Some people consume amateur porn on line. I am a sucker for
amateur fright night videos.
I only properly discovered YouTube a couple of years ago. It
wasn’t till then that I fully understood the power of the internet to
effortlessly dispose of time. Here you’ll find every pleasant television
memory, every edgy advertisement that didn’t get aired on TV, every pop song
that held special meaning and that you had previously thought could only be
called up from your own internal hard drive, every possible interview featuring
your favourite celebrity and every single amateur video, however lacking in
basic intellectual or artistic merit, ever uploaded by Josephine or Joe Average.
The amateur ghost vids are a genre unto themselves. The
first question we lovers of the paranormal are supposed to ask ourselves is: ‘Is
it real?’ This question is often unintentionally answered in the negative by
the makers themselves: the urge to go overboard is just too tempting. The orbs
are pleasantly spooky (orbs are surely the ecotoplasm of the twenty-first
century), but then the light of the bathroom turns on by itself, followed soon
after by the faucet doing the same. Sleeper ‘wakes up’ to investigate. I didn’t
come down in the last shower, along with the restless spirits of the dead.
Other times, as in the imaginatively titled
Ghost Children in Our Basement Caught on Tape, the
video looks genuine at first. These ghost kiddies slowly move toy cars around,
rock chairs, gently throw a doll to the ground and then turn the tele on. They
seem slightly sedated, and one commenter notes that she would much rather have
these polite ghost children than her own brats who would probably trash the
joint. The greenish tinge of the infrared light adds to the understated air of
authenticity.
But this impression is soon spoilt by onscreen messages like
‘subscribe for more ghost children videos’. Would someone who was genuinely
under assault by a poltergeist have the emotional fortitude to create a YouTube
channel with 112 videos? And once you start reading the comments, which pick the video apart,
you lose the forlorn hope that, despite your misgivings, perhaps this really is a genuine depiction.
While the majority of these videos reveal themselves to be fake, for would-be believers like me it is
the liminal area between the likelihood of fakery and the dim hope of
authenticity that makes these tapes so compelling. Perhaps that’s why the
comments calling out the fakes are sometimes so vitriolic. We’d rather remain uncertain than know for sure that someone's trying to pull our collective leg.
This one, which is obviously faked if you look carefully, shows
a speeded-up version of the reason a couple supposedly argue about whether he
makes the bed every day after she leaves for work. Delightful shivers up my
spine before the trick became obvious.
I found
this one very creepy at first, not because it couldn’t
be doctored – anything can be doctored – but because imaginatively
this seems unlikely. If you were going to create a ghostly effect, would you do
it like this? But then too many commenters declared that this was a speck of dust
moving over the lens, and I reluctantly conceded they were probably right.
Even if the trick isn’t obvious, a sure warning sign of fakery
in the majority of examples is that so much of the poltergeist action takes
place squarely in the vision of the time lapse camera that the makers supposedly
leave on for hours at a time.
Sometimes there is a dog involved, barking anxiously and staring at
something the video maker can’t see. The makers always seem compelled to ask
their dogs over and over again ‘What is it, Fluffy?’ (or Sid or whoever), perhaps
expecting their dog to be shocked into speech by the drama of the moment: ‘Dog speaks
for the first time after being asked “What is it?” twenty times during
poltergeist episode’.
Dog See's [sic] a Ghost! is a good example of the ghost-and-dog subgenre. Featuring a creepy attic ghost, it attracted no accusations of fakery, and the dog is genuinely terrified. If the authenticity of these videos should be judged purely by the comments, this one could be authentic (she says hopefully).
What scared me most in this video, though, was the terrible
use of apostrophes and unnecessary commas. ‘See’s’? What’s that about? Can a
verb possess something? Perhaps the apostrophe indicates that the verb is
itself possessed by the ghost of bad punctuation.
The videos recorded on security cameras seem by their very nature to be more authentic because of the low pixel rate and the fact that they're often in black and white.
What do readers think of
this one, which is set in a video store? The person putting the videos away seems
genuinely startled, but perhaps he’s just a good actor?
But in the final analysis, for genuine lovers of thrillers
it doesn’t matter whether these are real or not, any more than it matters whether
the people in amateur porn movies are really into each other. Because this is
really a replica of an existing genre – the thriller that apes reality, pioneered
by the brilliant Blair Witch Project,
and carried further in the Paranormal Activity series – the first of which was pretty
good, with the quality dwindling further with each sequel. We knew Blair Witch and Paranormal Activity weren’t real but it was the similitude that
made them scary, not a mistaken belief that one was watching a doco.
The same goes for these amateur videos. When they don’t
overreach themselves and you avoid reading the comments, they provide
great cheap thrills. It’s the carefully timed depiction of boring domestic
reality, with its combination of natural and technogical sounds, followed by sudden, inexplicable events at unpredictable intervals that produces the delightful eeriness. And of course the overly serious intertitles, which are usually white text on a black background, feature lots of full stops and are often accompanied by nothing but an ominous silence.
A decent supernatural thriller comes out only once every couple of years, so I am chronically thriller deprived. Amateur fright videos fill the gap in the meantime.
Ghost videos and the uncanny
Wikipedia tells us that the state known as the uncanny was first identified by
Ernst Jentsch in his 1906 essay, ‘On the psychology of the uncanny’. According to Jentsch, the uncanny is the result of ‘intellectual uncertainty’; it is always ‘something one does not know one’s way about in’. He goes on to say:
... one of the most successful devices for easily creating uncanny effects is to leave the reader in uncertainty whether a particular figure in the story is a human being or an automaton and to do it in such a way that his attention is not focused directly upon his uncertainty, so that he may not be led to go into the matter and clear it up immediately.
This explains why splatter porn is horrifying but not thrilling, and why its consumers require increasing amounts of gore to get their kicks. Good supernatural thrillers play on this uncertainty rather than revealing the source of the fear, or at least putting off the revelation until late in the day.
Freud goes further, arguing that the uncanny is basically about taboos like sex and death. Because these taboos are traditionally not dealt with directly, we end up projecting all our ‘stuff’ onto them; the uncanny thus reminds us of our own repressed desires. It doesn’t bust the taboos, though – it plays on them. A decent thriller uses all this psychic possibility while not spoiling the effect by exposing the taboo. Thus ghosts should be either invisible or indistinguishable from humans, and gore should be kept to a minimum.
But for someone with anxiety there is another dimension.
Anxiety means a constant fear of chimeras – the next social event, the next
work assignment, and even stretches of time ranging from the next five minutes to the future
itself. Watching a scary video is a way of controlling the way one is exposed
to fear of the unknown, enabling the viewer to mediate their fear in a safe environment.
But as well as immediate fears, perhaps the uncanny also
helps us mediate those unnamed fears that supercapitalism and the threat of
climate change cultivate in the most balanced personalities. Given the Russian
roulette we are playing with finance, people and environment, the future is
terrifying. Much safer to be terrified by chimeras that we know probably aren’t
real.
