I’ve been thinking about the relationship between technology and horror lately. In most cases, technology is starkly contrasted with The Horror, shown as something that breaks down in the face of the unexpected and the unknown. Very often, it’s the weapons and tools that humans place their trust in that are shown as insufficient (as in Aliens), but other technology often fails too. The cage can’t contain the monster (Akira and many, many others), the readings are off the chart (too many to count), the computer’s going amuck and printing apocalyptic messages (Prince of Darkness), we can’t make sense of the data (again too many to count), the video tape doesn’t have a control track (The Ring), there’s nothing but static on the radio (The Mothman Prophecies), and so on.

Even in movies and stories where technology is brought in to record or control the supernatural, with some knowledge of what it’s up against, it usually fails. The paranormal researchers in Poltergeist see the time-lapse recording of a toy car moving a few feet in the span of many hours as their crowning achievement, and in the face of the movie’s haunting, they can’t believe what they’re seeing, finally cracking under the strain and giving up, leaving the resolution of the problem in the hands of a midget medium. The curse in The Ring is ambivalent in its relationship to technology, on one hand, it’s centered around and transmitted by a technological medium, on the other hand, the video tape has no control track, and those cursed can’t be photographed or videotaped without unexplained distortions of the image.

I think that’s a generally very unimaginative and maybe even luddite use of technology in horror. Instead of using science and technology as something that breaks down in the face of the horror, it’s much more interesting and chilling to let technology calmly document and verify the unthinkable, confirming to us that what we do not want to believe is, in fact, true. The technology confirms the impossible, discarding the possibility of the “it’s all in his head” mental illness explanation.

There have been a few attempts at this. I remember one of my favorite Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes, Season 8, Episode 7, The Terror From the Year 5000, actually tries to do this. The example is interesting because it’s not a horrible idea, but it’s incredibly inept. The scientists in the movie attempt to carbon date something that’s come through a time warp from the future, and the carbon dating verifies that it’s indeed from the year 5000. It’s sheer idiocy, of course, given the way carbon dating works, but it’s at least trying to make technology into a cool, objective witness to the impossible.

In Lars Von Trier’s The Kingdom, technology is put to use once or twice to confirm paranormal phenomena. Specifically, a computer is used to enhance audio from an empty room until a ghostly voice is heard, to chilling effect. However, the whole of The Kingdom is very anti-science, with the premise of the story being that there’s too much science and rationalism (in a hospital!), and that’s what’s causing many of the supernatural problems.

It’s hard for me to come up with more examples, although they surely exist. It’s clear, however, that they are few in comparison to the counter-examples. It’s possible that the tendency to show science and technology as limited in scope and failing when confronting the Horror is something that we’ve inherited from horror’s romantic roots. The romantic poets were very opposed to rationalism and and reductionism, a mark that often shows in their work.

Horror as a genre has been good at using technology as a creator of the horror (Frankenstein and innumerable other over-reacher/mad scientist stories), sometimes as a medium for the horror to twist and distort or use for its own ends (The Ring, The Mothman Prophecies), and often as a feeble strawman for the horror to destroy as an illustration of man’s impotency (Aliens, Akira), but it’s rarely been used for that which science and technology is good at: Recording and verifying. There’s untapped horror potential there, I believe.

And for those who fear idiotic pseudo-scientific overexplanations of the paranormal that will destroy all mystery, a la the dread midichlorians from the Star Wars prequels, that’s not what I’m talking about. But if someone actually took the time to establish science as useful and not just for narrow-minded professors in tweed, it would at least be a bit more shocking when science finally failed to explain something. As it is, we’re pretty used to it.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 9th, 2005 at 5:06 am and is filed under Horror. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.