The evolution of fear: how horror kept up with new audiences
Horror needs to evolve with its audience to remain relevant and terrifying. Through utilizing new mediums of storytelling, the genre has progressed with its fan base.
When books became published en mass, Mary Shelley used this as a great way to scare readers with her horrifying monster. When radio broadcasts were amplified to cover the entire nation, Orson Welles spooked listeners with “War of the Worlds.” In the last several decades, Stephen King movies have grossed over two billion dollars by dismaying audiences on the big screen.
Today, the genre needs to maintain its relevance by continuing to update its mediums with the new forms of entertainment surfacing every decade. With new mediums, comes new fear evoked in audiences, as each form of storytelling plays on new forms of communication, from reading the horror, to hearing it, seeing it, and now, possibly feeling as though the audience can live the horror along with the storyteller.
Social media is the newest frontier of storytelling and has not been void of new horror stories. This newer medium is more effective in creating emotions of fear and terror, as it is easier for a modern audience to believe and interact with the story than a ghost story being told orally.
Adam Ellis’s original illustration of Dear David, the ghost which haunts his apartment.
The boy was distinct for his dented skull.
As a medium, Twitter is an autobiographical, chronological account of one’s social life through snippets of text posts and is therefore filled with information that is current, often personal, and always easily understood. Adam Ellis’s Twitter feed was no different to that of your average young professional, until he began posting a sequential collection of his encounters with a ghost he believed was inhabiting his apartment building called “Dear David.”
His tweets on the topic were interspersed among his average social life and work-related posts, giving readers the desire to keep a close eye on his feed to be instantly updated on the next “Dear David”-related happening. This is a new age of horror storytelling, harkening back to the classic “penny dreadfuls,” with new serialized stories being released with a new twist, of an autobiographical social media platform.
As an author, Ellis knows this will be a continuing story, as evident in his very first tweet on the topic, “thread” finishes his statement. It may be unclear if Ellis knew the thread would extend over a year, but his original explanation of the “Dear David” phenomena is explained over several posts.
A Twitter thread is also an emerging form of storytelling which has easily measurable audience interaction. An author can gain immediate feedback on his work and make improvised edits to maintain interest.
Since Twitter began a new era of publishing, it is a relatively new platform compared to previous ages; the Victorian era, which lasted over 60 years. When radio broadcasting was new, this medium was used to evoke mass hysteria in horror listeners, which was measured by local newspapers. “Dear David” brings about the same level of audience interaction in this brand new format of evolutionary storytelling, which is similar to radio and the mediums before it.
The tweet that begins the year long chronicle of Ellis’s life and hunting.
A glaring advantage Twitter has over the radio or podcast mediums is that of its use of primary narrative. When being told a story orally or via radio, there is always a narrator causing a degree of separation between the audience and the subject whereas Twitter is far more personal between the author and his followers.
Not only was the “Dear David” thread posted on Twitter, where Ellis boasts millions of followers, he is also active on Instagram, his Facebook comic fan page, and Patrion. At several points in his thread, he references aspects of his story that his followers had noticed.
Adam posted “totally boring brunch photos” on his Instagram, he fearfully stated something his fans noted in his following post.
Ellis’s evidence of paranormal activity.
“I posted one more photo of me and my friend before leaving, and that was that. But the next day I had a zillion messages about the third photo I posted. People had taken screenshots and sent them to me.”
@adamtots
The fans noted this glitchy photo, something he would not have even seen had it not been for his audience. The discovery pushed his story along, as he then tweeted, “I have no clue what happened. It looked perfectly fine on my phone when I uploaded it. I'd say it was just a glitch but I can't make sense of what's happening with my face.”
This not only allows his massive fan base to interact with this story, but also become a part of it by being mentioned in the tale itself. Social media prides itself in connecting people directly to others, with no middle man. It is a raw, unrefined system which makes us all overly nosey, incredibly interested, and easily sucked in. This is why “Dear David” works so well as a horror story.
More of Ellis’s frightening evidence of his apartment being haunted by a young boy.
Ellis’s photos (of arguable validity) of “Dear David”’s physical manifestation hovering over Ellis’s bed, the videos of his cats getting riled up in the middle of the night over seemingly nothing, and a physical boot being dropped from his attic hatch door.
While the horror genre has been evolving since the first ghost stories were told around a campfire, it is constantly morphing and rejuvenating itself through new mediums. With every generation of new storytelling styles, horror becomes more believable as audiences are awakened to new senses being used to interpret what is horrifying.
With new mediums comes new accomplishments in the genre, and “Dear David” has been crowned the best within the medium of social media storytelling. Due to audience interaction, a plethora of photos and visual aids, and the autobiographical nature of the site, the “Dear David” Twitter thread is horrifyingly believable.
