I

Old media can be scary – much scarier, ceteris paribus, than other objects of comparable antiquity. Film and television directors, as well as writers of fiction, who traffic in chills know that few things can insert a palpable sense of dread into a mise-en-scène more economically than a strategically placed daguerreotype (its dour or baleful inhabitants staring out from their world of sepia), a tinny voice issuing from an ancient radio, or the needle of a Victrola bobbing cracklingly in grooves of black vinyl. On the other hand, it is at least as much of a truism to say that new media, too, come freighted with anxieties as well as exhilarations: otherwise we would be less susceptible to narratives about being enslaved by a transpersonal Matrix, zombified by our cell phones, and so on. It should not surprise, then, that in our own media-saturated age a host of tropes and topoi derived from information technologies have tended to recur again and again in works of horror film and fiction. Many of these involve interactions between and among media: old technologies acting like new ones, and vice versa; categorial blurrings and hybridizations involving different media within a particular ecology, or the sense of an uncanny partnership or cooperation between them; and so on. Also common are tableaux of trans- or extra-medial transgression: e.g., the figure of dread escaping the representational field and entering the “real world” of the story. Then, too, there is the figure of prodigious or preternatural (and usually unasked-for) perceptual extension or augmentation, the trope of the technology that enables, or compels, one to see and/or hear more than is good for one.

I begin, then, from the general proposition that there is a certain natural affinity or symbiosis between media technologies (qua media technologies)Footnote ¹ and horror as a genre. Indeed, I wish to make the further claim that, in many cases, one or more of the above tropes assumes a sufficient degree of prominence within the work of horror fiction or film (that is to say, media are sufficiently central to its premise, and, especially, to the generation of anxiety and dread therein) that we are justified in speaking of a distinct genre or subgenre – albeit one to be defined chiefly according to a certain shared sense of Familienähnlichkeit – a genre which we might simply call “media horror.”Footnote ² Certainly there is no shortage of such sub-fields within the horror genre today, from “splatterpunk” to “torture porn” to “body horror.” The category of media horror (which is perhaps closest in affinity, or most analogous, to the last type, in that it involves at bottom sensory, if not somatic, modification), that not insubstantial class of narratives, in various media, centering upon the uncanniness of representational technologies, deserves I think a place in any such taxonomy. While I do not have space here to attempt anything like a full account of this burgeoning genre in the present day, I may mention, by way of sketching its contours, an exemplary case: the novel Ringu (The Ring) and its cinematic offshoots, in both Japan and America (there is already a scholarly collection devoted to exploring the varieties of “media anxiety” in the franchise).Footnote ³The Ring concerns, of course, a cursed VHS tape, the mere viewing of which brings horror and death (“Before you die, you see,” warns the American movie tagline). In its film versions, the franchise is responsible for one of the iconic images of horror cinema in our day – the bedraggled, malevolent girl-specter who crawls bodily out of the television screen and into the diegetic world of the filmic narrative. Everything about the revenant's appearance – staticky, monochrome, and marked by jumpy, herky-jerky movements – bespeaks, moreover, a horror of the archaic, of superannuated media forms. The videocassette, a storage medium then facing an extinction which has since come to pass (Lacefield 4), is only one relay in a kind of technological tag-team, as telephone, VCR, and camera – analog in Ringu (1998), digital in The Ring (2002) – all conspire to entrap and torment the victims of the demonic girl-ghost Samara (Sadako in Ringu) and her multimedia assault. The Ring is thus chock-full of the archetypal ingredients of media horror: striking tropes of inter- and trans-mediality, the fear of both old and new media, the figure of uncanny perceptual extension, and so on. This is, again, only one representative example; many others may readily be adduced.Footnote ⁴

The reasons for the emergence (or, as I hope to show, recrudescence) of such a genre in our time are not, surely, far to seek. It would doubtless be more surprising if the fluid, dynamic media ecology which we inhabit – which penetrates, indeed, into every aspect of our lives – did not spawn such horrors as The Ring's Samara. But of course our own millennial moment – the age of the Internet, the cell phone, the rapid evolution of video technology from VHS to DVD to streaming media, and so on – constitutes only the most recent chapter in an ongoing story of revolutionary technological innovation and dissemination dating back to the nineteenth century at least. None of the elements exploited by the current rash of media horror stories, nor the tropes by which these are consistently figured therein, are truly new.Footnote ⁵ Examples of these and similar figures, especially in uncanny contexts, can be found from the beginning of the age of modern media, inaugurated with the development of telegraphy and photography in the 1830s and 40s.Footnote ⁶ But perhaps the moment in the Victorian era most like our own with respect to media innovation was the fin de siècle. By the 1890s, the impact of the new ear-oriented technologies developed in the later 70s, the phonograph and telephone, was becoming more fully felt in the Anglosphere.Footnote ⁷ The same decade would also, in time, witness the harnessing of radio waves and X-rays. And perhaps the most dramatic development in the media history of the 90s was the birth of cinema. Historians of this period must, then, reckon among its most salient characteristics the acceleration of a process of perceptual technologization in multiple registers, and the continued emergence of something like a distributed sensorium in the culture at large (one, moreover, whose contours were constantly being renegotiated).

