[Commlist] CFP: Dead Media: Contemporary Horror and The Analogue - symposium

*Dead Media: Contemporary Horror and The Analogue*

*A BAFTSS Horror Studies SIG Symposium*

**

*ONLINE – SATURDAY 13^TH JANUARY 2024*

**

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outdated modes of photography and film.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.

*Topics proposed (which should focus on contemporary – e.g. post-2000 – 
horror media of any kind) might include, but are not limited to:*

  * Analogue media forms as haunted objects/conduits of terror
  * Analogue media as a narrative device
  * The aesthetic qualities (visual/aural) of outdated media (static,
    scratch, glitch, etc.)
  * The physicality of obsolete media formats (video, vinyl, tape,
    analogue photography, etc.)
  * Nostalgia and analogue media
  * Transnational/international analogue horror
  * Analogue horror, representation, and marginalisation
  * Revisiting, recycling, remixing and remaking horror with analogue forms
  * Fandoms/collectors of analogue horror media
  * Cross platform, multiplatform, and transmedia analogue horrors
  * Analogue media franchises/analogue media in pre-existing horror
    franchises

*Papers should be 15 minutes in length. Abstracts of 200 - 250 words 
plus a short bio (100 words max) should be sent to the event organisers, 
Laura Mee (**(l.mee2 /at/ herts.ac.uk)* <mailto:(l.mee2 /at/ herts.ac.uk)>*) and 
Shellie McMurdo (**(s.mcmurdo2 /at/ herts.ac.uk)* 
<mailto:(s.mcmurdo2 /at/ herts.ac.uk)>*) by 29^th September 2023. Queries can 
also be addressed to the organisers at these email addresses. *

**

*No registration fee is intended for this event. *


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