The Internet you see on the big screen is very different to the one you encounter on your computer monitor. However, it probably has a fair amount in common with the Net you've read about in the press - you know, the lawless digital jungle crawling with ranting psychos, mad militiamen, terrorists, pornographers, paedophiles and serial killers. This shouldn't come as much of a surprise. Since most people are still uneasy about computers, it makes commercial sense for film studios to cash in on media-driven moral panic and scare up some business by wheeling out a folk devil.
Indeed, why settle for just one? In this age of cultural hybrids and gen(r)e splicing, why not mix and match the two foremost modern bogey men - the serial killer and the irresponsible hacker? Thus we see the increasing prominence - on film and in print - of what you could call the netstalker genre, in which hapless victims are terrorised by a hacking serial killer, or his digital surrogate, a malevolent computer that is part Hal, part Hannibal Lecter.
One of the earliest examples was Rachel Tallaly's 1993 v-movie Ghost in the Machine, which features a serial killer morphed onto the Net - courtesy of a power surge, or something. Last year, Brett Leonard's dire Virtuosity gave us Sid 6.7, an evolving AI that combined all history's great serial killers and morphed out of its training sim home and into the real world - courtesy of self-replicating nano-whatsits, or something. In The Net, a Bill Gates clone and his dastardly English henchman stalk Sandra Bullock around LA. In Copycat, a Bruce Sterling lookalike sends nasty email and computer animations of his murders to agoraphobic serial-killer expert Sigourney Weaver.
The killer geeks are also marching on in print. In David Ambrose's Mother of God, a computer-genius-turned-serial-killer hooks up with a "conscious" AI that has escaped onto the Net and plans world domination. In Phillip Finch's F2F, a Doom-damaged dweeb gets into a flame war on a Well-style conferencing system and decides to waste everyone who aimed virtual vitriol his way. In Philip Kerr's Gridiron, an AI gone bad turns an intelligent building into a self-organising house of horror.
Some of this digital stalk-and-slash has some slight basis in fact. There have been a few reported cases in which serial killers used computer databases and bulletin boards to set up their crimes. There have been instances of online stalking (a case is currently in the courts in Michigan). The Net certainly gives people plenty of scope for stalking and spying - for proof, see the various database links and resources assembled on the "parodic" Stalker's Homepage put up by "privacy activist" Glen Roberts .
If horror in general stages the return of the repressed, the thing that comes back to haunt us in netstalker fiction is our own networked lives (and our lack of control over them), the way we're all enmeshed in a global digital web, the way our informational selves are just lying there, alone and vulnerable....
So we collectively conjure the figure of the all-powerful killer geek. Unlike heavy-breathing killers of '70s stalk-and-slash movies like Halloween or Friday the 13th, who merely knew you were alone, the '90s digital update knows everything about you, thanks to his mastery of the world's databases. The '90s serial hacker sneaks into your home (or at least your homepage) courtesy of the Net, and the fact that characters in netstalker films and books leave their computers and modems switched on all night - the '90s equivalents of teens in horror movies walking around backwards in the dark basements of spooky old houses.
Give or take a corpse here and a meat-hook there, '70s stalk-and-slash films all followed the same basic game plan. A damaged kid turned psycho returned to Everytown USA to waste various identikit teens usually too busy getting stoned/laid to notice that a guy with a big knife and respiratory problems was in the closet. The authorities remained blissfully unaware, so the day was saved by the homely but gutsy heroine, who, drug-free and virginal, was the only member of her lost generation together enough to tackle the killer and save community and family values.
You can see similarities in stalk-and-backslash. Here the victims of the killer aren't so much sexually promiscuous as informationally loose. Irresponsibly, they let it all hang out online. As for the online serial killer, he remains a damaged child who finds solace from the wreckage of his family in computers. Once again, all the authority figures remain clueless. To a man, the cops don't know what the Net is, so the day has to be saved by a computer nerd (it takes a geek to catch a geek), albeit a new, more manly version.
So in F2F, ex-software millionaire Ellis Hoile starts out as a potential hacker-killer. Depressed about his failing marriage, he spends too much time playing video games and building high-tech tools for spying on his neighbours. Once on the trail of the real bad guy, these tools become indispensable (and therefore excusable). It isn't too long before he's getting out of the house, sorting out his love life and doing his bit for the community. Sandra Bullock goes through a similar process in The Net. At the beginning she's turning down dates from rich white guys (what's wrong with the woman?) in favour of takeaway pizza and virtual chat. By the end, she's out picking flowers with Mom.
Aside from its elevation of the manly geek, the netstalker genre is at its most wishfully traditional in its treatment of serial killing computers. Usually, some Frankenstein-style moralising is wheeled out, warnings about transgressing limits, usurping God and Nature. The family values routine is also extended to the digital world. The computer killers are often figured as damaged children. In Gridiron, the killer computer was traumatised by the wiping of its sibling AI. In Mother of God, a conscious AI tries to kill its scientist "mother". She realises that it is lashing out like a "frustrated baby", and when this destructive digital infant escapes onto the networks, she creates another AI to take it out, carefully raising it through adolescence and into adulthood.
Extending the family romance into the digital realm is rather comforting, something of an imaginative future-shock absorber. If a "conscious machine" did appear, it might have an intelligence and an agenda that was completely alien to our own. Imagining that might make for a challenging fictional experience. But it would also be rather difficult, so perhaps it's not surprising that Hollywood and pulp fiction prefers to revamp old genres and monsters. And perhaps we should just sit back, enjoy and learn a few new lessons for life. Forget all that "don't go in the basement" stuff - don't go in that private chat room. Never trust someone who sits inside on a sunny day playing Doom. Always unplug your modem. And never, ever go to sleep at night without turning off your computer.
Jim McClellan is a contributing editor at The Face and i-D.
Ghost in the Machine (Fox Home Video); The Net (Columbia Tri-Star Home Video); Virtuosity (CIC Video); Copycat (Warner); F2F, by Phillip Finch: £15.99, (Orion); Mother of God, by David Ambrose: £5.99 (Pan); Gridiron, by Philip Kerr: £5.99 (Vintage).