Interestingly, this same period is also notable for its prolific, and conceptually innovative, contributions to the development of modern horror fiction.Footnote ⁸ But is there any meaningful correlation between these two things: between on the one hand, a veritable explosion of horror fiction,Footnote ⁹ and on the other, the conspicuous presence of a highly dynamic, unstable media ecology, crowded with new and (often) strange technologies of perceptual extension and modification? If the prominence, even conceptual centrality, of media to much of the weird fiction of this period is any indication, then to a significant extent, I want to argue, the answer is yes. The best-known example of fin-de-siècle media horror may well be Dracula, whose treatment of vampirism (as Christopher Keep, Jennifer Wicke, Thomas Richards, and Laura Otis have all in different ways explored) is clearly inflected by the technologies of representation which fill the novel: its collection of phonographs, telegraphs, Kodak pictures, typewriters, and so on (an ecology lovingly reproduced in Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 film versionFootnote ¹⁰), as well as the intermedial interactions and exchanges between and among these. The science-fictional horrors imagined by H. G. Wells in the 1890s – from his tentacular Martians to the Invisible Man – bear definite traces, too, of contemporaneous technologies of communication and perception.Footnote ¹¹ Many shorter tales of the period explore the unsettling possibilities inherent in particular media: in Kipling's “Wireless” (1902), for example, a radio experiment causes a tubercular druggist to channel the spirit of Keats; a lesser-known example is Richard Marsh's “Adventure of the Phonograph,” which involves the discovery of what we might call a snuff record, a chilling documentary recording of a woman's murder.Footnote ¹² And if we consider Heart of Darkness (1899) to be a kind of horror story (certainly it is one with existential “horror” at its core), then the possible influence of the phonographically recorded voice on ConradFootnote ¹³ suggests that the novella belongs on this list as well.Footnote ¹⁴

Certainly I am not suggesting that all weird fiction appearing at this moment falls under my proposed aegis of media horror, or that technologies of representation (or any other kind) are solely responsible for the proliferation of such fiction. Many important causes of dread can be, and have been, identified in late-Victorian fiction, stemming from such sources as evolutionary biology, theories of degeneracy and decadence, the fear of invasion and “reverse colonization,” and so on (indeed, wringing multifarious “anxieties” from the fin de siècle in particular is something of a cottage industry in Victorian studies). Rather, by adding media technologies to such a list, and arguing for the appearance of a substantial corpus of media-horror fiction a century before The Ring and its kin, I hope to illuminate another aspect of this much-discussed moment in British cultural history – namely, the degree to which the new media, and new media ecologies, of the nineteenth century generated anxieties centering (especially) upon the increasing technologization of perception, anxieties which found expression in a nascent (yet, as we have seen, durable) subgenre.

The particular case of media innovation on which I propose to focus here, and whose conceptual impact on the weird fiction of its time I mean to explore in some detail, is the emergence of cinema: a development which represented a quantum leap forward in the evolution of technology's power to capture motion, change, even (as it seemed) life itself, albeit a development long adumbrated (certainly in retrospect) by countless pre- or protocinematic devices invented during the previous decades, from the zoetrope to the Zoöpraxiscope. This crucial moment, well documented in the work of cinematic “archaeologists” like Laurent Mannoni and Deac Rossell (and, longer ago, C. W. Ceram), has recently become better known within Victorian studies thanks largely to the efforts of Tom Gunning. In his recent essay treating the thaumatrope as one example of an early, precinematic contrivance aiming at the kind of profound “coordinat[ion of] the perceptual and the technological” which we associate with modernity, Gunning emphasizes that “cinema was invented during the Victorian era and its basic technology – the motion picture camera, the film projector, even celluloid films. . . – emerged shortly before or during the 1890s” (“Hand and Eye” 495–96). The three authors I discuss here – Wilde, Marsh, and M. R. James – all wrote horror fiction of more or less classic status in the 1890s which, as I hope to show, was powerfully influenced by the contemporaneous development of cinematic technologies, from the work of the great chronophotographers to the breakthroughs of the Lumières, Edison, and others. Against this shared backdrop of cultural and technological history, each writer produced (as we will see) quite distinctive Gothic effects. Yet there are striking commonalities as well, with the conceptual influence of cinema registering in the fiction of all three as the presence of various forms of “uncanny kinesis.” The works I discuss all, I argue, draw upon emergent paradigms of the moving or living picture in generating their uncanny visions – from the animated portrait in Dorian Gray, to the immortal creature in The Beetle, which “projects” a series of photographic depictions of its essential form, to the numerous avatars of the cinema in James, typically figured as weird infections of older pictorial media (the magic-lantern screen which comes to life, the antique mezzotint that is seen to move, and so on). The discussion of fin de siècle fiction which follows is offered, then, as one episode within a larger historical narrative concerning literary and cultural responses to the technologization of perception in the modern age.

