Abstract
In the Dark, a 2007 webseries directed by Andrew Cull that purports to be the YouTube channel of a young woman documenting a haunting in her apartment, is arguably the first horror hoax webseries on YouTube. Two decades after the popular rise of two horror media traditions that make use of the storytelling power of hoaxes, the found footage horror film and creepypasta, this article returns to In the Dark as an early work that draws on both these modes and asks: what happens when a hoax gets old? If the credibility of a hoax is inherently time-limited, how might a work of hoax horror whose time has passed speak to us now? To explore the afterlife of In the Dark, I discuss this foundational but little-studied work in the context of earlier scholarship on genres and modes that make use of illusions of authenticity, like creepypasta, found footage film, and alternate reality games (ARGs). I discuss how In the Dark functioned as a hoax when it was originally published in 2007, examining its amateur aesthetics, its interactions with viewers, and its inclusion of apparently meaningless material to create a sense of authenticity and implicate the reader in the storytelling process. Reflecting on how the last fifteen years have changed the way this hoax appears to and works on viewers, I suggest that as the immediate credibility of a horror hoax diminishes, a different kind of horror effect takes over, allowing the hoax to function in new, unintended ways.
There are 38 videos on Louise Paxton's YouTube channel, all uploaded between April and July of 2007. They all seem to be filmed on the same small digital camera, and in almost all the videos Louise herself, a British woman in her early 20s, is the only person present.
In the first few videos we learn that Louise is moving from Norwich to London to live in an apartment she has inherited from her grandmother. Her YouTube channel is intended as a way to help her stay in touch with her friends in Norwich, and she often addresses them directly in her videos and description boxes. The first ten videos give updates on her everyday life, beginning with a montage of photos from her last night out in Norwich; after this follow detailed tours of various parts of her apartment, recordings of her cat playing, diary entries about her feelings on her breakup and her grandmother's death, and a demonstration of a trick she calls the ‘dolphin spit’.1
The eleventh video is shot at night. Louise looks upset, and unusually she starts by giving her full name. She is clearly speaking to a different audience. Suppressing tears, she says:
I’m making this video tape to record…document…an event which first started two nights ago […] On Tuesday night, an intruder came to my house. I was woken up by the sound of a rustling, like a scraping noise outside of my bedroom window […] there was a man stood at my door, here, leaning against the pane of the window. I called the police […] they said they couldn’t come unless he posed an immediate threat. Then again on Wednesday night I heard the noise again […] It's nearly one o'clock now and for the last two nights he's come at one o’clock, so I'm going to film and try to get some evidence on film.2
Another 26 videos follow, most of them attempts to catch the stalker on film or diary entries discussing what is happening in the apartment. Louise experiences various odd events – an old coin turns up in her flat, followed by a wallet; a cold spot develops in her bedroom; a key held in her palm seems to move on its own. Two months after the initial stalker videos, the account's last video is uploaded by Louise's friend Lizzie, the first and only person to visit Louise in her flat. Its title is PLEASE HELP. Lizzie writes in the description box: ‘I don't know what's going on. When I got into the bedroom a few minutes later Lou wasn't there. I don't understand where she could have gone. There was just her mobile phone and the camera. This is what was on the tape’.4
In the video, the two women have noticed someone outside the door again. There is a power cut, and we hear them scrambling around in the dark, as well as noises that seem to be coming from a different source. Towards the end of the film, Louise holds the camera while she cries and pounds on the front door. The sound cuts out, her hand stills on the door (see Figure 1), and the eye of the camera dips and floats lazily across the floor; the perspective and movement suggest that Louise is no longer holding it. In the last frame or two the camera light crosses a dark patch of floor beneath a chair and grainily illuminates what might be a pair of feet or a pair of hands.
Figure 1:. Louise pounds on the door. From @LouisePaxton, ‘PLEASE HELP’ (4 July 2007). Screenshot reproduced with permission from Andrew Cull.
Fifteen years later, Louise Paxton is still a missing person.
Louise Paxton's YouTube channel is a fictional web series directed by Andrew Cull, who titled the project In the Dark; Louise is played by the actor Zoe Richards. In the Dark, though it remains relatively little-discussed today, is arguably the first horror hoax webseries on YouTube. At the time of writing, we are two decades out from the popular rise of two horror media traditions that make use of the storytelling power of hoaxes: the found footage horror film, and the digital narrative mode known as creepypasta. Returning to In the Dark as an early work that draws on both these storytelling modes, this article asks what happens when a hoax gets old. Hoax-driven horror continually evolves and takes on new forms in order to maintain its believability, but how do individual horror hoaxes themselves change over time? If the credibility of a hoax is inherently time-limited, how might a work of hoax horror whose time has passed speak to us now?
