horror movie phrase repeatedly etched into wall

Thers's something in the morror!

A traveler seeks refuge in a room only to find it still possessed by a demonic creature that has already killed the previous inhabitant

Conor Bateman has sliced clips from (mainly American) horror films in which a cinema audience is slain schlockily in a theatre – an overlooked, self-reflexive trope across the genre. In each sequence, the screen is masked out to reveal the prior sequence: each audience is successively watching the killings that we, the actual audience, have just seen. The onscreen audience never leaves the theatre – there’s nowhere else in this world beyond the cinema, and the scenes of entrapment and containment play out in similarly-framed spaces of chaos (what if what we watched onscreen leaked out?). Without a scrap of ideology-addled earnestness, the tone moves from playful to inevitable. Like a game, it all loops together in an oddly fun, self-sustaining spiral of dramatic irony.

Strange experiments...Mysterious monsters...Lovecraftian horror...Telekinetic Bloodletting...Ravenous Insanity...These are merely a sampling of what lies...BEYOND THE WALL OF FEAR.

Everything you see and hear is a toy box of horror. Like a flood of light, this collage of glittering images continues uninterrupted. The images, which unfold rhythmically without gaps, maintain a single image, from the elaborate props to the nondescript room scenes. There is a story to be told, but more than that, what emerges naturally is the smell of death and night. The smell is not only dark and frightening but also innocent, like a child's idea of mischief being carried out. This is because he has the sense to refer to Frank Zappa's "Lumpy Grape" as a reference. The original music is also pleasant, reaching the ear like a whisper of light particles.

1-channel video, 2-channel installation. In the filming of Scanner a short fragment of a scene out of a horror film was repeatedly shown to an actor and his face was filmed as he watched the scene and described what he was seeing on the monitor screen. Initially, the image was quite distorted through technical scrambling and was only gradually made apparent and decipherable to the actor in several rounds of viewing. With each repeated round as the distortion of the image was decreased, the horror scene conveyed via the actor’s description became increasingly vivid. As well, in the repetition of the rounds in addition to the description, the actor was directed to try to mimetically imitate the figures as they became recognizable to him. The result is a narration in fragments which circles around a dark core. The images appear only fleetingly and variably in the mind of the viewer where they gradually condense into a mysterious scene.