There is a concept within occult esoterica known as the egregore. Put simply, an egregore is an entity birthed into the world by means of collective thought within groups of people. It may be benevolent or malevolent, depending on the energy that creates it, but the important aspect is that it is manifested rather than summoned. The eternal balance of energy suggests that there would be as many positive entities as negative, but the malevolent ones can create nightmarish havoc.
The idea has been around in one form or another for thousands of years. Some claim the angelic "watchers" in the Book of Enoch were egregores manifested by mass prayer among the Hebrews. The mass death of the 17th Century in Europe might have been fueled by the decline of the Church and the rise of a corrosive brand of paganism. The primary modern proponent of the idea was English occultist Aleister Crowley, along with 20th Century esotericists like René Guénon and Julius Evola.
I'm partial to the theory that civilizations like the Aztecs manifested the demons that devoured them. The Aztecs were famously paranoid of an imminent doomsday that would wipe them from the earth, and conducted their ritual massacres in hopes of forestalling their own collapse — and so perhaps miscalculated the kind of spirits such actions might bring forth. By the time the Spanish arrived, the Aztecs were already spiritually bled out.
Unlike Crowley and his seances or the Aztecs and their blood sacrifices, we needn't turn to the archaic means of manifesting the demon. Much like the Japanese superstitions surrounding the "ghost in the machine," the demon arrived the moment we flipped the ON switch on the first internet routers. The digital demon is here, and it threatens to swallow everything.
Pascal Plante's 2024 film Red Rooms follows a young model and nighttime internet autist named Kelly-Anne as she attends a murder trial. She gets to the Montreal courthouse before dawn every morning to secure a seat in the "visitor's section," along with a fervent and shaky woman from the countryside named Clementine who's there to protest the defendant's innocence. Kelly-Anne's motivations for attending are unclear, and remain so throughout much of the film — some might say through the entirety of it.
A man named Chevalier is accused of torturing and killing three young girls on camera and selling the videos to buyers on the dark web. In this way he's quite a big catch — though snuff videos and the online "red rooms" in which they're sold at auction have long been a specter of dark web lore, no one has ever gone on trial for such a pay-per-view murder operation. And so the trial is a major public affair, hence Kelly-Ann needing to beat the crowds every day to secure a seat.
Two of the videos in question were seized at Chevalier's residence, and will be shown during the trial in front of jurors and the families of the victims. The other has not been located, and has not yet appeared on the internet. The defense is that the man in the videos is wearing a mask, and thus it's not certain who it is.
What unfolds is a portrait of a woman at once dissolving and creating herself through immersion in the digital. At night, Kelly-Ann disappears online to become Lady Shallot, a hacker who plays poker for crypto currency and gorges on news related to the snuff murders. The filmmaking channels David Fincher in its blue-hued depiction of a human turned into a hyper-focused inanimate object as they stare at screens. Kelly-Ann's modeling persona is that of an avant-garde ice queen, but she clearly feels most alive when she's hooked up to the internet, perceiving the world through digital proxy. "Lady Shallot," after all, is a reference to Tennyson’s poem about a woman in Arthurian times who was cursed so that she might only see the outside world reflected in a mirror.
Kelly-Ann's not mean to people in real life, but her interactions are stilted and unsure — not simply autism but more the behavior of an organism no longer adapted to the physical environment. Even the odd friendship she strikes up with Clementine during the trial is like an anthropologist studying people by observation. Clementine is earnest and naive and Kelly-Ann is neither, so the latter is content to let the former do most of the talking.
Those aforementioned blue hues change to red about the two-thirds through the film, when it turns out Kelly-Ann has already seen the two snuff videos from the trial. She accessed them on the dark web, and shows them to Clementine one evening at her apartment. Clementine seems like someone who may not have internet access back home, and she doesn't appear to have a smartphone. She interacts with news crews and calls into a television show to protest Chevalier's innocence, and it's like something from thirty years ago, analog and outdated. So when Kelly-Ann takes her down to the darkest depths of the internet, she's shaken so much that she retreats back to the hinterlands. The Digital Age is a land of wolves, and she will not make it there.
On her own again, Kelly-Ann dives deeper into the murder case as her "IRL" life disintegrates. Her presence at the trial is weirding people out, and her modeling contracts are cancelled. This sends her off a cliff, and she tries to get a reaction from the accused by dressing up like one of the teenage victims at the trial until the dead girl's family has her removed.
