project Project: Film and the Internet,” 34. 134 Ibid. 135 Ibid. 136 Tellotte, “The Blair Witch Project Project: Film and the Internet,” 35.

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in the text.”137 Transformation enables us to “switch positions” or “change identities, role play, or

become a shape-shifter.”138 Agency and transformation share problematic limitations. While many

assume users become active agents in ARGs, as I will outline in the next chapter, the agency

interactive texts confer to us is restricted by authorial intention.

As with No Lies, the presence of cinéma vérité in the website provokes the viewer’s interest

and investment in the potential authenticity of the text. In doing so, this interaction draws the

viewer/user–likely (but not exclusively) a member of Generation X–to become the subject. As

Tellotte notes:

As site visitors move within the realm, they increasingly exercise an element of agency,

exploring, like the missing filmmakers themselves, different dimensions of the mystery:

gathering background on the region; pursuing the public debate about the missing students

through interviews with Burkittsville locals, parents of the students, and college professors

of anthropology and folklore; reading pages of Heather’s diary; looking over the evidence

accumulated by the local sheriff, the anthropology students, and the private investigator

hired by Heather’s mother. Through this agency affect, wherein we sort through a wealth

of clues in any order we wish to try and put the pieces of a puzzle together...we determine

precisely how much we want to be “creeped out” by the materials made available to us.139

Resultantly, like No Lies, the film’s website vaults us into complicity with the hubris of the three

filmmakers by mirroring their search to uncover the mysteries of the Blair Witch. This complicity

is extended into a critique of how mediated reality changes the way we perceive indexicality in

photographic media.140 Citing Paul Virilio, Tellotte notes that the postmodernization of technology

has led to a process of “glocalization,” which corresponds to the McLuhanesque notion that

137 Ibid. 138 Ibid. 139 Tellotte, “The Blair Witch Project Project: Film and Internet,” 36. 140 Tellotte draws on one line of dialogue in the film, specifically when Joshua Leonard picks up the camera, and comments that the camera has been inoculating Heather from the reality of the events because it filters reality, saying “it’s not quite reality.” Tellotte claims this line, in addition to the affect of provocation provided by the website and other ancillary texts, provides a critique of Generation X’s “relationship to cinema, the technological in general, and their usual filtering effect.” See J.P. Tellotte, “The Blair Witch Project Project: Film and the Internet,” Film Quarterly 54 (2001): 38.

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electronic devices have a “tendency to bring together many and different places.”141 Consequently,

it also “leaves us without a real place–decentered and lost.”142 For the majority of viewers/users

who do not live in geographic proximity to the filming location, the events of the Blair Witch

simply refer to a spatiotemporal “elsewhere,” an experience of distanciation that does not entirely

challenge the authenticity of documentary, per Sobchack.143

Furthermore, viewers/users are provoked by either their inability or reluctance to evaluate its

authenticity.144 Keller argues that the intertextuality of Blair Witch is driven by its inability to

signify outside of the text.145 Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s contention that “signifiers only ever

refer to other signifiers, never to any materiality,” Keller claims that the Blair Witch’s “inability

to signify” is its primary meaning.146 In the Blair Witch, “Meaning can only take place in a context

created by additional texts.”147 In other words, the intertext can only refer back to itself in an

infinite loop of self-referentiality.148 As a subject-participant who investigates and speculates on

the authenticity of the events in the Blair Witch, the user also mirrors this circularity through their

active engagement. Keller notes that a Time magazine article reported that “some Blair Witch

enthusiasts, even after having been told that the legend is a fabrication, have, nevertheless, sought

confirmation of the story’s validity by venturing to Burkittsville, MD to interview local

141 Ibid. 142 Ibid. 143 Ibid. 144 There also speculation that there was a disinclination to evaluate the film’s authenticity. Higley and Weinstock speculate this to be another reason for Blair Witch’s success: “This matter of its fakeness, then, becomes essential to questions about viewer pleasure: whether it matters that it is fake in order for one to enjoy it. When it was revealed that the filmmakers were actors who had not disappeared at all, some viewers felt cheated and the worth of the film for them was diminished, just as the issues of its truth claims fascinated other viewers and critics.” See Sarah L. Higley and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, “Introduction,” in Nothing That Is: Millennial Cinema and the Blair Witch Controversies, eds. Sarah L. Higley et al. (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2004): 14. 145 Keller, “Nothing That Is Not There, and the Nothing That Is: Language and the Blair Witch Phenomenon,” 75 146 Ibid. 147 Ibid. 148 Ibid.

