There's something there, beneath the surface. It's like an itch I can't quite reach, tormenting me. The grand lure of a puzzle.

The You Tube video is of a masked figure in a black cloak standing inside a derelict building. With the bird-like shape of its mask, it looks similar to the plague doctors of the seventeenth century. The figure raises its hand, and then its fingers in a pattern: 3, 1, 2.

A discordant electronic rumble plays under the image, occasionally changing in tone. The image constantly jump cuts, and the surface of the image often shifts, only slightly and only for a moment, hinting at the notion that there is something under the image that is veiled to me.

I pause the video for a moment, hoping to catch a glimpse of the letters and numbers that sometimes flit across the screen. The Birdman's stare is a silent challenge.

In the two chapters that follow I will build on an understanding of the primacy of the sensory-affective components of the image, examining how horror's continued evolution within the media form of online streaming video emphasises these properties in an attempt to intensify the spectatorial experience. As previously discussed, horror has an almost parasitic relationship to developing technologies, inevitably ‘bleeding through’ into new media artefacts in ways that fearfully question the speed of change and subsequent societal and cultural consequences that new technologies bring. These artefacts are often employed as a location for new forms of fictional storytelling, but they also often utilise the ambiguous truth status of the image in a similar manner to the found footage horror films examined in previous chapters.

This chapter looks at several new media artefacts as exemplars for this interface between horror and digital media: a selection of ‘non-fiction’ You- Tube videos I label as ‘post-cinematic horror shorts’. From this examination, the following questions arise: does the digital aesthetic and delivery modality of new media generate a unique bodily intensity?