io9
Yes kids, it's time for Horrorhead, a fortnightly column where grossout chaser Annalee Newitz talks about the dark intersection of scifi and horror. Tonight I'm going to a "special advance press screening" of cell phone horror flick One Missed Call because I'm so starved for new scifi-horror that I'll take anything — even a haunted technology movie. That's why I wound up seeing The Ring so many times (haunted videocassette — so analog!), Pulse (haunted Sprint network), and even Poltergeist (they're here! in the television set!). Don't even get me started on the haunted Web site thing (even one of the Hellraiser movies is about an MMO — or is it IN YOUR MIND?). And now there's One Missed Call, with its spooky mobile phones that kill you.
I want to call all these movies scifi because they're about technology doing strange things, which is pretty much the ultimate B-movie scifi plot. But of course then the whole ghost element gets in the way because homicidal spirits of drowned girls or neglected girls or raped girls or you-fill-in-the-scary-girl-thing are not the same as the smooth evil voice of HAL telling Dave about how he'll never open the pod bay door. And yet HAL and the drowned chick from The Ring have a lot in common.
I'd go so far as to say that the horror represented by the scary girls of haunted-tech flicks equals the fear of HAL and every other psychotic AI like say the one in Virtuosity (remember when the interwebs were haunted by Russell Crowe? how did they fit his hunkitude in those pipes?). What's the difference between a so-advanced-it-might-as-well-be-magic AI like HAL and a special-mental-powers-beyond-the-grave mutant girl whose spirit lives on a VHS tape? Pretty much nothing, except one pretends to be science and the other leaves it up to the viewer to decide.
After all, if you wanted to look at The Ring as scifi you really could. Before the psychic kid becomes a ghost, she has awesome mental powers that are right out of X-Men or Heroes (both of which are firmly scifi). Plus, scary girl's mom takes her to doctors who do tons of scientific tests on her, so there's your science, bitches. She has a power that can be measured by science, but not explained by it. Just like HAL, whose madness could never have been predicted by Grace Hopper or other famous computer science nerds.
Haunted technology even has a long and fertile tradition in real life. Sarah Winchester, who built the crazy Winchester Mystery House in Silicon Valley during the late nineteenth century, believed that she was haunted by ghosts in the Winchester Repeating Rifles that killed a zillion natives in the West and made her husband a fortune. Guns are a perfect technology to haunt, if you think about it.
Videodrome, David Cronenberg's mid-1980s scifi flick about haunted televisions, also includes a haunted gun. Or perhaps these televisions and that gun are just controlled by some kind of demonic "broadcast signal" with a pseudo-scientific origin. One could say similar things about the abysmal flick Event Horizon, about a haunted spaceship. Or is it just a ship inhabited by an evil alternate dimension whose properties can be explained in fake sci-babble? What difference does it make? It's all magic; it's all about how technology is mutating us and turning our future selves into something so techno-strange that it's as if the next generation will be monsters.
So I'm going to see One Missed Call, and I'm going to pretend that it's science fiction because whether it's ghosts or Cybermen taking over our bluetooth headsets it's all the same basic stuff. Whether or not it's good stuff . . . well, I'll tell you that in my review tomorrow.
Comments
my dating career has something in common with my cell phone and my tv then...
@tetracycloide: Wow does your dating career have anything to do with a virtual serial killer version of Russell Crowe? Because then I'm jealous.
Another oldy but goody: Demon Seed. Not haunted, but another AI gone wrong plot. Freaky movie. I've only been able to find that one in VHS format though.
@annalee: the closest i've come to that is dating a girl that was turned on by the serial killer version of russell crowe which is, and i hope you'll take my word on this one, nothing ot be jealous of.
I think it's entirely possible to call these movies sci-fi despite the ghost elements, as there's no reason to believe there couldn't be a physical explanation for the existence of ghosts. Not to mention, horror is not mutually exclusive of technology. Frankenstein is the best example of the sci-fi/horror melding.