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townsfolk.”149 “Whereas initially one would assume the denial that such a legend exists in

Burkittsville would be sufficient to put the quest for the Blair Witch to rest, the fact only alters the

nature of the search, refocusing it on the text once again.”150

The success of The Blair Witch Project and its articulation of veracity was the combinative

result of its appropriation of cinéma vérité as an aesthetical tool and provocative tool. Using the

truth claim and affect of provocation of cinéma vérité, Blair Witch intertextually provoked users

into a search for ‘the truth’, mirroring the filmmakers’ own search. As a result, Blair Witch

engendered active participation with the text, inaugurating Western cinema’s trend of promoting

their films with Alternate Reality Games (ARGs). In the following chapter, the evolution of these

ARGs and their investment of the provocative practices of cinéma vérité will be explored.

149 Melissa August, “Welcome to Burkittsville,” Time (1999): 62. Quoted in James Keller, “Nothing That Is Not There, and the Nothing That Is: Language and the Blair Witch Phenomenon,” in Studies in Popular Culture 22 150 Ibid.

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Chapter Three – Active Participation and Alternate Reality Games

The success of The Blair Witch Project–considered one of the earliest ARGs–provided the basis

for Hollywood studios to continue marketing their films by inviting users to actively participate in

investigatory games. These games often take the form of both online and physical investigations,

requiring participants to uncover clues via social media and perform certain actions throughout the

city. However, some ARGs still take the online form similar to the one used by Blair Witch. This

chapter will examine both types of ARGs, with a specific emphasis on the YouTube web-series

Marble Hornets. I argue that Marble Hornets offers another compelling mutation in this genealogy

by not only borrowing many of the same invitations to ‘investigate’, per Blair Witch, but also

unraveling its narrative in real-time through social media, allowing for users to actively engage

with the authors of the narrative, reflecting the social structure of the Internet. This seeming ability

to create and contribute to the narrative through the parameters of social media has important

implications for fandom consumption in the social media age.

To a certain extent, the popularization of digital cinema in the late 1990s contributed to this

hypothetical emancipation of the spectator from simply ‘spectating’. In “Cinema 3.0,”151 Kristen

Daly proposes a shift from Gilles Deleuze’s postwar concept of “the time-image”152 towards a

151 Curiously, Daly’s interests in Cinema 3.0 seem more inclined to narrative incoherency in puzzle films then to the multisensorial experience offered by ARGs. Much of the essay is focused on close textual readings of ‘puzzle films’ that disrupt the traditional coherency of classical Hollywood narrative codes, with examples such as Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000), Primer (Shane Carruth, 2004), and Inland Empire (David Lynch, 2008). For Daly, the arbitrary sequencing of events in these films symbolize the ‘remix’ nature of the web: “Shots are sequenced not to create a narrative but to remix one according to an algorithmic, not a narrative sense.” See Kristen Daly, “Cinema 3.0: The Interactive-Image,” in Cinema Journal 50 (2010): 90. 152 In contrast to the movement-image, in the time-image “acts of seeing and hearing replace the linking of its images through motor actions; pure description replace referential anchorage.” See David N. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997): 12-13. Quoted in Kristen Daly, “Cinema 3.0: The Interactive-Image,” in Cinema Journal 50 (2010): 81.

