Infinite Horror: Endless Networks and Apparent Reality in Mark Z. Danielewski’s “Clip 4”

Aislinn McDougall, University of Utah

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Abstract

In “Infinite Horror,” McDougall argues that Danielewski’s obscure short story, “Clip 4” is an example of post-postmodern, digital horror as it embodies Alan Kirby’s digimodernist aesthetics of “endlessness,” and “the apparently real.” Such aesthetics, she argues, are rendered horrifying by the video clip’s perpetual and unstoppable, digital looping and by the seeming realness of the story-as-article which ultimately implicates readers by forcing them online in an endless, digital investigation.

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Essay

Published in 2012 in the small magazine Black Clock, Mark Z. Danielewski’s short story “Clip 4” is presented as an academic article written by the fictional Realic S. Tarnen, a character who also appears in Danielewski’s 27-volume novel, The Familiar (2015-2017). In the short story, Realic investigates the mysterious circumstances of a projection video clip taken in the 1960s called Clip 4. The fictional clip shows a middle-aged man named Toland and a young man named Zeke sitting in Toland’s kitchen and carrying on a cryptic conversation about broken links “[b]eyond repair” and a succession of mysterious video clips described as “[s]ource material without source” (Danielewski 167). In 2014, Realic shows a copy of the video Clip 4 to a now elderly Toland on a laptop and then interviews him, only to uncover that Zeke had come to Toland in the 1960s to show him another, haunting, video clip of Toland’s daughter, Audra, drowning to death, though no cameraman is present or even possible given the angles of the shots (182-183). In the story, as per Realic’s research, within a day after his encounter with Toland, Zeke is found brutally murdered and video Clip 4, depicting Toland and Zeke’s conversation, is somehow replicated and distributed before becoming widely discussed, in time, by late 20th and early 21st century scholars (174). The short story ends with Toland’s horrifying insistence that, as with Audra’s drowning clip, nobody was present to have filmed his conversation with Zeke in his kitchen. We come to understand video Clip 4 as part of a succession of endlessly self-replicating, online video clips that leave their subjects dead— marginal notes on Realic’s article indicate that, shortly after his interview with Toland, Realic too is found “severed in four distinct pieces,” and several video clips of Realic’s conversation with Toland “appea[r] on the web” under the title “Clip 5” (186).

I begin with such an involved summary of Danielewski’s short story because, as will become apparent, an understanding of its complex layering is necessary as a way into some of the subsequent critical lenses with which I will engage. Much of Danielewski’s work straddles the line between the postmodern and the post-postmodern. House of Leaves (2000) was published at the precise turn of the twentieth century and as Robert Kelly suggests, it includes “modernist maneuvers, postmodernist airs and post-postmodernist critical parodies” (Kelly). Arguing that postmodernism is as good as dead, Alan Kirby calls “digimodernism” its postpostmodern successor, asserting that digimodernism “owes its emergence and preeminence to the computerization of text” and that it can be “characterized…by onwardness, haphazardness, evanescence, and anonymous, social and multiple authorship” (3, 52). According to Kirby, digimodernist texts embody the aesthetic of digital endlessness in that they “com[e] into being, as something growing and incomplete,” “seem[ing] to have a start but no end” (52). In addition to this post-postmodern endlessness, Kirby also introduces the digimodernist aesthetic of the “apparently real” which he describes as texts that “proffe[r] what seems to be real,” much like mockumentary-style and found-footage, shaky-cam films (140). To return to “Clip 4,” which certainly employs both a digimodern endlessness as well as an apparent reality, we can see that by merging Kirby’s digimodern aesthetics of “endlessness” and “the apparently real” with more traditional elements of horror such as the Gothic loop, the uncanny and the urban legend, that Danielewski’s story emerges as an example of what Linnie Blake and Xavier Aldana Reyes call “digital horror.” According to Blake and Reyes, digital horror refers to “any type of horror that actively purports to explore the dark side of contemporary life in a digital age” (“Introduction”). The self-replicative cycle of the sinister video clips in the short story thematically exemplifies Kirby’s digimodern “endlessness,” but this aesthetic is rendered horrifying in that it perpetuates an unstoppable loop and propagates uncanny duplications. Furthermore, the story’s presentation as a “real,” academic article embodies Kirby’s aesthetic of “the apparently real,” which harkens to the notion of the urban legend. The seeming realness of the story-as-article exacerbates the horror of the story because it implicates the reader in this “apparent” reality by forcing him or her online in an investigative role that seemingly never ends.