II

Walter Pater begins his famous essay on “The School of Giorgione” (later incorporated into The Renaissance) with a somewhat ambivalent meditation on the theme of intermediality in art. On the one hand, he derides the folly of critics who imagine that the contents of an art-work executed in a particular medium may simply be “translat[ed]” (83) into the irreducibly and intractably distinct forms of another. Yet at the same time he posits the existence of a kind of restless, Schopenhauerian striving within art-forms (“the great Anders-streben of all art” [86]) towards a state of trans-medial inflection or transmutation. In a catalog which culminates in the lapidary assertion that “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music,” Pater gives numerous examples of particular artistic media trying hard to emulate or approximate others:

The Picture of Dorian Gray – that most Paterian of all novels excepting, perhaps, Marius the Epicurean – is, I want to argue, similarly obsessed with media (of art and communication) and their interactions. But while the representational forms Pater invokes (painting, sculpture, etc.) are, if not actually transhistorical, at least very old, Wilde's novel is very much a product of a particular, and comparatively recent, moment in the history of representational technology. Specifically, I wish to suggest that, in Dorian, pictorial art, including of course the novel's central conceit – embodied in its eponymous portrait – consistently aspires towards the condition of cinema.

As the novel opens, Lord Henry Wotton is discovered in Basil Hallward's studio, drinking in (as any devoted follower of Pater should) a succession of exquisite moments through the portals of sense: “the heavy scent of the lilac,” “[t]he sullen murmur of the bees,” and so on. As for the visual register, we read in the second paragraph:

Almost immediately, then, Wilde introduces a topos which might easily be added to Pater's list of trans-medially aspirant forms: namely, the kinetic picture, the static image capable of capturing movement and change. Then, in the following paragraph, as if by a filmic cut (and having something of the metaphorically transitive force of one), we are shown the portrait of Dorian itself (“In the centre of the room, clamped to an upright easel, stood the full-length portrait of a young man. . . ” [49; ch. 1]). Hallward, too, presumes himself to be working in a medium that is “necessarily immobile”; yet of course his painting will soon enough become a veritable object lesson in the power of Anders-streben, successfully registering, if not precisely (or most conspicuously) kinesis, then the passage of time, and its Heraclitan twin, change: those crucial elements of life itself, elements once thought inaccessible to pictorial capture.

To be sure, the trope of the living picture is, and was then, not a novel one. Kerry Powell has ably connected Dorian with “a curious efflorescence,” in the 1880s, of a well-established “magic portrait” tradition to be found in Gothic fiction as far back as The Castle of Otranto (148). To read Wilde's novel, as I propose to do here, in relation to the history of (non-literary) media at the fin de siècle is by no means to deny the existence of this kind of intertextual influence. Perhaps, indeed, the dramatic flowering of “living pictures” in fiction which Powell finds at this moment (he identifies examples of this trope in Charles Reade, Henry James, and Margaret Oliphant, among others) is itself at least partly explicable (i.e., less “curious”) when viewed in the context of (proto)cinematic history. And the technological development of the late 70s and 80s which seems most likely to have informed Wilde's conceptualization of his changing picture (and may perhaps account as well for the “glut” of magic-picture stories “from 1880 onward” [Powell 165]) is chronophotography, “cinema's closest relative at the end of the nineteenth century” (Rossell 27).

Dorian Gray was conceived at the end of the great decade of the chronophotographers – that brief window before the development of cinema proper in the late 80s and 90s – inaugurated in 1878 when Eadweard Muybridge successfully captured the gallop of a horse in a set of sequential photographs. (The following year the same inventor's Zoöpraxiscope projected an animated series of drawings derived from this sequence.) Subsequently Muybridge (“the great popularizer of chronophotography” [Rossell 39]) lectured widely on his work in Europe and America, and in 1887 his Animal Locomotion: An Electro-photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements appeared in book form. Meanwhile his Gallic counterpart, Étienne-Jules Marey, pursued his own researches into the photographic capture of kinesis, constructing his fusil photographique in 1882 and directing its muzzle at birds in flight. A lesser-known figure (though particularly interesting in the context of Wilde's novel) is Marey's associate Georges Demenÿ, who specialized in the development of “animated portrait[ure]” (Mannoni 418). His Phonoscope, which captured the human face in the act of speaking, was patented a year after the appearance of Dorian; a pamphlet advertising his later Bioscope announced that “The portrait artist. . . ‘will abandon the posed portrait for the living portrait’” (Mannoni 444).Footnote ¹⁵

Basil Hallward's own “living portrait” – or rather, the uncanny recording technology into which his painting is transformed after he puts his name to it, in a symbolic gesture of renunciation (unlike the “pallid jade-faced painters of Tokio,” he has no conscious desire to evolve a new formFootnote ¹⁶) – should be understood as in large part an imaginative response to such recent, and well-publicized, developments in cinematic history or prehistory, and to the ongoing shift in the conceptualization of pictorial representation to which they contributed. Once again, it bears repeating that pictures in works of fiction had come to life often enough in the past. But Wilde's treatment of this trope resonates decisively with specifically nineteenth-century developments in pictorial capture. From the beginning, Dorian's portrait is photographically realistic; then, once it acquires its new powers, it comes to assume something of the strange, mechanized autonomy of the camera eye as well. More, it records real-world events in real time, preserving them as a succession of snapshots, registered at the precise moment at which they take place:

Or again, immediately after Dorian has murdered Basil, a “loathsome red dew. . . gleam[s], wet and glistening, on one of the [portrait's] hands, as though the canvas had sweated blood” (176; ch. 14). It captures, in short, a rake's (even a homicide's) progress, but frame by frame, rather than tableau by tableau: while one cannot animate Hogarth (inserting his pictorial narratives into a zoetrope, or a Zoöpraxiscope, would be an exercise in futility), Wilde's sequential portrait fairly begs to be set in motion. Muybridge, Marey, or Demenÿ would have set a camera before the portrait, and known what to do with the photographic record of its changes. And in fact, Wilde himself imaginatively animates his portrait for us, more than once inviting the reader, in descriptions employing the language of temporal passage, palpable change, even discernible motion, mentally to run the sequence of Dorian's mug shots (as it were) as a kind of stop-motion film:

And again:

If one accepts that Wilde's time-lapse portrait of 1890 is to some significant degree cinematic, or conceptually inflected by cinema (in, again, the historically expansive sense in which I am using the category here), then it still remains to consider just what is so frightening about it. Of course, at the level of content – that is to say, the grotesque spectacle of degeneracy and decay which it presents – it is quite hideous enough, in terms of both appearance and implication. But it also exhibits many of the unsettling properties characteristic of what I am calling media horror – tropes which one encounters again and again in the weird fiction of the nineties, no less than in the J-horror flicks of the next millennium. There is the, in this case metaphorical, photograph (or chronophotograph, or movie camera) that sees more than it should, more than does the unaided eye – and which teaches the viewer to see as it does. Moreover, the very blending of media forms, at this fraught moment in the development of pictorial representation, can be unsettling in its own right: Wilde depicts the infection of portraiture by an emergent paradigm, suggesting that traditional modes of pictorial art may now only be conceivable in terms of the new way of seeing. And in the novel's final horror we have a variant of the trope of trans-medial escape, already noted in Ringu: Dorian stabs at the painting, thereby changing places with it; the portrait itself enters, in effect, the real world (“Lying on the floor was a dead man, in evening dress, with a knife in his heart. He was withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage”) (214; ch. 20). As so often in works of this kind, what begins with media challenging or transgressing categorial boundaries between and among other media, ends with a climactic breach of the membrane between representation and reality itself.

I shall have (yet) more to say about these tropes and their possible significance in the following sections. But before leaving Wilde I would like to point out that the novel's use of a filmic or chronophotographic paradigm in its conception of the uncanny portrait also resonates with its own, quite specific, set of concerns and themes as well, in a way which further contributes to the generation of anxiety. I refer to the fact that the portrait serves as a kind of animated memento mori, in that its logic of continuous, connected sequentiality articulates precisely that which the Paterian philosophy of Dorian and Lord Henry seeks to repress or ignore. A contrast between two sets or series of images, contained within the text, may be useful here. When Dorian meets Lord Henry's wife, she says:

Does not Lord Henry's collection constitute a kind of perfect foil to Dorian's serial portrait? True, the reader does not get to see these photographs (as it were) for him- or herself. But it is difficult to imagine that they capture anything but a succession of “exquisite intervals,” in Pater's phrase, each frozen moment to be savored on its own terms, and bearing no relation whatever to the others in the series. Surely they are, in other words, a perfect pictorial embodiment of the Pater philosophy, with its “counted number of pulses only [to be] given to us of a variegated, dramatic life” (152). (Or, to borrow an image from Clifford Geertz, Lord Henry's photos no doubt constitute “a string of. . . disconnected, aesthetic quanta.”)Footnote ¹⁷ Basil's portrait, by contrast, proves a peculiarly sticky medium, and a stubbornly memorious one: each frame of its progress recalls all that have come before, however much Dorian might wish to conceptualize life as a sequence of discrete, amnesiac moments, free from the iron laws of time, change, and consequence. It is, I think, not least among Wilde's imaginative achievements in the novel that he is able to recruit a culturally emergent paradigm of the living picture as a kind of Gothicized counterpoint or nemesis to its “official” philosophy: a technology which remorselessly projects, as a changing picture-story, everything which the perfect Paterite would wish suppressed.

III

The core conceit ofDorian Gray hinges, then, on an essential asymmetry between the chronophotographic portrait, with its power to record change, and its unchanging, seemingly immortal subject. We find a kind of chiasm or inversion of this representational relationship in Richard Marsh's blockbuster shocker The Beetle (1897). There, the eponymous horror, an “ancient, evil, shape-shifting bug” (as a recent commentator has waggishly described it)Footnote ¹⁸ which brings terror to “the heart of civilised London” (Beetle 309; ch. 43), frequently changes form it- (or him-, or her-) self, while the photographic self-portraits which, by some uncanny means, it produces, remain unchanging. Even, that is, as the Ovidian creature from the Orient metamorphoses before the very eyes of the novel's horrified English protagonists – apparently changing sex as well as form (from human to monstrous insect and back again) – so does it simultaneously secrete or extrude (or, as one character tellingly puts it, “project” [169; ch. 22]) a series of “photogravures” of itself in its scarabaean incarnation: all precisely identical, and (yet?) seeming to exude a palpably living quality.Footnote ¹⁹ It is through the perspective of the munitions maker Atherton that the reader first encounters these mechanically reproduced images, which so terrify the Beetle's chief victim, the Parliamentarian Lessingham:

Later, another reproduction of the changeless (yet strangely “alive”) image finds its way to Atherton, rather like an office fax (in the days of office faxes) shoved through a mail slot:

In due course, we learn that Lessingham has been terrorized by a series of these “projections” in his own home, each mysteriously vanishing, only to be replaced by an identical successor:

Marsh's monster thus embodies an unsettling conceptual marriage of organism and machine: the Lord of the Beetle is at once a grotesquely “creature[ly]” body which constantly changes shape (it would be a wonderful subject for a Marey or a Muybridge), and an inscriptive technology which “projects” a kind of uncanny kinematograph of itself, capturing (perversely or counterintuitively) its unchanging essence, the dread immortal Idea underlying that body's multifarious transformations (as well as, more generally, that in saecula saeculorum quality associated, in the Western mind, with the Orient itself).

