Haunted Houses, Home Video and more of The Ring.

 

The above text is an unused opening to a version of Ehren Kruger's script for The Ring (2002)¹

The inclusion of the record icon may suggest the scene functions as a foreshadowing or allusion to the film's final scene where Aiden creates a copy of the cursed videotape with the help of his mother, Rachel. What it certainly does is introduce the audience the antagonist (and in certain contexts victim) of the text – the VCR. But we are not only seeing this familiar device from a new perspective, it's interior or a fictional imagining of it's interior - we are being prompted to recognise this as a place of deeper, meta textual purpose.

In the final paragraph and it's follow up line the scene description appears to posit the VCR's interior architecture as an urban landscape surrounded by dark woodlands. The presentation of this strange world, illuminated by a record icon sun – serves as an establishing shot of what could easily be understood to be the epitome of small town America. A place so often the site for disruption and fear in the horror genre and surrounded by the dimly lit American wilderness; a place within the horror genre, that has never been entirely tamed.

A new day is dawning on this place, a town or city whose relationship to electronic media is, we feel, somehow not as it should be.

This inverted micro to macro visual scenario, where an establishing aerial shot of the wider location is positioned within the cramped interior of the films key prop and 'player' may further prompt our genre expectations. Surely, somewhere along the dimly lit streets of this town there must exist the another component in a supernatural horror – the haunted house.

But that house is never located, not along the streets nor at the edge of the tangled wood and the reason for that is that we are already within it. That is to say that the depicted VCR itself is serves as the Haunted House.²

The VCR, as depicted above and elsewhere within The Ring operates as Haunted House on several levels.

Haunted Media. In Dark Places: The Haunted House in Film³,  Barry Curtis asserts the haunted house functions as a 'a trans-dimensional archetype' that it's varying material shape often incorporates elements of the 'feudal castle, the ruined monastery, and the remote cottage' locations stained by 'memories, by the history of their sites, by their owners fantasies and projections'.

'The idea that objects and places can retain memories of traumatic events is an old one.' states Curtis. By these standards we could assert that the VCR relates to the haunted house via concepts of Haunted Media. This idea, best illuminated in Jeffery Sconce's Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television⁴ observes a tradition of crossover between the technologies and beliefs of sound and image media and the supernatural. The ability of location and often specifically a house to be supernaturally encoded with paleomagnetic traces of the past is best exemplified by Stone Tape theory, named after the much discussed TV play by Nigel Kneale.⁵

Like Sconce's many examples the VCR is a site where transient disembodied entities pass through. They materialise ephemerally, before vanishing back into their place of confinement, the black shiny ribbon tape as described in the screenplay. The medium's conspicuous lack of the material indexicality, so prominent in analogue film where each frame will reveal itself by merely being held up to the light might further suggests video a likely candidate to be charged with such ideas. The tapes surface is, until treated to the rigidly specific protocol of the VCR drum head, as impenetrable and abstruse as the rock walls in Kneale's play. If recorded images are burnt onto and embodied by the film frame then the same images might be said more to 'haunt' videotape. They are both there and not there. They are charged into their medium, existing only as magnetic disturbances.

The spectral, illusory nature of the analogue video image, as experienced on the CRTs of The Ring, is enhanced when we consider that it never truly existed as a complete image in anyplace other than our own cognition. The electron beam that draws the image, line by line, across the screen, would illuminate a portion of line on an ordinary family sized CRT television no wider than a few centimetres at any given moment. That is to say the images, though viewed, are never truly present.

The Ring, Videodrome (1983) Lost Highway (1997) and of course The Stone Tape (1972) are all charged with the uncanniness of the electronic recording media. Dealing with both anxieties of hidden or subliminal content and content that has been recorded by means that defy quotidian comprehension. 

In The Ring where a ghost materialises via a videotape we could say that she not only haunts the tape but that her ghostly ontology is reliant on the structure  which it occupies.

The Fun Fair or Carnival Haunted House. The description of the VCR's interior is reminiscent of another haunted house experience that has less to do with the supernatural, at least authentically. It's evocation of trapdoors and moving parts within a pitch black environment conjure more the fun fair or carnival haunted house.

My experience of these attractions was in 1970s and early 80s British traveling fun fairs. The promise was an encounter with the supernatural but these were  places where technology, took the place of supernatural forces to thrill, disorientate and shock the visitor.

In the absence of the means to furnish these houses with startling apparitions or any other type of spectacular effects (these places lacked the budget of Disney's Haunted Mansion) they relied instead on the generation of other sensations and anxieties to create the state of unease needed to keep the punters and rubes coming back for more or at the very least not demanding their money back.

