Demon media: Horrific representations of the transformative global image

Demons ([1985] 2007) and Demons 2 ([1987] 2007) offer self-referential commentaries on the power of media to shape audiences: demons literally step off the screens of the cinema (part one) and television (part two), turning everyone they bite or scratch into one of their exponentially growing number. The demonic contagion spreads through two vectors, first, violent media and then the violence those media engender, and the result is gruesome death, gruesome transformation, or both. These vectors transgress the boundaries of media, representation, nation, and ethnicity, and in doing so they erase them, creating a homogenous, murderous mass. The threat of lethal homogeneity the demons carry becomes a metaphor for the potential of converging global media to redesign their consumers into a mass of identical beings defined not by history or culture but solely by consumption. Since both media technologies and bodily contagion are the demons’ means of reproducing, the demons both use media and are media, and they are determined to spread until the world is pure media with nothing to mediate. The films’ portrayals of media are not entirely pessimistic, however: as demon media transform old ways of being, they open new possibilities.