The Haunted Broadcast: Using Static to Understand Broadcast’s History and Present

Abstract

Broadcast static—interference, visual snow or noise—has been a critical part of media history. Typically signaling a breakdown in communication, representation of static has persisted in cinematic and televisual content. Despite static’s ubiquity throughout broadcast media history, it remains an underexamined object of study. In this paper, I turn to two examples of how static is used as a narrative, rhetorical or esthetic device—as a way to explore new technologies to a parallel world (Poltergeist and From), and as a means to access and rework the past (The Ring and Archive 81). Drawing upon media histories of hauntings, these examples demonstrate how static offers a temporal gateway between the present, past, and future. I argue that static is a useful framework through which to understand technological change and failure and show how audiences have been active in reading not only texts but broadcast technologies themselves.

Introduction

In 1982’s Poltergeist (1982), a blue flickering light and accompanying high-pitched noise interrupts the sleep of a child, Carol Anne, who leaves her bed to perch in front of the static-filled screen. As the rest of the family sleeps together in the bed behind her, Carol Anne seems to form a connection with and between the static before its anthropomorphic characteristics emerge. The static forms peaks on the television screen, extending beyond the glass as a hand and a series of specters which are absorbed by the wall behind the family sleeping. The force of their movement sends Carol Anne’s hair skywards, and eventually stirs the family who wake to hear the message: They’re here.

Static was a mainstay of analog television, a visual and auditory remainder of the process of broadcast and a material evocation of its failure. Beyond the decline of analog television, static has continued to be a representational reminder of television as it has been, is used as an esthetic device on video platforms, and serves as a critical representation of time and pastness. Despite this, static remains an under-examined element of television’s history or its present. This paper outlines some of the major ways that static has been consistently utilized as a narrative or rhetorical device in horror films and series (and their promotion) in order to begin to map static’s evolving importance in negotiating the relationship between past screen cultures and emergent practices. I argue that static has acted as a bridge between worlds and temporal states, and its persistence reflects ongoing concerns and positive claims about technological media change.

As screen technologies and cinematic objects age, they leave material reminders of their distance from being considered “new.” Hilderbrand (2009) labels many of these material presences as the “aesthetics of access”—in the case of videotape, this can be seen as the image and sound loss that becomes compounded as tapes are copied, and copies are made from copies. While these practices and objects may seem distanced from the world of streaming, they continue to live on both through archives and through representations of degradation in more contemporary media. In this paper, I explore how static (including visual snow, and visual and sonic interference) has become an established esthetic and narrative device that embodies the sociotechnical relationship between television, cinema and other emergent and legacy technologies. I look at two dominant ways in the horror genre that static has been utilized, each engaging with the technologies and cultures of domesticated media through both individual texts themselves and screen promotion. In these examples, static not only embodies the potential for horror that comes from the absence of a discernible image or sound, but horror exists within technological failure or within the folk practices of media manipulation: copying, bootlegging and sharing. Static is the material remnant of copying, deleting, playing, or storing. Static dares us to look, to find hidden messages in loss or distortion—to find the new.

What is Static: The Cultural and Technological History

Static, or “noise” or “snow,” was a type of visual and/or sonic interference in analog broadcast media—chiefly on broadcast television and radio. The term has been loosened (or, perhaps, never narrowed) to refer to any kind of analog trace of broadcast failure or sonic intervention in a planned broadcast. Static is the “noise” to the signal (Stadel 2016)—a remainder of the act of broadcasting, that makes material the towers, antennas, and other technology that makes broadcast possible. Noise is typically understood as the “unwanted” (Deane 2013) element of the process of accessing a signal. Static has appeared on television when a broadcast has failed, when a television hadn’t yet been “tuned” to receive channels automatically, or another electrical failure. While the sonic qualities between television and radio static are similar, the visual component of static on television is a random series of typically black and white pixels not organized in any way. For analog television users, this at times would have resulted in static forming into an image as the channel was properly tuned. In the United Kingdom, static was experienced by viewers after the broadcast ended for the day. For radio users, static continues to be a common occurrence, more so than when accessing digital television. Static is the noise heard when tuning between stations, and when leaving adequate reception for a weak signal.

