The ways in which we have come to negotiate with the presence of technology in our lives are multiple and varied. Himaganga revisits the 2021 Malayalam film Chathurmukham to see how the techno-horror genre represents some of the anxieties that surround the pervasiveness of media devices in our everyday lives.
Himaganga Joji
A woman tries to destroy a smartphone by breaking it with a hammer. She looks at the phone in horror as an uncanny sensation of pain runs through her. As the phone’s glass screen breaks, her face too starts to spurt cracks. She is enveloped with horror as she observes the cracks widening, with more and more blood oozing out of her face.
The protagonist’s face cracking simultaneously with her smartphone. Image Credit: Jiss Toms Movies; Manju Warrier Productions.
This is a pivotal scene from the 2021 film, Chathurmukham [Fourth Face], which opens with a quote by Thoreau, ‘Men have become the tools of their tools’. The quote sums up the condition of becoming the objects of the very technology that we use. Techno or digital horror is a new genre that viscerally captures human anxieties and paranoias around losing control over our relationship with technology, heightened in an era when technology pervades every aspect of our lives, accessing the most intimate spaces and the most minute of bodily processes.
Chathurmukham is perhaps the first Malayalam film to be marketed specifically as ‘digital/techno-horror’ cinema. The film probes into the use of the mobile phone as a technological instrument bringing horror into the lives of the protagonists. The film’s depiction of horror is symbolic of the anxieties in the current age of surveillance, modernisation, and human reliance on technology along with the gendered anxieties around women’s use of technology.
The film follows Tejaswini, a young woman running a company on CCTV solutions, living on her own in Thiruvananthapuram. Due to an accident, her smartphone is destroyed and she is compelled to buy a cheaper phone. Subsequently, a series of paranormal incidents seemingly associated with the smartphone start threatening her life, which worsens whenever she strives to get rid of it. Later, she comes to know that the device is haunted by the spirit of its creator, whose work on a new smartphone model was rejected by an exploitative investor citing its lack of a good selfie camera. The man, Adarsh, dies, leaving the smartphones to haunt and kill all those who end up using them. This is his form of revenge against a shallow world that believes, in his own words, in ‘gimmicks’ like selfies. The film comes to an end with Tejaswini overpowering the smartphone through various horrific encounters with it.
Technology is supposed to provide us with safety and security and make our lives easier. But in the film, they are perceived as a spectral deathly presence. In a specific scene, Tejaswini is disturbed in her sleep and she wakes up to find that all the technological devices around her have gone haywire. In a dimly lit room, the camera moves from a close-up shot of her scared, horror-struck face to a wider shot that highlights her smallness and isolation. It draws the audience in to feel the fear that she is experiencing. As Tejaswini realises that the phone is nowhere in the room, a sudden ringing startles her. When she looks around in horror, Adarsh’s spirit appears out of nowhere and beats her down. She starts to develop rashes all over her body. Amidst all this, she recollects leaving the phone on the terrace of the building. The rashes are due to the connection that the smartphone has with Tejaswini’s body. The bodily proximity of the phone, and its safety thus become important for her survival. As soon as she retrieves the phone, everything goes back to normal. This is the spectrality and horror associated with the smartphone, pointing out to the intricacy of the relationship between technology and human bodies.
A decade ago, the Malayalam film Chappa Kurishu (Heads or Tails, 2011) thematised how the smartphone challenges existing notions of privacy and personal space. However, it was released at a time when the circulation of the smartphone was still in its nascent stages and was not as common a phenomenon then as it is now. Since then, we have witnessed dynamic changes in the use of media technologies and personal digital devices. (Mokkil 2019). The anxiety regarding the harms that it can potentially cause has also multiplied. This can be seen in the different tropes employed in these films. While Chappa Kurishu invoked fear in relation to the loss of privacy, causing humiliation and breakdown in relationships, Chathurmukham portrays the device as a supernatural entity causing deathly experiences.
Humanity, Modernity, and Its Obsession with Technology
Technology in the contemporary context is able to keep humanity under its constant gaze. Humans tend to be mere objects who are consciously and unconsciously controlled by them. Reyes and Blake (2015) define digital horror as any form of horror that strives to look at the bad side of contemporary life in the digital age. The genre of horror has always been utilised to showcase the collective fears of society. Here, it is in relation to technology. The Malayalam film industry has always occupied itself with ghosts or with other mythological figures like yakshis to represent horror. Unlike myths that used to appeal to Malayali fantasies, it is the fear of technological domination, of complete occupation and control by devices, that becomes a serious concern for films like Chathurmukham in the contemporary. The dead person coming over to take revenge continues to be a trope while the object that haunts starts to get displaced onto technology.
In Bollywood, the genre of digital horror has been used to question the ideas of modernity, urbanisation, and consumerism in the Indian context (Agha 2021). All three phenomena get collectively represented through the smartphone. In Chathurmukham, the protagonist, Tejaswini, cannot imagine a single day without her smartphone. The character is shown as having strained relationships with her family because she is always glued to her phone. Lost in her phone, she fails to address the problems between her and her family. In contrast, her life is shown as magically repairing itself once she decides to stay away from her haunted phone. Therefore, the horror invoked by the film acts as a symbolic punishment to the individual’s excessive attachment towards technology. The movie also portrays the immensity of radiation in the space of the city that gives the smartphone its superpowers. This, in turn, brings Tejaswini closer to her death. The massive technologisation of the city is contrasted with Tejaswini’s small hometown. Her lifespan is stabilised when she goes back to her home. She feels better physically and emotionally, and rekindles the strained bond that she had with her brother. She understands later that it was the radiation that was bringing her down. Furthermore, it is also interesting to note how the smartphone is able to bring deaths by the control of other technological objects. Devices like fans and lights come under its spectral influence, horrifying Tejaswini. It seems to be representative of the all-pervasive power of the digital device. It reminds us of newer technologies like the Internet of Things and the many interconnected devices that occupy our home and everyday lives. Thus, through its choice of genre, the movie offers a critical take on the idea of technological progress and development.