Indeed, with etymology in mind, we should rather term the Beetle-Lord's practice of pictorial reproduction a form of anti-kinematography: here Marsh generates an unsettling effect in part by overturning historically emergent expectations that a mechanically produced and “projected” sequence of photographs of the same subject should register motion and change. More usual is the figure of photographs (or other pictorial media) becoming kinetic; Marsh provides one early example of this scenario in his story “The Photographs,” included in the 1900 collection The Seen and the Unseen. Set chiefly in the governor's office of a “Canterstone Jail,” “The Photographs” concerns a series of uncanny, sequential pictures taken of a prisoner named George Solly – it is the story, in effect, of a mug shot gone awry. The first picture of Solly (an official portrait requested by Scotland Yard: he sits in the prison yard holding up a slate with his own name on it) excites curiosity when a “veiled figure,” not visible while the picture was being taken, is seen standing in the background. The Governor immediately suspects fakery: “[W]hat have you done to the plate since you exposed it? You know, Mr. Dodgworth, this looks to me very much like one of those so-called spirit photographs – you know what I mean – printed from two exposures, and that kind of thing” (Seen 15). In fact the image is neither faked nor, properly speaking, a “spirit photograph,” the figure being (as is subsequently revealed) not a ghost but the prisoner's living wife, who is somehow able to project her image into, or onto, the pictures taken of her husband. More pictures are subsequently taken, and the “spirit photograph” becomes a kind of uncanny movie: the figure recorded by the camera eye is seen to move, frame by frame, and by a series of actions to signal Solly's innocence. She first conceals his name on the slate, then effaces it, then replaces it with another:

Solly's wife, or her spirit (or astral projection?), is even able to stage a new, more accurate mug shot of her own, so that it is Bradell himself who sits in the chair (“with an air of curious discomfiture”), holding up the slate with his own name on it, written “in a clear, feminine hand” (24). Here, at least, the spooky technological augmentation of human vision leads to the rectification of human error: the moving picture can perceive l'uomo deliquente more truly than the unaided eye; Solly is freed, Bradell justly incarcerated.

But perhaps the horror writer of the 1890s most obsessed with living pictures was M. R. James, who evolved his distinctive version of the Gothic taleFootnote ²⁰ in the final decade of the nineteenth century, in a series of stories ultimately collected in the 1904 Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (other collections of mainly inferior stories would follow in the early decades of the twentieth century, but the pattern had been firmly set by his late-Victorian tales). James's first story was published in National Review in March 1895Footnote ²¹: a pivotal year in the history of film,Footnote ²² having probably the best claim to having witnessed the invention of cinema proper – the development, that is, of a perfected method for the projection of moving, photographic images. 1895 represented the culmination of several important technical and technological threads over the past two decades in particular – including, crucially, the invention of kinetic versions of the magic lantern like Emile Reynaud's Praxinoscope (1876); the photographic capture of animal and human motion by (again) Muybridge, Marey, and others in the 70s and 80s; and finally, at the beginning of the 1890s, the development of the Kinetograph and Kinetoscope (devices not yet capable of projection) by Thomas Alva Edison and W. K. L. Dickson. The convergence of these technical ingredients led ultimately to the public demonstration by the brothers Lumière of their Cinématographe on 28 December 1895 – a “date that historians hold sacred” (Parkinson 17). I want to explore here the extent to which James's fiction, today the object of renewed interest,Footnote ²³ was conceptually inflected by cinematic technologies, with the emergent paradigms of kinetic capture, and promise of the uncanny preservation of life, which they brought with them. Sometimes the filmic traces in James are explicit, as in “The Haunted Dolls' House,” a later tale whose eponymous object shows its possessor horrible slices of (past) life at night. Confronted by the disconcerted collector to whom he had sold it, the antiques dealer in the story likens the house to a movie theater: “But I put it to you, Mr. Dillet, one of two things: was I going to scrap a lovely piece like that on the one 'and, or was I going to tell customers: ‘I'm selling you a regular picture-palace-dramar in reel life of the olden time, billed to perform regular at one o'clock A.M.’?” (Collected 297). (The cinematic pun which results from James's rendition of the shopkeeper's dialect – “reel life” – is perhaps accidental, but certainly felicitous.Footnote ²⁴)