Cubitt (2017) positions noise such as static is “defined by exclusion: it is what is not communicated” (p. 4). He argues that when we try to listen to it, to comprehend it, “we should recognise in it the basic flux of mediation, thralling and distracting as the waves of the sea” (Cubitt 2017: 4). If noise is defined by what is not being communicated, static and other mediated noise is defined by the absence of a clearly understood broadcast. It is a lack of articulation, other than articulating that something has failed to connect, or something is yet to. However, static has since morphed into something that isn’t only present through the design of broadcast media, but as a narrative device; one that draws upon cultural histories of media use, of limited and work-around access to texts, and that shows the act of reading media as a technological object.

Stadel (2016) has outlined the ways that static has been crucial to both radio and television, as it has plagued both technological creations—the latter involving both the sound and image of static or noise. While the relationship between radio and television has been broadly understood as radio pre-dating the formation of television, this has more recently been problematized by some scholars, including Stadel (2016) and Galili (2020), who disrupt the clean narrative of technological progress, instead showing the interconnectedness of media forms despite seeming divergences between their aims. Rather than each new media technology appearing in an ever-expanding pattern of progress, there have been experiments, failures, and complex relationships between similar technologies. Stadel argues that the relationship between radio and television is symbiotic—that televisual technological development was dependent upon advancing radio technologies. Stadel (2016) posits that by turning to the noise of television, such as static, “noise emerges as an alternate televisual ontology, an ontology that reflects broadcast television’s development via technologies of radio” (np).

The relationship between radio and television as broadcast technologies has been understood by many in relation to “liveness” (Sconce 2000)—that the “in-time” capacity of broadcast set these technologies and their associated social practices aside from other media such as cinema. Within individual technologies, there is also a more complicated timeline than the movement of AM to FM in the case of radio, with FM existing since the 1940s (Stadel 2016). Stadel (2016) outlines that during television’s emergence, “the presence or absence of static marking a major dividing line between different modes of radio transmission, modes of transmission that emanated not only from the speakers of free standing radios, but also from television sets” (np). For audiences during this time, the presence or absence of static thus reflected what type of media they were encountering, whether or not the broadcast was successful, and also embodied the “liveness” of the medium through its potential for failure.

Static was understood by many, including regulatory bodies of both television and radio, to be noise, and noise was something to be minimized, something that detracted from the experience, an “unwanted addition” (Weaver 1949, in Stadel 2016: np). During the period of television’s rising popularity to become a mainstay in the home over the rest of the millenium, television noise became a consistent complaint in media commentary. This was not only due to the addition of television into the domestic space causing noise, but noise within television’s design; as Stadel (2016) argues, noise “was a metonym for all of television’s failures—proof that the medium could never be art.” For audiences outside of major metropolitan areas in the 1950s, “static was the most common form of signal to come across the televisual receiver” (Stadel 2016, np). Within a decade, static became a narrative device on shows such as The Outer Limits (Sconce 2000; Stadel 2016), and has since remained a specter on narrative television particularly in science fiction and horror, as will later be explored through more contemporary examples, even when static isn’t necessarily a phenomenon experienced by some contemporary viewers. Beyond television and film, static has also been part of the design of online platforms and streaming services, as will be discussed further in this paper—demonstrating that static can stand in for anticipation and failure simultaneously. Consequently, static has come to mean something in addition to its lived history as an indication of a signal being sought or lost. Instead, it shows an ongoing presence in narrative media and beyond as being a metaphor for anticipation of connection, or of a nostalgic evocation of the past. In these ways, static serves two temporal purposes seemingly at odds with each other, united by the ways that its use helps us to understand the negotiation of new broadcast media with the old.