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more contemporary “interactive-image,” which she states is “the cinema of the user.”153 Invoking

Martin Heidegger’s Weltbild, she states: “Instead of world as picture we have world as game.”154

According to David Rodowick, the digital era’s ontological and phenomenological re-structuring

of the image inaugurates a trend where “the spectator is no longer a passive viewer yielding to the

ineluctable flow of time, but rather alternates between looking and reading as well as immersive

viewing and active controlling.”155 This active controlling can take the form of choosing the

sequence of the film through remote controlling or scrolling in a VLC player, participating in

online fandom forums, or by taking part in interactive marketing strategies. In the “interactive-

image,” users are no longer viewers; they do not simply spectate, but participate in a discursive

engagement that extends beyond the film text.156

In this chapter, I will be focusing primarily on ARGs. ARGs are interactive, narrative-based

games that take on a variety of forms. Its importance in the twenty-first century entertainment

industry cannot be understated, as they have been used to market popular Hollywood films such

as The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008), Cloverfield, and A.I. Artificial Intelligence (Steven

Spielberg, 2001). In this context, to promote the film, ARGs encourage active participation to

engender interest. In harmonization with Jenkins’ transmedia thesis, ARGs diffuse the narrative

across numerous media platforms, but also encourage a physical component.157 In other words,

Cinema 3.0 “puts the viewer to work.”158 For example, in the ARG “Why So Serious”–released

by Warner Brothers to promote The Dark Knight–users were given hints and clues over e-mail and

153 Kristen Daly, “Cinema 3.0: The Interactive-Image,” in Cinema Journal 50 (2010): 81. 154 Daly, “Cinema 3.0: The Interactive-Image,” 82. 155 David N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007): 177. Quoted in Kristen Daly, “Cinema 3.0: The Interactive-Image,” in Cinema Journal 50 (2010): 82. 156 Ibid. 157 Ibid. 158 Daly, “Cinema 3.0: The Interactive-Image,” 86.

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by phone to locate a key object that moved the story of the game forward.159 The ARG stipulated

the user to perform a variety of physical actions, thus valorizing the importance of multisensoriality

in the era of the “interactive-image.”

Cinema’s relationship to the tactile has been considered gimmicky, particularly with William

Castle’s “Emergo,” which consisted of a floating skeleton used during screenings of House on

Haunted Hill (1959). However, recent work in the field of haptic visuality has offered a compelling

reason to reconsider tactile experiences in cinema, especially given the emergence of ARGs. Sarah

Pink has recently argued in favour of “the sensory turn,” a shift in visual studies that re-situates

our experience of the image with an emphasis on “multisensoriality and inter-textuality [of the

senses].”160 The sensory turn displaces visuality as the dominant sense in Western culture, as it

claims that our senses are not individuated, but in fact operate synergistically, since

multisensoriality exposes the interrelation between the senses of sight, sound, and touch to our

experience of the image.161 This thesis is supported by scientific research that claims that “our

phenomenological experience is not of a disjointed system, but of a coherent world, where sound,

159 Angela Ndalianis elaborates on the characteristics of Why So Serious: “A huge viral-blitz campaign, the likes of which hadn’t been seen before, relied on a variety of transmedia experiences that also infiltrated the urban sphere. A website supporting the political campaign of the apparently “real” Harvey Dent appeared online and his image on one of the sites was (over months of increased word-of-mouth viewer access) slowly defaced with graffitied Joker-eyes and the Joker’s red-rimmed diabolical smile; in other words, the collective participant access to the site was responsible for defacing the good-guy lawyer and, therefore, mirroring his soon-to-be anticipated fate (in the film) as the defaced supervillain Two-Face. Numerous sites online presented Gotham City as if it were a real city, but more than this, the serial buildup to The Dark Knight film addressed fans as actual citizens of “an entire working fake city”; there were real websites for Gotham City cab companies (www.gothamcab.com), the Gotham City Newspaper (www.gothamtimes.com,) a cable company (www.gothamcablenews.com), the subway (www.gothamcityrail.com), the police (www.gothampolice.com), a pizzeria (ww.gothamcitypizzeria.com), the Gotham National Bank (www.gothamnationalbank.com), and many others. Inviting participants to side with the Joker, Harvey Dent or Bruce Wayne/Batman, real-cities-as-Gotham-City were set up as a huge performance spaces [sic] in which the transmedia story could play itself out…Online, the Joker provided clues to be decoded by participants, and, in many instances, the solution required going to actual locations in cities in the U.S. in order to find further information that would unlock the next stage of the story.” See Angela Ndalianis, The Horror Sensorium: Media and the Senses (North Carolina: McFarland, 2011): 186-187. 160 Sarah Pink, “Sensory digital photography: re-thinking ‘moving’ and the image,” Visual Studies 26 (2011): 5. 161 Ibid.

