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Abstract
Blue Light of the Screen: Notes on Horror is a memoir of the author's obsession with the horror genre. To that end, it explores depression, visual culture, family trauma, Catholicism, and spectrality. It considers the reality-bending, immersive experience of watching and working in digital screens as a contemporary mode of reverie. It reflects on personal and cultural spiritual beliefs and superstitions in terms of the long-standing connection between seeing and believing. Strongly influenced by Freudian theory but not itself Freudian, Blue Light of the Screen investigates memory, fantasy, and hysteria as they are staged in horror television and film, the author's own life, and a variety of cultural sources. While the manuscript begins as a study of the twentieth and twenty-first century horror genre, with a focus on the ghost film in particular, it gradually broadens into an exploration of existential horror and questions of faith. In terms of its form, Blue Light of the Screen sits somewhere between memoir, philosophy, and prose poetry, and also contains lists and illustrations.