Jacob Heayes traces how desktops, manipulated media and the internet have come to be the most potent tools in horror, from The Blair Witch Project to Host.
Back in 1999, the horror world was irreversibly changed by the release of an unassuming film titled The Blair Witch Project. Reception at the time was frequently accompanied by one unifying verdict—nobody would want to go camping in the woods again. Mining the malice out of familiar locales is deeply rooted within horror tradition, harkening back to laboratories hiding within sublime vistas or Gothic castles inhabited by decrepit vampires. The visual layer of film accentuates this fear of the familiar even further.
A decade after the world was captivated by the Apollo 11 Moon landing, Ridley Scott unleashed Alien upon cinemas. The world would quickly find out that in space, no one can hear you scream. Friday the 13th’s iconic Camp Crystal Lake cemented the summer camp as an instantly recognisable slasher trope, while Halloween’s deceptively innocent suburban neighbourhood set out to make audiences terrified of their own backyard. Contemporary horror cinema is experiencing its own rejuvenation thanks to filmmakers like Jordan Peele and Ari Aster expanding the reaches of the genre in exciting creative ways—but it’s still difficult not to feel like we’re retreading old ground. However, there is one location only fully explored in the past decade that also heralds the arrival of its own generation of horror filmmakers: the computer desktop.
A significant factor in The Blair Witch Project’s runaway success was its innovative use of the hand-held found-footage format, released under the pretense that it was a real student documentary whose contributors had gone missing a year prior. The fairly-new internet was also utilised in the film’s marketing, encouraging audiences to follow the developing mystery and share their theories with friends. The marketing campaign functioned as a precursor of what we now identify as a viral sensation. Blair Witch wasn’t the first found-footage film: that honour goes to Ruggero Deodato’s nauseating Cannibal Holocaust. Yet, through merging the existing technique with the excitement around the internet, Blair Witch entirely revitalised the subgenre.
A similar pattern appears to be emerging for desktop films. Typically associated with horror, these films entirely take place on the screens of digital devices, presented as if they were shot with screen-capture software. Low-budget affairs like The Collingswood Story from 2002 proved that the genre was as much in its infancy as the technology that brought it into existence, scrappy and lacking polish. The cinematic release of Blumhouse’s Unfriended lent legitimacy to the style. Now, the idea of recording an entire film on a desktop no longer sounded so nonsensical. Digital storytellers have been thriving on platforms like YouTube, Vimeo and TikTok for years, synthesising the modes of distribution and presentation into a clever whole.
Adam Butcher’s Internet Story was released in the last decade, but is an example of an early hit, touching on various online inspirations like scavenger hunts and Flash animation to create a creepy tale of disconnection. Internet Story is also one of many examples that show how susceptible desktop film is to change and mutation, resulting in even recent efforts now feeling outdated. Zachary Donohue’s The Den (also known as Hacked in the UK) only released in 2013 and fittingly draws upon the spontaneity of chat apps like Omegle and Chatroulette that were sensations at the time. Watching the film in 2021, however, is downright peculiar: the desktop itself looks like a relic, the conflict surrounding a hacker terrorising fictional chat software is barely relatable and the hackers themselves are nothing short of comical parodies. When desktop films become too dependent on trends of the time or particular apps to tell their story, they run the risk of losing their relevance the moment the credits roll.
Desktop cinema isn’t without hope however—there are lessons to be learnt from earlier horror films that incorporate the Internet to convey fear. There is a rich tradition of blending the digital realm with reality in Japanese horror in particular. Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s disquieting 2001 film Pulse centers on a group of teenagers disturbed by the presence of ghosts on their boxy white computer monitors. While Kurosawa’s film only minimally interacts with the desktop itself, it touches upon ideas of online loneliness and the impossibly complex networks that make up the Internet and all the mysteries it holds. In his retrospective, Alex Denney notes that Pulse’s ghosts are proof that “once the Pandora’s Box of technology has been opened, there’s no going back.” The desktop is here with us to stay, even if the dialup tones heard in Pulse have faded into the past, like forgotten spirits of another era.
As the COVID pandemic has increased our dependence on computer use and accelerated the onset of loneliness, most significantly in young people, there has rarely been a more potent moment for desktop cinema to grapple with these themes. One of 2020’s surprise hits was Rob Savage’s Host, a desktop film recorded entirely on Zoom, centering on a group of young women attempting an online seance only for a malevolent spirit to be let loose on their devices. While it certainly employs tools like video filters for frights, Host also taps into a rugged filmmaking sensibility, overcoming the obstacles of the pandemic to create a horror film about loneliness and the invasion of privacy while advancing its sub-genre.
The medium of the desktop furthers the effort to make filmmaking as accessible as possible, through using minimal equipment and only requiring the slimmest of budgets. As YouTube has beckoned a new generation of celebrities, it is equally possible that online and desktop films will cause a resurgence of young talent in the filmmaking scene. Furthermore, this storytelling device isn’t even limited to horror, as works like Searching and the upcoming Jane Schoenburn film We’re All Going to the World’s Fair have shown.
Presenting unique challenges that harken back to the birth of minimalist movements like Dogme 95, desktop cinema can be as creatively reinvigorating as they can be cheesy or cheap. Some things take time to express their full potential; somewhat an antithesis to the fast-moving world of the Internet. These new endeavours however are already making us feel terrified to log back on.
Words by Jacob Heayes
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