One of the primary ways that static and other visual and sonic interference has been discussed in media studies is through critical considerations of the practices and objects of videotape, where this interference adds to the reading of the media object and text. Videotape is a “reproductive technology” (Hilderbrand 2009, 33), in which consumers can both access video texts and copy them onto future video objects. Developed in the later 1970s, VHS players and videotapes as new media technologies became more widespread in the 1980s and 1990s. Videotapes were marketed to consumers as a way to bring the cinema home, to build personal collections of videos that were important to them, and also document and copy television and personal videos. This confluence of purposes for video meant that personal histories and memories became an integral part to understanding this emergent technology.

The media companies seeking to control the intellectual copyright of the texts that could now be copied and distributed via informal networks were often the same companies seeking to showcase all the technological potential of VCRs and videotapes (Greenberg 2010). Through this negotiation of new technologies and the economic imperatives behind them, individual networks and personal connections allowed for new practices of copying and sharing to emerge that outpaced the capacity for a pre-Internet movie studio to pursue. Bootlegs—the unauthorized copying and distribution of video content that were shared through ad hoc and more formalized networks and clubs—is an important part of video, and therefore television, history (Greenberg 2010).

Lucas Hilderbrand describes this history in relation to the distribution and reception of bootleg tapes, but also considers their esthetics as a primary factor in bootleg culture. For Hilderbrand, the visual and sonic residues of the act of recording, transferring, and distributing provide “texture and qualities” which in turn become the “aesthetics of access” (2009, 163). The esthetics of access not only make visible the alternate, informal networks of distribution, but materially call into being audience participation with the text. Individual videos took on new lives with audiences, achieving cult or underground status—particularly in experimental genres—the pooling of the collective affect of seeking out these texts would also result in greater degradation of the video. The video then became a material remainder of this desire, with static pops and pixel degradation following the narrative text’s replication. Tapes that have been copied many times “typically reveal lost resolution from multiple generations of duplication, so that the colour looks washed-out and the audio becomes distorted” (Hilderbrand 2009, 175). This media history is present too in the narrativization of static that draws upon the negotiation of emergent and past technologies with media audiences.

Static has also moved beyond appearances in screen texts to appearing as an esthetic feature on newer platforms. Shudder, a horror streaming service, utilizes similar esthetics to build a sense of an ongoing horror community. Static appears upon opening the app—the S in “Shudder” “judders and skips—initially as if afflicted with a digital glitch—but in the background, animated TV static fills the screen,” with earlier versions of the interface referencing computer monitors and TVs—a “gateway into the platform nostalgically simulates analog television, but also references iconic and cult ‘haunted television’ films” (Balanzategui and Lynch 2023, 164). As Balanzategui and Lynch (2023) explore, the platforms’ “nostalgic vernacular not only solicits fan nostalgia for iconic horror classics, but harks back to horror’s conflicted relationships to legacy media: relationships that were foundational to horror’s subcultural constellated communities from the ‘70s onward” (p. 163). Static in this case also stands in for the esthetics of access, as described by Hilderbrand (2009)—each glitch showing the difficulty of attaining a title, the cult status attributed to it, and as a material remainder of the ways that the text has moved through communities. To have ghosts or demon forces launch from static is a knowing nod not only to the time and space during which static was naturally encountered, but also to the audiences who feed into its presence. In part, static is also about a remediation or hark back to legacy media, and the role that it played in the distribution and reception of horror and other subcultural media on television, this time making it part of the production of similar texts.

This moves static’s emergent uses away from merely signaling a glitch or failure in broadcast—as can be seen on other platforms such as the ill-fated IGTV on Instagram—and instead points to static appearing as a paratext or a framework through which to understand authenticity, fan cultures, and the relationship between audiences and technology.

Static as Warning; Static as Hope: Poltergeist, From and Technological Change

Sconce (2000) demonstrates how most new electronic technologies have at one point been understood in relation to the spiritual realm. With a new mediated technology comes experimentation as the technology is moved into the home and then integrated into everyday life. Sconce (2000) creates an incredibly detailed history of how the spiritual realm has been both a framework through which to negotiate new, misunderstood technologies, but also has been central to mediated representations of new technologies. From the outset, for instance, televisions were framed in news articles as being haunted (pp. 1–2). He writes:

Each of these [news] stories draws on a larger cultural mythology about the “living” quality of such technologies, suggesting, in this case, that television is “alive. . .living, real, not dead” (Feuer 1983: 14) (even if it sometimes serves as medium of the dead). The “living” quality of television transcends the historically limited and now almost nonexistent practice of direct “live” broadcasting to describe a larger sense that all television programming is discursively “live” by virtue of its instantaneous transmission and reception. Central as well to the initial cultural fascination with telegraphy, telephony, and wireless, such liveness is at present the foundation for a whole new series of vivid fantasies involving cyberspace and virtual reality. (Sconce 2000, 2)

Beyond the trope of the haunted television characterized as a misunderstood black box (where the emergent technology of live broadcast seemed to create a dialog between the audience and the broadcaster), audience fascination with the technology and its capacity for broadcast was also related to other technologies when they were in their infancy.

As a well-established trope in horror films, the haunted television has continued to act as a site of horror, despite television’s increasing disconnect from the live broadcast. Returning to Carol Anne’s spectrally terrorized family in Poltergeist, as the Freeling family comes to learn that they are being haunted, her father Steven uncovers that the ghostly violence is connected to an ancient burial ground underneath a new subdivision—that he sells to unsuspecting families. Static here acts as a conduit between the human present-day world and the spiritual realm occupied by the ghosts dedicated to stopping the disrespect of their resting place. As a mode of communication with Carol Anne (and therefore the audience), static encourages the act of reading; reading both the dynamic image of static, and of reading the intentions of the spirits who are choosing to communicate via this medium. The correlation between static and ghostly forms of communication is not lost; in between the black and white pixels that make up static, is the potential for an image to form. In static that appears as a broadcast failure, lines may appear across the screen as an apparition of the failed broadcast, with a barely traceable or audible version of the intended screen. As Balanzategui and Lynch note, Poltergeist is a part of the “haunted television” trope, including other films such as The Ring (2002), Videodrome (1983), Balanzategui and Lynch (2023, 164) and Sconce (2000).

At the time of Poltergeist’s release, both televisions and VCRs had become accepted and popular domestic technologies. In their ubiquity, they also became “black-boxed,” in that their technological components were less important to understand in order to be able to operate them (see Van Den Boomen 2014). John Ellis has described how television in the early 80s was primarily a sound-based medium, holding a “stripped-down image” (Ellis 1982, 131, in Sedman 2013). Released in 1982, Poltergeist pre-empted the release of stereo television, which “resulted in production studios updating their audio production and post-production techniques to incorporate the new system” (Sedman 2013, np). Writing in 1989, John Fiske described how television’s meaning was in its excess or overload of messages, claiming that “television’s main semiotic energy is. . .not in producing meanings, but in policing and controlling the excess of meaning it cannot help producing” (Fiske 1989, 69–70, in Deane 2013). Static is an understudied part of the meaning that television could not help but produce in its analog era.

As televisual technology developed, television noise—static, snow, etc—was a problem to control, and a symptom not only of technological failure, but of the amount of content created for and by television—the “stream” described by Williams (2003 [1974]). As St Clair (2013) writes, “As a near ubiquitous aural backdrop in the home. . .television audio often goes unnoticed: we tune it out as so much background noise” (np). Cormac Deane outlines how “television aims to achieve a higher signal-to-noise ratio by filling the sound channel with as much content as possible, arguable to the point where television noise itself becomes a shorthand for noisy interference, particularly in cinema, as in the murder scene of Coppola’s The Conversation” (1974), Deane (2013, np). Poltergeist is an example of this context. However, Poltergeist demonstrates the ability of children to listen past the onslaught of noise—to find meaning beyond the ubiquity of television’s stream. The children are drawn to a television inexplicably being operated beyond human interference, demonstrating that childhood wonder facilitates the lack of acceptance of “noise” as a technological background.