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smells, tastes, lights, and touches amalgamate and our sensory modalities combine, substitute, or

integrate.”162

The ‘sensory turn’ emancipates viewers from the singular act of ‘viewing’. In cinema, haptic

studies have provoked movement away from the dominant Lacanian model of film analysis and

towards a more phenomenological view that promotes cinema’s appeal to the viewer’s emotional

and physical responses.163 Etymologically, the word “haptic” derives from the Greek word

haptikos meaning “to come into contact with,” implying a tactile relationship between subject and

object.164 The haptic “constitutes “the reciprocal contact between us and the environment,” but

also refers to our bodies’ kinesthetic ability to “sense their own movement in time and space.”165

According to Angela Ndalianis, early and contemporary film theory prioritize “ocular-centric”

perception (similar to the hegemonic status of visuality in Western culture), a paradigm that

traditionally values “psychoanalytic and ideological frameworks.”166 Giuliana Bruno, an early

proponent of haptic visuality, notes that in privileging psychoanalysis as its dominant critical

methodology, film studies has neglected to pursue the haptic “acts of inhabiting and traversing

space.”167

The haptic appeal to multisensorial experiences in visual media is accentuated in ARGs. For

instance, Ndalianis applies Bruno’s notion of “site-seeing” and “haptic visuality” to The Dark

Knight’s Why So Serious viral campaign.168 According to Ndalianis, the internet sites that

engendered physical participation beyond the mediated text encouraged a “quite literal” haptic

162 Ibid. 163 Angela Ndalianis, The Horror Sensorium: Media and the Senses (North Carolina: McFarland, 2011): 3-4. 164 Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (USA: Verso, 2002): 6. 165 Ibid. 166 Ibid. 167 Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film, 15. 168 Ndalianis, The Horror Sensorium: Media and the Senses, 189.

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experience, because “[the] adventures across city locales were actual journeys through city spaces;

and integral to these adventures were the accompanying sensations of body movements, sights,

smells, sounds, touch and taste.”169

Immediacy and contingency are also critical to the success of ARGs. Daly reminds us that

contingency is key in the interactive-image, since it is “a function of game and chaos theory [that]

creates a network of possibilities.”170 Immediacy and contingency are the characteristics that

inform the presence of cinéma vérité’s affect of provocation in ARGs. The found footage horror

ARG Marble Hornets allows us to understand this mutation of cinéma vérité, for it updated its

narrative in real-time across social media sites such as Twitter, YouTube, and online forums.

Marble Hornets is a complex transmedia project that requires intensive background

information. Marble Hornets is a YouTube web-series launched in 2009 by Joseph De Lage and

Troy Wagner. YouTube proved to be an ideal platform to host the web-series, considering the

video-sharing and streaming service’s proclivity for anonymous video distribution at the time. The

narrative unfolded around the character Jay (played by Wagner) being given a box of tapes from

his friend Alex (played by De Lage). The tapes, according to Alex, contained footage from Alex’s

unfinished feature length student film, Marble Hornets. Operating under the assumption that the

narrative of the series overlaps with our own reality, Jay launched the marblehornets YouTube

channel. The channel’s introductory video, which runs for 1:59 and currently holds nearly

4,000,000 views (as of July 25, 2015), was posted on June 20th, 2009, and contains footage of

someone (presumably Jay) driving through rural Alabama with overlaying text that reads:

The following clips are raw footage excerpts from Alex Kralie. A college of friend of mine

[sic]. In 2006, Alex was in the process of shooting his student film, entitled Marble

169 Ibid. 170 Daly, “Cinema 3.0: The Interactive-Image,” 83.

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Hornets. Over the three months that this took place, his film crew complained of his

increasing levels of stress and irritability. Near the end of shooting, Alex halted production

indefinitely and dropped the unfinished project. He told me it was due to the “unworkable

conditions” on his set, which was less than a mile away from his house. I asked what he

planned to do with the countless number of tapes he had filled. “Burn them.” Being a film

student myself, I hated to see all of his work go to waste. And after some coercing he agreed

to give them to me. Under the condition that I never mention it to him again [sic]. Soon

after, Alex transferred to another school and I haven’t seen him since. At the time, I was

too unnerved to look through the tapes, and eventually forgot about them. A few days ago

