摘要：The contemporary moment has seen growing aggregates of urban populations accommodate and get entwined increasingly into ‘technologized’ models of experience. The ‘technological’ is now seamlessly ensconced into the basic material flesh of the city’s quotidian everyday life (Sundaram 2010). As the ‘ordinary’ today is peppered and constituted by humdrum technological objects, a foundational transformation in our sensorium is precipitated – newer regimes of materiality are inaugurated as our bodies are perpetually girdled by a new object-world. In this new changing experience of the material everyday, the technological also becomes a primary precinct in which negotiations with the supernatural (and the uncanny) get staged. The technological increasingly serves, in different ways, as the evidentiary archive for the supernatural, its site of production, and the premiere mise en scene of its performance within Hindi cinema. This paper closely chases the transformations in the contemporary horror film, focusing especially on Ragini MMS (Kriplani 2011) and 13B (Kumar 2009) to understand how the spectral today gets densely intermeshed with the digital. Clearly distinct from the earlier Ramsay brothers’ productions, as well as the later moment that Sangita Gopal has bracketed as ‘New Horror’ (2012), these films locate the site of horror entirely within the technological. This paper argues that the technological is not merely the site through which the spectral articulates itself, but also its thematic raison’d etre in a rapidly changing contemporary digital moment. While Ragini MMS explores the idea of the spectral ‘poor image’ – a ghostly MMS that haunts its own makers; 13B presents a television set that gets inhabited by mortified bodies of an earlier time who play out a daily soap that echoes and predicts the future of the family watching it.
