The final chapter contextualizes the reflexive style of found footage horror in the “mechanical objectivity” paradigm to demonstrate how the genre encourages viewers to engage with the film as visual evidence that in turn produces a sense of viral omnipresence. The third chapter turns to histories of sonar and ultrasound to interrogate how recent horror films use sound mixing and audiovisualization techniques to express the spatial confinement of quarantine and unstoppable viral dissemination. The second chapter analyzes the representational structures that surround microscopic images on screen to demonstrate how these images are used to guide the viewer across the disparate visual and geographic scales of an emergent outbreak. The first chapter draws on scholarship on disease mapping to analyze how recent films and video games use maps to communicate the geographic distribution of an outbreak and produces the overwhelming sense of viral omnipresence. Each chapter interrogates a representational strategy to track the way popular media articulate the scale, presence, containment, and transmission of EIDs. Rather than focusing on scientific or medical content, I analyze the intersection of media forms and scientific paradigms that produce epistemological impressions-the sense of science-that help us see, hear, and feel an emergent outbreak. Coupling medium-specific analysis with historical and anthropological work on science and medicine, I track the way digital medial communicate EID outbreaks. In an effort to represent these complex networked phenomena, popular films, television, and video games have turned to the rhetoric of science and medicine. As products of globalization, emergent infectious diseases (EID) arise from the shifting environmental conditions, transportation networks and social practices of an interconnected world. This dissertation examines the recent archive of popular media documenting the spread of emergent outbreaks. Thus, the contemporary horror genre is being defined across media through an emphasis on the vulnerability and impotence of the searching camera. While the “shooter” in “First-Person Shooter” indicates a marriage of action and looking, games like Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Layers of Fear have, like found footage films, equated “horror” with a sense of helplessness and vulnerability by removing combat as an option, and by minimizing the player’s capacity for control. Found footage, unlike FPS, is predicated on looking within the film being a fundamentally vulnerable act, and on the helplessness of the viewer to intervene into the action onscreen. The horror genre provides two notable analogues for the FPS camera: the “Killer POV” sequences that were an emblem of the slasher era, and the faux-documentary handheld cameras of the “found footage” cycle that came to prominence in the cinema alongside the rise of the FPS in video gaming. In this article, I suggest that the FPS camera might belong to a longer tradition of “searching” cameras that begins with another kind of First-Person camerawork, handheld cinematography for documentary films. Theorist Alexander Galloway has asserted that the subjective camera of First-Person Shooter games marks a distinct break from cinematic traditions.
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