Seeing the technology of television being harnessed by spirits creates a new frontier—one that needs to be translated or understood. Static acts as a mediation between the new world and the past, one that thrives on the unknown. Television is a spectacle and communal technology in Poltergeist, with the potential of the medium explored not only by the spirits, but in also how it is used by the humans. In one scene, Steven has friends visit to watch football on the television, each friend crowding around a relatively small screen. The channel abruptly changes to another, resulting in a back and forth with the remote. The issue is revealed as the neighbor having the same television and remote, with their television too close to the property boundary. An argument ensues between the neighbors, about who is responsible for moving their television. This argument and situation forebodes the sense of the television as being haunted not only by spirits, but by other people. The technology appears domestic (and therefore safe) but has a public element to its operation and its potential sabotage.

The timing of the television hauntings is also situated within broader screen practices. As Hutchison (2018) notes, “for the two decades beginning in the mid-1950s, late night ‘creature features’ were staples of local television across the United States” (p. 96). During these presentations, the television was “taken over” by presenters, who shifted the usual fare on television to one of horror and thrillseeking, monsters and ghosts. This practice continues to the present day on streaming service Shudder, with Joe Bob Briggs introducing horror films through the The Last Drive in with Joe Bob Briggs (n.d.). Prior to this, Elvira also became an icon of late night television in the United States and other syndicated national networks, introducing creature features in a sardonic way, building anticipation for the film ahead. The late night hauntings in Poltergeist speak directly to this history without necessarily directly evoking it; the expectation that late night television would house a fictional haunting opens the gates for a real haunting to be within the realm of possibility: late night television is not something children should see, regardless of how attractive they might find it.

The role of children as a conduit for the magical potential for reading television is also critical to Poltergeist’s narrative world. As a black box, the television is a container of magic, potentially delivering messages at any time, each as unbelievable as those broadcast from the dead beneath the house. Building upon the work of Sconce (2000), there is a long history of seeing new technologies as haunted, but also as a direct method of communication to spirits and the underworld. Static’s presence as an actor in Poltergeist reflects the negotiation of television into the home, and the negotiation of television into cinema. This slippery history, which Galili (2020) describes as being not as not sequential, but symbiotic, is also present in horror films, where television acts as a medium (in both senses) to interrogate our relationships—both real and potential—to screens. When television was understood, as Deane (2013) argues, in relation to constant programing and noise, couldn’t a message from a world beyond our own slip through? Indeed, Galili (2020) describes how early television was referred to as “seeing by electricity”—which, arguably, Carol-Anne shows the horrific potential of.

Static: The Sound of Failure, of Anticipation

As aforementioned, static is typically encountered (beyond its narrative and esthetic representations) when technology fails to broadcast a signal. While Poltergiest demonstrated the capacity for horror in the stream of screen information, I now turn to an example where broadcast technologies occasionally punctuate life, rather than dominate it. Science fiction/horror television series From (2022-) begins with the Matthews family driving through small-town America in their RV. As they pass a felled tree with an ominous crow (the only type of crow), the family ends up driving around in circles through a small town, increasingly gathering the attention of the locals. They are stuck in a feedback loop, achieving the same outcome despite changing their route. After hitting another car and regaining consciousness in various states of shock, the family is informed that they need to make it to shelter before dark or they will not survive. The Matthews family find out that the unnamed town is terrorized each night by a murderous group of creatures who appear to be human. Coming to terms with their predicament, they incorporate into the small town and associated nearby commune “Colony,” but remain hopeful that there is another way out, a way to make contact with the outside.

Crucially, From inverts our everyday uses of technology. As more locals die at the hands of the almost-humans, the Matthews family uncover that there is electricity being hardwired into the town. Lamps work, a jukebox plays in the diner, but they do not function by simply being “plugged in.” There is a power grid specific to the homes and businesses coming from underground. Conversations in the first season are progressively interrupted by static on the police radio—its function unknown, and its interruptions random. One character becomes increasingly focused on broadcasting to the source of static, to show they are alive. Here, static serves as the potential for an outside world and the infrastructure to access it. It also represents normality, and the ability to explain what they know of their situation, which given the circumstances would mean rescue was unlikely. But it is a new version of an old technology, and needs to be understood.

