Digital Horror, an edited collection from Xavier Aldana-Reyes and Linnie Blake

In 2002, I decided to go and watch the re-make of The Ring at my local cinema. The next day I was ill from school and decided to watch a movie to pass the time. This was the time of VCRs and to amuse myself I went through the video tapes which had been used to record from television but hadn’t been labelled. (A pet peeve of mine). I had to play the tapes in order to know what was on them and was somewhat horrified when I stumbled upon the Ring (1998) playing from just the right (or wrong, depending on your point of view) section to give me heebie-jeebies. Apparently, I had forgotten that I had recorded the film sometime in the past. Anyway, I legged it upstairs and crawled into bed away from the horrors on the screen. As is befitting childhood fears, I checked under the bed for monsters and ending up staring into the screen of an old television that had been stored under my bed. I don’t think I slept properly for weeks.

With this in mind, I’m not sure if I am excited or terrified by the publication of Digital Horror: Haunted Technologies, Network Panic and the Found Footage Phenomenon (2015), an edited collection from Xavier Aldana-Reyes and Linnie Blake. In fact it may be the first time that anyone has been horrified by the publication of an academic book. However, given how much I enjoyed Aldana-Reyes’ Body Gothic (2014) – which you can read about here and here – I think it might be worth trying to overcome my fears.