Paranormal Activity: Surveillance and Ghosts

Tod Williams Paranormal Activity 2 (2010)

Paranormal Activity makes concrete the long, arcane history of film as a haunting, and asks how surveillance turns us all into ghosts.

One reading of Paranormal Activity 2, by theorists Steven Shaviro and Julia Leyda, identifies the surveillance cameras used in the film as the true possessors: the technology installed to monitor the supernatural seemingly summon it instead. Watching PA2 is like inhabiting the logic of surveillance itself, the presence of danger without explicit knowledge of a threat. Only after they are in place does the spirit begin to interact with the material world. Lacking a human host, the ghost finds refuge inside the cameras, growing stronger as it grows accustomed to its techno-organic body. Otherwise mundane footage of empty rooms and pool cleaners suddenly becomes hallmarks of the haunted house, and the audience its spectral guest.

The surveillance camera further positions the viewer, also, as a kind of ghost, disembodied, levitating and teleporting through walls, and between live feeds. Surveillance engenders the spirit with an omnipresence and a way of moving through space whilst remaining unseen by the living. Doubly, the viewer can see everything, but is not in control of what they are seeing, as if possessed. Shaviro and Leyda go on to argue that instead of a Big Brother who watches from above, the world has moved to an inverse state described as "sousveillance", a watching from below. They write that we find ourselves in a participatory Panopticon, where thousands of little brothers and little sisters have digitised, possessing our images, our joy, and our pain a thousand times over.

Paranormal Activity only makes concrete the long, arcane history of film as a haunting. Celluloid's ability to "capture" time, hold an imprint of a physical moment, then breathe new life into those who are already dead, has long been thought of as supernatural. Cinema "appears to animate the inanimate human body", 24 times a second, writes theorist Laura Mulvey, as "the photographic index reaches out towards the uncanny as an effect of confusion between the living and dead." But as digital processes displace historically analogue ones, we also displace our own physical reality into one that is virtual, and one where all information is staged on a conceptually different numerical domain. The more of ourselves we feed into this system, the more ghostly we become.

"The digital arts render all expressions as identical since they are all ultimately reducible to the same computational notation. The basis of all representation is virtuality: mathematical abstractions that render all signs as equivalent regardless of their output medium. Digital media are neither visual, nor textual, nor musical - they are simulations." - The Virtual Life of Film, David Rodowick

Tod Williams Paranormal Activity 2 (2010)

The intertwining of our digital lives with our irl-sphere has created ghosts of us, and our contemporary possessors are huge, intangible entities that bear down upon us from beyond.

Horror games, too, take advantage of their immersive medium, the tactility of digital environments and our tendency to actualise within them via haptics. Games like Fatal Frame or Outlast have the player traverse a haunted mansion with only a camera to defend themselves, looking through the lens to see the ghosts, and in doing so, you let them inside you. Through controller and screen, our bodies are digitised, poured into avatars that host us. Subject becomes object, and objecthood is a kind of death: swallowed by immersion, murdered and reanimated in an untouchable loop.

The intertwining of our digital lives with our irl-sphere has created ghosts of us, and our contemporary possessors are huge, intangible entities that bear down upon us from beyond. Paranormal Activity similarly found haunting in the architecture of its moment. The first film, released in 2007, feels porous, already possessed. As the crash of 2008 loomed, the houses themselves became sites of dispossession, hollow shells ready to be entered by something outside. The haunted architecture in question, a McMansion (bloated, ostentatious, mass-produced) in middle-class, suburban America, offers little protection to both ghostly possession and dispossession, as foreclosure rolled in on the horizon. The haunting isn't an aberration but an expression of the ordinary: generic rooms, generic footage, where disorder rises from sheer repetition.

