‘If You’re Seeing This, I’m Probably Dead’: Poe, Lovecraft, and the Literary Heritage of Found Footage Horror Edward Anderson Portions delivered at South Atlantic Modern Language Association 2012 Convention It has been said that horror turns on the absence of something essential or the presence of something unexpected. Sometimes, both are true. The definitions and consequences of the horrific can be affected just as profoundly by the structure of a narrative as by its elements. What I will here refer to as ‘recovered manuscript fiction’ could be considered a subcategory of epistolary fiction, but possessing a distinct and identifiable set of characteristics which render it decidedly different than what we would expect of more widelyregarded works like Dostoevysky’s Poor Folk¸ or Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters, or even another example from horror, such as Dracula. The horror of recovered manuscript fiction is alluded to in its own label; it is the found chronicle of some adventure—or misadventure—told by the very figure who has undergone the experience has not returned to tell the tale in the flesh. What is not so selfevident is the degree to which interactions and connections are made possible by this narrative situation, developments that other narrative types might preclude, such as peculiar engagement strategies and uniquelyfunctioning plot constructions. The body of film which has developed as a crossmedia descendant of recovered manuscript literature displays equivalent hallmarks, though technological evolution has allowed for radical approaches to this particular storytelling practice.
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‘If You’re Seeing This, I’m Probably Dead’: Poe, Lovecraft, and the Literary Heritage of
Found Footage Horror
Edward Anderson
Portions delivered at South Atlantic Modern Language Association 2012 Convention
It has been said that horror turns on the absence of something essential or the presence of
something unexpected. Sometimes, both are true. The definitions and consequences of the
horrific can be affected just as profoundly by the structure of a narrative as by its elements.
What I will here refer to as ‘recovered manuscript fiction’ could be considered a subcategory of
epistolary fiction, but possessing a distinct and identifiable set of characteristics which render it
decidedly different than what we would expect of more widelyregarded works like
Dostoevysky’s Poor Folk or Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters, or even another example from
horror, such as Dracula. The horror of recovered manuscript fiction is alluded to in its own
label; it is the found chronicle of some adventure—or misadventure—told by the very figure who
has undergone the experience has not returned to tell the tale in the flesh. What is not so
selfevident is the degree to which interactions and connections are made possible by this
narrative situation, developments that other narrative types might preclude, such as peculiar
engagement strategies and uniquelyfunctioning plot constructions. The body of film which has
developed as a crossmedia descendant of recovered manuscript literature displays equivalent
hallmarks, though technological evolution has allowed for radical approaches to this particular
updated or finished before he meets his end. The fact that he often does so ‘out loud’, with
references made to the planning of the text in the text itself, is a strategy of authenticating the
narrative, of better equipping the reader to believe that the account is happening—has
happened—within their own physical realm. This all has an obvious and profound effect on 1
content, as, barring aforementioned philosophical and redemptive reflections, the authors of the
examples we shall study here dedicate little space to any detail that does not contribute to the
reader’s understanding of the situation. This results in a cast of characters who are exceptionally
transient, often devoid even of name and disappearing from the narrative as soon as the function
of their presence is fulfilled. The state of such characters should not be mistaken as being
indicative of a lack of dimensionality of the recovered manuscript story, however, as those
figures, by virtue of their nearfacelessness, significantly enrich the reader’s understanding of the
situation, even if only by our reaction to them. Thus, such characters attain a unique type of
realism that we see just as often in the films that the recovered manuscript form has spun off.
So many discursive concerns and engaging structural considerations thus identified, we
can thus turn to a specific example of the form. Here, we will focus our attentions on one of
Edgar Allen Poe’s tales as a prototypical. It would, initially, seem an obvious choice to examine
his only novel, the Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, an epistolary of diary entries
from the misadventures of a deceased sailor. But, as with Defoe, this is where the previous
description of the recovered manuscript form becomes relevant; Arthur Gordon Pym does not
qualify as recovered manuscript because, narrativelyspeaking, Pym died after the piece was
passed on to the next link in the chain of delivery (a narrative device which will be examined
1 Tangentially: this raises the question of how prudent it would be, regardless of modern writing conventions, to refer to the action of a given recovered manuscript in past tense.
later); the recovered part of the ‘recovered manuscript’ moniker distinguishes Pym as something
different in its nature.