To explore the afterlife of In the Dark, I examine it in the context of earlier scholarship on genres and modes that make use of illusions of authenticity, like creepypasta, found footage film, and alternate reality games or ARGs. I discuss how In the Dark functioned as a hoax when it first came out, examining its amateur aesthetics, its interactions with viewers, and its use of what I will describe as noise, the inclusion of apparently meaningless material to create a sense of authenticity and implicate the reader in the storytelling process. Reflecting on how the last fifteen years have changed the way this hoax appears to and works on viewers, I suggest that as the immediate credibility of a horror hoax diminishes, a different kind of horror effect takes over, allowing the hoax to function in new, unintended ways.
In the Dark is at the intersection of two related modes that become central to horror storytelling around the turn of the millennium: the found footage film, and creepypasta. What is usually identified as the first creepypasta narrative, an Angelfire website entitled Ted's Caving Page, was published in 2001, while the contemporary rise of found footage film began in 1999 with The Blair Witch Project. While Blair Witch is obviously not the first horror film to use found footage elements, it is usually described as the turning point in the popularity of found footage horror in the early twenty-first century;5 journalist Lucia Peters's description of In the Dark as ‘the Blair Witch Project of the internet’ refers both to its storytelling style and its groundbreaking quality.6
Both these narrative modes make use of the interplay between the real and the fictional. Found-footage horror films contain visual or audio recordings that are diegetically, and sometimes extradiegetically, presented as preexisting and real. Joe Ondrak argues for a distinction between found footage films ‘that simply use the aesthetics of documentaries or news footage to foster immersion and those that are presented, without irony, as real events’; Blair Witch, which included a missing-persons notice for its three actors as part of its marketing campaign, is an instance of the latter.7 As Alexandra Heller-Nicholas notes, the mainstream popularity of found footage as a commercial film genre post-Blair Witch means that the form has lost some of its sense of real-life ‘threat’:
the threat that a found footage horror film may present actual events that occurred in the real world has eroded through the increasing ubiquity and subsequent familiarity of its codes and conventions […] This shift […] to the multiplex blockbuster adds a degree of security to the experience of watching horror films that are explicitly framed around their claims of authenticity.8
Existing critical readings of horror hoax webseries often centre on what is probably still the best-known entry in the genre, Troy Wagner and Joseph DeLage's Marble Hornets, which began two years after In the Dark and ran until 2014, long after it had been revealed as fictional. Marble Hornets has found footage elements as well as an explicit connection to creepypasta; it is inspired by and was a major element in the mainstream popularisation of the Slender Man creepypasta mythology. It has, then, been read both as part of a creepypasta tradition and as a variant of found footage film: Adam Daniel describes it as a ‘post-cinematic’ found footage film project,11 while Shira Chess describes it as part of the collaborative creation of Slender Man as an ‘open-sourc[ed]’ internet horror story.12 In the Dark also has the hallmarks of both these modes, but its director and lead actor use neither term to describe it. Instead, in the Q&A session (about a different project) that seems to be the first public confirmation of In the Dark's fictionality, they call it something else: a hoax.
The interplay between authenticity and hoax has been a central vein in popular horror for over two decades, and for storytelling that makes use of claims of authenticity, this is a long time. Even when it is not, as in Niehoff's definition, explicitly designed to ‘deceive only for a while’, the credibility of a horror hoax inevitably degrades over time. As time passes, any given hoax work is increasingly likely to be actively debunked, to be proved fictional by events that contradict the story, or to have its author establish it as fictional, often in the process of monetising it. The 2004–2005 creepypasta narrative The Dionaea House, for instance, underwent both the latter processes through author Eric Heisserer's continued public life after the in-story death of the character bearing his name, as well as his subsequent sale of the film rights. As Heller-Nicholas says of found footage film, commercialisation can erode credibility.
Kristiana Willsey examines the way commercialisation affects audience belief in the case of Adam Ellis's ‘Dear David’ thread. ‘Dear David’, which began in 2017, is another genre-founding text, the first widely-read Twitter hoax horror thread. In it, the comic artist Adam Ellis posts about his recurring dreams about the ghost of a little boy with a misshapen head, who eventually seems to cross over into reality and cause disturbing events in Ellis's home. Like Louise Paxton, Ellis posts images and videos of what is happening to him, and he gains a following that pores over and analyses his evidence. Willsey explores the change in audience response to ‘Dear David’ after Ellis announces his sale of the film rights to the narrative: ‘Memorates and legends are believed or believable, while commercial supernatural fiction is not, but online these genres overlap’.15 As Willsey goes on to show, a narrative that becomes unbelievable to its audience does not necessarily lose its power to engage. Moreover, belief and disbelief in such cases are rarely a clear binary, as Jane McGonigal argues in her analysis of early-2000s ARG players' performances of belief in the game narrative – ‘an active pretense of belief that enables, heightens and prolongs their play experiences’.16 Nonetheless, the conditions that shape audience belief in a hoax do change over time; more generally, the horror hoax mode itself becomes less credible as it develops recognisable genre markers and as earlier works with these genre markers are revealed as fictional. After Blair Witch, it becomes harder to make the next found footage horror film as credible.
