Caetlin Benson-Allott, Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens

While reading Caetlin Benson-Allott’s Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens: Video Spectatorship from VHS to File Sharing , I also happened upon the 2015 release The Final Girls (Todd Strauss-Schulson) and was immediately struck by how effectively Benson-Allott equips her reader to engage with contemporary horror and spectatorship practice. The film begins with what appears to be the logo for a VHS distributor, its neon colour scheme and style evoking a 1980s aesthetic, giving way to a trailer seemingly assembled from a battered 35 mm print. The trailer plays out a typical summer-camp-slasher scenario, but as it concludes it reveals the trailer’s diegetic spectator, a teenage girl streaming the content over a wireless network on her smartphone. This moment plays with the intricate historical, technological and phenomenological interplay of genre and medium, one that Benson-Allott traces with remarkable skill in a book that argues for the central importance of video platforms (VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, streaming media) in the evolution of the viewing subject

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