I found them filed away in the back of my closet. After three years and zero contact with

Alex, I have decided to look through them. All of the tapes are unnumbered and missing

timestamps. Other than taking place in the summer of 2006, it is impossible to determine

the exact order or date of each. Should I find anything in any of them I will upload it to

keep as a permanent record.171

In total, the YouTube channel has eighty-eight entries (including the introduction), ending with

“Entry #87,” which was published on June 20th, 2014, five years after the first video. Most of the

early entries consist of Alex’s footage that Jay deemed bizarre or unnerving. However, as the

narrative continues, the series occasionally moves away from the found footage style (per

Meslow’s definition), with Jay filming his investigation into Alex’s mysterious disappearance.172

Marble Hornets exists as a multi-textual phenomenon across various social media websites. As

a result, its relationship to the internet needs to be historicized. As Heller-Nicholas notes, the

success of Marble Hornets is primarily contextualized within its exploitation of “broader Internet

forum cultures.”173 As the series unfolds, the protagonists are faced with their central antagonist,

a tall, faceless figure called “The Operator.” Outside of Marble Hornets, this creature is known

famously as the Slender Man, a paranormal creature born on the Internet. The naissance of the

Slender Man mythology began on the SomethingAwful.com forum in a thread titled “Create

Paranormal Images,” with the goal of prompting users to Photoshop images containing ghosts or

other paranormal phenomena. Many of these images were also provided with fictional backstories.

171 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wmhfn3mgWUI 172 The series is a mix of found footage (per Meslow) and mockumentary. 173 Heller-Nicholas, Found Footage Horror Films: Fear and the Appearance of Reality, 196.

43

On June 10th, 2009, user “Victor Surge” offered two images of a group of children with a tall,

faceless creature lurking nearby. The pictures were given the following captions:

1) “We didn’t want to go, we didn’t want to kill them, but its persistent silence and

outstretched arms horrified and comforted us at the same time…”

1938, photographer, unknown, presumed dead.

2) “One of two recovered photographs from the Stirling City Library blaze. Notable for

being taken the day which fourteen children vanished and for what is referred to as

“The Slender Man”. Deformities cited as film defects by officials. Fire at library

occurred one week later. Actual photograph confiscated as evidence.”

1986, photographer: Mary Thomas, missing since June 13th, 1986.174

The post was a success among SomethingAwful users. For instance, user “cowboythreespeech”

wished that it was “legit” (colloquial term for legitimate). Several other users, including users

“Leyendecker,”175 “ZombieScholar,”176 and “21stCentury”177 praised “Victor Surge” for the

efficacy of his post. “Victor Surge” continued to post more photos, further developing a narrative

around the creature. The language of his posts assumed a position of authority on the matter, as he

replied as though the pictures he provided were legitimate: “Maybe I’ll do some more research.

I’ve heard there may be a couple more legit “Slender Man” photographs out there. I’ll post them

if I find them.” On June 11th, 2009, he followed his post with another photograph and several

extracted quotations detailing the research into the photograph.178 User “LeechCode5” followed

Surge’s post, prefacing with “I’ve been seriously debating sharing these, but after Victor Surge’s

posts I feel I have to.” The user then went on to post two photographs, each with a caption

174 http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3150591&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=3#post361861415http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3150591&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=3 175 “oh gently caress you when I finally saw the guy in the background I lost it this is going to give me nightmares” [sic]. 176 “You are an amazing and terrible bastard, sir. Well played. Now to look over my shoulder every couple seconds for the rest of my day…” 177 “My God…this could be glorious in book form.” 178 http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3150591&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=4

44

providing some context into the Slender Man sighting. From there, the mythology of the Slender

Man developed collaboratively, reflecting and emphasizing the democratic, uncontrolled, and

contingent social environment of the Internet.