As a result, horror hoax storytelling has to change forms in order to continue to hoax effectively. Fictional stories told as though they are real have been integral to horror storytelling since its earliest roots in folklore; found footage film is only one recent offshoot of this, and creepypasta another. Neil McRobert argues that Gothic narratives in general are ‘predicated on the complex interaction of reality and fiction’; he mentions The Castle of Otranto and Dracula as early examples of the Gothic use of counterfeit ‘found footage’.17 Presumably this kind of storytelling will continue to evolve and change in order to maintain its ability to hoax, since the early hoax works in a new subgenre or format tend to be more credible than later ones – a process that can be easier to detect in small subgenres like Twitter hoax horror, where ‘Dear David’ seems to have both popularized the genre and exhausted its credibility. In a 2018 article on creepypasta's future prospects, Alex Hall, the creator of the early creepypasta BENDrowned, points to this need for evolution: ‘I think there's someone out there with an idea involving multiple mediums that's going to set the internet on fire and I can’t wait for him or her to realize it’.18
But here, returning to In the Dark fifteen years after its release, I am less interested in the future of hoax horror storytelling than in its past, seen in the light of the present. If horror hoax storytelling must continually evolve or lose its power, how are the earliest, perhaps originally the most effective, hoax works in a particular genre affected by the passing of time?
How, then, did In the Dark work as a hoax in 2007?
In the Dark's hoax storytelling has a great deal in common with that of creepypasta. In earlier work, I argue that creepypasta's distinguishing features are anonymous authorship (either through actual anonymity or pseudonymity, loss of the original source, or a misrepresentation of who the author is), interplay between authenticity and fakeness, and interactivity (readers are actively or implicitly encouraged to spread the text, to remix and recycle it, to perform actions based on it, or to influence the story through commentary as it is told).19 This emphasis on audience interactivity, a natural affordance of internet storytelling, is one of the things that distinguishes typical creepypasta narratives from typical found footage horror films. In the Dark conceals its authorship in order to present itself as real: the videos are posted to what looks like Louise's personal account and are all, apart from the last one, presented as filmed and uploaded by her; Cull and Richards are only openly linked to the project two years after it ends. And it involves its audience in problem-solving: the protagonist requests and responds to suggestions from viewers about what to do next.
A tricky aspect of any storytelling that claims to present authentic material is the need to explain why, diegetically, this material is being recorded or published. In the Dark addresses this through Louise's apparent inability to reach her friends in other ways. Louise often speaks directly to her original intended audience, her Norwich friends, as well as to other viewers. In Where Are You Norwich Mentalists? May 12th 07 she asks her friends to get in touch: ‘Just an email would be nice […] I haven't heard from you in a while so I think you don't like me any more’. In Weird Cold Spot in My Bedroom. May 4th 2007 the description box asks her viewership as a whole to help her solve the mystery: ‘OK, can anyone explain what's going on here? It's been going on for nearly a week now. I’m out of ideas, anyone got any thoughts? I'd love to hear them, L xx’. In the description box of a later video, Worst Night Yet. June 24th 2007, she again addresses her viewership as a whole, but now in a more reflective, intimate mode: ‘I think I let it in. Does that make any sense? That night, when I opened the door. I don't think I scared it off I think I let it into the house. Is that possible?’
The most complex audience interaction comes in My Reply to JD. May 21st 07. Here, Louise responds to a video by the user jdbelieve that analyses one of her own stalker videos, slowing down a ‘weird’ camera movement to show what the video describes as an ‘orb’ of light.20 Louise is grateful but unconvinced by the ‘orb’ idea: ‘I think I'm going to go with, um, the idea that it might just be dust […] moisture particles in the air or pollen’. Jdbelieve's account only posted four videos, all analysing some aspect of Louise's videos. This could indicate that the account was faked by Cull, who says that he actively managed Louise's comment section.21 If so, though, it is a surprisingly restrained performance. There are moments in Louise's videos that seem distinctly, dramatically supernatural, like the key rolling out of her hand on its own in Really Weird. June 15th 07 or the image of disembodied hands or feet in the last video. But the analysis in the jdbelieve videos focuses instead on what seem to be random shapes and smudges in the footage and interprets them as faces, hands, figures, or orbs. As a commenter on one jdbelieve video writes:
Maybe it is youtube and I do believe in spirit but I cant see a thing that you said it have on the video… I mean I see what you want us to see but in my sens that doesnt look like a face or a hand…22
Figure 2:. Louise tells the camera about her stalker, in typical image quality. From @LouisePaxton, ‘Stalker Video 1’ (27 April 2007). Screenshot reproduced with permission from Andrew Cull.
