I joined hands with Media Studies scholar Anthony Enns (Dalhousie University, Canada) and connected 19th-century Spiritualist imaginaries of the networked home with contemporary smart houses. We presented our latest research “Tracking Movement and Activity in Haunted Houses and Smart Houses: The Horrors of Networked Domestic Spaces” at Movement and Computing Conference, Utrecht University, 30 May 2024. We are currently working on a co-written publication consolidating the genealogy of smart home horror films.

Abstract:

The “smart home” tracks movement and activity through an integrated system of surveillance and automated services, which is often operated through remote control. This paper zooms in on the thresholds of control over one’s home system and studies this through the frame of haunting and horror. To what extent do smart homes appear to be possessed by disembodied intelligences, as if sentient entities are haunting the space? By taking a historical and comparative perspective, this paper addresses the ways in which spiritualist practices in the late 19th century anticipated the futuristic home designs of the late 20th century, and it examines the resurgence of a distinct subgenre of techno-gothic film and TV that represents the smart home as a threat to humanity. In films like Demon Seed (1977), for example, smart homes are showcased as the latest technological marvel, yet they soon become sentient and begin to abuse their occupants by imprisoning and in some cases even murdering them. This theme continues to inform more recent works, like Tau (2018), Margaux (2022), and Murder at the End of the World (2023), yet these films also incorporate a range of new concerns, like ubiquitous computing, machine learning, data mining, motion capture, and robotics, into their imagination of the networked home. The paper primarily focuses on how these works reflect contemporary cultural anxieties by critiquing the integration of these technologies into domestic spaces.