On June 18th, 2009, user “ce gars” provided his contribution, which served as the premise for

the YouTube web-series that would debut two days later.179 On June 21st, 2009, “ce gars” posted

the link to the introductory marblehornets YouTube video posted a day earlier.180 The Twitter

account, @marblehornets, soon followed, with the first tweet linking to the first video. Following

179 The post is as follows: “About two or three years ago, a film school friend of mine, Alex, was working on his first “feature length” movie. It was called Marble Hornets and I think it was about a twenty something returning to his childhood home and recalling events that happened there. It was pretty pretentious film student fare, but I helped out for a few days before my summer classes started, and a few rare occasions after that. Everyone on the set seemed pretty excited to be making it, especially Alex. The set itself was about a half a mile away from Alex’s house, roughly a thirty minute drive away from where I lived at the time. It was a pretty heavily wooded area, I guess give it to give a sparsely populated small town feel. Most of the movie took place outside. After about two months of shooting, Alec dropped his pet project completely. It was really sudden when he let me know [sic] about it. When I asked him why, he told me it was because of the “unworkable conditions” of where he had picked to shoot. Which [sic] struck me as odd since he had been living around the area since he was eight, and never seemed to have a problem with it. What’s even stranger is that he acted incredibly distant when telling me this news. Soon after, he started avoiding me and from what I hear, everyone else. All he did was sit around his house. Being a film student as well, I hated to see his work go to waste and decided to talk to him about it a bit more. A few weeks later after he had stopped shooting, I finally convinced him to let me come over. Something about him was worse than I’d originally thought. He had lost a good bit of weight, and looked pretty sickly. I pretended like I didn’t notice and we just hung out for awhile [sic]. Right before I left, I asked him about Marble Hornets and what he was planning on doing with all of his tapes of raw footage. With almost no hesitation, he simply said “burn them”. This caught me off guard. When I asked why he didn’t just archive them for B-roll in future projects, he just said he never wanted to work with the footage again. He was completely serious about this. I couldn’t understand why he’d just want to get rid of it completely. Surely it wasn’t all that useless. So I asked if I could take a look at them. He agreed, but only under the circumstance that I never bring them back to him, and never discuss what was on them with him. He also highly discouraged me from showing any of it to anyone else. I laughed at this, and said that he must have accidentally made The Ring or something with the way he was talking. He didn’t acknowledge this and brought me up to his attic, where he was storing the pile of tapes. There were tons of them. He grabbed a couple of plastic shopping bags and piled the tapes and give them to me, then shooed me out of the attic. Right as I was walking out the door, he said, in the most serious tone I’ve ever heard from someone, “I’m not kidding, don’t ever bring this up around me again.” Alex’s comment was so sudden that I didn’t have time to react before he had closed the door on me. He transferred to an out of state school soon after that and I haven’t seen him since. I filed the tapes separately from my others, and was honestly too freaked out to look at them at the time, and eventually forgot about them. But reading about the slender man [sic] has peaked [sic] my interest again. Maybe it’s what Alex was talking about that day. I’ve decided to begin going through the tapes tonight. If I don’t do it now, I probably never will. I’m hoping all I find is an unfinished student film and nothing else. That would sure put me at ease now that I’m thinking about it again. If there’s interest, I’ll post anything that I find on here.” 180 Along with the link, the post reads: “Here’s what I was talking about earlier. Plenty of tapes to go.”

45

entry #9, a second YouTube channel with the username “totheark” uploaded a video response,

titled “Regards,” on July 22, 2009. The video is ten seconds long, and features strange graphics

and ends simply with the word “closely.” The YouTube channel for totheark consists of thirty-

nine videos, all of which are responses to Jay’s videos. They feature abstract, experimental imagery

that Dana Keller suggests is connected to cinematic representations of the paranormal.181

The videos that De Lage and Wagner produced on both YouTube channels utilize cinéma vérité

documentary codes. For the marblehornets YouTube channel, both the found footage and the

footage Jay “produces” inherit from cinéma vérité the unsteady handheld cinematography, the

presence of the filmmaker within the diegesis (indeed, the filmmaker is the main character in most

of the videos), and the presence of the camera to provoke the subject. Drawing on Gillian Helfield,