In order to increase the odds of the radio working, it is elevated. A clear message of static is received—and critically, this time it isn’t the sound of a broadcast failure, rather the potential of a future connection. They create a plan to use Colony house on high ground to build a radio tower, draining the battery reserves and other resources in the town in exchange for hope of an outside connection. When Jim discusses the initial test with his wife, Tabitha, we hear this exchange:

Tabitha: You got a signal!

Jim: Static, that’s a far cry from a signal.

Tabitha: Well, it’s something.

Static might offer hope, but that hope is relatively short lived. Sayad (2022) describes the history of haunted media in film and television, and categorizes texts such as Poltergeist and The Ring as part of the “dangers-of-curiosity theme, which taints technological developments with an element of threat, actually fascinates and thrills” (p. 2). In From, over the course of the first season, the tower is built involving most people at the commune house Colony, who scavenge through the town for all electrical items to be repurposed. As they work on building a tower with some success, static functions as a sign that the tower and the radio is at least functioning electronically. Radio waves are understood as being able to do what humans are not. A recurrent comment from both Jim and the deputy police officer, Kenny, is that radio signals and waves “work” or “travel” “in ways that we can’t.” The anticipation for the potential of radio waves is that they are magic; even in a world where there are no explanations for the origins or meaning of the town, media is black-boxed, despite that they are the ones making it happen. When the radio successfully works, a voice is heard—which then in turn changes the situation from one of seeking help, to communication being a further form of surveillance. The voice on the radio uses Jim’s name and warns him and the rest of the town against digging—which his wife, Tabitha, has been doing under their house in order to understand the network of electricity powering the juke boxes and lamps. This brings a longer history of radio as being a spiritual medium as described by Sconce (2000), into being—but shows a material threat of being too curious.

Static here works as anticipation, as the potential for technology. In its failure to transmit or receive, static offers safety in its absence of a message. It shows not only that there is noise in the system, but that there is a system to access. Michel Serres describes how the French term for parasite also is used for static. He writes,

But one must write as well of the interceptions, of the accidents in the flow along the way between stations – of changes and metamorphoses. What passes might be a message but parasites (static) prevent it from being heard, and sometimes, from being sent. Like a hole in a canal that makes the water spill into the surrounding area. There are escapes and losses, obstacles and opacities. An angel passes. Who stole the relation? Maybe someone, somewhere in the middle, made a detour. (Serres 2013 [1980], 11)

The town therefore lives between two networks of unknown infrastructure: the underground labyrinth of electricity, and the ephemeral radio waves. Static quickly changes from hope and anticipation in From to another means by which the townspeople exist in a world full of danger they don’t understand, surveilled by beings in a relation they don’t understand. Technology—while familiar—facilitates connections to their past lives through outdated media (jukeboxes, old radios), and perhaps offers a more sinister connection to an underworld. Someone, somewhere in the middle did make a detour in the message.

Both Poltergeist and From offer a means through which to examine static in relation to technology’s potential. That from within the failure to broadcast a discernable image or sound, there is the potential for a message from a parallel world—one in which technology need not be limited to human communications. While From involves an older technology (analog radio), its use in a world new to its participants draws upon the wonder and close reading for a message seen in Poltergeist. Technology in both cases is here to be experimented with, for information in loss and access opened by a flicker or crackle.

Static: Accessing and Reworking the Past

The Ring (2002) features a haunted video tape that creates a curse for its viewer. Upon viewing the montage of symbolic but unknown imagery, the unsuspecting person has seven days left to live. The video is punctuated either side by static—at the beginning a ring accompanied by distortion and the sound of television static, and at the end of the montage, static announces the end of the tape’s recording, and the beginning of the curse. Throughout the film, a static-filled television both signals the beginning of the curse or the impending death of someone who has previously watched the tape—it announces beginnings and endings simultaneously.

Static provides a space through which to reorder and rework video content. The main character in The Ring, Rachel, is a journalist, and keen to understand the video curse—understandably, given she has seven days until she dies following her viewing of the tape. Throughout her investigation, it becomes clear that she needs to understand what happened to the girl depicted in the video. She, along with her ex partner, uncovers a history of abuse and neglect. The relatively abstract images in the video (punctuated by static), serve as a means of communication with the girl Samara and her spirit. The static and home video esthetics reinforce the role of the past in navigating a present with Samara. The degraded qualities of the video also demonstrates the “aesthetics of access” as described by Hilderbrand (2009); static, hisses and glitches imply not only the supernatural components of the tape, but also that it has been copied.

