Isabel Pedersen, Ihor Junyk FEARMONGER: FEAR, FILM, DIGITAL EMBODIMENT, AND CINEMATIC FUTURES “when we invent a new technology, we become cannibals. We eat ourselves alive since these technologies are merely extensions of ourselves. The new environment shaped by electronic technology is a cannibalistic one” Marshall McLuhan, 1967 Introduction In “Cinema del Limite,” Antonio Bisaccia, R. Bruce Elder, Peggy Gale, and Giuliano Lombardo make a controversial claim 1 . “The cinema as we have known it,” they argue, “is dead”. As the argu- ment progresses it becomes clear that “‘the movies’ are very much alive.” What has been killed of is “a specifc narrative form devel- oped over the frst forty years of the cinema’s existence, which was dependent on a specifc ensemble of apparti” and particular viewing practices. Paradoxically, according to the authors, the cinema has died, not through atrophy, but because of a hypertrophy of mov- ing images. The proliferation of personal computing devices and the algorithmic circulation of images has led to a surfeit of movies: “Go to almost any sports bar or pub, or walk through the lobbies and atriums of almost any large public buildings, or take an eleva- tor in a modern skyscraper, or take a taxi, and you are likely to fnd a screen with some kind of movie being shown on it.” The vastly diferent conditions of the production, circulation, and consumption of moving images has led to a “crucial juncture for the cinema.” Mainstream Hollywood flm has doubled down on a brutalizing cin- ema of attractions that seems ever more empty and unfulflling. The 1 A. Bisaccia, B. Elder, P. Gale, G. Lombardo, Cinema del Limite, in “Pa- rol”, 2015, pp. 15-19.