She then returns to the digital to embark on her final quest — obtaining the third snuff video when it's sold in the titular Red Room. In the film's best scene, she gains access to the bidding and begins a high-stakes online poker game at the same time, each one going on one of her two computer monitors. It's riveting filmmaking, edited with such vigor that you almost forget that in this scene, surrounded by darkness except the light from the screens, you are somewhere in a lower realm of the new digital Hell that has crawled into the world these last few decades.
Kelly-Ann wins the poker game and then the auction, and she opens the file that appears on the desktop. After watching the third girl's murder, she takes the file to the house of the girl's family and leaves it as final evidence of Chevalier's guilt. But not before dressing as the dead teenager again and posing for a selfie on the girl's bed.
In a way, she's consumed both killer and victim through fiberoptic cables. Perhaps as a searcher — like Eve, maybe her quest was a gnostic search for both good and evil. But perhaps she has also succeeded in manifesting through herself a new demon into the world - an egregore birthed from digital vanity and dissembling. A nonperson.
Though the kind of for-auction snuff films depicted in Red Rooms have not appeared in case files brought to trial in the West, they almost certainly exist. Murder investigations and even political scandals have brushed the surface of this underworld for decades, especially in Europe, where the "Bjorn Tape" scandal in Holland and the Warwick Spinks case suggested a disturbing network of both perpetrators and people willing to pay for the product. This is on top of a wealth of on-camera murders committed by organizations such as ISIS and Mexican drug cartels, which showed up regularly on websites like LiveLeak and Rotten during the 2010s. Those of a certain age may also remember the Faces of Death VHS videos of the 1990s that made the rounds of high school watch parties, which combined fake snuff scenarios mixed with real recordings of things like auto accidents and suicides.
Closer to the content depicted in the film are the video and audio recordings of serial killers. Leonard Lake and Charles Ng recorded tortures at their mountain hideaway in the 1980s. Maury Travis, who preyed on prostitutes in St. Louis, made a video that he titled "Your Wedding Day" wherein he tormented and then strangled one of his victims. That video and those of Lake and Ng were never leaked to the public, but one made by a pair Ukrainian mass murders known as the Dnepropetrovsk Maniacs did make it onto the mainstream internet in the 2000s — "3 Guys, 1 Hammer" remains a hallmark of extreme (and accessible) internet content.
The most notorious of these — and the one which certainly inspired the scene in Red Rooms where family members become sick and leave the courtroom while one of the videos is played — was an audio tape recorded by the "Toolbox Killers" in the 1970s. Lawrence Bittaker recorded himself and his accomplice Roy Norris torturing a teenage girl in the back of their van, which included striking the girl on the elbow repeatedly with a hammer until she begged them to kill her. The tape has never been released to the public, though it remains on file at the FBI training library where it's assigned listening for new recruits to see what they can take. Famed FBI profiler John Douglas played the tape for actor Scott Glenn as the latter was preparing to play Jack Crawford in Silence of the Lambs. Glenn broke down crying while listening to it, and later said the tape changed his opinion on the death penalty.
All of this content has robust online communities dedicated to its dissemination and consumption. Most of these consumers are likely only curious, but therein lies a rub.
Misguided curiosity is a core trespass in mythologies and faith traditions throughout human history. From Adam and Eve to Pandora to Bluebeard's newest young wife, it recurs as a violation that disrupts some kind of pact between the curious and some powerful keeper of secrets. Don't eat that apple. Don't open that box. Don't go in that room. Don't download that .mp4 file.
This seems like an odd counterpoint to the nobility of "questing," wherein the hero charges into the unknown to take down some dark counterforce — usually a force of destruction like a dragon or a witch or a rival warrior. These heroic quests tend to be straightforward seek-find-kill narratives that laud the triumph of defeating clear and direct threats — think St. George and the Dragon or Beowulf and Grendel. The enemies in those stories are known quantities, as is the danger they pose to the heroes and their communities.
