Netflix’s found-footage Taiwanese horror film Incantation (Ko, 2022) offers something unique in a quite tired genre. Whilst falling into the usual tropes of found footage films – the shaky POV shots of shadowy rooms keeping us on our toes, static CCTV footage demanding our close scrutiny, pixelated social media posts fragmenting into digital debris before our eyes – it’s the first film of its type that I’m aware of that fosters and plays upon a kind of active spectatorship constructed through optical illusions.
As a horror film, Incantation follows the story of a traumatised mother, Ruo-nan, who has been supernaturally cursed when she and her fellow Youtuber ‘ghost busters’ trespass on an ancient ritual concerning a malevolent deity known as ‘Mother Buddah’. The curse, we learn, is to some extent bound or represented by this insignia, which we see in various manifestations throughout the film:
Before transitioning into its arguably formulaic core narrative, Incantation breaks the fourth wall with a sequence that is somewhat visually and tonally akin to a Powerpoint presentation rather than genre cinema. It’s an interesting opening gambit: rather than some gory introductory sequence and before we learn anything about this curse and its potential impact upon Ruo-nan’s young daughter Dodo, Incantation instead opens with Ruo-nan as a voice-over narrator, discussing the ability of our minds to shape the world around us. Ruo-nan (the diegetic director of this filmic testimony – perhaps the latest in her Youtube output?) employs two different optical illusions as evidence for this claim, one of a rotating Ferris wheel, the other, this quite ubiquitous image of a London underground train. Is this a horror film or a TED talk?
Gazing at the image full-screen, the train appears to be moving at a constant speed. But in which direction is it moving? Ruo-nan tells us that ‘the direction of this moving train can […] be either moving forward or backward based on your will.’ She continues:
‘I want you to try to control it only with your mind. Did you see that? Our will is quietly shaping this world.’
It’s a neat trick, a reminder that cinema is, after all, based upon a unifying optical illusion: persistence of vision, the idea that a rapid series of sequential still images will, to the human eye, be perceived as fluid motion due to the minute persistence of the previous static image upon the eye’s retina. This train station GIF is in fact comprised of only four individual frames (seen below) and yet the brain’s ability to fill in the gaps and extend these four images into an everlasting remake of the Lumière Brothers’ L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat underscores the fundamental susceptibility of our perception, and how cinema and other visual media exploit it.
The film’s opening use of this illusion establishes its core conceit: that we the viewer can and will have a direct influence upon the events that unfold, an ability to shape and be shaped by the images that we see, to change the direction of events on screen.
Discussing the power of icons/symbols, Ruo-nan then asks us to memorise the insignia depicted above alongside the following (untranslated) incantation – Hou-ho-xiu-yi, si-sei-wu-ma – stating that she ‘actually made this video because [she’s] hoping that everyone can help resolve [her] daughter’s misfortune.’ At various points in the film, Ruo-nan asks the viewer to repeat this incantation, either out loud or in our minds, whilst picturing the insignia. We are engaged and co-opted in this narrative conceit wholeheartedly, told that our recitation of the chant will aid in daughter Dodo’s well-being and safety. And wouldn’t we want to help? Isn’t a key principle of the horror genre the need for the viewer to empathise with a vulnerable protagonist?
More generally, all found footage films are predicated to some extent upon an explicit breaking of the fourth wall in the sense that we are meant to be watching unmediated footage rather than the presentation of a seamless and unconscious diegetic world in which the characters remain unaware of the camera’s/audience’s presence. Watching The Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield, or Paranomal Activity, we the viewer are dramatically engaged by the fact that we are (supposedly) viewing unmediated/unedited footage of the type we ourselves could have filmed on our smartphones or video cameras. The characters themselves are aware of the camera and its documenting vision and will control and dictate its gaze as suits their desires/purposes. It is within this sense of recognisable verisimilitude, this audio/visual familiarity, that these films operate and produce textual meaning. They engage us because they purportedly present an unfiltered view of characters and events that we recognise, that could be us.
They do, however, tend to maintain a kind of passive spectatorship. We view the ‘record’ of Cloverfield, the testimony of its characters, without the ability to actively participate in the events as they unfold. Incantation, in contrast, interweaves into its narrative an act of audience participation in the form of its repeated incantation and the recurring presence of the uncanny insignia that we begin to view everywhere, its presence in some undefined way marking the wrath of Mother-Buddah. So integral is this viewer participation to the film, that [spoilers ahead], the film’s final act sees the material nature of the film itself co-opted into yet another optical illusion predicated upon the phenomenon of persistence of vision.
In a final bid to rid herself and her daughter of Mother Buddah’s curse, Ruo-nan asks the viewer to recite the titular incantation one last time whilst staring at the insignia on screen (below), rendered in white against a stark black background. Meanwhile, red subtitles (both in the original Taiwanese and English) are re-positioned from the usual place at the bottom of the screen to the dead centre, finally revealing the translation of the mantra before abruptly cutting to a completely white screen and Ruo-nan’s voice stating that she’s ‘sorry’, she has ‘lied to you’.
The sudden inversion of the above image to a completely blank white screen (with the caveat that the spectator has been staring at the centre of the screen for the minute or so the film exhibits this image) should result in an afterimage of the the insignia captured prominently upon your retina and easily viewable on the screen upon which Incantation has been playing or any comparable white surface within view. It’s a familiar optical illusion, but no film that I’m aware of has similarly played with the characteristics – limitations? – of human visual perception in the same manner, literally influencing the viewer to produce their own actively constructed (after)image and filling in the ‘gap’ of the film’s momentary blank screen.
Not to be outdone by this optical gimmick, Ruo-nan informs us that the incantation we have been participating in has actually been more insidious in nature than she let us believe. Rather than combating the curse of Mother-Buddah, the incantation actually asks that those who recite it take on the burden of the curse itself and its malevolent consequences. It’s predictable, sure – the filmic equivalent of those urban legend email chains that require you to forward on some nightmarish image or tall-tale to ten other unfortunate recipients, lest you be the one who suffers – but the way in which Incantation adapts this conceit through the visual exploitation of our sight produced, for me at least, quite a captivating (albeit superficial) effect.
It reminded me that these stories, these characters, particularly within the horror genre, are only made real, empathetic, and believable through our conscious consent and complicity as viewers. Our perception fills in the gaps, and our willingness to suspend the disbelief upon which the medium of film is based demands that we stare into the screen with all the emotional engagement that a film’s characters and events ask of us, either literally in the case of Ruo-nan or in a more conventional/rhetorical sense.
A film like Incantation can only work if you’re prepared to give it your focus, engagement, and the material limitations of our eyes themselves – something Ruo-nan learns all too late.
Notes from the Multiplex 