Gender and Surveillance
The increasing use of technology among youth, especially young women, feeds into several social anxieties. The smartphone provides individuals with agency, thus becoming an arena beyond familial control. Individuals can do whatever they like with their phones within their privacy, away from the eyes of the family (Rao and Lingam 2020). The film shows how the character actively denies her family’s attempts at marrying her off. She is a career-driven woman who enjoys the pleasures that life offers to her in the city space. This moral anxiety regarding technology thus gets represented as horror in this film. Part of the anxiety stems from fears around youth consuming globalised content through their smartphones and the consequent erosion of traditional values. Smartphones are specifically helping women to empower themselves, often becoming a tool for their access to the external world (Jacob 2021). This brings in the same kind of anxiety that once surrounded women reading books, thus resulting in fear and horror.
The film is also about the fear of being looked at in an age of surveillance. Tejaswini cannot get rid of the phone, however much she tries. She tries to dispose of it in a pond, but a passerby brings it back to her. She leaves it on the road to be smashed by vehicles and even tries to break it down by a hammer. The phone remains undisturbed while Tejaswini gets injured badly in all these attempts. It seems as if the phone has total control over her, and that it follows her everywhere. It is also shown as sending automated texts to individuals on her behalf. The phone in itself following Tejaswini shows the general fears of surveillance. It is the fear of loss of privacy that leads to this representation. The intense fear and emotions experienced by Tejaswini are symptomatic of the complete control and surveillance that the governments and big corporations have over individuals through technology. In the film, we also see how Adarsh’s startup idea is stolen by corporate giants, pointing out the power they have over ordinary citizens. The state and corporate capital are shown as assuming total control over our lives to gain maximum profit. The core question that needs to be pondered over is whether we as individuals have anything to call our own and cherish without being digitally mediated and surveilled.
The film also symbolically reflects the paradoxical situation of technology being perceived as a bane and a boon. It is surveillance technology itself that she utilises to escape from its death threats. The CCTV cameras that are used to ensure her safety, the pictures that give her information regarding her impending death, and the final use of the Faraday cage to block signals, all represent this. This contradiction is evident in her obsession with the selfie camera as well. The mainstream argument of selfies making humanity narcissistic is made evident through Tejaswini’s behaviour. But ironically, it is these selfies that ultimately provide her with clues to escape the countdowns to death that the smartphone imposes upon her. Here, unlike older films that emphasise on a return to an innocent past, as against the corrupted present, the film takes up a different focus. It is self-conscious of how a complete detachment from technology is impractical and impossible. Therefore, the film stresses the need for individuals themselves to be vigilant in their consumption of technology, rather than preaching about a total disconnect.
The film can be placed in conversation with several other Indian movies that dealt with this anxiety with technology, such as that of the Rajnikanth blockbuster 2.0 (2018), which deal with technology and its harm on the environment. There are other films like Ragini MMS (2011) and Love Sex Aur Dhoka (Love, sex and betrayal, 2010) that dealt with the power of technological devices to monitor the lives of individuals, and its ability to marginalise and shame them. This aspect is interesting as it reveals how anxieties around modernisation and technology have always tried to express themselves through various genres. It becomes part of thrillers, family dramas, and ultimately horror, that showcases this anxiety to the fullest. Chathurmukham‘s ending remains open-ended with the smartphone’s spirit being revived, leaving us to think about the inescapable eeriness of the technological world that we inhabit.
Works Cited
- Agha, Uzayr. 2021. “The Ramsay Riot — Bollywood Horror and The Anxious Indian Audience.” Medium, December 10, 2021. https://medium.com/@uagha3/the-ramsay-riot-bollywood-horror-and-the-anxious-indian-audience-f436701822ac.
- Blake, Linnie, and Xavier Aldana Reyes. 2015. Digital Horror: Haunted Technologies, Network Panic and the Found Footage Phenomenon. Bloomsbury Publishing.
- Jacob, Renu Susan. 2022. “A Smartphone of One’s Own.” Ala / അല. May 16, 2022. https://alablog.in/issues/38/a-smartphone-of-ones-own/.
- Mokkil, Navaneetha. 2018. “Anxieties of Seeing: The Sensational World of Cinema, Digital Media and Politics.” Bioscope: South Asian Screen Studies 9 (2): 165–83. https://doi.org/10.1177/0974927618813478.
- Rao, Neomi, and Lakshmi Lingam. 2020. “Smartphones, Youth and Moral Panics: Exploring Print and Online Media Narratives in India.” Mobile Media & Communication 9 (1): 128–48. https://doi.org/10.1177/2050157920922262.
About the Author: Himaganga Joji is a PhD student working on cinema at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Institute of Technology Tiruchirappalli.
Editor’s Note: This article is part of a Special Issue that features writing by participants from our 2023 Writing Workshop.
Fantastic
Thanks for this. Glad to see that the film is appreciated. Also, it’s only in ZEE5 and so no one gets to watch it.