But Pym, though being unique for its length amongst Poe’s work, is not the first of its
kind thematically, and its antecedent proves a more successful example of the narrative type we
are concerning ourselves with. Just as Poe would write his dead women and premature burial
tales, so the sea and the idea of a record, what’s found of the otherwise lost, had called to him
half a decade before, in ‘Ms. Found In a Bottle’ (1833). A relatively obscure entry within Poe’s
omnibus, the story nevertheless provides us with all the structural requirements heretofore
identified; we are quickly introduced to the journal of the unnamed narrator, a chronically
restless and ironically directionless sailor who finds himself in the midst of a gale. He is hurled
from his own ship and lands, seemingly undetected, on the deck of a mysterious vessel bound for
the South Pole. In his journal, the presented record of the tale, it is made clear that such a
destination can only mean death. As he tries to find a means to preserve himself aboard while
simultaneously grasping for a safe exit, he takes desperate notes about the ineffable crew of the
ghost ship;
A man passed by my place of concealment…. He muttered to himself, in a low broken tone, some words of a language which I could not understand, and groped in a corner among a pile of singularlooking instruments…. His manner was a wild mixture of the peevishness of second childhood, and the solemn dignity of a God. He at length went on deck, and I saw him no more. (111)
The transience of this figure could be chalked up to the compactness of short story as a form. By
its nature as a literature of panic, however, written under the constant threat of mortal danger,
recovered manuscript fiction alters the valuation of such an appearance, imbuing it with that
same air of inescapability that so hangs over the entire presentation of the tale.
Meanwhile, although the established conditions seem inhospitable to reflection, quite the
contrary is true. Rightly or wrongly, products of the horror genre are often maligned for their
lack of psychological depth in favor of salacious and visceral thrills, but good literature is often
defined by some degree of emotional development. Horror, as a larger genre, is by no means
barred from such heights, while our example from Poe shows how the deliberate inclusion of
moral and philosophical reflection would come to be a staple of the genre. In an otherwise
unprefaced passage, the narrator shares an emerging sense of his own fate:
A feeling, for which I have no name, has taken possession of my soul —a sensation which will admit of no analysis, to which the lessons of bygone times are inadequate, and for which I fear futurity itself will offer me no key. To a mind constituted like my own, the latter consideration is an evil. I shall never—I know that I shall never—be satisfied with regard to the nature of my conceptions. Yet it is not wonderful that these conceptions are indefinite, since they have their origin in sources so utterly novel. A new sense—a new entity is added to my soul (112).
This sense of dread is an evolving one, however, and, as he considers it, the narrator can
distinguish the peculiar tortuousness of time, of a period that closes in on fate, but has some
duration still set aside to intimidate, to subsequently, ironically drive the narrator’s reflections.
I have just left the deck, where I find it impossible to maintain a footing, although the crew seem to experience little inconvenience. It appears to me a miracle of miracles that our enormous bulk is not swallowed up at once and forever. We are surely doomed to hover continually upon the brink of Eternity, without taking a final plunge into the abyss. From billows a thousand times more stupendous than any I have ever seen, we glide away with the facility of the arrowy seagull; and the colossal waters rear their heads above us like demons of the deep, but like demons confined to simple threats and forbidden to destroy (11314).
Dour though the forecast is, and even within the confines of the involuntary voyage—the cage of
a ship gaining on its destination, on finality itself—valuable room in this endemically
timebound narrative is set aside specifically for the act of chronicling. Indeed, the exploration
of deep emotions is truly endemic to the structure here, as the narrator of the recovered
manuscript is expected to engage in the sort of philosophical and moral reflection any actual
person might engage in upon such an event, thereby exposing, perhaps, the expectation of
realism even in the midst of a clearly fantastical situation. At some point, then, he reader comes
to suspend disbelief of the supernatural elements, the purely fictional points of the fiction, as the
realistic elements are introduced, come to be expected and, as such, allow for an adoption of the
tale as realistically feasible in respects that must still be explored.
To continue the exploration of that obscuring of the boundary between the situation of the
narrative and that of its delivery as narrative to the viewer, we can turn Lovecraft’s ‘Call of
Cthulhu’. Here, narrator Weyland Thurston records the progress of his research of a malevolent
pagan god and the cult that worships it. If, according to the categorical conventions of
epistolary, ‘Ms. Found in a Bottle’ is to be considered monologic—just the one narrator’s
tale—Cthulhu makes a neat feat out of being polylogic while still maintaining an authentic,
identifiable ‘recoveredness’ in its nature. Ostensible testimonies and notes of several chroniclers
are included, all having been recovered from the belongings of narrator Thurston’s deceased
uncle. As a reflection in his own notes, Thurston comes to realize that it is the very knowledge
of the existence of this supernatural evil that has already doomed him;
“… [This] record of mine… wherein is pieced together that which I hope may never be pieced together again. I have looked upon all that the universe has to hold of horror…. As my uncle went… so I shall go. I know too much, and the cult still lives. … Cthulhu still lives, too, I suppose…. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men…. Let me pray that, if I do not survive this manuscript, my executors may put caution before audacity and see that it meets no other eye.”
Lovecraft heads ‘Call of Cthulhu’ with a note that, yet again, the story the reader is about to
embark on was recovered from a dead man’s papers: Thurston’s own. Assuming that disbelief
identifier, ‘horror'—is a commercial, narrative subgenre, the label of which is, with respect to
reality, a misnomer; all is fabricated, nothing is truly recovered, no previouslysynthesized
element is found in the development process. If the product is effective however, its subjective
status of fiction can, for the reader, become blurred or more easily ignored in much the same
manner as we’ve seen in the literary examples already discussed.
