ABSTRACT
“Screenlife” refers to visual content which takes places entirely on what this chapter terms the mise-en-screen or the screen within the frame. This chapter analyses three examples of Screenlife—supernatural horror Unfriended (Gabriadze, 2014), mystery/thriller Searching (Chaganty, 2018), and the Zoom-produced pandemic horror Host (Savage, 2020)—to argue that a focus on the relationship between “real-life” and digital identities unites the films. Expanding upon the found footage horror film's engagement with mediated subjectivity, Screenlife films refract the subjective image not only through a camera's diegetic presence, but also through the interfaces that fill and divide the frame, and through the multiple profiles/accounts that the characters are logged into and currently interacting within. By drawing attention to their busy hypermediated frames while still maintaining a strong sense of embodiment, the films emphasise tensions between the real body/self and online identity/self. The films imply that although digital platforms and digital devices promise users a rhetoric of control over the organisation, presentation, and shareability of the data generated by our lives, these same devices and platforms may threaten to fragment user identities either by opening them up to public scrutiny or encouraging a potentially contradictory multiplication across or within various platforms.
