Talk title confirmed for keynote this November

This November I will be delivering my first ever keynote address at a conference called "Spectacular Now," which is being held at the Technical University of Dortmund, Germany. In my talk, which is based loosely on my contribution to Snuff: Real Death and Screen Media, I aim to shed light on the subcultural value of real death imagery, from the dawning of the video age to the present day. Find the full abstract below.

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The Macabre Video Underground: Historicising the Subcultural Value of Real Death Imagery

In this talk, I will explore the centrality and significance of real death imagery to horror film fan cultures past and present. First, I will demonstrate how a swelling interest in gory horror movies in the 1980s coincided with the emergence of an array of contemporary, direct-to-video, ‘shockumentaries’ that collated sequences of genuine human tragedy and atrocity for the purposes of entertainment. I will then argue that these types of films, and the contexts within which they were consumed, set a template that would later be adopted by so-called ‘shock sites’: websites that specialise in the remediation of filmed sequences of death, such as BestGore and LiveLeak.
 
Drawing initially on the little-acknowledged Traces of Death (1993-2000) series, its producer Dead Alive Productions, and other comparable films such as Executions (1995) and Faces of Gore (1999), I will show how, at a time when fans went to great lengths to obtain explicit and gory exports of uncensored horror and death films, niche producers sought to align themselves with a new breed of horror film fan (the ‘gorehound’), producing videos that, in various ways, chimed with discourses that surrounded the subcultural practices of contemporaneous fans. I will conclude with a discussion about the legacy of these films in the twenty-first century, and offer analysis of some the shock sites that the likes of Traces of Death have inspired.

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