As Tryon (2009) notes, films such as The Ring that play with the sub-genre of found footage, often critique mass media’s potential for contagion or ruin, and also critique home video cultures. The Ring begins with a conversation about hating television—the implication that television is rotting brains and leading to social destruction. Tryon describes how these meta conversations about media reinforce the active versus passive binary that has plagued media studies. However, despite how television may be framed in conversation and by the act of being haunted by a media object, The Ring also demonstrates active viewing through investigation of the tape, moving beyond the fear of static. Tryon describes the investigation component of The Ring as central to its premise—something also seen in Archive 81, a Netflix series that involves a character searching through video content to solve another mystery, becoming entangled and terrorized in the process.

Archive 81 (2022) further demonstrates the role of static in bridging worlds and times. Using a blend of fake found footage from 1994 and narrative dramatization from the present day (and a combination of both), it follows two tandem but connected storylines. In the present day, Dan Turner—a VHS enthusiast and conservationist who works at the Museum for the Moving Image in New York—is invited to work in a remote and strange location on conserving tapes. The tapes are generally filmed by or depict PhD student Melody’s investigation of a building in New York called the Visser. The footage from the Visser building points to a supernatural mystery, that led to the building burning down, presumably killing its residents.

Throughout the process of restoring the tapes, Dan encounters static. Static begins as a marker between sections of tapes, where perhaps Melody stopped filming and started up again—demonstrating the esthetics of access in her creation and the copying/degradation of the tapes over time. However, this rudimentary use of static evolves over the period of restoration. On the rural campus where Dan has been sent to work on the secret project, cell phone and internet reception are non-existent. Dan is fitted with a medical alert bracelet as his only way to communicate danger to the outside world. During his time on the compound, Dan uncovers pockets of the property’s periphery where cell phone reception works, and he speaks to his friend Mark, who works on a podcast and sells VHS tapes. It is during this work that Dan uncovers that the dominant narrative of the Visser building is a myth, and that something is being covered up.

Static then becomes a space for horror. Not only in becoming a bridge between the human world and non-human world (as in Poltergeist and we come to learn in From), but as a material element of haunting and possession. Static is arguably the first time that the supernatural component of the Visser building is introduced, through a scene reminiscent of Poltergeist. While closely editing footage, Dan rewinds and replays part of the static, seeing a demonic head appear. The static offers a space through which to imagine the potential for the footage and the building it sought to understood. As Dan is later able to travel between times, static acts as a bridge around Dan and Melody, as they traverse time periods and talk to each other to understand the mystery of the Visser sharing knowledge of the past and the present. Static acts as a force field around whoever is in the “wrong” time, and also as a way to be materially pulled between worlds.

Indeed, on much of the promotional material for Archive 81, static acts as a barrier between the two main characters in profile. In the opening credit sequence, it not only acts as a way to date the found footage, but it also positions static as part of the drama. In the world of horror, static acts as an anticipatory gateway—it is a precursor to a message through the medium. But it also points to the potential magic to unearth hidden histories, even in the relative mundane work of archiving. This retelling of televisual and audiovisual history also places static at the center; a center that propels the narrative, allows worlds to combine, and provides a place for the hidden, horrific forces we can’t ordinarily see to show themselves.

Technology, here, sees something we can’t. Likewise, the trailer for The Ring focused on using static as a way to build anticipation for the film, bleeding together the fictional found footage component with the potential for a real audience to be possessed. It’s worth noting that although both Archive 81 and The Ring involve working with fictional found footage, theorists of found footage horror would not categorize it within the genre (Heller-Nicholas 2014; Sayad 2022). The promotion, however, seeks to bleed into the genre, or at the very least build upon its popularity. As Sayad (2022) notes, found footage draws “our attention to our faith in technology’s potential to expand our perception and sometimes extend our experience beyond the image through formal elements and viewing experiences that directly address, and even incorporate, the real space of the audience” (p. 1). When fictional found footage is used in promotion, it works with the direct threat to the audience that they can be cursed or haunted through their consumption.