The fun fair or carnival haunted house would disorientate in near total darkness with sliding walls, conveyor belt floors, trapdoors and automata that swing to and fro in the dark. The architecture was one of legerdemain, concealed mechanics of pulleys and hinges – a place that seeks to literally pull the wool over your eyes and rug out from underneath the feet. The skeletons were clearly plastic and far from convincing but the closets in which they resided were numerous and always where you least expected them.

To enter into such a place was to mix the fear of the supernatural unknown with that of the technological in a corporeal experience where the only certainty was that the house, it's mechanical haunting, was running rings about you. Darkness was it's ally, as was the scent of axle grease, ozone from over clocked starter motors repurposed as servos and flashing incandescent bulbs sprayed with orange cellulose car paint. The tremors around you were beyond comprehension. Among the sounds of repurposed army surplus klaxons and clips from the BBC's Sounds of Death and Horror⁶ were the sounds of the house working. Perhaps these unknown creaks, rumbles and judders were as disconcerting as the screaming skulls and siren blasts because the house did not give away it's secrets. The mystery of origin of these devices, their designers and builders were as beguiling as any of the horrors and thrills they had on offer at 30 pence for four minutes.

These effects contain a sort of technological uncanny themselves. Like the SFX and genre techniques employed in horror film, those technologically complex depictions of the fantastic, abject and grotesque whose spectacular attractions are compounded and amplified by a lack of understanding of how such artifacts are generated. In both cases the process of production itself is an asset of the unknown.

Again there is a parallel to the VCR here, a media device quickly came to represent an odd combination of the alien and the mundane. The inner workings of these machines that resided in our homes for so many years were rarely observed and even more rarely understood. The VCR's cassette snatching trap doors, darkened interiors, strange mechanical clicking and whirring were in certain senses as mysterious and perplexing and any of the content played and presented on screen.

The Gothic. The Haunted House is a place charged with Gothic familial anxieties, framed by architraves skewed by structural decay, uncanny disconnects, troubling ruptures in the classification of interior and exterior, deathly silent rooms where faces of the long since passed stare down from the walls. 

In a haunted house, according to Barry Curtis, 'what haunts is the symptom of loss -something excessive and unresolved in the past that requires an intervention in the present' ⁷

The actions and the offenses of the past reoccur and play out in the present here, a location discovered through and driven by fate. A place of vengeance that refuses to forget or be forgotten.

Just as Rachael and Noah's problematic parenting is reflected in the heightened stakes of Samara's familial catastrophe, the mistakes are repeated, echoed. Despite their presence becoming residual, disturbances caused by invoked guilt and panic become ever stronger with each generation.

The guilt with which the Gothic edifice of the VCR is charged is that borne by it's adopters, users who later and at the time of the making of The Ring it's betrayers and deserters. For this is a place troubled by the collective anxiety of millions of VCR owners aiming their machines and tapes at the rubbish bin. A not quite dead media but certainly an abandoned media.

Samara, suggests Jessica Belanzategul, is a proxy for the VCR .

Samara, 'embodies both the vengeance and rapid disintegration of a long dominant audio-visual format.'⁸

Samara was cast away, abandoned, left for dead – she came back. Her wrongdoings included projecting imagery in the minds of her family and neighbours.

...the things she'd show you... solemnly recalls her father (before becoming horse in his bathtub)

VCRs take the fall for DVD... abject soon to be obsolete. ⁹

In Retrotechnophobia, Caetlin Benson-Allott posits the VHS within The Ring as a patsy, a stand in for an emergent DVD in an anti piracy narrative. A parallel reading (that the author does not ignore) locates a masked anxiety regarding imminent abandonment of the VCR - the dumping of a once prized item and with it shared associations and memories, the (at the time) scarcely addressed environmental impact, the unknowns of the accelerated move towards the digital as the driving forces of The Ring. 

As every haunted house movie confirms, ghosts and their domains can be abandoned but they rarely go away. Instead they become further embittered and locked into the walls and floors of the haunted edifice. 

In The Ring this Gothic architecture is located in the dark chambers of the VCR itself, before and after it was erased from our collective cultural behaviors if not our memories.¹⁰

'the House of Usher is no more – the place whereon it stood is as if - it had never been' ¹¹

(1) http://www.horrorlair.com/movies/scripts/The_Ring.pdf

(2) The released version opens with a shot of a more conventional spooky looking house. This isn't the only use of location and architecture to elicit unease in The Ring. The images of the face at the window within the montage, the Morgan house itself, the motel site - even the cold industrialism of the lift and stairwell in Noah's bachelor pad studio, these elements of mise en scene all play an active part within the texts genre objectives. But there is no haunted house in the conventional sense. That is, a site that both central to and an active antagonistic force within the narrative. Only the VCR might be said to fulfill these criteria.

