Cine-Excess 2019

I answered an open call for papers for Cine-Excess, a cult/horror conference and film festival currently in its 13th year (fitting!) and currently in Birmingham U.K. A list of suggested topics led me down a rabbit hole of Post Millennial Aesthetics of Horror and, even more broadly, posing the question: "What Are We Afraid Of?" 

Here's a quick re-cap of what I uncovered during my research....more to come about the event soon (if I get outside of airport purgatory!)! 

If horror movies are a way to process our collective fears, what are we currently the most afraid of? 

TECHNOLOGY

Post-Snowden, Whistleblowing, Big Data =  Grainy Surveillance cams, fear of an encroaching presence, a desire for control (does anyone know how they film these? Are they altered in post to look like surveillance cams? Or...? The moire pattern...?)

The ubiquitous Computer/Phone/Personal Camera = the radial distortion, protagonist looking directly at audience (implicating audience further into the film). It is odd to think that this image is a wholly new visual phenomenon. 

The Constant Connection = the Physical Cell Phone as an extension of the plot-- almost like a new character, a new & necessary prop

Fantasy User Interface (FUI) = another plane of existence within a film, a visual representation of a fictitious digital realm often an animation, sometimes spawning real-world apps

ISOLATION

The Isolation of the Digital Age = distanciation, shots that isolate viewer, sometimes like a first-person shooter/POV video-game, other times like a dollhouse (even literally), placing the watcher in a critical space, excessive voyeurism like the social media landscape

Microcosm = another manifestation of isolation, CGI/FX, pushing the space of the screen, moving beyond a frame of time and space

Cults! Cults! Cults! = matching outfits, washes of color, folk imagery, an outsider coming in to challenge belief systems 

THE PAST

The Repressed and Oppressed = new heroes, low-looming shots, women not lacking in anything, diversity on screen, the development of a new, intersectional gaze?



Chrono-Collapse = the collapsing of chronotypes (fictions within fictions), a product of the digital age & woke-ness, time periods are blurred through mise-en-scene, costuming, mannerisms, an effect that questions & processes the sins of the past/present

Horror is a boundary-pushing genre, poking at the holes in the status quo and terrifying in the name of social change. 

The visual manifestations and emerging contemporary tropes are reflections of the future we fear most, a future we can still shape.