The Image Goes Viral—Virtual Hauntings in The Ring and Feardotcom

Abstract

This chapter deals with films in which technology and technological devices are portrayed as demonized or haunted. Just in the past forty years, there have been a number of popular films concerning such “ghosts in the machine.”¹ These films come in many forms: those that deal with normally nonsentient machines, like John Carpenter’s Christine (1983) or Stephen King’s Maximum Overdrive (1986); those that deal with cybernetic organisms, like the Terminator series (James Cameron, 1984, 1991; Jonathan Mostow, 2003; McG, 2009) and Spielberg’s AI: Artificial Intelligence (2001); and those that focus on media or communications technology, like Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983) and the Poltergeist series (Hooper, 1982; Brian Gibson, 1986; Gary Sherman, 1988) or, more recently, The Matrix trilogy (Wachowski Brothers, 1999, 2003, 2003), Gore Verbinski’s The Ring (2002), and William Malone’s Feardotcom (2002). In this last category, we might also include Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994) and Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness (1995), in which the demon has entered into the process of horror production itself. In all cases, a will, spirit, or consciousness is attributed to nonhuman, inorganic devices. Endowed with these new powers, such devices and the creatures that sometimes emerge from them threaten humanity and human-centered reality.