Horror Culture in the New Millennium: Digital Dissonance and Technohorror by Daniel Powell (review)

Horror fiction is, or should be, of increasing interest to folklorists. The recent surge in popularity of the so-called “folk horror” subgenre is only one obvious area for folkloristic engagement. More broadly, horror texts and horror fandoms offer fascinating commentary on contemporary cultural issues and ideas with which folklorists are centrally concerned.

According to Daniel Powell, much recent horror and science fiction points to the dehumanizing, disconnecting potential of digital technologies. He offers a thoughtful meditation on these themes across six chapters, primarily through close readings of literary and filmic texts supplemented with excerpts of interviews with authors, editors, and others currently working within the horror community. For Powell, “technohorror”—a term in use, in hyphenated form, since at least 1987—comprises those works that “[explore] the potentially disquieting negotiations humans enter into with our tools, machines, and social structures” (p. 22).

The first chapter considers the Freudian uncanny in films like Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), and Ex Machina (2014), then looks back on literary horror of the past two centuries to create a “taxonomy of the horrific” (p. 9). Powell’s discussion here touches on what he calls “the oldest forms of the speech act” (p. 7), that is, oral folk narratives. He is explicit about his evolutionary approach both to folklore and to the horror genre (which are both forms of storytelling, in his usage, and which he therefore considers of a piece): “This study, which investigates narratives located along a continuum of expression progressing from the oral to the digital— from the primitive to the contemporary—then regards the visceral, overt threat portended by the monstrous as roughly analogous to the oral tradition. Technohorror . . . is generally correspondent with our digital present” (p. 8). He goes so far as to provide a pyramidal chart illustrating the themes he associates with different horror subgenres, from “monstrous” fiction at the bottom—characterized as “grotesque, exaggerated, interstitial, abnormal, menacing, artificial, predatory” (p. 9)—to technohorror at the top. The hierarchy implied in Powell’s evolutionary approach, and made explicit in the pyramid chart, seems more a matter of personal taste than of fact, as the contemporary horror genre continues to produce compelling, sophisticated, and socially relevant works dealing with all of the categories he outlines.

“Digital dissonance” is Powell’s name for what he sees as the mismatch between the speed of technological development and the capacity of human beings to adapt their expressive forms to those technologies. He explores this theme in the book’s second chapter, which describes the changing publishing practices adopted by various horror authors in the face of advancing digital technologies. The chapter includes excerpts of interviews with authors, editors, and others in the horror universe.

Chapter 3, “From Folklore to Netlore,” reminds readers of the truism that folklore undergirds much horror fiction. Here, Powell discusses the presence of “artifacts” of folklore in digital cultures, citing Andrew Lang (via Alan Dundes) on folklore as a kind of archaeology of ephemera (p. 57). The chapter also outlines vernacular venues of horror production (following Robert Glenn Howard on the “vernacular web”) and briefly considers the role of folkloric ostension in digital contexts. Toward the end of the chapter, Powell turns to the internet monster Slender Man. He writes: “The grim details of the Slender Man Stabbing also indicate that [the victim] and her family had no sense of the imminent attack. In this way, the case study is an almost textbook example of technohorror’s reach into our lived experience” (p. 77).

It isn’t immediately clear why Powell chooses to include a chapter on folklore, but it seems to stem from his evolutionary orientation, and Powell is at pains to prove that folklore remains vital in the digital age. The shift toward the digital, he suggests, “has not only positively remediated the field in terms of ease of data...