But, if the body of literature that qualifies as recovered manuscript fiction is slight, so
found footage horror, as one of the newest subgenres of horror and one of the most novel
storytelling styles currently being used in filmmaking, suffers from a reputation that might just
threaten to likewise curtail its development. As tolerance for horror chronically ebbs amongst
professional film critics, amateur bloggers and horrordedicated websites such as
BloodyDisgusting, Fangoria, and ShockTilYouDrop.com have taken over much of the serious
discussion about the benefits, liabilities, and curiosities of the form. Increasingly, the
demographic of the average horror movie reviewer approaches that of the average horror movie
fan, as well as the average found footage horror filmmaker; young to early middleaged, male,
and tech savvy , a characteristic that becomes important as we consider the reliance of the 3
narrative form on the availability and, anymore, pervasivity of consumer communications
technologies. The form is likewise overlooked within academia, perhaps due to assumptions of
its quality based on the proliferation of those blevel entries that, as with the rest of horror,
discursively detract from the achievements and importance of superior examples. Or, we might
assume that the lack of critical interest is a qualitative judgment made against the relatively scant
3 Many of today’s prominent found footage filmmakers, such as Paco Plaza (Rec, 2007), Oren Peli (Paranormal Activity, 2007), and Matt Reeves (Cloverfield, 2008) fit this description, as do the filmmakers of such landmark found footage pieces as Ruggero Deodato (Cannibal Holocaust, 1980, during which time the director was 41) and Daniel Myrick (who was 37 when The Blair Witch Project was released in 1999).
subdivision of a larger genre that, itself, has had difficulties being taken seriously. This last
supposition rings false, however, considering the wealth of serious study dedicated to related
subjects, such as the cultural foundations of the slasher movie, the sociopolitical underpinnings
of cinematic zombie mythology and, of course, issues ranging from familial tensions to
consumer psychology to gender difference amongst classic creature features. Found footage
horror continues to be produced, however, and in greater volumes all the time. In 2012,
Paranormal Activity 3 enjoyed an opening weekend of $52.6 million, a fall record at the time
(Box Office Mojo). That franchise, arguably the most successful in the subgenre, will be
continued in another film in 2015. And it will be competing with a host of new entries, including
The Gallows, The Fear Project, Stalker, The X Species, and Occupants, as well as international
titles including Ukraine’s Ghoul, and the UK’s Night Fall. Meanwhile, 2014 saw the most
recent installment of perhaps the most successful nonAmerican franchise, the Spanish [REC]
series. 4
But, academic attention notwithstanding, even the marketplace prevalence of the form is
a radical departure from where such films were even thirty years ago, at the dawn of practical
home filmmaking. At that point, with Poe and Lovecraft long dead and the recovered
manuscript form being taken up only occasionally and never with any great degree of success, it
becomes fascinating that the ultimate impetus for the resurgence of such a unique narrative
perspective would not be the development of new media content, but of new media forms and
increased consumer access. The economic and technological advancements of the second half of
4 Though, to be fair, the franchise name, a reference to the common on‐screen notification from many brands of video cameras, becomes ironic; only the first two films of the series are presented entirely as found footage. [REC] 3: Genesis is only partially shot in the style, while the last, subtitled Apocalypse, abandons the format entirely for a traditional, 3rd person camera perspective.
Yet, the needless complications of such dedication are not lost on other characters, as the found
footage horror film strives to counterbalance blunt illogic with sensibility. Jason’s incredulous
girlfriend, Debra, disparagingly proclaims that “If it’s not on camera, it’s like it didn’t happen”.
The viewer is meant to relate better to this more practical perspective, yet we also know that the
value placed on documentation must will out if there is to be a film at all and if we are to be able
to continue playing our own role within a history that we ourselves imagine for it. Accordingly,
Jason sits out the action of his own volition, foregoing even the opportunity for catharsis as he
futilely searches for a solution to reinsert the camera into the center of the action. Upon
returning, Debra confronts Jason with another camera, found elsewhere in the hospital. As she
demands that the filmmaker become the filmed, his squirming is visible and understandable.
Even though his own camera has never left his hand, Jason’s relationship with his film has
suddenly taken a sharp turn. Such abrupt distancing of author and media, and the commensurate
redefinition of one’s role in the creation of the other, provides a point of sharp contrast with the
genre’s literary ancestor. As the entirety of the recovered manuscript relies on the deliberate
recording of the events, so the author not only must find the time to write, but must have the
chance to focus on nothing else. The document becomes not simply a record, but an extension of
the author’s state of mind. The automated creation of content made possible by the camera
obviates such intimacy to the point that the device will continue to record even if there is no one
present—or alive—to operate it. As the shot switches from Jason’s view to Debra’s, the
originator of the document becomes just another subject of its focus. 5
5 Tangentially, Diary of the Dead also shows how found footage horror has come into its own since Cannibal Holocaust and The Blair Witch Project. Romero, being arguably as important a director to the horror genre as Steven Spielberg is in mainstream cinema, makes extensive use of new media forms in this expansion of his Night of the Living Dead mythos. The use of the internet to research and track the epidemic inverts Blair Witch’s own