But more generally his tales are haunted by animated pictures, bristling with scenarios in which pictorial representations, in one way or another, come to life, or threaten to do so. Indeed, the trope of the figure of dread issuing from such a medium into the world of the story should perhaps be considered the archetypal M. R. Jamesian germe or premise. Where they do not, as so often, seem to engender or call forth (often horrid or uncanny) forms of life, the pictures in his stories may themselves move – or otherwise mimic, or aspire to, a capacity for kinetic capture. Sometimes both things may be true at once, with moving pictures breeding animate figures. Often, too, the reader is struck by what appears to be the retrospective investment of a broad range of pictorial media, especially those of the past, with a cinematic capacity for living movement. James's stories are certainly full of pictures, technologies of the image which date from periods ranging from the author's beloved medieval era to the modern age: the reader encounters, among other media, stained glass tableaux (and other ecclesiastical images), illuminated manuscripts, a seventeenth-century drawing, a pictorial narrative inscribed on an eighteenth-century sepulcher, an early nineteenth-century print, magic lantern slides, and photographs. And it is impossible not to detect a certain essential continuity or kinship among James's pictures, of whatever historical provenance – one that inheres, as I have already indicated, in their kinetic quality. Even those that do not actually move often seem to be straining to do so, like the images graven on the sides of the malevolent Count Magnus's sarcophagus; in one, “among trees, was a man running at full speed, with flying hair and outstretched arms” (71). Or else (again) they seem to burst, alive, from the confinement of their frames. James's first published story, “Count Alberic's Scrap-book,” written sometime between 1892 and 1893 and appearing in print in 1895,Footnote ²⁵ sets the pattern for this characteristic topos. In it, a Cambridge antiquarian named Dennistoun (the prototypical James protagonist), on a visit to a French cathedral, procures an old folio filled with priceless illustrations dating back to the early eighth century. It is a more recent image, however – “a sepia drawing at the end of the seventeenth century” (8), depicting King Solomon commanding a demon – that drives the narrative. Not only “drawn from the life” (9), the hideous creature in the picture lives still, emerging to terrify the drawing's possessor. Only by burning the picture (after photographing it: his scholar-heroes tend to be obsessive photographers) does Dennistoun banish the horror. A few years earlier, in an unpublished sketch, James had already begun to explore the trope of living pictures. “A Night in King's College Chapel,” probably James's first attempt at a supernatural story (Count Magnus 287), imagines a late-medieval chapel transformed into something very like a movie theater. Left alone in the chapel after falling asleep in a stall, the narrator watches in horror as the stained glass windows come to life, their static images bursting out in a riot of activity: movement and “voices male, female and animal” filling the chapel (Count Magnus 253).

It is in stories like his celebrated “The Mezzotint,” however, that emergent paradigms of kinetic capture associated with cinematic technologies register most forcefully. Written soon after “Canon Alberic's Scrap-book,” and loosely connected with it,Footnote ²⁶ “The Mezzotint” also seeks to stir up anxieties about living pictures; in the latter tale, however, these anxieties attach at least as much to the technology of representation itself, as distinct from the thing represented. The antiquarian protagonist of “The Mezzotint,” a Mr. Williams, is a virtual Xerox copy of Dennistoun, a curator charged with acquiring “English topographical drawings and engravings” (24) for the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford (in thinly disguised form). His attention is drawn, by a dealer in such pictures, to an “[i]nteresting mezzotint” in his catalogue (“View of a manor-house, early part of the century. 15 by 10 inches; black frame. ₤2 2s.”) (25). Williams (somewhat reluctantly, given the price) sends for the print. At first the picture appears unremarkable: “It was a rather indifferent mezzotint, and an indifferent mezzotint is, perhaps, the worst form of engraving known” (25). When the print is left to itself, however, the astonishing property which had, presumably, led to its being labeled, modestly enough, as “interesting,” begins to manifest itself – namely, the picture's ability to “move,” by presenting a sequential series of images, like the consecutive frames of a movie. When first examined, the engraving shows only the manor house itself (Williams remarks, significantly or ominously, “there aren't even any figures to give it life”) (26). With each successive viewing, however, a terrifying figure emerges from one side of the frame and proceeds to creep, stage by stage, first into the house and then out of it again, now bearing a stolen child in its arms. Its progress is tantalizingly slow, the entire journey unfolding over the course of several days.

The figure (whose backstory, not important here, is disclosed in due course) does not in this instance escape from its frame to vex its spectators – though there is the unspoken (and unrealized) possibility that it may escape from the cinematic print (a possibility explored, though whether or not with knowledge of James's tale I do not know, in the Stephen King story “The Sun Dog,” essentially “The Mezzotint” transposed to a Polaroid age). Moreover, while the figure's appearance is, to be sure, sufficiently disconcerting (one look gives Williams's “skip” a bad case of nerves), James here focuses the reader's attention on the sheer uncanniness of the moving picture itself. James's mezzotint functions, in other words, as a kind of gothicized cinematograph – the new medium of the 1890s projected backwards into an ancestor or avatar from another moment in the history of pictorial technology – one whose narrative unfolds with exquisite slowness: one way, surely, to defamiliarize the (still-new) kinetics of the cinema.Footnote ²⁷ Moreover, in another striking echo of the emergence of the new medium, once Williams and his colleague discover the print's powers as a technology of kinetic capture (like the cinema, it stores, and replays, a slice of real life), their response – to photograph the print every time it “advances” a frame – mirrors, albeit in a kind of inverted form, the activities of the great chronophotographers, who (as we have seen) sought to parse the movement of living things, through rapid photographic capture, into the discrete frames of a pictorial sequence. Here, then, the evolution of cinema registers suggestively within the M. R. Jamesian tale of terror. And while the story's sense of dread is concretely embodied, within the field of representation, as a frightening figure, much of that dread seems to derive rather from the nature of the emergent medium itself. (In these stories James seems in effect to be saying, All movies are horror movies.)