Considering static as a connection or sinew between multiple narrative worlds makes static a subterrain or alternate world between cinematic and televisual universes—a central character in the history of both mediums, and sometimes, what has drawn them together. As in The Ring, it can pre-empt a broadcast, and also leave anticipation for what is coming next: what can be imagined in the noise. Tryon (2009) argues that “the publicity for The Ring prepared viewers to anticipate a film that addresses the ubiquity of electronic technologies,” with the film appearing “at precisely the moment when VHS was becoming obsolete as a medium” (p. 46). By focusing on the potential horror of an outgoing technology—in both The Ring and Archive 81, viewers are invited to read screen technologies as connected by their horrific potential in both the old and the new. Although these texts may focus on the contagious potential of haunted media, they also show active reading of the text, seeing both the formal qualities of the tapes they are seeking to understand as well as the supernatural potential of the media technologies that hold the image.

Static has become critical to creating authenticity in the construction of alternate histories, and specifically a shared mediated past. For those who have not directly experienced times in which static was a constant, the prevalence of it as a trope needs little explanation. Static allows a technological past to be easily evoked, and within the horror genre, acts as a ghost of that past, to create a space for haunting, memories, anticipation, and failure. It demonstrates how through the unexpected readings and workings of media technologies, other times can be accessed and reordered.

Conclusion: Static Beyond Nostalgia

If horror is used, as Weeks (2024) and Landsberg (2018) argue, to “advance a point” (Landsberg 2018, 635), then static is being drawn upon to create a temporal environment for the “newness” of newer media to sit alongside the past. Weeks’ (2024) discussion of Landsberg leads to consider how “specific cinematic elements in horror films are well-suited for exposing the everyday horrors that are overlooked,” achieving this by “in part, by rendering the familiar as unfamiliar” (p. 394). Static as a horror trope achieves this by drawing upon the mundane nature of broadcast, and using the potential, the anticipation of failure or an incoming message to show how media allows access to parallel worlds or times.

In each of the examples discussed in this paper, the mundane nature of searching for a signal turns the everyday into something with the potential to haunt, to possess, to surveil. In doing so, it also encourages a critical reading of our collective mission for technological progress—creating televisual worlds in which the past cannot be escaped but can be repurposed. So ubiquitous is the presence of static that it is deployed in screen promotion—to stand in for broadcast, but also to use a slippery temporality to point to our shared media pasts and to anticipate our media futures.

Sconce’s (2000) exemplary work in this space provides a framework through which to consider how people have read broadcast technologies over time. Although claiming a medium is haunted or has the capacity to talk to other realms may seem a thing of the past, the evergreen use of static in contemporary horror demonstrates not only an ongoing link to that history, but also how it is a useful structure through which to understand the relationship between technology and audiences. These uses reflect the myriads of ways that technology is made sense of by those who use it, not only those who design it. If the meaning of a text cannot be controlled by its creator, so too can a technology exist beyond its intended parameters. As horror is so concerned with suspending disbelief and making the mundane supernatural, static has become a critical way to show the many potentials of media and mediums.

Static has been drawn upon in contemporary media as a way to create a material bridge to our shared mediated pasts, but has also acted as a ghost of that past. This past directly evokes the history of participation with media—in both intended and unintended ways. It demonstrates the potential to read closely and find temporal or spatial dynamics in between the black and white pixels on the screen, or the hiss and crackle on radio. As shown in each of the examples in this paper, turning to static allows us to understand broadcast history through the way people use media and read it is a technological device, not only as a narrative one—where failure alone can open up the potential for meaning. With the ongoing focus on narrative analysis of screen texts, turning to static as a persistent trope, character, and device allows us to consider continuity in amongst media change: that audiences have consistently found ways to provoke new practices and methods of reading, whether it be closely analyzing a pixelated screen or by building their own devices to access a world that they don’t yet understand.