The repetitive cycle of online video clips in “Clip 4” can be most simply characterized by Kirby’s digimodernist aesthetic of “endlessness,” but this infinite textuality emerges as horrifying because it is inescapable and impossible to control. Kirby lists “endlessness” as one of digimodernism’s core traits, asserting that the “shape and detail” of “[d]igimodernist endlessness…emerge[s] from the social, cultural, and technological specificity of the electronicdigital world” (163). It must be mentioned that Kirby insists that “it is almost possible to argue that digimodernist literature does not exist” (emphasis added) (218). However, his digimodernist aesthetics are undoubtedly applicable to the literary. Kirby suggests that digimodern endlessness is largely theoretical in that “endlessness” does not necessarily mean “the story literally goes on forever” because, he insists, “each [digimodern] narrative has . . . a finite number of words, scenes, or episodes” (emphasis added) (159). Kirby describes the endless narrative as embodying “a narrative form established so as to go on in principle forever, capable of being halted only by external interference” (emphasis added) (160). In “Clip 4,” the revelation that the clips make up an endless and unstoppable succession complies with Kirby’s theory for digimodern endlessness, especially considering that, over time, these clips appear on “the web” (Danielewski 186), creating an online, digital narrative of the cryptic footage, accessible to fictional online users and researchers. The Clips and the fictional circumstances of their existence are revisited and contextualized further in his seemingly “endless” 27-volume novel, The Familiar (2015-2018), a point to which I will return. While this repetition of the clips in both The Familiar and the short story certainly embodies Kirby’s aesthetic of digimodern endlessness, it is the very fact that these self-replicating, endless video clips in Danielewski’s story cannot be “halted…by external interference” that renders “Clip 4” digital horror.

Kirby does not directly characterize digimodernism as horrifying, but this digimodern endlessness exacerbates the horror in Danielewski’s story because the uncontrollable repetition of the clips establishes a sense of inevitable entrapment. This digital entrapment is best described as a mise-en-abyme wherein we are left with a clip within a clip within a clip. According to Brian McHale, “[a] true mise-en-abyme is determined by three criteria: first, it is a nested or embedded representation, occupying a narrative level inferior to that of the primary, diegetic narrative world; secondly, this nested representation resembles” or copies “something at the level of the primary, diegetic world; and thirdly, this ‘something’ that it resembles must constitute some salient and continuous aspect of the primary world” to the point that “we are willing to say the nested representation reproduces or duplicates the primary representation as a whole” (124). In the context of Danielewski’s short story, the “primary, diegetic narrative world” is that of Realic’s written account while the nested, embedded representation that occurs as an inferior narrative level is the video Clip 4, depicting Zeke and Toland’s conversation. In the story, the events portrayed in video Clip 4 very closely resembles the conversation between Realic and Toland in the diegetic narrative in a way that quite eerily “duplicates” it. This mis-en-abyme layering is established as infinite at the story’s conclusion when Clip 5, depicting Realic and Toland’s conversation, becomes the next, inferior level of narrative in the repetitive cycle. Yet, this duplicating layering transcends the video clips’ obvious replication and occurs on the level of Danielewski’s literature. If, as McHale insists, the mise-en-abyme must “duplicat[e] the primary representation as a whole” (124), then we get precisely this in the story’s title: “Clip 4.” Not only is the diegetic narrative of Realic and Toland encapsulated within a short story with the same title as the nested narrative itself—“Clip 4”—but this Clip also becomes a nested representation in Danielewski’s larger work, The Familiar, a 27-volume novel that, as of February 2018, is currently on “pause” (“It is with a heavy heart…”).