In “Casting the Runes” (first published in the 1911 collection More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary), it is the magic lantern, a representational device with a long pedigree, which is invested with uncanny kinesis. “Casting the Runes” centers upon the diabolical activities of a dabbler in the dark arts named Karswell, and the episode gives James an early opportunity to establish Karswell's bona fides as a sadist. Having (uncharacteristically) offered to entertain the local schoolchildren, Karswell proceeds (much more characteristically) to terrify them, by giving them a kind of sexed-up magic lantern show. The images he presents are both progressively horrific and, interestingly, progressively kinetic, culminating in their seeming irruption into the real world: his last slide “show[s] a great mass of snakes, centipedes, and disgusting creatures with wings, and somehow or other he made it seem as if they were climbing out of the picture and getting in amongst the audience.”Footnote ²⁸

Yet again we see the by now familiar trope of intermedial migration or transgression, as well as another elegantly compressed dramatization of the birth of cinema itself (from the womb, as it were, of the older medium). To the magic lantern's principle of projection the evil magician Karswell (a kind of malign Méliès, perhaps?) adds the crucial ingredient of kinesis, with anxiety-producing results. All of Karswell's sequences are frightening, to be sure (the wolf in an early Little Red Riding Hood scene is “so dreadful that several of the smaller children had to be taken out”), and characterized by an apparently photographic degree of realism (“All the slides he showed. . . were absolutely realistic, and where he had got them or how he worked them [Mr. Farrer, the local clergyman] could not imagine”) (147). But as the show continues, the sequential images he projects seem as it were to accelerate, to become freighted with an increasingly palpable quality of motion:

The final technological gap between this serial picture-story, with its perceptibly “hopping,” “dodging” horror getting progressively closer to its prey, and the full-blown kinetics of film proper is subsequently bridged, as we have already seen: in a climactic instant, sequential narrative is miraculously transmuted into living movement, as a host of invertebrate things comes bursting out of the screen.

The creepy-crawly nature of the horrors which (seem to) emerge from Karswell's moving-picture show leads me to a final observation about the possible influence of an emergent cinematic paradigm upon James's fiction. Specifically, I wish to point to a certain affinity between his tales and the emergence of new practices of inscriptive, pictorial “life-writing” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, an affinity that can, I argue, be traced in James's conceptualization of that most central feature of his (or any) ghost stories – namely, the ghosts themselves.

In contradistinction to the traditional conception of the ghost as disembodied spirit, James's prove most often, certainly most memorably, to be only too corporeal – they are, in effect, all body.Footnote ²⁹ Yet they also differ greatly from other, conventional varieties of embodied revenant as well. For what is perhaps even more striking than their palpable physicality (at least in the present context), is the sheer, unmitigated aliveness of these beings.Footnote ³⁰ Where (for example) “undead” figures (vampires, zombies) are, as the name suggests, conceptual hybrids mingling the unnatural prolongation of life with the signifiers of death (the classic exemplar is the bloodless, animated corpse, bearing such signs of the cemetery as grave dirt, cerements, etc.), the typical James “ghost” exudes no quality, perhaps, quite so conspicuously as a (grotesque, to be sure) superabundance of pure, creaturely vitality. His ghosts are largely, indeed, not only zoic but zoological horrors: beasts, or therianthropic blends, drawn conceptually from a broad spectrum of the animal kingdom. Whether arachnoid, simian, insectile, or teuthologous (or some amalgamation of these with a debased humanity), the typical James ghost is a full-blooded organism, more inclined to race, scurry, or scuttle than to drift or glide.

A review of James's ostensibly spectral creations will show how prodigally he bestows upon them the markers of animal vitality. Many of them, for example, are hairy.Footnote ³¹ Consider the creature that emerges (as it seems) from the seventeenth-century illustration pasted in Canon Alberic's scrapbook:

Then there are the quite unmetaphoric – and gigantic – spiders from “The Ash-Tree.” Disconcertingly mammalian in appearance, they are first mistaken for squirrels and kittens (38, 45); seen more distinctly, they are revealed as “veinous. . . [and] covered with greyish hair” (46). Likewise, in “Number 13” the only part of Nicolas Francken's physical form – as distinct from his frenetically kinetic shadow-self – which we see is his arm: “clad in ragged, yellowish linen, and the bare skin, where it could be seen, had long grey hair upon it” (59). It would seem, then, that the sorcerer's “animal spirits” (57) are embodied in a largely animal form as well (he also yowls like a cat).

