Affective intensities and evolving horror forms : from found footage to virtual reality

Abstract

This thesis examines the evolving forms of cinematic horror, from the sub-genre of 'found footage,' to post-cinematic new media forms such as Youtube horror, both narrative and non-narrative, and cinematic virtual reality horror. By examining how these new forms alter the dynamics of spectatorship, the thesis asks how cinema's affective capacities have shifted in relation to these modifications in the form of cinematic horror. Departing from psychoanalytic, representational and hermeneutic models, it explores the ways that horror as a genre strategically withholds its semantic content in order to produce terror and dread. I argue that somatic experience fills these gaps, and that the embodied experience of the viewer/participant is intensified through the way each of these modes utilises its unique aesthetic and technological capacities. Phenomenological approaches provide a framework here to interrogate the distinction between film-as-object and viewer-as-subject, and to reframe how, in viewing these cinematic horror artefacts, we do not simply decode or interpret these works, but interface with them through embodied experience. This thesis contends that horror's specific affect emerges from this embodied experience of the image. Theoretical insights from emerging models of embodied simulation add further depth to this analysis. Drawing on Deleuzian readings of horror cinema, the thesis extends these models through an exploration of the concept of the perception-image in relation to found footage horror cinema, and the time-image in relation to the 'postcinematic' short horror films of Youtube.

Date of Award	2017
Original language	English