(3) Curtis, Barry, Dark Places: The Haunted House in Film,
REAKTION BOOKS; Illustrated edition (1 Sept. 2008)

(4)Sconce, Jeffrey, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television,
Duke University Press, 2000.

(5) Kneale, Nigel, The Stone Tape, BBC 2, 1972.

 (6)  Sound Effects No. 13 – Death & Horror, BBC Radiophonic Workshop, 1977.

(7) Curtis, ibid.

 (8) Balanzategui, J. (2016), ‘Haunted nostalgia and the aesthetics of technological decay: Hauntology and Super 8 in Sinister ’,Horror Studies, 7: 2, pp. 235–51, doi: 10.1386/host.7.2.235_1

(9) Retrotechnophobia: Putting an End to Analog Abjection with The Ring, published in Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens, 2013, Caetlin Benson-Allott, University of California Press. p113

(10)The videocassette might, with it's own curious magnetically charged, mechanical, sealed ontology, be said to function as the VCR's uncanny reduced familiar, itself invoking a sense of the haunted house.

(11)Got this off the cover of a videotape! E. A. Poe via Corman via 1989 Video Collection International VHS release cover tagline. Fall of the House of Usher, AIP, 1960. 

Macrovision 5 - time Code, fingerprints and the unacceptable copy.

 When visualising the absence of timecode depicted on the LCD counter of Noah's video editor as an abstract jumble of non characters and glitches, The Ring signifies a crisis of language and a disruption of understanding. Within horror genre, this is another step away from any safe, quotidian, perception of reality. It evokes the supernaturally charged archaic runic symbols of M. R. James' Casting the Runes, the technological defiance of The Golem and the horror of the unutterable as described by Lovecraft.

This imagery is fortified by Noah's erroneous and anthropomorphic description of video timecode as being akin to a human finger print and the glitchy symbols denoting their absence. This posits the tape's contents not only as uncanny other but as a lying beyond the realm of identification or any normal sense of ontology, perhaps their lack of symbolic function locating them as glimpses of a horrific Real.

Similarly, the Macrovision signal, referred to in it's patent application as consisting of a random, pseudo-random and predetermined pattern distribution of pseudo-sync pulses, is a disruptive non-signal and as such cannot be read. Like the anomaly identified by Noah it is merely error generating; a recording from a unknowable source and of a technological ontology shrouded in no small amount of intrinsically intentional and commercially rooted mystery.

The task of these pseudo signals is to negatively effect and disrupt any copy made of the recording within which they are concealed; to corrupt and smear it to the point that it has become useless, abject or to use the intention stated in the patent application, the become unacceptable. This smearing is also present in the trope on Noah's timecode display. These broken decimal numerical signifiers whose integrity is so taken for granted, almost a priori, as to make them seem invulnerable has been dragged from their quotidian stability, they too have become unacceptable.

Noah later experiences distortion and becoming unacceptable when his own image is smeared on the screen of a grocery store's CCTV system. Like the corrupted timecode this highly economical special effect succeeds in evoking a sense of horror very well. The image on the screen, almost a mirror, presenting an opto-electric facsimile of Noah, suggests he has not copied well. Like sensitives, pets and spooky kids as employed in a multitude of horror movie tropes, technology serves to look beneath the surface and show the, occasionally horrible, truth. When mechanical reproducibility asserts it's own eerie aura it leaves little doubt that something has not worked out.¹

Despite Noah's authoritative AV credibility (Noah functions as a low emotion, logicist, expert. If Noah thinks something is awry, our genre savvy tells us we should take heed) not all video recordings contain timecode ² but when they do they can be located in the same area as Macrovision. The Vertical Blanking Interval's versatility as a payload provides a secure and hidden storage space for Vertical Interval Time Code (VITC) just as it does for for anti-copy protection. Despite Noah's misrepresentation genuine versions of 'Video Fingerprinting', which has nothing to do with timecode but concerns the assignment a unique hidden signature to a video recording for anti-piracy purposes, appear to have also utilised blanking intervals – albeit the Horizontal Blanking Interval further ³.

