By 1931, the connection between horror and the color green was so well established that Universal Pictures purportedly marketed the green tint in Dracula as “the color of fear”.¹ A decade earlier, German expressionist films such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), The Golem (1920), and Nosferatu (1922) had adopted green tint as the preferred color for forests, night, intertitles, and most strikingly, atmospheric dread, monstrosity, and horror. Although the early history of color monochrome has been largely forgotten by the general public and has passed into the recuperative domain of scholarly researchers and archivists, the embodied experience of black-and-green thrives today in found footage horror thanks to night vision technology. While the ancestors of tinted cinema can be found in the color gels of stage lighting and magic lantern shows, the unheralded heir to technologies of gothic green affect can be found in one of horror’s lowliest subgenres.

This videographic essay features the results of a mentored professor/graduate student project that connects the use of green in silent-era tinting to the use of green-tinted night vision in found footage horror. Our project employs tools for color analyses inspired by the summed frames technique of Kevin Ferguson as well as movie color bar codes synched to live frame-by-frame timeline scrolling to better examine links between the overall tint profile of a film and the specific diegetic and connotative uses of color within any given sequence.² Those color visualizations map similarities between early tinting and night vision green (ostensibly in-camera, but often tinted digitally in post-production). Thanks to color bar codes, we can trace the evolution of the Paranormal Activity franchise from blue to green as night vision reclaims its role as the color of fear in the twenty-first-century. More than two dozen visualizations of digital found footage horror films informed our research into not only how black-and-green monochrome dominates the horror subgenre, but also more importantly how green tint functions when fused with technologically mediated vision. Our analysis considers how the aesthetic, affective, and physiological phenomena associated with night vision work in concert to align the embodied human eye with its technological counterpart.

As a mentored project, this project represents the possibilities of faculty-student collaboration and co-authorship. Funding for student compensation and materials were provided by a mentoring grant from the BYU College of Humanities. We met twice a week over the course of nearly two semesters (a stretched timeline due to Covid). We did background research on early color and night vision technology. Michael reached out to cinematographers and directors for practical information about the use of in-camera night vision and post-production tinting. We watched a selection of 29 films, including silent classics and found footage horror. We ran those films through scripts to create the summed frames and bar code representations as well as a script to make the bar code a scrollable video file. That link between bar code and video helped us easily identify the precise images associated with each strip of color, which ensured that we would not conflate a night vision green scene with a non-night vision shot of the outdoors or of a room with green walls. Once we had the finished summed frames images and the video timeline bar code files, we were able to make useful comparisons such as the use of green in [REC] (2007) and its remake Quarantine (2008), or the chromatic evolution of the Paranormal Activity series (2007–2021). After gathering all of our video assets, we used the Milanote app to group stills by theme and create a collaborative storyboard. The process was therefore collaborative and dynamic at every stage. Once complete, we co-presented our project at the 2022 Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference. The feedback from reviewers at [in]Transition led to improvements and revisions that rounded out the valuable mentoring journey from conception to publication. We believe that faculty-student co-authored videographic essays present a model for mentorship that is more engaging and collaborative than traditional written scholarship. Our hope is that this essay will not only give new insight and context about color in a horror subgenre but will also serve as a proof of concept for the videographic essay as a viable pursuit for academic mentoring.

Biography
Marc Olivier is Professor of French at BYU, where he teaches European cinema, photographic cultures, critical theory, and French literature. His recent book, Household Horror: Cinematic Fear and the Secret Life of Everyday Objects (IU Press, 2020), draws on philosophies of the nonhuman to promote readings of cinematic objects as actors that transcend traditional notions of props and decor. He is series editor of the forthcoming Icons of Horror series with Indiana University Press.

Michael Ashman recently graduated with his MA from the Comparative Studies program at BYU. Though his research interests range from literature to photography, his real passion is film, and his thesis is about representations of frontier wilderness in Brazilian cinema and American westerns. He plans on applying to PhD programs in film studies this year.