This mise-en-abyme duplication of the diegetic narrative or Clip 4 is exacerbated and then sustained within The Familiar as we come to learn more about Clip 4’s contexts, and the multiplicity of Clips (5 and 6) come to be explored. The first mention of “Clip 4” in The Familiar, Volume One: One Rainy Day in May (2015) comes from Anwar’s co-worker Talbot who asks Anwar, assuming, if he “know[s] about the clips…[l]ike Clip 4” (384). In response to Anwar’s denial of knowing anything about such clips, Talbot responds exasperated: “‘The Man? The Kid?’ Talbot continues [while tinkering with the code {hunting for tedious errors}]. ‘Or Toland Ouse? Zeke Rilvergaile? The girl Audra? Willow Rue? And now this other guy…Realic Tarnen…? What happened to him?’” (385). Realic’s paper is mentioned explicitly in The Familiar, Volume Two: Into the Forest by another character, Cas (The Wizard) (549) who owns and consults one of various crystal ball-like, “strictly digital” supercomputers “with projections calibrated and angled to conform to the properties of the lens[es]” called Orbs that seem to reveal images or “Clips” from past and near-present (One Rainy Day in May 628). While some appear all in question marks (629), others have portions redacted (630, 632) or appear entirely in binary code (640). On page 633 of The Familiar, Volume One, Cas reflects on the “infamous Clip #1” and Danielewski’s experimental typography reveals a spherical, textual version of the very Clip of Audra drowning described in Danielewski’s short story, “Clip 4”:

Reflecting on the limitations that the Orb’s technology presents, Cas relates how in the 1960s, others working with the Orbs had been able to get the various clips on film, which implies that in the short story, the projector film Zeke uses to show Toland the clip of Audra drowning was extracted from one of the digital Orbs. But more importantly, it is here that Cas reveals herself to be the one who originally discovered Clip 1 of Audra drowning while scrying with her Orb (636); the where and how of its extraction and distribution is unknown but clearly referenced. Cas’s reflections on the Orbs’ technological history implies that the Clips have digital origins as products, first and foremost, of the mysterious Orbs, and second as archived visual footage as extracted from the Orbs. In The Familiar, Volume 4: Hades, Cas reflects on Clip #3 as “[d]iscovered in 1988 by Cas, of Cas herself, sitting at a computer back in 1984” (237) and although this replication of herself does not necessarily match those of Toland, Zeke and Realic (where individuals who disseminate the Clips end up dead), it still illustrates the duplication at the core of mise-en-abyme layering.

Not only does this nesting of Clip 4 between short story to 27-volume novel actualize the duplication process at the heart of mise-en-abyme, but it also embodies a digimodern aesthetic of endlessness. The interconnectivity between Danielewski’s works transcends a relationship between “Clip 4” and The Familiar and rather, he has created a network that both subtly and explicitly hyperlinks his oeuvre together. As Lindsay Thomas describes it, “[a]s we read these novels, we are implicated within this intertextual relationship, the living link that connects each novel to the other” (389). She refers to Danielewski’s own claim that The Familiar “is meant to generate ongoing discussion among readers” whether in person or online “mark[ing] a return of the serial form to explicitly ‘literary’ contemporary fiction during a time when the form has been successful in several other mediums…including blogs, television, comic books, and fantasy and science fiction” (389-390). The Familiar certainly contributes to an endlessness in Danielewski’s oeuvre through this interconnected network, but also, as Thomas suggests, in that it “seems interested … in … what it feels like to experience the sheer length of the series, its lasting on and on” (390). Essentially, the diegetic narrative surrounding the video Clip 4 becomes a story, repeated within the short story, repeated within the ongoing and seemingly infinite 27-volume novel.

Andrea Juranovszky asserts that “[r]epetition plays an undeniably distinctive role in Gothic discourse” and that “Gothic forms of repetition are characterized by a ‘sense of imminent doom’” (Glennis Byron qtd. in Juranovszky). For Juranovszky, such “[r]epetition…is presented as a cosmic force, unleashing itself on a preordained line of endlessness” that catches the subject helplessly “within a state that continuously reproduces a moment, and obstructs…the possibility of a future outside of the frame of repetitions” (Juranovszky). Juranovszky exemplifies these elements of the Gothic with more traditional texts such as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), but the Gothic loop, which Juranovszky describes as a “frustrating,” “tiresome progress…involv[ing]…temporal, physical or intellectual imprisonment” that often leads to “the frightening realization of being trapped in a series of never-ending circles,” remains applicable to both Danielewski’s The Familiar and “Clip 4.” Horror lies in the repetition of video Clip 4 within The Familiar so long after the publication of the short story “Clip 4” because it emerges as an uncanny repetition of an already uncanny repetition of the video Clip 4 which is sustained by and founded on uncanny reptition. Moreover, in the short story, the fact that the cycle of video clips and subsequent deaths remain unbreakable at the story’s end suggests that the characters are imprisoned by this cycle, with no “possibility of a future outside of the frame of repetitions” (Juranovszky). Undoubtedly, “Clip 4” embodies a “Gothic loop” that is temporally, physically and intellectually imprisoning, yet Danielewski reconfigures this Gothic loop in the context of digimodernist endlessness and apparent reality, introducing a digital imprisonment.

