[Commlist] Symposium: Dead Media: Contemporary Horror and the Analogue

*DEAD MEDIA: CONTEMPORARY HORROR AND THE ANALOGUE*

*A BAFTSS Horror Studies SIG symposium *

*Saturday January 13^th , online*

**

*Full programme and (free) registration available here. 
<https://baftsshorror.weebly.com/dead-media-contemporary-horror-and-the-analogue-symposium.html>*

This symposium will explore the reappropriation of analogue formats and 
styles within the contemporary horror genre across various media 
platforms. The event is intended to connect media scholars working in 
this area and highlight current research across relevant topics, with a 
view to future collaboration.

​

While the ‘dead’ in ‘dead media’ evokes themes of death and haunting 
situated at the heart of the genre, the term is also indebted to media 
archaeology and Bruce Sterling’s Dead Media Project, an archive of 
obsolete technologies initiated in the 1990s as digital formats began to 
take off and take over from analogue. Much existing scholarly work has 
explored the cultural contexts and the collection, distribution and 
reception of analogue media forms such as vinyl, video, and obsolete or 
outdated modes of photography and film. But less attention has been 
given to how dead media objects now function within the contemporary 
horror genre and its diegeses. Horror has, of course, always been quick 
to reflect the threats of new technology, and haunted, cursed, or 
dangerous media has provided fertile ground for horror narratives. But a 
recent raft of films (V/H/S/94, Antrum), series (Dead Wax, Archive 81), 
games (Outlast, Fatal Frame), podcasts (Video Palace) and web series 
(Local 58) use analogue objects at the centre of their narratives to 
explore the malevolent possibilities of dead media in the digital age. 
Many of these examples, along with others within music, literature, and 
visual art also utilise analogue aesthetics such as glitches, static or 
other forms of media degradation. In contemporary horror, dead media is 
utilised in various ways: as an object of nostalgia, as a reverent nod 
to the genre’s past, to forefront a gritty analogue aesthetic, or to 
engage with the horror of recording, repeating and recycling—ever more 
relevant in our hypermediated world.


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