ABSTRACT
The chapter examines de Man’s inhuman materiality in relation to the dark web, the myth of the Red Room and the phenomenon of creepypasta. It argues that materiality as a machinic force characterised by repetition, loss of meaning and outside of human control is apt to examine gothic and horror stories, videos and images circulating on the surface as well as the darker corners of the internet. Repeatedly, internet horror is linked to the gaze, and focusses on the act of seeing and being watched, in order to give shape and form to what lies beyond the human. Even when online media promise the spectacle of murder and gore, this only serves to uncover our subjection to machinic repetition, as we are enthralled by images circulating and consumed indifferently. Media taking flesh, webcams watching us, horror figures without faces or lacking human characteristics trembling on the edge of human perception, these are all forms of gothic mediation, where online users come face-to-face with an inhuman reality and their own objectifying gaze looking back at them.