In Cinema in the Digital Age, Nick Rombes insists that “[i]t is not, perhaps, the idea of replication that frightens today (after all, reproduction lies at the essence of who and how we are) but rather that we are continually haunted by images because they are so easily archived and dispersed” (Rombes). Yet, such dispersion is inextricable from replication, and in the context of “Clip 4,” what is most horrifying is the possibility that recorded images will be replicated and dispersed beyond one’s own control. In the story, it is the sourcelessness of the video clips that initially perturbs Zeke and he is described by Clip 4 scholars as “distraught, distracted, ‘appalled’.…not to mention, as pretty much everyone else has concluded, including [Realic], ‘terrified’” (168). When Toland describes Zeke’s clip of Audra drowning, he recalls that it “‘wasn’t one shot. There were shots of her all over. From above. Close up. Underneath’” and from the depths of the ocean (183) all comprised into a single clip. Toland ultimately suggests that the cameramen were spectral, non-existent when he muses over their impossible absence: “[t]here had to be other people there.”…Except she would have reached out to them…She sure would have seen them. But she didn’t” (183). It seems likely that, in video Clip 4 when Zeke says, “source material without source” (184), he is remarking on these non-existent cameramen (183). The question of the cameraman’s degree of control is crucial in the context of found footage horror films, or what Kirby calls “apparently real” digimodernist texts, because the shaky-cam aesthetic requires the camera to be established by an operator or source: “When one of the directors of Devil’s Due (Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, 2014) was interviewed upon the release of the film, he explained that found footage had clear disadvantages connected to the need to justify the presence of the camera” (Blake and Reyes). In the short story, the spectral cameramen of video Clip 4 emerge as the unjustified camera of the shaky-cam horror genre that would transcend the “disadvantage” of which Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett speak. This inability to justify the cameras that capture Audra’s death is shatteringly disturbing to Zeke, Toland’s later suspicion that Realic is pulling a stunt with video Clip 4 is rooted in a longing for control of the visual replication. He yells at Realic,

“Kid, no one else joined [me and Zeke] that night. We were alone. Like you and I are alone now. Dammit, you tell me where this clip of yours comes from!…There, where it should have stood, had to have stood, to record your ‘Clip 4,’ to do all that panning and zooming, close-upping and such, there, right there, there never stood no one, and there sure never was no camera.” (185) 

Toland’s reaction borders on paranoia, and in a disturbing déjà vu where Realic’s visit almost exactly resembles Zeke’s in the 1960s, Toland is terrified by his inability to locate the video clips’ sources. This thematic of digimodern endlessness merges with the “Gothic loop” that entraps the characters in an endless cycle with no “possibility of a future outside of the frame of repetitions” (Juranovszky), generating a sense of horror contextualized by digitality.

While the unstoppable “Gothic loop” renders Kirby’s digimodern endlessness horrifying, another mode of repetition that intensifies “Clip 4”’s horror is the uncanny similarity between the circumstances and content of each video clip. Although I recognize the precariousness of turning to Sigmund Freud’s work for reference, his definition of the uncanny contributes productively to certain elements of horror studies. Most simply, he defines the uncanny as “that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar” (220). His explication of the German words “unheimlich” and “heimlich” reveals the peculiar tension at the core of “the uncanny” where it means both that which is familiar and that which is unfamiliar. Or rather, the horror lies in the fact that the unfamiliar remains “concealed and kept out of sight” (224-225), creating the horror of false familiarity—what is merely a double of the familiar. Although Freud’s “double” is concerned with replications of the self, his exemplification of the double transcends “primary narcissism” (235) to include a more general, situational “repetition of the same thing” (236-237), which he insists “arouse[s] an uncanny feeling, which…recalls [a] sense of helplessness” (237). This notion of “helplessness” aligns with the “imminent doom” of the Gothic loop in that Freud attributes “an uncanny atmosphere” to “involuntary repetition,” suggesting that it ultimately “forces upon us the idea of something fateful and inescapable” (237). When Toland views Realic’s video Clip 4 portraying Zeke and Toland discussing and watching Audra’s Clip in Toland’s kitchen in the 1960s, Realic and Toland become bound by the “involuntary repetition” that perpetuates such “an uncanny atmosphere” (237). The two men encounter, on film, familiar scenarios from the past that, in their repetition, become altogether alienating and most importantly, the “involuntary” nature of the repetition leaves both (especially Toland) “helpless.” Yet, while “Clip 4” depicts “the uncanny” in this way, it complicates the traditional, Freudian “uncanny” in that it begs the question: what happens when the uncanny is rendered digitally? What of digital replication?

