When ghosts text

** SPOILER ALERT**

I’ve always been fascinated by – and drawn to – horror stories where paranormal entities haunt and scare us using the tools we’ve invented just as effectively as they can using their own power.

Normally a ghost is just the manifested spirit of somebody who’s died, a demon the soul of an evil spirit visiting us from hell or a monster the result of awry science or some ancient curse. They appear to us in the world like anything else, just because of their ‘thisness’.

But I’m more impressed when a haunting tale can use technology to give us the heebie jeebies.

The first time I remember noticing it was Dean R Koontz’s 1983 novel Phantoms, where one of the scientists investigating the phenomenon manages to get the otherworldly creature haunting the deserted town talking to her via a text-based computer chat program. The details I most remember about the conversation is that it tells her to ‘fuck off’ and calls her a ‘boring bitch’.

Since the era when a lot of pop culture actually became about technology (the 80s, mostly), it’s been explored in horror fiction and movies far more.

I can’t remember the name of it, but there’s a minor classic horror flick from the era where some kids plays a vinyl LP backwards and conjure up the demonic incantation of a dead rock star.

Classic Japanese ghost jam The Ring doesn’t just feature VHS video as a plot device, it’s actually about VHS video. I’m sure there were a couple of cheap knock offs from the straight-to-video world about haunted DVDs in subsequent years.

And today, we’ve had so many movies and novels about hauntings and the paranormal centred around mobiles phone calls, internet video chat and social media, techno-horror is a genre in itself.

So I really wanted to do the same thing in Falling. Firstly because it made sense – it’s set in 2037, when technology would be even more pervasive than it is today.

But secondly because I like it so much when it’s done well. I really wanted to capture the disquiet and eeriness (aside from just the fear) of the supernatural using our own tools to talk to or scare us further.

Like the escalation of the phenomena themselves, it builds slowly in Falling. When the surveyor is crawling all over the main supports of the Harbour bridge taking readings, nobody suspects ghosts and goblins, they just figure it’s mechanical or metallurgical stress.

And when the poor, doomed young man hears what appears to be the sounds of metal crashing and the screams of the dying through the bridge systems, he can mostly convince himself it’s just the sonic expression of forces thanks to bad materials or manufacture.

Later still, when Donald the metallurgy professor is parked near the bridge to take his readings in the university research van, Barry is implanting a new demagnetiser module in the brace in Dale’s back miles away in his surgery.

The paranormal energy builds – possibly because of Donald’s proximity – and eerie occurrences appear in the surgery in response, like an old style printer spontaneously producing a ghostly elevation view of the roadway and supports of the bridge.

Later still, when Tim is involved and nobody’s in any doubt that they’re dealing with the supernatural because of the terror and carnage they’ve all seen, haunted technology in Falling gets its closeup.

While cavorting in bed during the weekend they realised they’re falling in love, Dale and Vicki download a chat programs to their phones to send each other kissy faces and silly pictures.

But later, after Vicki’s met her horrible and premature demise at the hands of whatever is plaguing them all, Falling will (I hope) raise the hair on the back of your neck when she apparently uses the app to contact Dale from the grave, telling him she’s in what amounts to hell, the monster that stole her away tormenting and killing her over and over again.

Her missives are short and poorly written, as if she’s done them in a rush, desperately trying to type them out in and click ‘send’ using broken and bloodied fingers while demons claw and slash at her.

When it’s done right, horror can highlight just how scary technology can be.

Somewhere right now, some kid is writing a novel where a ghost can be on everybody’s computers at once thanks to a cloud computing service, or how it’s impossible to exorcise it from the world because of the security of the blockchain. And I’m all for it…