Murderous Mimesis: found footage, police violence and the boundaries of the real.

• In Event: New Directions in Cultural Criminology

Abstract

15 years after the 1999 release of The Blair Witch Project, with “found footage” having taken hold as the characteristic technique for post-millennial horror, Chicago police shot and killed 17-year-old Laquan McDonald. While McDonald’s killing was no aberration, it bore a prominent example of a new form of found footage horror: the police camera murder video. We argue that the growing corpus of footage of police killings shares many of the aesthetic and affective markers of contemporary horror cinema, and that those points of overlap suggest that these two forms – which each suggest or insist on the primacy of perspective – operate in and across the same cultural registers. Like found footage cinema, body-worn and dashboard camera videos of police killings complicate the boundaries of the real: audiences are commanded to question their place as viewers and to interrogate the veracity of the image and the violence it captures.

Authors

• Bill McClanahan, University of Tennessee, Knoxville

• Travis Linnemann, Kansas State University