Keller writes that “[Jay’s] combined roles of participant and storyteller are expressed through the

first-person point of view cinematography that constitutes most of his entries,” which resonate

with Helfield’s discussion of “cinéma direct’s aesthetic conventions,” which include a mobile

camera and sense of immediacy.182Additionally, the totheark channel functions to provoke Jay, the

main character, into continuing his investigation into Alex Kralie’s disappearance. Dana Keller

has rooted the presence of cinéma vérité (although she refers to direct cinema) in the emergence

of folk horror.183 For Keller, the attributes of twenty-first century folk horror are “in line with the

181 “It is worth noting that the format of totheark’s videos closely resemble the cursed video that features in the film Ring (Hideo Nakata 1998). In the film it is suggested that the villain Sadako (Rie Ino’o) imprinted her curse onto a videotape through a method comparable to telepathy. The similarities suggest that totheark’s videos could be from something non-human or superman, with the ability to transfer images telepathically to video.” See Dana Keller, “Digital Folklore: Marble Hornets, the Slender Man, and the Emergence of Folk Horror in Online Communities,” (M.A. Thesis, The University of British Columbia, 2013) 60. 182 Keller, “Digital Folkore: Marble Hornets, the Slender Man, and the Emergence of Folk Horror in Online Communities,” 54. Quoted in Keller, “Digital Folklore: Marble Hornets, the Slender Man, and the Emergence of Folk Horror in Online Communities,” 32. 183 Keller, “Digital Folklore: Marble Hornets, the Slender Man, and the Emergence of Folk Horror in Online Communities,” 32.

46

conventions of cinéma direct [sic] and postmodern horror.”184 Folk horror titles are “open-ended,

providing audiences with opportunities for continued speculation and discussion of whether the

events depicted might involve natural or supernatural explanations.”185

The realism imparted by the presence of cinéma vérité provokes the viewer into assisting and

ostensibly playing a role in Jay’s investigation. It also provokes users to question the authenticity

of the narrative, even though evidence of its fictitious nature is obvious. Similar to Margrit

Schreier’s findings with Blair Witch audiences, Keller observes “the current top suggested Google

search phrase for the series–“Is marblehornets real?” suggests that a fraction of the Marble Hornets

viewership are uncertain about the film’s ontological status.186 Referring to Todorov and Carroll’s

notion of the “fantastic hesitation,” Keller claims that while the mythology of Marble Hornets and

the Slender Man character are clearly fictitious, “it is important to acknowledge that such stories

employ a rhetoric of truth that encourages audiences to entertain such possibilities.”187

Marble Hornets used its vérité realism to provoke the user into participating with its

protagonist. The emphasis on social media enabled users to interact directly with the series’

creators, although responses were intended to keep the illusion of reality alive. While comments

were (and continue to be) disabled on the marblehornets YouTube channel, totheark’s channel

enables users to reply and “decode…and/or theorize on the broader Marble Hornets

conspiracy.”188 The Twitter account, however, allowed users to contact Jay directly. The Twitter

account contains five-hundred and six tweets, and as of July 2015 has fifty-six thousand followers.

184 Ibid. 185 Ibid. 186 Ibid. 187 Keller, “Digital Folklore: Marble Hornets, the Slender Man, and the Emergence of Folk Horror in Online Communities,” 32-33. 188 Keller, “Digital Folklore: Marble Hornets, the Slender Man, and the Emergence of Folk Horror in Online Communities,” 22.

47

The ‘tweets’ posted to @marblehornets often gave the sense of immediacy, allowing followers of

the account to be kept up-to-date on the whereabouts of Jay outside of the YouTube videos. The

tweets range from seeming banality (“I will be uploading Entry #7 soon,” posted on July 7, 2009)

to the intriguing (“Outside the store again. Trying to look inconspicuous on the bench across the

street. Not sure if I’m succeeding at that or not,” posted on February 12, 2012). The nature of

Twitter as a social media platform allows Twitter users to ‘tweet’ directly to other users. Since

Twitter does not users to prevent other users from replying, unlike YouTube, users are free to

‘tweet’ to @marblehornets. For instance, on December 21, 2012, @veroreos replied to a tweet

(“Tim has been working constantly ever since Entry #65. Told me it’s to get some money saved

up. I think he’s considering quitting his job,” posted on December 20, 2012) with

“@marblehornets Holy shit, where does Tim even work? He bounces around jobs a lot right?”

