Conference Agenda

Amidst recent moments of fear and violence within the United States, an analysis of music in the horror film Green Room (2015) offers an opportunity to interpret relevant issues of terror, especially pertaining to sound, technology, insularity and white supremacy. The action of the film takes place in the remote Oregon woods, identified as a locale of aggression and Nazi sympathy. The film (starring Anton Yelchin and Patrick Stewart) features a struggling hard-core punk band that unknowingly accepts a gig at a militant, white supremacist club. When the band witnesses a murder there, they are locked into the green room, fighting for survival with makeshift weapons against a heavily armed skinhead militia. The standoff results in extreme violence and spotlights common horror film questions of what constitutes humanity under extreme circumstances and in the face of trauma. Within this setting of visual excess and dualistic morality, music and sound progress the narrative as the protagonists lose control of their surroundings. Drawing on work by David Novak (2013), I read various punk expressions, noise, and feedback sounds as instances of aural excess, which echo the excessive conditions of violence and confinement visited upon the band. Further, I argue, noise and silence variously overtake the punk music on which the film is predicated. For instance, the band’s own music is often visually indicated but sonically deleted, fading to, or replaced by, silence, noise, or more lyrically-oriented scoring, creating a technologically disjunct representation. The musical identity of the band comes to be increasingly characterized by absence, subject to fierce obliteration, as the musicians lose their lives amidst violent terrors with distinctively American resonances.

In 2011, nationally known English entertainer and media personality Jimmy Savile died, precipitating a deluge of sexual abuse allegations against him. For those of a certain generation, these revelations were harrowing, forcing them to reevaluate their relationship with the media of their youth; as Mark Fisher wrote in Ghosts of My Life, “the 70s was returning, no longer as some bittersweet nostalgia trip, but as a trauma.” One particularly haunting response to this national trauma is Matthew Holness’s surreal horror film Possum (2018), in which the puppeteer Philip, an adult male sexual abuse survivor, struggles to voice his trauma. A modern-day silent film, Possum relies largely on the soundtrack, composed by four members of the reconvened BBC Radiophonic Workshop, to express the haunting nature of trauma. Accordingly, the electronic score recalls the soundscapes of 1970s British media, even sampling the work of Delia Derbyshire, while creating a distanced, eerie atmosphere—a sonic ectoplasm that permeates Philip’s isolated world and collapses the boundary of internal and external. I argue that this strategy, known as hauntology, functions to destabilize any sense of progress in working through that trauma. This is further evidenced by Philip’s multiple symbolic failed attempts to destroy the titular puppet Possum, and by the technical interspersion of previous shots that create a nonlinear loop of traumatic repetition. In this way, the film supports Cathy Caruth’s theorization of trauma as unrepresentable, unutterable, and a disruption of time. Furthermore, Philip’s struggle to voice the unutterable creates a gendered confrontation with the classic horror trope of the “screaming point.” As Michel Chion argued, the tension that had been building in a horror film comes to a climactic expression voiced by the female protagonist. Stacey Anh Baran has recently reformulated this as the “cathartic scream,” where characters confront their grief directly. Possum clearly resists both modes of screaming, as Philip cannot bring himself to vocal expression but achieves some resolution through silent action. Thus, with its hauntological soundscapes and thwarted vocality, Possum offers a poignant meditation on the isolated nature of male sexual abuse suffering in the wake of a national tragedy.

On December 28, 2025, the Islamic Republic of Iran faced yet another round of sweeping protests across the country. Frustrated with decades-long economic repression and lack of prospects for prosperity or even access to the basic necessities of life, protesters demanded louder than ever a regime change. In addition to appearing in unprecedented numbers in streets of large and small cities, they went on strike during the protest days and gathered on rooftops at nights shouting anti-regime slogans. Government buildings were also set ablaze and known Iranian officials and individuals with direct ties to the regime became the target of attach and vilification on social media and public places. However, the tangible horror emerged when the regime’s killing squads with direct orders to shoot the protesters in the head began the deadliest crackdowns in the history of the Islamic Republic. The international media and press officially estimated a death toll of up to 36, 500 people within the two days of January 8 and 9, 2026, when protests reached a peak nationwide. For Hannah Arendt, at the core of a totalitarian regime is the “most radical denial of freedom.” The mass killings of the protesters were not the only measure that the Islamic Republic took to quell the protests and to give force to a collective sense of fear and terror. By shutting down all communication lines, the regime actively isolated the country from the international community. Arendt also highlights the production of large-scale terror and isolation as defining features of totalitarian governments. Focusing on a netnography of news sites and social media pages that provided access to trickled down news, imageries, and videos from Iran during the protests, I argue that a sonic analysis of protests and the regime’s arrest scenes serve as a critical tool for identifying the totalitarian components of the regime’s suppressive measures. My paper highlights at the same time how technologies such as virtual private networks and satellite internet provided an avenue for protesters to circumvent the regime’s totalitarian modes of isolation and demonstrate their silenced wailing and frustrations to the world.