Review: Adam Daniel, Affective Intensities and Evolving Horror Forms: From Found Footage to Virtual Reality (2020)

How do ghosts work? Do they know of their matter inconsonance? / Do they know we’re there when they pass through us?

– Mike Mills (2017)

Writing for haunted times

We live in haunted times. Haunted by the memories of a pre-pandemic existence, we continue to persevere through variant viral outbreaks. Haunted by the two-dimensional digital avatars cast on our devices (at least for those of us fortunate enough to have this luxury), we are increasingly alienated from our three-dimensional biological selves. Although the writing of Adam Daniel’s Affective Intensities and Evolving Horror Forms: From Found Footage to Virtual Reality (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020; henceforth Affective Intensities) (Fig. 1) predates the COVID-19 pandemic, its focus on affectual and somatic responses to immersion in a – primarily digital – audio-visual media ecology could not be more timely. Daniel’s coverage of primary texts is extensive, and the text opens with a focus on ‘found footage’ horror films – The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity series in particular. The remainder of Affective Intensities deals with material that will perhaps be of most interest to readers of this site: a discussion of numerous ‘post-cinematic’ YouTube anomalies (including Suicidemouse and its terrifying deconstruction of animation) is followed by ruminations on video games (such as Alien: Isolation) and virtual reality cinema (such as Catatonic).

Adam Daniel, Affective Intensities and Evolving Horror Forms: From Found Footage to Virtual Reality (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020).

Nonetheless, Affective Intensities is not particularly concerned with narrative nor form per se, and instead revolves around the claim that “modifications to the way we experience audio-visual media, at the level of the senses, have effects that transcend variations in content or narrative structure” (2020, 2). It is not difficult to extrapolate this assertion beyond the media with which Daniel is primary concerned. Our social world has never been more overtly (computationally) mediated: proliferating proportions of both work and leisure are now irrevocably tied to digital screens and Daniel’s introductory claim that “we live in a culture that is increasingly reshaped by transformations in audio-visual media” seems, for large swathes of the globe, practically a truism at this point (2020, 2). Haunted by the flatness of affect and other such glitches that manifest as epiphenomena of a digitised existence, Jean Baudrillard’s prophetic declaration that human society is being re-crafted through “electronic encephalization” has never seemed more apt than it has right now (1988, 17).

Phenomenology over hermeneutics

As Daniel notes, however, the evolution of affect in relation to modern media subsumption has been occurring for an extended period of time, and his focus on (post-)cinematic horror media is well-chosen to provide specific evidence of such an ongoing transition. “Given its transgressive concerns,” Daniel argues, “horror as a genre is often the first site to interrogate evolving technologies, both within the narrative and through the formal properties of the medium within which it exists”, and he subsequently attempts to move beyond the kind of genre-based film theory disproportionately focussed on narrative and theme that precedes him (2020, 3). Instead, Daniel proposes to engage in an analysis that pays attention to phenomenological matters rather than hermeneutic ones: charting “affective response” rather than “semantic understanding” (2020, 17).

Similarly, Daniel’s concentration on diverse media forms is well-considered, in that, as he observes, each of these forms explicitly encourage “an intensification of bodily presence” (2020, 201): found footage film; post-cinematic videos; horror video games; and virtual reality experiences are each indicated as inducing specific – subtly separate – somatic reactions. In order to explore these strands of interest, Daniel situates Affective Intensities as “an amalgamation and synthesis” of a wide array of different theoretical approaches – predominantly related to cinema, new media, and (film) philosophy, but also to psychology and neuroscience (2020, 204). The ambition in Affective Intensities is laudable, but its theoretical exposition is not always effectively managed, leaving the text as a whole haunted by the spectral force of its own extensive and divergent research interests.

Theoretical hauntings

This haunting manifests in two major ways. Although Daniel’s interdisciplinary approach is welcome, the first stumbling block of the title is that Affective Intensities cannot but feel rather like a lego-block construction of its constituent theoretical components. Such a networked entanglement is the shadow which haunts almost all academic citation – theory is always obviously referential, but this referentiality is obtrusively overbearing in the case of Affective Intensities; rather than incrementally shifting intellectual discourse, Daniel becomes instead bogged down within it. The mediated quality of the argument presented is the largest issue on this front: while there is an attempt to rethink orthodox reception theory, Daniel’s claimed “synthesis” is drowned in a confusing mise en abyme of secondary materials.

To take a specific example, Daniel posits that “engaging with both Hansen’s and Michael Taussig’s interpretation of Walter Benjamin’s concept of mimetic experience, Anne Rutherford further elaborates on how this mimetic innervation comes about…” (2020, 107), and strikingly similar such rhetorical movements punctuate each of the chapters; when X explicates Y, who is drawing from Z, inspired by A, who was reflecting on B, in turn criticising C, and thus affirming D, the argument (both Daniel’s and his many cited theorists’) tends to get lost in an abstracted hall of mirrors. The dense refractions of theory could have been more judiciously spread across the length of Affective Intensities and made more succinct, particularly given the tautological structure that quickly emerges as a result (in phrasing, as well as replication of theory). Indeed, there is no corresponding level of close primary textual analysis, which only exacerbates the problem.