More broadly, the use of boredom creates an effect that, following Adrian Hon, I will describe as noise - although Roland Barthes's term, the reality effect, and David Letzler's term, cruft, could also be applied here. A comment on one of the last videos describes the problem In the Dark has to overcome, and which in the eyes of this commenter it fails to:
I won’t turn sour grapes on all this. But, my gut tells me it isn’t real for one simple reason. It is too perfect. It is a wonderfully woven tail fit for Hollywood, but real life doesn't tend to be that way. Our monds want it to, but it isn’t true. The camera movements, Louise's brillant reactions and emotions. Truly this was all better than anything I ever saw on the silver screen. BRAVO to all involved. Brilliant!23
A more extreme case of this problem is faced by players of ARGs – interactive, collaborative storytelling games that are intended to be experienced as part of the players' real lives. In ARGs, much of the work is in identifying the text: you must begin by discovering, or at least coming to believe, that there is something there to interpret, and then continue to seek out new interpretable text. ‘[P]layers looked for the game everywhere - everything became a potential clue or plot point,’ writes Jane McGonigal in her reading of the Beast, an early ARG.26 Adrian Hon, who is an ARG designer, describes people engaged in the QAnon conspiracy theory as similar to ARG players ‘looking for signals in the noise’, collaboratively mining (in this case illusory) significance from perceived clues in the world around them.27 In the same way that cruft in fiction is near-uninterpretable but still serves a purpose, noise is necessary to ARGs: if there is too much signal and too little noise, you are not playing a game so much as reading a narrative.
Unlike ARGs, which are decentralised texts that must be actively tracked down, In the Dark is delimited and basically linear, but it has no obvious structured narrative, and the reader must work in order to uncover the story. The videos that make up In the Dark do contain a story – it is, in fact, a classic ghost story, in which the only untraditional element is the lack of a payoff to the ending: a young woman moves into a new home, becomes haunted, investigates the haunting, and disappears. A chronologically-watching viewer who is unaware that the videos are a hoax will at one point become aware not necessarily that they are watching a fictional narrative, but that, fictional or not, something interesting is going on. For our purposes, we might call this the story. The point where a viewer watching chronologically would realise that there is a story is clear; this happens in the eleventh video, which is distinct in tone and content from everything that has come before. After this point most of the videos are about threatening or strange occurrences in Louise's home. Importantly, though, Louise's account does not start to follow a clear story arc here, or, really, at any point. In addition to the boring, confusing or anticlimactic elements present within many of the ‘stalker’ videos, Louise continues to post entire videos of noise throughout: a video in which she thanks each of her subscribers by name; an attempt to start a YouTube trend of ‘time capsule’ videos; a one-second clip of a photograph of her.
The viewer, then, must sift through all 38 videos to find the story. Once the viewer is aware of the story, the titles sometimes give clues to the content of a video, allowing for some skipping. Like an ARG player, they might also use the crowdsourced experiences of others by reading comments, or just looking at view counts. The videos with by far the most views are the first two stalker videos and the last four videos, while the clearly noisy videos and the middle-period stalker videos all have similar, lower view counts, suggesting that many viewers have not followed the full story, but created their own edited versions focused on its dramatic beginning and ending.
Whichever approach an individual viewer takes to finding the story in In the Dark, the project's use of noise has a dual purpose. It makes the project more convincing as a hoax by making it more awkward, illegible and redundant – more like real life. And it makes each viewer, even those who are not contributing to the narrative through comments or response videos, engage actively in the storytelling. Neil McRobert emphasises the importance of the diegetic editor in found footage-style narratives, the person or people who found, collated and presented the footage – the writers of the title card in The Blair Witch Project, the preface to Dracula, the top layer of editorial footnotes in House of Leaves.28 In the Dark only contains one video with a diegetic editor, the final one, where Lizzie finds Louise's abandoned camera and uploads her footage with an explanatory comment. Aside from that, if In the Dark is found footage, the viewers are the ones finding it. The use of noise creates a space for viewers in the narrative by turning them into editors, piecing together their own edit from apparently unpromising raw material.
