Virtually Famous

It is rare that comedies work, let alone ones fused with found footage horror. Somehow co-directors Joseph and Vanessa Winters have stuck the landing so well that Deadstream (2022)  works as both horror and biting satire. Our anti-hero, Shawn, will do anything for online ‘likes’. His uncanny mannerisms and absurd facial expressions remind one of the incredibly irritating and terminally insincere UFO/Supernatural youtuber, Shawn Dawson. Similar to Dawson, Shawn is a ‘monster hunter’. Except there is a twist: his online career has hit the skids, and his journey into an allegedly haunted house is a last gasp attempt to get his ‘subs’ back.

What some people are willing to do for online fame, is, quite frankly, a bitter indictment of where we are right now. Shawn - although utterly terrified of ghosts - becoming increasingly bruised and beaten, relents in the house. If his viewership is exploding, so is his ego. Like the demonic presence that accosts him, we’re reminded that Shawn, too, does anything to expand his following: in this way, are they all that different? 

Deadstream plays with the audience's expectations - the Winters expect seasoned horror followers, here, and so they deliver some nuanced nods to the found footage meta, while subverting cliche horror conventions. From the clever utilisation of in-film cameras, to Shaun’s idiosyncratic habit of playing music to build suspense, (resulting in trans-diegetic confusion) the filmmakers clearly have a finger on the pulse of horror's need to reinvent itself.   

It’s telling that the resident evil, here, finds its source of power in the grizzled frontier of 19th century America; this past, so alien, now glimpsed, makes up the lore of the house. A world away from the technosphere’s most desperate clout chaser and the online persona he inhabits. There is both a literal and symbolic schism, then, between the residence and the trespasser: they stand in for a story of an America in its infancy and one, slowly, but surely, invading from the future, ensuring an endless decline.