The jargon-heavy approach and rather recursive style that marks the majority of Affective Intensities, then, makes much of its content redundant, because it is constantly reiterated. And herein lies the second theoretical haunting: Daniel’s own attempted (re)formulation of argument, especially as it manifests in the employment of atypical terminology, can further increase readerly confusion. For example, Daniel’s discussion of the found footage genre of contemporary horror cinema, which encompasses (at least) two full chapters of Affective Intensities, introduces the phrase “out-of-frame” (2020, 58). The coining of this phrase, readers are told, offers Daniel a way of terminologically formalising all of the material that remains tantalisingly unseen in horror media, and which thus tends to increase affectual response in viewers: “the out-of-frame retains a tangible link to the materiality of this ‘real’ world, one that emerges as an affective surplus of the image,” and, according to Daniel, “accentuate[s] the manner in which cinema can have transformative effects on a spectator that go beyond our identification with character or engagement with narrative” (2020, 58; 71).

Fig. 2 - Web series Marble Hornets (Troy Wagner, 2009).

Taken in isolation, the above example is a relatively innocuous coinage. It could even be argued that it reflects Daniel’s attempt to move from hermeneutics to phenomenology partially by way of formalist concerns. However, a few chapters later, in his discussion of video games, Daniel introduces the phrase “blind space” – itself adopted from the work of Pascal Bonitzer (1981), by way of Bernard Perron (2018) – as “roughly equivalent to the out-of-frame as previously discussed” (2020, 164). This simply raises the question: if adequate terminology already exists, and is widely accepted in existing academic discourse, what purpose does Daniel’s idiosyncratic shift serve? Thus, Daniel’s “synthesis” – and the text’s odd deviations from such synthesis – raises more questions than it answers.

Framing out

Affective Intensities will primarily appeal to academics working in the fields of new media and dark fantasy, although even this audience will likely be limited by both the style and substance of the text. There is something of a dissonance between the extended length of the early chapters and the brevity of the later ones, and because Daniel’s theoretical apparatus is heavily front-loaded, it is really only towards the end that Daniel starts to convincingly engage with any of the primary texts on their own terms. This shift plays to the major strength of Affective Intensities: Daniel treats each of his chosen popular cultural texts – from Marble Hornets (Fig. 2) to 11:57 – and the explicit media in which they exist, with a sense of seriousness, and the preliminary exploration of video games and virtual reality – and to a lesser extent, post-cinema – in the later chapters are particular beneficiaries of this approach. Furthermore, given that these newer media forms are generally under-theorised in existing criticism, Daniel’s closing sections are driven to offer more original thinking, leaving this part of Affective Intensities more useful to both scholars and a general audience than the earlier chapters. Daniel’s ultimate claim that “in some vital sense the body is now the frame in virtual reality” stands as a particularly striking example of such exploratory critical content, and it remains a shame that such a position is not developed at greater length (2020, 202). Regardless, the ending portion of the text offers a space where Daniel finally begins to overcome the hauntings of academic discursive requirements. In these closing stages, conspicuously phantasmic variants of theory begin to retreat, fading out-of-frame at last.

**Article published: August 5, 2022**

References

Baudrillard, Jean. 1988. The Ecstasy of Communication, trans. Bernard and Caroline Schutz, ed. Sylvère Lotringer. New York: Semiotext(e).

Bonitzer, Pascal. 1982. “Partial Vision: Film and the Labyrinth,” trans. Fabrice Ziolkowski. Wide Angle 4, no. 4: 56-63.

Daniel, Adam. 2020. Affective Intensities and Evolving Horror Forms: From Found Footage to Virtual Reality. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Mills, Mike (Toehider). 2017. “How Do Ghosts Work?” “GOOD.” Sydney: Bird’s Robe Records BRR090, compact disc.

Perron, Bernard. 2018. The World of Scary Video Games: A Study in Videoludic Horror. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.

Biography

Ben Eldridge is an early career researcher of Literatures in Englishes & the current Vice-President of the Association for Canadian Studies in Australia and New Zealand (ACSANZ), who lives and works primarily on unceded Darug and Gadigal land. If not performing the exploitative, unpaid labour that is intrinsic to the functioning of the modern neoliberal ‘academic’ sector, Eldridge can be found either denouncing technocratic management or – like his personal avatar, the Canada goose (Branta canadensis) – honking eternally into the void of existential despair. This, he realises, may be a tautological claim.