As Simone Niehoff points out, hoaxes are time-limited: a hoax invites the audience to believe in it, but if the audience only ever believes, it has not fully worked. In the case of In the Dark, as in many horror hoaxes, there is no single moment of collective disenchantment; at any time different members of its audience may be in various stages of belief or disbelief. Although the project has been revealed as a hoax by its creators, it is still, in 2022, possible to come across it in a context that allows it to trick a viewer. Niehoff uses Theresa Heyd's concept of ‘audience splitting’:
A hoax needs two audiences, one to fall for it and one to laugh at it. In the case of hoaxes that […] try to deceive a general audience, ‘audience splitting’ results from the phenomenon that usually ‘some recipients catch on to [sic!] the deceptive stance of a hoax faster, while others will take the hoax for bona fide information’.29
But though credulity is never evenly distributed, the tendency is for viewer belief in In the Dark to sink over time. Kristiana Willsey traces a similar decrease in belief over time in ‘Dear David’'s Twitter audience, but points out that belief and emotional involvement in a hoax narrative are not the same thing: ‘fear doesn't require belief; even a dubious reader may greet new instalments of the narrative with clammy hands or a quickened heartbeat’.30 What does eventually cause much of the audience to disengage from ‘Dear David’ is Ellis's announcement that the story has been optioned for a film adaptation, shifting it from a collaborative ‘folkloric narrative’ to a single-authored ‘commercial narrative’.31 Viewer engagement is driven not by unquestioning belief, but by the ability to take part in the story.
Belief, then, is a not a straightforward matter in horror hoaxes. Niehoff and Heyd emphasise the role of ridicule in hoaxes: ‘Effectively, ridicule is inherent in the expression “hoax” itself’.32 But in my experience, audience discussions of horror hoaxes put little emphasis on ridiculing believers, or even on the idea of being deceived. The mood of skeptical or disbelieving audience comments is usually not derisive of believers, but regretful or even mournful. Comments on horror hoaxes have their share of mockery and in-fighting, like all comment sections, but the viewer comments quoted above show a more typical attitude: ‘I mean I see what you want us to see but in my sens that doesnt look like a face or a hand’; ‘I won't turn sour grapes on all this’. These comments are skeptical but supportive; they suggest that the commenters would have liked to believe. Where audiences catching on to most hoaxes would naturally quickly distance themselves from their earlier belief to avoid seeming gullible, the audiences of horror hoaxes often seem to deliberately remain in a kind of halfway-state of suspended disbelief. In earlier work, I discuss this phenomenon in the form of contemporary web articles on ‘Dear David’ that express continued uncertainty about whether the story is true, reading this ambivalence as as a way of ‘keeping a hoaxy space open'.33 Similarly, Jane McGonigal argues that ARG players do not really believe the game is real, but instead construct performances of belief that often involve a considerable effort to paper over lapses in the game's realism. It seems likely that ARG players overall have a stronger investment in the game than hoax audiences have in the hoax, meaning both that they are more likely to be fully aware of the game's unreality, and that their performances of belief are more complex. That said, McGonigal's description of the affect of this performance also describes the affect often seen in horror hoax audiences: ‘It is a bittersweet virtual belief [pointing] to the unmet promise of experiencing its real counterpart […] that longing to believe in the face of the very impossibility of believing’.34
As we might expect, then, In the Dark has had a complex afterlife. Declining belief in a horror hoax is visible over fairly short timescales, as seen in Willsey's study, which covers a period of a year or so. (In hoaxes that cover less time or are less convincing, the process can be much faster — see, for instance, Tom Taylor's ‘creepy cabin’ Twitter thread.) But In the Dark is considerably older than that. In most viewing modes, YouTube dates comments and uploads not by their time and date of posting but by their distance from us in time, emphasising not when something happened but how old it is: three hours ago, two days ago, 11 months ago. This becomes stranger the longer the timeframes are, as the second-to-second immediacy that we associate with social media drops away, slowly building a kind of temporal vertigo. In the case of In the Dark, which is nearly as old as YouTube itself, this effect is very strong: fifteen years ago.
