THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 17IN EARLY APRIL,at the height of the pandemic lockdown,
Gianpiero Petriglieri, an Italian business professor, sug-
gested on Twitter that being forced to conduct much of
our lives online was making us sick. The constant video
calls and Zoom meetings were draining us because they
go against our brain’s need for boundaries: here versus
not here. “It’s easier being in each other’s presence, or in
each other’s absence,” he wrote, “than in the constant
presence of each other’s absence.”
Petriglieri’s widely retweeted post reads like the germ
of a horror tale. The liminal space between presence and
absence, reality and unreality, is often where the litera-
ture of fear unfolds — a place called the “uncanny.” That
old aesthetic term for creeping dread, famously dis-
sected by Freud, is typically now applied to disturbing
specimens of digital animation said to reside in the “un-
canny valley.”
Screens and artificial intelligence have shown up
regularly in the horror genre since the dawn of the per-
sonal computer. “Ghost in the machine” stories are so
common that, when I submitted a proposal for a horror
novel about technology, my editor warned me against
deploying a malevolent A.I. as my antagonist.
But it’s hard to find scary stories that depict how we
become the ghosts in the machine. The anxiety we feel
when our virtual connections outweigh our real ones is
more often a subject for nonfiction, such as a 2018 New
York Times article headlined “A Dark Consensus About
Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley.” A
quote in the piece from a Silicon Valley office worker —
“I am convinced the devil lives in our phones” — has
stuck with me like the tagline on a dog-eared vintage
horror paperback.
In fiction, technological anxiety is more typically the
province of satirists rather than scaremongers, and it’s
not hard to see why. First, while screens can haunt and
obsess us, they can’t stalk and attack us. Unless you go
the David Cronenberg route — not easy on the page —
cyber-horror isn’t visceral.
Writing psychological horror about tech isn’t much
easier. We tend to define the internet as a way to connect
with other people — plugging in, getting wired, being
online. Horror fiction, by contrast, thrives on the isola-
tion of the haunted house or the snowed-in Overlook
Hotel. There’s a reason modern horror plots often de-
pend on characters’ cellphones getting lost or dropping
the signal.
To early humans, disconnection from or shunning by
the tribe meant death; connection was life, light,
warmth, hope. Loneliness remains part and parcel of
horror stories — the dark hall, or the mansion in “The
Haunting of Hill House” where, Shirley Jackson wrote,
“whatever walked there, walked alone.” On the brilliant
British horror podcast “The Magnus Archives,” one of
the 15 godlike entities that terrorize humanity is known
as “the Lonely.” There is no corresponding terrifying
embodiment of “the Crowd.”
The chief exceptions to this solitude-is-scary rule are
zombie and pandemic tales, in which gatherings are omi-
nous and even loved ones might be carriers. But you can’t
catch a virus online — not that kind, anyway. What you
can catch are forms of compulsion, unease and anxiety
that are much harder to pin down — if hardly unknown.
In his 1919 essay, Freud linked the uncanny to a “mor-
bid anxiety” caused by the return of a primitive belief
we’ve done our best to repress. One example is the belief
that dead people are still with us; another, the conviction
that nothing is random, since shadowy forces pursue us
through our lives.
To someone living exclusively online, many of Freud’s
“primitive beliefs” would be literal truths. The dead live
on in their videos and social media feeds. Thanks to
targeted advertising, a pair of boots we put in our cart
months ago stalks us at every turn. The notion that a
single utterance can turn a random citizen into an influ-
encer might have sounded to Freud like magical think-
ing. We see it happen every day.
Or consider the uncanny motif of the double, which
has inspired writers of dread from Dostoyevsky to Tana
French. The fear of having our identity appropriated by
a look-alike doesn’t seem atavistic in the era of catfishing
and deepfakes. We all lead parallel lives in which pres-
ence is absence and reality is malleable.
Those online lives can be deeply fulfilling, assuaging
loneliness and fostering new communities. But when we
depend too much on them, things can go awry. Reality
can lose its reality, as it has for those sufferers of video-
game-related disorders who reportedly see Tetris blocks
floating in midair. And that’s where the space for uncan-
ny fiction opens.
The horror tale that best captures the uncanniness of
virtual life may be the cult film “Kairo” (“Pulse”), which
was released way back in 2001. The director, Kiyoshi
Kurosawa, uses a simple horror conceit — ghosts are
online — to summon the terror of dissolution. His
specters aren’t digitized serial killers or vengeful A.I.s,
but the spirits of people like us who have overflowed theafterlife and colonized the virtual world.
From screens, these ghosts haunt the living, their aim
being not to kill us but to “make people immortal by
quietly trapping them in their own loneliness.” One by
one, the film’s living characters evaporate into pixel-like
fragments, their individuality flowing into a stream that
includes the now and the then, the living and the dead.
The offline world slides toward a quiet apocalypse.
Like Jackson’s Hill House, Kurosawa’s internet is
crammed with ghosts who offer one another no society
or solace. “People don’t really connect, you know,” an I.T.
specialist warns an internet novice. To connect online,
“Kairo” suggests, is to be more alone than ever, crowd-
ing the world with echoes of humanity that never reach
a receptive ear. The film is chillingly prescient about the
loneliness we feel as we refresh our feeds late at night,
searching for proof that we’re real and finding only other
digital ghosts doing the same thing.
I strove to channel that loneliness in my own cyber-
horror book. The plot involves a video game that lives on
the dark web and taunts potential players with a legend
of unbeatability. But software is not the antagonist. Like
me refreshing my feeds, players of the game are caught
in a loop of desire and rejection, a compulsion to keep
playing when there are no rewards left. It’s that loop that
ensnares and destroys them.
Writing about the scary side of screen time taught me
that, uncanny as it may be, the world of ones and zeros
doesn’t birth monsters; the human compulsions we
bring to it do. The solution may be to develop a talent for
disconnecting, not permanently, but periodically, to allow
ourselves to feel the nagging pain of isolation that under-
lies so many of our virtual connections, a reminder that
when we live online we’re all in the same uncanny boat
— present in our absence, together alone. 0Essay/The Horror of Connection/By Margot Harrison
Meeting online may be the scariest thing we do every day.
JULIA DUFOSSÉMARGOT HARRISON’Slatest novel, “The Glare,” comes out this
month.
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