The advent of digital technology has seen the development of what many call “the digital uncanny,” although most perspectives focus on the relationship between human and automata, be they robots, digital avatars (Suler) or art installations (Ravetto-Biagioli). I stress, on the other hand, a different mode of the digital uncanny that involves one’s encounter with the familiar (be it the self, a circumstance, an event etc.) as digitally recorded, without one’s knowledge and beyond one’s own agency. Digital images such as Danielewski’s peculiar “Clips” are uncanny in that they replicate what is known, but they can also repeat and duplicate automatically. Consider opening a video Snapchat of yourself you never knew was taken, or the experience of seeing your recorded image on the security monitors in a department store, or perhaps the uncanny discovery of digital ads on one’s social media profile after having searched once for the product advertised. We can imagine that, in Cas’s discovery of “Clip #3” in 1988 which portrays “Cas herself, sitting at a computer back in 1984, studying Mefisto’s curious syntax with an even more curious opaline halo surrounding her” (237), she experienced a similar encounter with the familiarity of the self, digitally encapsulated by the digital Orb without her knowledge. Of course, her knowledge of the Orb’s technology might minimize her surprise in finding images of herself therein; however, when Cas “revisits Clip #3” “[a]s an afterthought,” she finds that Clip 3 portrays here “without [the] halo” in the original clip despite the fact that “[c]lips aren’t supposed to change.” She calls this an unknown “digital disturbance” but establishes that, no matter how “small” or “transparent,” such a disturbance can be best described as an “incipient stor[m] rising angrily against the day” (237). In other words, Clip 3 of Cas’s own self is first and foremost an uncanny repetition of the self, but interestingly, in returning to it, Cas finds it is made even more eerie by the fact that details of the original digital clip are now involuntarily altered.

Kris Ravetto-Biagioli interprets Freud’s uncanny as that which is “driven by the compulsion to repeat, and that compulsion is automatic” (1). In this sense, the automatic nature of the replication is horrifying because it transcends human decision and control and it introduces the notion that technology itself can take on this decision-making role of control. In Danielewski’s short story, the near identical natures of both video Clip 4 and the sinister Clip 5, detailing Realic’s last moments, certainly harken to Freud’s conception of “the uncanny,” but they reconfigure it through digital technology, complying more with the notion of the digital uncanny. When Toland finally remarks on the doubling of his conversation with Zeke by his more recent conversation with Realic, the source of his exasperation is the replication of what was already a disturbing and traumatizing scenario: “‘You see kid,’ Toland… finally sputtered, ‘like you’ve seen already, here’s the same table, same wallpaper, same places. And right where your computer sits now sat his projector. Right where this recorder sits now sat the same damned recorder. I can vouch for all of it. You can too. Hell, you can see it in your clip’” (185). It is first the sameness between video Clip 4 and his current conversation with Realic that horrifies Toland. The short story, as fictional academic article written by Realic, is annotated with marginal notes by Realic’s girlfriend, Caroline Weld, who similarly highlights the horror of this replication when she writes, “Call me!!!!! Call me!!!!!” (185), punctuated with ample exclamation points, in response to this moment in Realic’s account. The familiarity of video Clip 4’s circumstances is highlighted by Toland’s repeated use of the word “same,” but the unfamiliarity is rooted in the shift in time, the alteration of recording devices and the people involved. While this replication of circumstance scares Toland, it is the automatic replication and distribution of the clips that truly constitutes the digital uncanny because it transcends human involvement, giving control or “user” status to, presumably, a non-human entity—perhaps the technology itself, or, in the context of The Familiar, the Orb, VEM^[1]VEM” is a mysterious and unknown entity referenced across Danielewski’s oeuvre. In The Familiar, it seems to refer to a sinister organization at the core of the novel’s darkness. Antagonist … Continue reading or Cas’s nemesis, the villainous Recluse. Ravetto-Biagioli studies a set of interactive, digital art installations that, he argues, “elicit uncanny visceral effects” while “challenging us to think about how communication technologies often double as surveillance technologies, confusing the role of a user-activated display with that of an automated tracking and profiling system” (2). The installations he studies capture the viewer’s image via surveillance technology in order to project it on screen “as a spectre haunting the screen” (7). The video clips in Danielewski’s short story produce similarly “uncanny visceral effects” as the nature of the video clips’ production is hauntingly one of non-consensual surveillance—the very notion of being watched. But again, beyond the organic horror of surveillance technology, the fact that it is automatic, blurring the line between real cameraman and automated cameraman, reworks Freud’s uncanny into the digital uncanny.