@marblehornets responded later that day with “@veroreos He’s been working at the same place

since I found him, I believe.”

Finally, as Keller points out, the Twitter and YouTube comments section are “interactive spaces

in which viewers can play the role of detective by discussing the series as though it is an actual,

real-world case that needs solving.”189 However, Keller importantly observes that interaction with

Marble Hornets is limited: “Viewers may not be able to tangibly affect the Marble Hornets

storyline, but the series adopts many video game conventions that mimic an interactive

experience.”190 A key problem in the “interactive-image” thesis is that it naïvely ignores the

authorial parameters around all entertainment texts, including interactive ones. In other words,

“the interactive-image” does not emancipate the viewer from the dominance of narrative, although

189 Keller, “Digital Folklore: Marble Hornets, the Slender Man, and the Emergence of Folk Horror in Online Communities,” 91. 190 Ibid.

48

it may distinguish itself through a mix of contingency and non-linearity.191 Narrative is still a

dominant feature even in ARGs, since they are mapped out authorially and in cases such as The

Dark Knight, exist diegetically alongside the text they are meant to promote. Some aspects of the

game are left up to chance, since the paths the players take to unlock clues are characterized by

individual social conditionings. Regardless, the parameters of ARGs are still industrially-defined,

and thus in some respect authorial. Nonetheless, even the most banal replies on Twitter in some

way ‘shape’–however trivially–the narrative and place it outside of the creator’s control, even if

the sequence of the narrative is not dramatically or infinitesimally altered.

Conclusion

From its beginnings, cinéma vérité’s affect of provocation has evolved beyond constituting the

camera’s impact on the subject’s behaviour. With its emergence as a popular aesthetic choice in

mock-documentaries and found footage media, cinéma vérité provokes and impacts the viewer’s

behaviour, resulting in the viewer becoming the subject. The subject, then, participates under the

assumption that the diegesis ontologically overlaps with our own world. Thus, the user is not only

provoked by the camera’s realism. It is the intertextual realism, or the diffusion of cinéma vérité

transmedially, that provokes and manipulates the subject’s behaviour.

No Lies proved that cinéma vérité could be successfully implicated as artifice. However, its

success in this area was ephemeral. The fictional implementation of cinéma vérité as artifice made

its formal and textual evolution necessary. As The Blair Witch Project demonstrated, cinéma vérité

191 Daly argues that the contemporary state of narrative in cinema reflects various aspects of digital culture. This is formalized in films such as Memento, which seem to be “sequenced not to create a narrative but to remix one according to an algorithmic, not a narrative sense.” However, this does not seem to displace the dominance of narrative, merely disrupt its traditional linearity. See Kristen Daly, “Cinema 3.0: The Interactive-Image,” in Cinema Journal 50 (2010): 90-91.

49

could be infused with media intersectionality in order to create a metadiegetic universe that

supposedly overlapped with our own. Given The Blair Witch Project’s release around the

popularization of digital media, its diffusion of cinéma vérité across its intertext manipulated and

provoked the viewer’s investment, capitalizing on Generation X’s fascination with morbid

interests to prompt viewers to ‘investigate’–and thus participate–with the text. Though Blair Witch

and its mythological success as a hoax still required the style to evolve.

Similar to Blair Witch, Marble Hornets also used cinéma vérité intertextually to provoke the

viewer’s interest. The user must follow the entire narrative as it plays out over the various social

media platforms in order to have a wholesome and rewarding experience. While Marble Hornets

borrows a number of the interactive and provocative characteristics of Blair Witch, its application

of the immediacy of social media allow for users to interact with the text in real-time, mutating the

provocative use of cinéma vérité into the twenty-first century.

Despite the range of scholarship on found footage horror and its important relationship to

emergent interactive trends in digital media, the important role that cinéma vérité plays in both

conveying the subgenre’s verisimilitude and its provocative effect on viewers/users has remained

elusive. Demonstrably, there is a further need to historicize cinéma vérité within the context of

evolving trends in user-text interactivity. To “provoke” academia into this participating in this

conversation, this essay has examined found footage horror through this historical and

phenomenological lens in order to contextualize the cinéma vérité within these growing interactive

and intertextual trends.

50

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