Haunted nostalgia and the aesthetics of technological decay: Hauntology and Super 8 in Sinister

Abstract

Abstract The horror genre is in large part defined by a distinctive use of sound, which facilitates the effects by which it is defined. The genre is unique in its creative deployment of sound to activate and intensify dread and shock, and to launch what Peter Hutchings describes as ‘comprehensive assaults upon the senses’. This assaultive use of sound is central to the genre’s characteristic provocation of feelings of entrapment and peril, for, unlike the image, sound resists the viewer’s attempts at momentary escape. The recent supernatural horror film Sinister (Derrickson, 2012) powerfully illustrates the complex associations between sound and image upon which the horror genre relies to conjure its effects. Much of the thematic and aesthetic intensity of Sinister emerges from deeply unsettling interactions between sound and image created by the ambiguous layering of diegetic and non-diegetic sounds. Echoing earlier haunted media films such as The Ring (Verbinski, 2002), Derrickson’s film revolves around Super 8 film reels that house a malevolent supernatural being. This article examines the augmentation of analogue aesthetics in Sinister, and argues that sound is central to the film’s simultaneous evocation and troubling of Super 8’s conventional nostalgic connotations. To achieve this, Derrickson pairs macabre Super 8 imagery with the eerie sounds of hauntology, a form of experimental electronic music that emerged around the turn of the millennium and takes troubled nostalgia as its core theme. The hauntological soundscape of Sinister accompanies the Super 8 footage not only to enhance the sonic textures of technological obsolescence, but to incite conflicted feelings of nostalgia-gone-wrong. As a result, the soundscape of Sinister not only foments the film’s most potent affects, but develops much of its subtext.