PRACE II ZJAZDU POLSKIEGO TOWARZYSTWA BADAŃ NAD FILMEM I MEDIAMI

Tom 24 (2018)

Zombiczna transmedialność i złośliwy demon obrazów

Strony: 55 - 66

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Abstrakt

Zombic transmediality and the malicious demon of images

Contemporary horror films can no longer be reduced to classical cinematic models. Is the term “genre” still functional? If so, then there is a need to look at genre through the mediation of a technological form. Introduction of the concept of “meta-horror”, or “database horror”, might be necessary. “Zombie cinema” is interpreted on the one hand as trauma of extermination by Žižek, and on the other — as the only contemporary myth by Deleuze and Guattari. Yet, in reality, it is a retreat from magic and the gothic genealogy of horror cinema; it is a turn towards the physiology of death, often reinforced by an index-like relationship with reality. In 1968, George Romero turned zombies into emblems of culture Night of the Living Dead, so intensely marking their presence in transmedial narratives. At the same time, Cannibal Holocaust by Ruggero Deodato belongs to the category of found footage cinema within horror films, which later will be mediated by viral marketing Blair Witch Project. Another genre formula — horror verité — mobilizes epistephilic lust, but the camera and the viewer, as its extension, is attacked and threatened Paranormal Activity, Rec, Cloverfield. Volatility and the flickering nature of genre formulas submerged in a dynamic transmedial cultural space is connected by an always affective communication mode. While locating types of contemporary horror films between the spheres of media reality and real reality, we might reconstruct the meanings of these narratives.