@NefariousNewt:
Bio-Sci-Fi
Yes, yes... but where does Lawnmower Man come into all of this? Also, hasn't Doctor Who now firmly established that any "supernatural" phenomena are simply stranded aliens from dimension Q trying to get back to their home world?
@FrankenPC: Demon Seed! I have that on VHS. Prometheus the AI downloads himself into a home security system and forces uppity lady Julie Christie to become his barefoot-and-pregnant housewife! OMG what a movie. "I can give you pleasure like a man would."
The difference between a so-advanced-it-might-as-well-be-magic AI like HAL and a special-mental-powers-beyond-the-grave mutant girl is that HAL is not magic in the universe in which that story takes place and mutant girl is. Sci-fi, at least as I would define the genre, is about fictional science. There is no fictional science in the ring or one missed call only fictional paranormal events.
@tetracycloide: Unfortunately, he is buff and hot as hell in Romper Stomper (especially in his underwear). You just have to overlook the fact that he's, like, a Nazi. Which was hard for me to do.
I LOVE science fiction/horror movies. I am not ashamed to say that The Ring scared the bejesus out of me and I had to cover up my TV with a blanket for a week. Pulse was terrible, but the original Japanese version is supposed to be good. I'm sure there's a read of this blog out there that is into Japanese horror cinema...was it?
the movie AI was scary.
Oh wait, I confused the word scary with long and boring.
If scary stuff is up your aisle, go and have a look at utterly brilliant video director Chris Cunningham's work with Aphex Twin and Squarepusher. Enough bio/tech-horror to go around for everyone.
@TruculentandUnreliable: yeah i was more or less told that about romper stomper as well as the one movie with brad pit where he gets the shit beat out of him over some chic, spy game i think it was. apparently bloody hot guy does it for some girls.
@DeathbyTheremin: oh dear god, you had to go there, didn't you? my bejeezus has just left me, and it didn't leave a forwarding address.
@annalee:
That Tesseracting robot in the basement was one of the most wild ideas I've ever seen in robotics. Really an underdog of a movie.
@tetracycloide: Yeah, not so much into bloody dudes. More the super-buff bald guys in their underwear.
@geekgrrl: Tee hee.
Actually, most of these would be considered Science Fantasy. To be truly Sci-Fi, there has to be a technical explanation on how it happens.
Maybe io9 would be a good place to have a list of SF sub-genres, being that this is looking to be the end-all be-all of Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror news and views.
HAL was not evil or mad, merely broken. We should try to avoid anthropomorphizing machines: they really, really hate it.
virtuosity had absolutely nothing to do with the interwebz or any of it's constituent tubes.
Now, if your going to wax intellectual about the subject...
@DeathbyTheremin: Agreed, I stumbled across their stuff on Netflix. Well worth worth watching.
oh newitz please tell me youve seen the miike version of this stinker, one missed call.
i think you've got a great sci-fi thing going simply comparing what the asian filmmakers did with the ideas and how the american filmmakers changed the narrative.
@dagzine: Haven't seen the Miike version of One Missed Call, though I gotta say I thought the US version of The Ring actually did a great job translating the Japanese horror into a US context.
What was that movie, with the like posessed cars, trying to kill people?
I've heard that haunted-tech J-horror is less about technophobia, and more about the fear of disease. In Ringu or the original Missed Call series, the tech is just a vehicle for a fatal virus, of sorts. The horror is in watching the infection spread.
Miike's Missed Call was better than expected.
I'll assume the remake's garbage.
You know, I thought the Miike version of One Missed Called sucked quite hard on its own, so I'm not particularly upset that they've remade it.
Oh, and I agree with @annalee, the US Ring is not bad.
However, I will never forgive the remake of Dark Water because the original rocked scary dead little girl goodness like mad! It's got - uh - pipes, so I'm going to go ahead and call it steampunk hence obviously scifi.
Incidentally, how about the horror thematic in Sunshine?
Check out the Marshall half-stack and Stratocaster in the background of the photo. Reminds me of Caspar Broetzmann, whose music (played on that exact gear) would make a perfect soundtrack for movies like The Ring. The music alone is scarier than most scary movies.
[en.wikipedia.org]
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