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Rob Savage

Posted on March 19, 2021

Host and Found Footage in the Age of COVID-19: Horrific Hyperreality

Guest Post

Everything happens over Zoom, now. Even séances. Host (2020), directed by independent British filmmaker Rob Savage, follows a group of friends who make the ill-informed decision to conduct a séance over Zoom. The group is whittled down, one by one, as they confront a supernatural entity they conjure through the internet. Host reveals the Zoom room as a haunted space, one that requires constant negotiation with (un)reality and disruptions in spatiality. While filmmakers around the world have been working with found footage for decades, the social upheaval of COVID-19 created a unique opportunity for horror to address our complicated relationship with technology during this period of forced isolation, collective grief, and desperate uncertainty. Read more

Dawn of the Deaf
Posted on August 29, 2018

The Gifts of Deafness in Horror

Guest Post

There remains debate as to whether deafness and hearing-impairments should be classified as disabilities.  Many, including those within the deaf community and their allies, affirm that deafness is a culture rather than a disability.  Still, others affirm that having a hearing impairment imposes disadvantages on an individual.  We can think of many ways that being deaf brings challenges in common daily life activities- the ringing of a doorbell, the answering the telephone, the knock of a door.  In horror media, deafness may mean missing the screams of loved ones, or not perceiving an audible threat, until the threat is close enough to sense by other means.

Horror characters rely on specific strengths to get through the terror they are experiencing and/ or to survive.  In some examples of television and film, deaf characters utilize their hearing impairments as a gift to fend off the horrors while the hearing characters around them remain vulnerable.  In these instances, we see a paradigm shift from one in which deaf persons suffer incapacities to one in which their deafness relates to a tenacity in the face of terror, even as they  maintain their human vulnerability.

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