Look Out, “Hereditary” — Twitter’s Here
https://twitter.com/_emnays/status/1280490263132200960
Twitter is frightening for more than just the ability for anyone to access anyone for any reason — horror stories have creeped onto the platform as well, pieced together in threads. Utilizing Twitter threads to tell stories isn’t a new thing, by any means — that’s what the tool is for. Traditionally, it’s used for informative essays and lists — not for telling scary stories. Even still, many authors have capitalized off of these threads, using them to weave compelling narratives that often trick the audience into believing they’re real. One such narrative is a title-less thread by Emmett Nahil, detailing a visit to his parent’s house in Massachusetts that starts to get terribly off-putting. By using Twitter as his medium of choice, and by neglecting to clarify that it is anything other than real, Nahil manages to increase audience immersion from what it would have been had he written his story traditionally. By playing with reality, Nahil proves that digital tools can raise immersion and suspension in a larger audience higher than traditional media could ever dream of.
Nahil plays with reality in his story in a multitude of ways, beginning with the moment he pressed ‘send Tweet’. People don’t use Twitter looking for fiction. In fact, it’s one of the most terrifying things about social media: people tend to believe everything they see. Users see Twitter and other social media apps as a place to share snippets of their lives, or as a place to announce their opinions when otherwise they would be shunned or ignored for them. It could be argued that social media is inherently fictional — we carefully select which images to post that best paints the picture of a perfect vacation, or we use special apps to enhance our best features and erase out bad ones. People don’t want to acknowledge this, however. Naysayers of Kim Kardashian’s flat stomach are accused of being jealous and nothing else. People who point out that it couldn’t possibly be that warm in Maine right now are branded as Debbie Downers. People want to believe that what they’re seeing is real, just as they want others to believe that what they’re posting is. Social media has to operate on some level of trust and belief, and Nahil capitalizes off of this to the utmost degree.
Nahil is a writer, and generally uses his Twitter as a place to rant about his struggles or to promote his work. He does not use it to tell stories — the closest he’s come to it is bouncing book ideas off of his many followers. By opening the thread with “Ok so as I’ve mentioned I’m visiting my parent’s house in New England for extended quarantine stay and I had a uh. very strange day yesterday so…story time” (Tweet one), Nahil lulls his followers into a false sense of security by framing it as one of his daily rants, and he immediately locks into that special cocktail of belief and trust. He presents this thread as a personal story — nonfiction. He’s immediately in character, and there’s no semblance of an introduction or even a title page (or title Tweet, in this case). He starts off cold turkey, imitating real stories other Twitter users tell, and tricks the audience into thinking everything they are about to read is true, as well as currently happening. This is something film and books can’t do, because rather than automatically assume something is real, as people do on Twitter, audiences assume film and other traditional media are fictional unless stated otherwise.
Traditional media can’t trick an audience like this, and thus can’t get the immediate immersion Nahil is able to get. Audience immersion is also increased because Nahil is able to set it in real time — again, traditional media is unable to do this, because neither books nor films can be updated as they’re happening. The closest thing to this kind of real-time feeling would be news channels, which is something meant to be taken as fact. The audience almost experiences Nahil’s story with him — they discover the unusual wifi network just moments after he does, they’re told the haunted history of the poltergeist it’s named after as Nahil researches, and they hear the chilling cat’s yowls the morning after Nahil lays awake all night listening to them. It’s like watching a live police chase on Channel 9 — only instead of updates on the hour every hour, we get a new detail only when Nahil himself runs across them.
Another way Nahil creates immersion is through his use of images and sound bites, which further aid the reality he’s already been able to cultivate with his audience. In his very first Tweet, he includes an image of his ‘parent’s backyard’ (actually his own), and describes how unsettled he is by the fence, and how his dog won’t stop staring at it. By presenting exactly what he’s looking at, he immediately plunges the audience into the story. It makes it feel like he really is currently there, taking quick pictures from behind the glass backdoor for easy illustration. It’s a far cry from even film’s attempts to make things seem casual, such as found footage films. Even amateur filmmakers accidentally capturing a horror story on camera feels less realistic than a man recounting his story on social media, with only a picture of a fence serving as his proof.
Don’t misinterpret — traditional media can be engaging, and often is. Because it is unable to access this specific level of ‘truth’, however, there will always be something separating the audience from it. People tend to care more about things that are supposedly ‘real’ — with fiction, there’s always an escape, a way to laugh off the blood and gore because it’s ‘fake’. Audience’s suspension of disbelief can vary when watching films and reading novels — how invested they become depends on how aware they are that they’re reading someone else’s creation, on how carefully they’re paying attention to plot holes and turns of phrase. With reality, there’s no choice: it’s real. Plot holes can’t happen, it can’t be laughed off as ‘too unrealistic’. When reading nonfiction, the critical parts of our brains are often shut off, because we think there is nothing to analyze other than what’s on the surface. While some may be just as invested in traditional media, everyone has to be invested in reality. By tricking the audience into thinking his fiction is real, Nahil accesses a section of people that he would have otherwise never attracted, and that is certainly a point in favor of using Twitter as a medium, specifically for horror: fiction often gets in the way of scaring people. What happens when that cushion is gone?
The third and final way Nahil uses reality is through his use of the Internet. Not only is he using Twitter as his pen and paper, but he’s made the Internet a huge part of his story: he’s asking the audience for advice, he’s doing his research on Wikipedia, and one of things to clue him in on the fact that something’s not quite right is a new wifi network listed on his Mac: ‘pyewacket’. People reading Twitter are usually adept at the Internet and are on it often, so such a heavy inclusion of it makes it feel more immediate to the reader. It feels like something that might happen to anyone — we’ve all had a new wifi network pop up before. This helps add to the suspension, as well. The audience is left asking: ‘could this happen to me?’ with a seriousness closer to watching the news report a murder than watching a film about a ghost. The new wifi seems so innocuous, but the audience knows it really isn’t. He also shows his research on Wikipedia, which helps him as a narrator seem real and rational. He unveils his discovery that Pyewacket was the familiar of a witch killed in the famous witch trials, which occurred near his parent’s house, and how his laptop wouldn’t stop crashing when he googled anything about it. This, paired with descriptions of dogs shaking from fear and nonexistent cats screaming on the other side of the fence, is hair-raising and far too real. Film often shows characters doing deep research at the library or diving into the dark web to figure out what creature is after them, and it feels unrealistic. Most people would do a Google search, and in all likelihood, there would be a Wiki article about it. The inclusion of such surface-level research shows an understanding of people and an understanding of the Internet, and it further convinces the audience that everything they’re seeing actually happened the day previous.
By using Twitter and all of its features to tell his story, Emmett Nahil plays with the audience’s perception of reality more than traditional media ever could, and increases his audience in doing so. His ability to trick the audience like this increases suspension, as well as immersion, and makes the story feel so real it’s frightening. Nahil weaves a fantastic horror story about poltergeists and witches with these new tools, and he has proven that a good horror story can be told anywhere — and that maybe sticking to the same methods can become stagnant.
