In addition to those readings of cinematic texts, a Postdigital Gothic interpretation of popular compression formats for music (MP3) and images (JPEG) suggests the usefulness of the Gothic as tool for understanding the interpretive work of machinic speech. This chapter begins and ends by highlighting cinematic examples of Postdigital Gothic narratives, first, in found footage horror, and then, in the computer screen horror movies Unfriended (2014) and Unfriended: Dark Web (2018).
Those unwelcome disturbances signify our human entanglement with the nonhuman. The unspeakable manifests itself through the noise of computer glitches, compression artefacts and sonic disruptions.
From sound and image compression formats to the secret algorithms that fuel social media, the digital realm is not an empty portal for ghosts, but rather a vault of manuscripts buried beneath familiar interfaces. See Video: ‘Insidious 3’ Trailer Teases Origins of Blumhouse Horror Franchise (Video) Developed by Timur Bekmambetov (Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter), written by Nelson Greaves and directed by Russian filmmaker Leo Gabriadze, Unfriended has a canny sense of how computers have become, for most of us, a conduit to the world. Instead, Postdigital Gothic calls attention to hidden architecture undergirding the virtual. This represents a turn away from the ‘Cybergothic’ fascination with the ghostly, immaterial aspects of digital media. Postdigital Gothic describes a mode of narrative and critical enquiry that evokes the unsettling nature of human and nonhuman actors interwoven within technological assemblages.
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