Black Mirror Season 3 Episode 2 "Playtest"

Black Mirror Season 3 Episode 2 "Playtest"

Black Mirror is a new show on Netflix. Every episode is different but each fall under the same theme of "technology"

This episode is about a man who is looking to make money so he gets hired to become a video game tester for a really successful Japanese company. This game is a spin on virtual reality, with a chip implanted in him rather than a headset, he has to stay over night at a "haunted" house and experience the game to give feedback. In this screenshot from the episode at 32:35, the man is looking on at a photograph hanging in the house. Earlier in the episode, he sees this picture and there are no lights on and it seems like a pretty standard painting of the house he is in. But in the moment I've captured, he recognizes a light on in one of the windows in the painting that wasn't there before. How is this possible? This moment is what I thought of when reading "The Mezzotint" by M. R. James. This moment in Black Mirror is the modern version of that story. The timelessness of horror are used both of these scenarios. Meaning, they both feed off the fear of something changing in an object that was created to remain the same. It is supernatural, so as humans we understand that situations like this can't actually happen but if they were, it would be terrifying. Black Mirror and M. R. James capture the same intensity in a small modification to a picture to scare the viewer. I think it's interesting to take something from the Victorian period and our modern world and see an exact correlation. Perhaps it is saying as a society, our fears and skepticism have stayed the same and will stay the same for many years to come.