Other James creatures, on the other hand, are (presumably) slimy: in “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas” the unfortunate treasure-hunter perceives “a cold kind of face pressed against my own, and moving slowly over it, and of several – I don't know how many – legs or arms or tentacles or something clinging to my body” (108–09). (Later James hints that the creature is “perhaps more like a toad than anything else” [110].) And the familiar from “Count Magnus” is a “figure. . . unduly short, and. . . for the most part muffled in a hooded garment. The only part of the form which projected from that shelter was not shaped like any hand or arm. Mr. Wraxall compares it to the tentacle of a devil-fish [i.e., octopus]” (71). “The Residence at Whitminster,” on the other hand, features monstrous insects – sawflies, as one character reports in disgust, “as tall as I am,” all “long thin arms, or legs, or feelers” (235). (We might here recall, too, the invertebrate, protocinematic apparitions – “snakes, centipedes, and disgusting creatures with wings” – who make their wriggling exodus from the screen in “Casting the Runes.”) Of course, the undead can also be hairy (like Dracula), slimy, or otherwise animal-like. But, again, James's zoic ghosts bear no conceptual traces of the grave, no sign of any encounter with death – they represent (as it were) the uncanny and indefinite preservation of organic life pur.

In this they have much in common, as I have already hinted, with the new cinema in its various incarnations: that host of novel devices whose equally diverse nomenclature nonetheless reveals an essential continuity. Biograph, Bioscope, Biokam, Animatoscope, Zoöpraxinoscope, Photozoötrope, Vitascope, Viviscope (to give only a partial list):Footnote ³² all promise the perpetual preservation of life. (Those devices etymologically suggestive instead of movement – Kinetoscope, Kinetograph – of course promise the same thing; the quick are not the dead.) And of course back of all these looms the ancestral zootrope or zoetrope, i.e., “wheel of life” (as late as the 90s Marey, “intent on dissecting the principles of movement in birds, insects, animals, and humans,” would “regularly cut up his original images and [mount] them in an electric Zoetrope, in which he could see the reconstituted motion”) (Rossell 41). James's stories are, in other words, not only thematically inflected by the cinema; in some sense they are homologous to it, engaged in a like project of (uncanny) zoögraphy or life-writing. At the very least, James's bio-ghosts are wonderfully à propos creatures for the age of the Biograph.

IV

The most celebrated account of the category of the uncanny rests its interpretive case in no small measure upon the imaginative substitution of testicles for eyeballs, as the recurrent topos of ocular rapine in E. T. A. Hoffmann's Der Sandmann prompts Freud (inevitably) to remark: “A study of dreams, phantasies and myths has taught us that anxiety about one's eyes, the fear of going blind, is often enough a substitute for the dread of being castrated” (938). Of course, other readings are possible. One wonders, for instance, what Marshall McLuhan might have made of Hoffmann's tale. I suspect he would have observed first of all that sometimes, pace Freud, an eyeball may indeed be an eyeball – while at the same time insisting that the loss of an organ of sense (whether by an individual or an entire culture) is itself rather a big deal (the premise, it might be said, of McLuhan's entire corpus beginning with The Gutenberg Galaxy). It seems likely, too, that he would not have focused (so to speak) so exclusively on the Sandman's association with sensory privation (his incarnation, that is, as Coppelius the stealer of eyes) as does Freud (“the feeling of something uncanny is directly attached to the figure of the Sand-Man, that is, to the idea of being robbed of one's eyes”) (937). For of course in his role or aspect of “demon optician” (Freud 937) – as Coppola the peddler of optical media – the Sandman is a bringer of new eyes as well:

No obvious threat of castration here, yet the episode is at least as uncanny as many another in the story. The technologies of visual augmentation which Coppola heaps on the table fill Nathaniel with “horror” and loathing, their weirdly autonomous gaze seeming to transfix him where he stands. And while he prevails upon his diabolical visitor to put away his “thousand eyes,” Nathaniel does, unfortunately, accept a spy-glass, not greatly to his advantage. Of course, it is something of a commonplace, since McLuhan at least, to suggest that the prospect of perceptual extension itself implies a corollary act of sensory amputation or estrangement – the Sandman, as Coppelius, removes your eyes (or threatens to); as Coppola, he replaces them, with potent, yet alien, prostheses (to invoke the Freud, this time, of Civilization and Its Discontents).

Might we, then, consider Hoffmann's story as (to some extent at least) a kind of precursor or prototype of the genre whose emergence I have sought partially to trace in this essay? The possibility that Hoffmann's own experiences with the optical media of the day might have played an active role in his conception of the Sandman is raised, if only obliquely, by Freud himself: “[W]e perceive that [Hoffmann] intends to make us, too, look through the demon optician's spectacles or spy-glass – perhaps, indeed, that the author in his very own person once peered through such an instrument” (937). For it may be true that the Oedipus myth (which Freud also invokes) plays upon universal anxieties. That is to say, the fear of blindness (and for that matter castration) may indeed transcend cultural history. But not so, surely, the anxieties associated with the technologization of perception, from the cinematically-inflected horrors of the fin de siècle which I trace above, to the prospect of “hacked” or “hijacked eyesight”Footnote ³³ in the dawning age of Google Glass. (If, as I began this essay by observing, both old and new media can be profoundly unsettling, one reason for this may inhere in the fact that both – the Kinetoscope, for instance, viewed by a twenty-first-century eye and a nineteenth-century one, respectively – remind us how profoundly our organs of sense have been colonized, their work of perception off-loaded to artificial devices.) The roots of media horror, in other words, cannot be extricated from the contingent histories of representational technologies, and their fraught reception within particular cultures. It is precisely for this reason, it seems to me, that such stories can provide an especially valuable resource for historically-minded scholars – and not only those concerned with the Victorian period – interested in shedding light on the perceptual, conceptual, and affective integration of these technologies in the modern era.