The Squid Cinema From Hell Kinoteuthis Infernalis and the Emergence of Chthulumedia

Here be Kraken! The Squid Cinema From Hell draws upon writers like Vilém Flusser, Donna J. Haraway, Graham Harman and Eugene Thacker to offer up a critical analysis of cephalopods and other tentacular creatures in contemporary media, while also speculating that digital media might themselves constitute a weird, intelligent alien. The book engages with contemporary discourses of posthumanism, speculative realism, object-oriented ontology and animal studies to suggest that humans are the products of media rather than media being the products of humans.

Including case studies of films by Denis Villeneuve, Park Chan-wook and Céline Sciamma, The Squid Cinema From Hell also provides a daring engagement with various media beyond cinema, including literature, music videos, 4DX, advertising, websites, YouTube, Artificial Intelligence and more. Zounds! This unique and Lovecraftian book will change the way you think about, and with, our contemporary, media-saturated world. For as we contemplate the abyss, the abyss looks back at us - and chthulumedia, or media at the end of human times, begin to emerge.

William Brown is a Senior Lecturer in Film at the University of Roehampton, London. He is the author of various books, including Non-Cinema: Global Digital Filmmaking and the Multitude (Bloomsbury, 2018) and Supercinema: Film-Philosophy for the Digital Age (Berghahn, 2013). He is also a maker of micro-budget films, including En Attendant Godard (2009), Selfie (2014) and This is Cinema (2019).

David H. Fleming is a Senior lecturer in the Communications, Media and Culture Division at the University of Stirling, Scotland. His research interests surround the intersectionalities of cinema, philosophy and technology and publishes widely in interdisciplinary journals including SubStance, Film-Philosophy, Deleuze Studies, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Journal of Urban Cultural Studies, Social Semiotics and edited collections such as Posthumanisms Through Deleuze (Indiana University Press, forthcoming) and Deleuze and Film (Edinburgh University Press, 2012).