Among In the Dark's noisy videos, one has a poignancy that it can only have gained in retrospect: We Are You Tube 2007. The Amazing YouTube Time-Capsule!, in which Louise encourages other YouTube users to post videos of something that represents 2007 to them. She holds up a copy of the Guardian as her representative object – one of the headlines is ‘She's on MySpace, he's on Facebook – where should you be?’ – and says, ‘Think how amazing it could be to look back on this in a few years!’ Marc Olivier, discussing the role of anachronism in present-day horror cinema, describes how new films use fake glitches to recreate the aesthetics of older media formats: ‘The jarring spectacle of data ruins is becoming to the twenty-first century what the crumbling ruin was to the Gothic literature of the nineteenth century’.35 Conversely, In the Dark's sense of dislocation in time is authentic; it feels intensely dated, but comes by it honestly. The project is shot on what was at the time just a digital camera, and is now very obviously a digital camera from the mid-2000s. Even the use of music in the first video contributes to the effect: if you were making this project as a period piece set in spring 2007, the Kaiser Chiefs’ ‘Ruby’ is exactly the song you would use.
Over time, slowly, In the Dark has turned into an anachronism, a time capsule. It is not a ‘data ruin’ in Olivier's sense, i.e. glitchy or visually degraded; with the exception of some changes to the YouTube layout and the time-since-posting numbers ticking upward, the videos look and play exactly as they would have for a viewer in 2007. The way social media interfaces like YouTube are built around enabling instant communication makes this uncanny in itself: at first glance, it looks as if a viewer can still post a comment and expect a response. (We might think of the derisive term ‘necroposting’, used to describe inexperienced forum users accidentally posting in a long-inactive thread: there you go, talking to the dead again.)
In the Dark looks and sounds the same as before, but it has become a ruin. What differentiates this experience from the nostalgia or unease a viewer might feel looking at any old YouTube video is that In the Dark is a hoax: a text with a specific, performative function, a design on the viewer. And as this function degrades, something else takes its place. Where for the earliest viewers the videos might have been unsettling because of the idea that they could be real, they are now unsettling in the way an abandoned amusement park ride might be: they are a form of entertainment that has become unusable for its intended aim – to take you for a ride – but that remains in place, both a reminder and a subversion of its original purpose. One of Robert Ginsberg's comments in The Aesthetic of Ruins is reminiscent of In the Dark in the present day: ‘The ruin renders function incongruous insofar as it makes us conscious of that larger context that is the ruin. How odd that a structure continues to perform its intentional activity within a building that has lost its purpose’.36 The functional elements of the ruin – in this case, the hoax itself – continue to try to perform their design, even after the passing of time makes it impossible for them to do so. It is as if the ruin does not know that it is dead.
The passing of time, then, introduces a meta element to In the Dark as horror media. Where initially it was unsettling because of its content – possible evidence of the supernatural – it is now unsettling primarily because of what it is: a piece of anachronistic media, a dead but still intermittently functioning hoax, a half-buried piece of early-internet lore. This inevitably diminishes its power to scare the viewer, but also decreases the distance between the viewer and the source of unease. As Adam Daniel writes, the viewer is always positioned as ‘an unseen diegetic participant’ in found footage:37 early viewers of In the Dark were watching a stranger document her own haunting in real time; current viewers are finding and piecing together an unfinished story from a discredited and abandoned YouTube channel. Viewers begin to occupy a different role: they are not witnessing someone else's haunting, but rather encountering something ghostly themselves.
Who is the ghost in this ghost story? In one possible reading, Louise is. In the Dark is a title you can only use for this project if you are not in the dark about it yourself; the title usually used by earlier viewers is Louise is Missing. While my own reading is that diegetically Louise is alive and haunted by a separate supernatural presence, there is a possible reading of In the Dark in which she is either a ghost from the start or becomes one over the course of the videos. Her ability to affect the world around her fades: friends stop responding to calls; a job interview gets cancelled at the last minute; a friend who is about to come and visit sprains her ankle. Finally Louise herself disappears, apparently into thin air. In another sense, Louise is a ghost simply because she appears to the viewer on film: in a Derridean reading any recorded image of a person is haunted by their death, whether it lies in the past or the future. As Kas Saghafi notes in his study of Ghost Dance, a film in which Jacques Derrida refers to cinema as the art of letting ghosts come back, ‘[a]ll tele-technology functions on the basis that what is captured must be reproducible in its absence’, and so every appearance of a person on film is a reminder of their disappearance: ‘a disappearance or departedness (disparition) that was already there as [they] spoke and [were] being filmed’.38 But what complicates this is that Louise is not, like Derrida in Ghost Dance, appearing as herself, nor is she a character portrayed by an actor. She is something else, a hoax: looking at Louise we see someone who will at some point be gone, but through the trick photography of the hoax, we also see someone who was always absent. Louise was never there, and she is still missing now.