 Also, VITC allocates a space for 32 bits 'User Bits' of user defined information or annotation, which can comprise of digits or letters. So in theory Noah's description of time code is not impossible, adding to what Nicholas Rombes refers to as 'uncanny associations'; here specifically between the anti-copy objectives of The Ring, as described by Caetlin Benson-Allott and the technology and UX qualities of the genuine anti-copy system, Macrovision.⁴

The proposal of video possessing a fingerprint, or in this case lacking one, suggests a video anthropomorphism or animism considered elsewhere by Caetlin Benson-Allott and Ina Blom⁵. It also brings to mind the fingerprint as one of the go-to models for the semiotic index if only to remind us that VHS may have been analogue but it's indexicality was and remains more theoretical than observable. A single field of VHS video, that is a screen filled with odd or even lines providing half of a full screen image, is recorded on to tape in a track around 9cm long and 0.049mm wide. Two of these tracks interlace to provide a full frame. As each frame will comprise of 250 lines we can see that any individual line occupies a piece of tape far smaller than a pin head. Analogue video is not indexical in the same sense that can be said of analogue photography, moving image film or even most sound recording media⁶. When stored on tape, the video signal, which is of course invisible to the eye, has been further encoded and obfuscated by Frequency Modulation for purposes achieving higher quality images. A VHS videotape recording, then, is thrice removed from a true and appreciable  indexical relationship to it's subject; in it's dimensions, encoding and loss of visibility as magnetic recording on entirely uniform tape. The magnetic video tracks are so insubstantial, that dusting of the tape surface with powdered iron filings, a method for viewing magnetic recordings, reveals nothing. Only the relatively heavy percussion of the control track on the tapes edge is visible.

This could also be said of the CRT TVs and monitors seen in The Ring. Analogue screens of this type never truly depicted and image. If analogue film creates an illusion of moving images, analogue video took the subterfuge a stage further with an illusion of a the single images that an illusory moving image are then formed of. If analogue video is truly indexical of anything, it would be a single dot or beam of light. Just as mechanical television economically (if ultimately impractically) made use of a single light sensor tucked behind a spinning disc, the video tube camera and it's corresponding dipslay media, the CRT, collected and displayed images with a single fast moving electron beam moving in parallel lines. The entire moving image technology, therefore only views or displays, and is only indexical to, a single point of light at any given time.⁷

So in this sense Noah's observation on the ontology of Samaras tape serves as meta critique of a moribund format, it's lack or indexicality but moreover it's elusive status within semiotic classification – even when declared spent and obsolete.

Noah's proposition that every video recording contains a signature, a record of it's own origin may have it's own origins in a technology that was emerging in consumer markets at the time of The Ring's production. In the early 2000s digital still photography was fast becoming a desirable and affordable alternative to analogue film and with came new takes on the technological uncanny. EXIF metadata, encoded into every image file saved by the camera, contains information on the device itself as well as when and how it was used. VITC time code was a digital signal inserted into an analogue media and as The Ring was produced at a time of widespread A to D conversion, might Noah's fingerprint/signature also have betrayed anxiety about some of the, yet to be comprehended, emergent successors to analogue media? Moments of transition illicit anxiety and the The Ring's glitchy time code representing a weird digital lurking unseen within the analogue, would in horror genre systems, usually suggest the potential for imminent attack.

(1) Retrotechnophobia: Putting an End to Analog Abjection with The Ring, published in Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens, 2013, Caetlin Benson-Allott, University of California Press p125

(2) ibid, p116 All analogue videotape recordings do contain a control track which is read by a separate head to regulate the speed of the tape as suggested by Caetlin Benson-Allot , though this does not effect the 'scan' rate as such – rather the rate at which the tape is passed across revolving/scanning drum head. The control track is not, as suggested, timecode. Though there was a system that embedded an SMPTE time code into the control track (CTL) this method was rarely employed.

(3) I was given information on this technology, seemingly something of an in-shop self build at a 90s VHS duplication facility, via an online forum. It's unverified and I haven't cleared permission to share with the provider/poster yet. More info on request!

(4)Nicholas Rombes, Cinema in the Digital Age, 2009 Columbia University Press, and Caetlin Benson-Allott, ibid.

(5) CBA, VCR Autopsy, journal of visual culture, 2007 and Ina Blom, Introduction to The Autobiography of Video. The Life and Times of a Memory Technology (2016), Sternberg Press, p19

(6) grooves on an LP, an undulating wave on an optical film track which match the Cymatic movements of speaker diaphragm or other physical bodies effected by sound

(7) As contemporary high speed imaging demonstrates clearer than ever before – visual demonstration here - The Slo Mo Guys - How a TV works in Slow Motion - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BJU2drrtCM