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Chapter 17 - Haunted TikTok: Comedy in Gothic Times

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2026

Avril Horner
Affiliation:
Kingston University, London
Sue Zlosnik
Affiliation:
Manchester Metropolitan University
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Summary

From the page to the big screen to the small screen, at the end of this book we come to the smallest screen of all: the mobile phone. In some ways mobile media offer more of the same. The kinds of Gothic comedy discussed elsewhere in this book are certainly present on mobile media – at times literally, as media are continually reproduced, consolidated and subsumed by the smartphone. The modes of audience engagement and enticement mobile platforms invite have also been seen before, from the gags of silent film (Verstraten 2017), to the captivating ‘flickering lights’ of magic-lantern ads (Väliaho 2017), to the tactile pleasures of the flip-book (Horsman 2017). But there is something about mobile media that feels intensely Gothic, which comes in part from this derivativeness Today's internet, mediated through the mobile phone, is repetitive yet forgetful, is full of paranoia all along the political spectrum, and offers a potentially endless source of the taboo and barbaric. The post-millennial, post-capitalist social web is obsessed with history and archiving, perfor¬mance and the repressed. It ignites the imaginations of media studies scholars with monstrous metaphors. As Wendy Hui Kyong Chun writes, new media are leaky, paradoxical and ‘wonderfully creepy’ (Chun 2016, 52). On the internet, suggests Melissa Gronlund, we can also find ‘the Gothic tropes of the uncanny, the undead, and intrusions into the home’ which ‘show how notions of the individual, the family, and the domestic are in fact being newly contested’ (Gronlund 2014). For Chun, social networks and online friendship offer all ‘the promise and threat of networks: the promise of an intimacy that, however banal, transcends physical location and enables self-made bonds to ease the loneliness of neoliberalism’, while at the same time thriving on exclusion and para¬noia, ‘the threat of a security based on poorly gated “neighborhoods” […] a monstrous, undead chimera of “friends” constructed through neighborhoods of likeness and difference’ (Chun 2016, 103–4).

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