“Clip 4”’s embodiment of Kirby’s digimodern endlessness emerges as horrifying when contextualized by the Gothic loop and the digital uncanny, yet amidst all this repetition is the question of authenticity. In “The Uncanny in the Digital Age,” John Suler asserts that “…as communication technology advanced…the distinction between reality and phantasy [has become] progressively blurred…In this new digital age everyone’s ability…for determining what is real and what is phantasy, what is machine intelligence versus human intention—is being challenged” (377). Kirby’s digimodern aesthetic of “the apparently real” similarly “proffers what seems to be real.” For Kirby, “[t]he apparently real comes without self-consciousness, without irony or self-interrogation, and without singling itself to the reader or viewer” (Kirby 140). He uses The Office (2005-2012) and The Blair Witch Project (1999) to exemplify apparent reality—The Blair Witch Project categorized as a shaky-cam or found footage film and The Office, a mockumentary-style sitcom. In Danielewski’s story, the authenticity of video Clip 4 is heavily disputed by Realic’s contemporary scholars, and such a scholarly dispute (although fictional) about the Clip’s authenticity quite outwardly speaks to this aesthetic of digimodern, apparent reality. Beyond its being in keeping with academic dispute and disagreement in published articles, the discussion is ironic in that it centres around whether or not video Clip 4 itself is authentic. Realic references a “recent surge of counterfeit [‘Clip 4’ videos] which” he suggests, “have nearly succeeded in calling into question the veracity of the original ‘Clip 4’” (170). The verisimilitude of these counterfeit video clips feeds directly into the horrifying nature of “Clip 4” because they seem authentic, while many are not (Realic even goes so far as to describe one featuring James Franco and Michael Shannon) (171). While one of Realic’s colleagues insists that video Clip 4 was authentically recorded in the 1960s on a “Phono-Trix 88 reel-to-reel” rather than “a smartphone [or] some dedicated digital recorder” (168), another argues that, using a smartphone app “or one of a dozen alternate software packages,” someone “digitally altered the source material to give the appearance of something worn, unique and aged” (169). Realic expresses no interest in legitimating either argument, but having located Toland as well as Zeke’s tombstone, ultimately establishes the historicity of the video.

But herein lies a final layer of “Clip 4”’s digital horror: is it real? Although Kirby uses The Blair Witch Project as the quintessential example of the apparently real, he does not overtly connect apparent reality with horror. However, Kirby’s apparently real is, as he writes, “the outcome of a silent negotiation between viewer and screen” wherein “we know it’s not totally genuine, but if it utterly seems to be, then we will take it as such” (141). This contract between viewer and screen is in keeping with the more traditional horror tagline: “Based on a true story.” Urban legends have been shared as “true stories” for decades, often to insight sensation and horror, or to be used as cautionary tales, but their success lies in the fact that, sometimes, people really do take them to be true. Kirby writes that The Blair Witch Project’s “narrative concerns the apparent emergence into reality of what had previously been considered ‘legends’ and ‘stories’… depict[ing] the gradual passage of what the students are investigating from the status of ‘tale’ to bizarre and enigmatic truth” (143). In a blogpost called, “The need for truth in ‘based on a true story,’” The Bitter Script Reader praises The Blair Witch Project for its ability, not only to convince viewers of its truth, but more importantly, to send these viewers on an investigative mission to get to the bottom of the insidious Blair Witch. They write, “I thought it was brilliant how they tried to add some verisimilitude to the whole thing by building that internet rabbit hole for people to fall down if they attempted to do an internet search on that story” (The Bitter Script Reader). Like The Blair Witch Project, much of “Clip 4”’s horror lies in the fact that it too is presented as an “apparently real” academic article about a purportedly real set of haunting, uncontrollable and dooming video clips that leave their subjects dead.