In itself, the departure from material bodies is scary. Via digitisation, the Paranormal Activity films slip, totally, from our plane. As their digitised homes are left ajar to the dead, the family's bodies are cast out across a binary sea, empty matrices ready to be filled. These outside forces actualise within and through the digital realm, which acts as their summoner. The surveillance system doesn't protect the house so much as hollow it out, reducing bodies and furniture alike into grainy data feeds. In Paranormal Activity 2, as in our own life as Watched Things, the characters' bodies and house are equalised, all placed on the same plane of that which seeks to possess them. Surveillance creates doppelgangers of us, in an uncanny otherworld constructed from our boot prints in code-green snow. One that is ungraspable, stolen, easy to manipulate and impossible to destroy.

Fatal Frame (2002), developed by Tecmo

As digital photography has far surpassed celluloid in popularity, we create digital versions of ourselves through social media, which in many cases are uncanny doppelgangers of our own lives. Meanwhile, private companies collect information through nameless algorithms, constructing our digital ghosts to better sell us advertisements, songs, and moods. Increasingly, it becomes difficult to hold ownership over this "self" as its multiplication slips across platforms, out of our grasp. Sometimes an old Instagram post, an adolescent tweet, a message long thought lost, surfaces again. These revenants remind us that nothing is truly gone; everything waits, ready to return and look back at us.

Stripped of our physicality, our existence is bound to the virtual realm - to the dark side of the woods.

Anyone who grew up in rural England knows that ghost stories are commonplace. I remember playing out with friends, running through the dark boughs of the woods at the end of our village, cut through by the Avon, a river separating the "village" side of the woods from what we called the "dark" side. There were a few bridges that crossed from The Village to The Dark, and the one we chose had a large, metal structure that sent our footsteps groaning over the water like an alarm.

The villagers said that in the heart of The Dark there lay an abandoned Victorian swimming pool, whose steps sunk deep into mossy rainwater. They told stories about the drowned, how they had seen them there, heard them stalking the pines. We must have been in that forest for almost an hour, still without sight of the fabled pool. As we lost hope and the tension loosened slightly, my friend took a group photo. The flash shattered the blackness, and on the tiny LCD screen, behind us, was a shape. Zooming in to its pixelated depths, I swore I could make out a face, peering from just behind my back, a hand draped over my shoulder. That was enough to send us running home, none of us admitting we were afraid.

The image of the face hiding in the dark followed me: it stayed in the shadows of my room for months. My friend sent the picture around to us some years later, but I never kept it. The digital realm felt too similar, too slippery to protect me. Our photos, including the one of me in the woods with the presence, are terrifying because they are all images of ghosts, ectoplasm that will outlive their hosts; stripped of our physicality, our existence is bound to the virtual realm - to the dark side of the woods.

A recent New York Times article details how Peter Listro's son is gathering data from his father to turn him into an AI avatar. He reasons that his 83-year-old father, diagnosed with cancer, will pass before he sees his son get married and have children of his own, and he has always imagined how happy his father would be the day he saw himself become a grandfather. In the face of grief, Listro has opted to spend what time he has left sacrificing his physical body to the digital realm. His future children will get to see and interact with their grandfather, but what they will inherit is not a body but a ghost, a likeness stitched together from recordings. Might they inform the AI Listro that he is dead? How will Listro take the news? I fear for our connection to the old world, as we trade one haunting for another. AI is like Pandora's Box; we have already opened it, and it will be capable of unknowable things, arising with a philosophy and language made in digital purgatory, where we have all already been reduced to a sea of dust.

Whilst writing this, I tried to track down the image from my time ghost-hunting in the woods, but it's gone. My friends can't find it. My phone with the file long-dead. But I can't escape the feeling that it's still out there, swimming through an empty pool.

Author

Harry Bayley is a programmer, writer and filmmaker currently living in Taipei. Caught between wanting to be uploaded to the cloud and a fear of Skynet, he writes to find understanding in the machine and [de]mystify its gestures.

Editors

Caleb Carter is a co-founder/editor of The Big Ship

Bryson Edward Howe is a co-founder/editor of The Big Ship