Eerie cellphones update

The uncanny internet continues to infect the mobile phone world, as David Pescowitz reminds us of the continued rise in eerie cell phone culture, noting Takashi Miike's One Missed Call (Chakushin ari, 2003).  The New York Times review has this useful comment:

the object of dread is the cellphone - not any one cellphone, but the system of wireless communication itself, which becomes a kind of superhighway for the transmission of bad karma.

Note the "superhighway" term, which draws on its Clinton-Gore era usage to describe the internet.

Pescowitz also points to this account of mobile weirdness from Radio Television Brunei.

some have heard a mobile phone ringing in the middle of the jungle when security personnel claim none of them received any incoming calls. Smugglers in the bushes being tipped of, perhaps...

And this familiar icon of Asian horror cinema, ported to cell phone:

Making the rounds among teenagers via mobile phone is the popular one being a woman with long hair sitting at a balcony behind a man who is posing for a picture.

Meanwhile, Dark But Shining spots this great telco commercial, using this trope of haunted phones... to sell phone service!  Notice how it pushes the uncanny back to landlines.  Very Gothic, haunting the old stuff to thrill users of the new.

Comments

[Bryan]

Speaking of older phone tech in creepy situations, remember the phones in The Matrix? Not the cool FedExed phone Morpheus sends Neo, but the old, big, rotary phones connecting the worlds.