The fact that “Clip 4” takes the form of a real academic article renders it “mockademic” in genre. I use the term “mockademic” to categorize works of literature, like “Clip 4,” that are presented as academic articles or textbooks so as to similarly indicate a certain degree of “realness.” Like Danielewski’s novel, House of Leaves (2000), a fictional novel presented as an academic documentation of a film documentary entitled The Navidson Record, Danielewski’s “Clip 4” appears as a draft of an academic article with marginal edits and notes. Danielewski offers a link to “Clip 4” from his official website, but it proves to be a “dead” link, so to speak, in that it merely takes you to a Goodreads page for Black Clock issue 15—ironic, considering the opening of “Clip 4” includes Zeke relating that “[l]inks are broken” (167). As it seems, Danielewski could be purposively burying works like “Clip 4” on the internet as a means of requiring the reader’s devotion and research. The broken links propel the reader down internet rabbit holes—much like viewers of The Blair Witch Project—in an attempt to satiate the intense wanting for knowledge about these possibly real clips. By presenting the story as an academic article, Danielewski builds an apparently real environment around “Clip 4” that intensifies the work’s legitimacy, but more importantly, its horror in that, we go looking for it online. Although it seems unlikely that adult readers would childishly turn to the internet to find YouTube versions of the clips, the convincing form of the story prompts them to do so. For instance, “Clip 4” makes reference to a website, unique to and frequently referenced in Danielewski’s fictional universe, called parcelthoughts.com that, in my one childish moment of curiosity, I found actually exists as a website online. The site itself appears quite like it is described by Realic in “Clip 4”: “a… This-Domain-Is-Under-Construction page. There [are] no introductions or explanations” (173). In the centre of a blank, white webpage, the Parcel Thoughts logo—a black, cube-shaped present wrapped in pink ribbon that gradually darkens to red—glows and users cannot interact with, click or navigate from the parcel. Although the site does not explicitly indicate that it is under construction, the defunct and unfinished nature of the site is eerily parallel to Realic’s similar internet voyage in the short story. Such a reading experience makes a digital researcher out of the reader, necessitating the reader’s use of the internet in a way that transcends the text by interpellating them into the horrifying, infinite loop of digimodernism.

Works Cited

Blake, Linnie and Xavier Aldana Reyes. “Introduction: Horror in the Digital Age.” Digital Horror: Haunted Technologies, Network Panic and the Found Footage Phenomenon, edited by Linnie Blake and Xavier Aldana Reyes. I.B. Tauris, London, 2016.

Danielewski, Mark Z. “Clip 4.” Black Clock, 2012. pp. 165-186.

—. “It is with a heavy heart…” Instagram, 2 February 2018. Photograph. 10 July 2018.

—. The Familiar, Volume One: One Rainy Day in May. New York: Pantheon Books, 2015.

—. The Familiar, Volume Two: Into the Forest. New York: Pantheon Books, 2015.

—. The Familiar, Volume Three: Honeysuckle and Pain. New York: Pantheon Books, 2016.

—. The Familiar, Volume Four: Hades. New York: Pantheon Books, 2017.

—. The Familiar, Volume Five: Redwood. New York: Pantheon Books, 2017.

Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Translated by James Strachey, The Hogarth Press, 1999. pp. 219-253.

Juranovszky, Andrea. “Trauma Reenactment in the Gothic Loop: A Study on Structures of Circularity in Gothic Fiction.” Inquiries Journal/Student Pulse 6.05 (2014).

Kirby, Alan. Digimodernism: How New Technologies Dismantle the Postmodern and Reconfigure Our Culture. New York, Continuum, 2009.

Kelly, Robert. “Home Sweet Hole.” The New York Times, 26 March 2000.

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Biography

Aislinn McDougall is currently the Visiting Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities at the University of Utah where she specializes in North American contemporary literature and digital humanities. Her work highlights the intersection between twenty-first century literature and digitality as exemplary of the post-postmodern.

© 2021 Aislinn McDougall, used by permission

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Technoculture Volume 10-11 (2021)