Another possibility: the ghost is ours. ‘Death, our death, is the ruin's greatest symbolism,’ writes Ginsberg.39 A viewer who watches In the Dark now is looking at a ruin, and ruins do exactly the same thing as the Facebook memes that ask if you want to feel old – they tell us that something has already been lost to the past. They are visible signs of the ravages of time, making them both reflections and reminders of our own future deaths. In this interpretation, In the Dark begins as potential evidence of the existence of ghosts and degrades into a memento mori. For Derrida, this is what recorded images are, too: they look forward into a future where not only the person in the image but also the viewer are gone. But there is another way to see it: if images point to an unknown future, a future without us in it, a hoax image might point to something different. The one thing we know about the unknowable future is that we will die. The horror hoax, shaking our certainties, says: what if what we know is wrong?
‘Hoax’, as Niehoff notes, has an ambivalent etymology: it is an abbreviation of ‘hocus’, an eighteenth-century slang term for tricking someone or drugging them without their knowledge, which derives from the stock magic formula ‘hocus pocus’. That phrase in turn is often argued to be a mock-Latin derivation of the Words of Institution spoken over the Eucharist to transform it, hoc est enim corpus meum: this is my body. The word ‘hoax’, then, links both to trickery and to the sincere intention to make something extraordinary happen. Line Henriksen, discussing the root of hoax in hocus pocus, writes: ‘the words of trickery […] are performative; they make something happen’.40 Henriksen argues that the reveal of the hoax as fake does not necessarily cancel this performance. An audience may experience the promise of a hoax (in the case of Henriksen's study, that an image on the internet can haunt you; in the case of In the Dark, that ghosts exist) not as broken, but as deferred: ‘the “real” thing is still out there, somewhere, merely delayed’.41
We might expect the reveal of fakeness to act as a payoff – a finishing flourish, a definitive conclusion to the hoax's narrative. This does seem to be the case with some hoaxes, like the political hoaxes described by Niehoff, in which the reveal is an indispensable part of their purpose. But horror hoaxes have a different structure. They almost never have clear reveals; Cull and Richards' belated reveal is actually unusually definitive. And as discussed, audiences do not tend to react to these reveals as definitive: in Willsey's study, the audience continues to participate even after they are fairly sure they are being hoaxed. What I described earlier as the counterintuitive behaviour of people who are fooled by a horror hoax – not to disavow their earlier belief, but to try to maintain it, at least ambivalently – might come from this sense that the revealed hoax is in some sense incomplete, that the punchline has not been delivered. The audience is waiting for the third beat – the part where we realise that it was true after all.
In The Dark, then, speaks to us differently as time passes. Turned into a ruin, the hoax becomes a reflection of our own deaths, our own future not-thereness. But it also maintains, even in ruin, a space of future possibility: that there is something still to come, that the hoax might turn out to be a deferred miracle.
1. @LouisePaxton, ‘Re: Not Impressed! Louise Paxton’ (24 April 2007), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jf-YhYI_JEU.
2. @LouisePaxton, ‘Stalker Video 1’ (27 April 2007), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NT3slMhpj8&t=6s.
3. @LouisePaxton, ‘Stalker Video 2’ (27 April 2007), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4894vGNOfU&t=3s.
4. @LouisePaxton, ‘PLEASE HELP’ (4 July 2007), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=da8NbshjD7o&t=1s.
5. See Xavier Aldana Reyes, ‘Reel Evil: A Critical Reassessment of Found Footage Horror’, Gothic Studies 17, no. 2 (2015): 122–136, Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Found Footage Horror Films: Fear and the Appearance of Reality, (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014), 63, and Neil McRobert, ‘Mimesis of Media: Found Footage Cinema and the Horror of the Real’, Gothic Studies 17, no. 2 (2015): 137–150.
6. Lucia Peters, "The weird part of YouTube: In the Dark, Louise Paxton and the line between fact and fiction", The Ghost in My Machine, 6 November 2017, https://theghostinmymachine.com/2017/11/06/the-weird-part-of-youtube-in-the-dark-louise-paxton-and-the-line-between-fact-fiction-louise-is-missing-youtube-web-series-video/
7. Joe Ondrak, ‘Spectres des Monstres: Post-postmodernisms, hauntology and creepypasta narratives as digital fiction’, Sheffield Hallam University Research Archive, https://shura.shu.ac.uk/23603/, 5–6. Published in Horror Studies 9, no. 2 (2018): 161–178, https://doi.org/10.1386/host.9.2.161_1.
8. Heller-Nicholas, Found Footage Horror Films, 4–7.
9. Line Henriksen, ‘A Short Bestiary of Creatures from the Web’, The Ashgate Research Companion to Paranormal Cultures, ed. Sally R. Munt and Olu Jenzen (London: Ashgate, 2014), 408.
