I’ve been spending a lot of my research time lately investigating the subgenre of Folk Horror and enjoying what might be called the revival’s second wave, or a rising appreciation of it among cinephiles, spearheaded in recent days by the recent release of Kier-La Janisse’s documentary, Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched from Severin Films. I’m […]
Category: New Media
Das Unheimliche in New Media: online animation, websites, computer games, software, and other electronic forms.
CALL FOR PAPERS: From Carmilla to Drusilla: Vampires Across Popular Culture (dl: Feb 15, 2018)
International Vampire Film and Arts Festival | 7-10 June 2018 | TRANSYLVANIA The third annual International Vampire Film and Arts Festival will take place in Sighisoara in Transylvania, Romania, on June 7th-10th, 2018. And to celebrate their popular fiction dual degree collaboration, WRITE TOGETHER — in which students earn an MA studying at Edinburgh Napier […]
CALL FOR PAPERS: The Vampire Across Popular Culture (dl: Feb 1, 2017)
CALL FOR PAPERS CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT: The Vampire Across Popular Culture INTERNATIONAL VAMPIRE FILM AND ARTS FESTIVAL Transylvania, Romania May 25-28, 2017 http://www.ivfaf.com The second annual International Vampire Film and Arts Festival will take place in Sighisoara in Transylvania, Romania, on May 25th ‐ 28th 2017. [UPDATE: All paper presentations have been chosen for […]
Everything Is Uncanny
The latest print issue of Wired magazine (Sept 2015) includes a mini-feature story on “The New Cultural Literacy 2016,” which includes the above entry on the ubiquity of the uncanny valley in technological design. The phrase “Uncanny Valley” has indeed become so ubiquitous in discourse that it seems to be drummed up whenever anything is […]
Zombie Video Games
In the video article, “Why all the Zombies in Video Games?” the popular gaming review site gamespot turns to Mori’s theory of the uncanny valley for an answer. “[Zombies] seem to encapsulate a perfect storm of repulsion. First off, they have horrible, glazed dead eyes. And eyes appear to be the crucial thing we look […]
Reanimating Dead Photos with New Media Animation
Last year I wrote about the uncanny aura of “Cinemagraphs” — a.k.a. “animated GIFs” in a posting called “Eternal Moments and Smoking Billboards”. I made the point that these images are “an uncanny artform, because it literally “brings to life” still frames — and while this may in some ways be more apparent in stop-motion […]
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