10. Jessica Balanzategui, ‘Creepypasta, "Candle Cove", and the digital gothic’, Journal of Visual Culture 18, no. 2 (2019): 188.
11. Adam Daniel, ‘“Always Watching”: the interface of horror and digital cinema in Marble Hornets', Global Media Journal: Australian Edition 10, no. 1 (2016): 4. See also Adam Daniel, Affective Intensities and Evolving Horror Forms: From Found Footage to Virtual Reality, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press (2020), and Heller-Nicholas's briefer discussion in Found Footage Horror Films.
12. Shira Chess, ‘Open sourcing horror: the Slender Man, Marble Hornets, and genre negotiations’, Information, Communication, & Society 15, no. 3 (2012): 374–393. Marble Hornets is also discussed as creepypasta in Dana J. Keller, ‘Digital folklore: Marble Hornets, the Slender Man, and the emergence of folk horror in online communities’ (2013), Ph.D thesis, Vancouver: University of British Columbia, and in Ondrak, ‘Spectres des Monstres’.
13. Boston Haverhill, "The Torment London Premiere and Q&A", Gorepress (2010), http://www.gorepress.com/2010/08/10/the-torment-london-premiere-and-qa/.
14. Simone Niehoff, ‘Unmasking the Fake: Theatrical Hoaxes from the Dreadnought Hoax to Contemporary Artivist Practice’, in Faking, Forging, Counterfeiting: Discredited Practices at the Margins of Mimesis, ed. Daniel Becker, Annalisa Fischer and Yola Schmitz, London: transcript, 2018), 224.
15. Kristiana Willsey, ‘Dear David: Affect and Belief in Twitter Horror’, in Folklore and Social Media, ed. Andrew Peck and Trevor J. Blank (Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 2020), 145.
16. Jane McGonigal, ‘A Real Little Game: The Performance of Belief in Pervasive Play’, Digital Games Research Associaton (DiGRA) ‘Level Up’ Conference Proceedings 2003, 4.
17. McRobert, ‘Mimesis of Media’, 137.
18. Xavier Piedra, 'What the hell happened to creepypastas?', Mashable, 30 October 2018, https://mashable.com/article/creepypasta-changed-channel-zero.
19. Erika Kvistad, ‘The Digital Haunted House’, in Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, ed. Clive Bloom (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 957–971.
20. @jdbelieve, ‘Re: Louise Paxton Weird Camera Movement’ (14 May 2007), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmNIlxH2-vQ&t=3s.
21. Steve Powell, ‘An Interview with Writer-Director Andrew Cull on In the Dark and the Enduring Mystery of Louise Paxton’, The Venetian Vase (24 August 2018), https://venetianvase.co.uk/2018/08/24/an-interview-with-writer-director-andrew-cull-on-the-enduring-mystery-of-louise-paxton/.
22. @sammiiboyy ‘Maybe it is youtube and I do believe in spirit but I cant see a thing that you said it’ (2007), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Jstwm6FoPc
23. @RandyBrooks, ‘You have a point. I won't turn sour grapes on all this. But, my gut tells me it isn't real’ (2007), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnDdN0E2j1Q&t=147s.
24. Roland Barthes, ‘The Reality Effect’ (1969), in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard, ed. Francois Wahl (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 146.
25. Barthes, ‘The Reality Effect’, 148.
26. igal, ‘A Real Little Game’, 6.
27. Clive Thompson, ‘QAnon Is Like a Game – a Most Dangerous Game’, WIRED (22 September 2020), https://www.wired.com/story/qanon-most-dangerous-multiplatform-game/.
28. McRobert, ‘Mimesis of Media’.
29. Niehoff, ‘Unmasking the Fake’, 255.
30. Willsey, ‘Dear David’, 155.
31. Ibid., 155.
32. Niehoff, ‘Unmasking the Fake’, 255.
33. Kvistad, ‘The Digital Haunted House’, 966.
34. McGonigal, ‘A Real Little Game’, 4.
35. Marc Olivier, ‘Glitch Gothic’, in Cinematic Ghosts: Haunting and Spectrality from Silent Cinema to the Digital Era, ed. Murray Leeder (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 253–270.
36. Robert Ginsberg, The Aesthetics of Ruins (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004).
37. Daniel, Affective Intensities, 5–6.
38. Kas Saghafi, ‘The Ghost of Jacques Derrida’, Epoché 10, no. 2 (2006): 274.
39. Ginsberg, ‘Ruins’, 359.
40. Line Henriksen, In the Company of Ghosts: Hauntology, Ethics, Digital Monsters, Ph.D thesis (Linköping: Linköping University, 2016), 176.
41. Ibid., 176.