The warnings against curiosity, on the other hand, are more about the dangers of forbidden knowledge. The idea that all "knowledge is power" is a modern one, and is perhaps contraindicated by manmade horrors like bioweapons and the nuclear bomb. The core lesson in these stories is that there is a good reason some knowledge should be inaccessible. There are dark corners of the world — dark corners of the soul — that one gains nothing from accessing and perhaps risks everything by seeking. "Here Be Monsters," so say the old maps.
There is a feminist reading here, to be fair, since the perpetrators in this kind of story are often female. Impetuous young women — they're almost always young — give in to their curiosity and violate the agreements when left alone. Think Bluebeard's wife in his castle, Kelly-Ann in her dark apartment. There seems to be a theme across history and across cultures that women are uniquely tempted to wander past barriers to damnation when lured by forbidden knowledge or sensations. But is this fair?
The film presents the primacy of women thematically but never addresses it head on. This does not mean women's direct involvement in the evil itself, but in their greater curiosity about — and perhaps attraction to — homicidal depravity. The "True Crime" boom of the 21st Century has provided analytics to back this up. The consumers of true crime podcasts and television shows and print books are overwhelmingly female. I'm not qualified to proffer why exactly this is, but I suspect it might connect to a duality expressed by Kelly-Ann as she bounds down the digital rabbit hole.
Whereas Clementine seems motivated by a misplaced motherly instinct to deny or excuse the behavior of the accused, Kelly-Ann believes Chevalier did it, and while driven to prove this to the authorities she is also drawn to it. She amps up her resemblance to one of the victims for effect - perhaps edging on a desire to be consumed by the monster. True Crime and "Smut Lit" consumer data as well as anonymous fantasy confessions suggest her arc may just be a more extreme example of a rather common proclivity, a perverse side of the same coin wherein men are more prone to the actual hands-on savagery. In some dark recesses, monster and victim might be more symbiotic than we'd like to think.
Much of that is ancient. Persistent themes drawn to illustrate human nature as it relates to locked boxes and closed doors. But the technology is the variable here. Not because of what digital tech is — screens of glass and strings of metal wrapped in plastic and shot through with energy — but because it provides one of the most potent temptations the Devil has ever offered. Ease.
The promise of ease is the path trod by this particular egregore. The Devil's bargain is not to convince someone to want something new, it's to smooth the way toward what they already desire. He blows on the embers of greed, sloth, pride — all the deadly sins that lie somewhere in every human soul, waiting for a weakness that wakens them. Just a whisper in the ear that drapes onto wants you already have but no longer have the moral or spiritual strength to refuse or pursue via more virtuous means. See the legend of the blues musician Robert Johnson striking a deal with the Devil at the crossroads to give him mastery over the guitar. You already want to open the door, it's just that little extra push.
There has never been more powerful technology for ease than the internet. Ease of knowledge. Ease of purchase. Ease of sexual stimulation. Ease of attention. Ease of delivering pain, and ease of receiving it. Ease of wholesale and instantaneous identity creation. You now possess the means to garner a following of millions, and also the means for that same torrent of pseudo-human energy to rip your psyche apart. It's never been easier to both disseminate evil and to consume it, and therefore have your soul destroyed by it. Self-dissolution is now possible in ways we still don't understand.
Kelly-Ann desires the dissolution of her real-world self in exchange for the ability to take on other identities at will - Lady Shallot, a series of avant garde aesthetic presentations, a murdered teenager. She is to able accomplish these things via the identity-formation machine of the internet, but as mentioned above, the process has rendered her a nonperson as she has descended down into the web's darkest depths. An empty vessel for the very worst mankind has to offer, to which she is inextricably linked and melded. She sends the video to police, and proves that Chevalier is the killer. But the million dollars she paid for it has gone to someone, and she herself has already viewed it. She has broken the cursed seal on the tomb, and the descent of this highly intelligent woman into parasocial obsession with killer and victim alike suggests someone without a firm sense of her own self, and thus a vulnerable vessel for evil sent via an internet connection.
In other pieces I've touched on the work of contemporary French philosopher Paul Virilio, who contends that every new technological "advancement" brings with it a new unique disaster. So the creation of the ship leads to the shipwreck, the plane the plane crash, the nuclear reactor the meltdown, and so on. Those mechanical disasters have increased in scope over the centuries and were understood by the people who dealt with them, but nothing has prepared mankind for the all-encompassing disaster of the digital. The technology is omnipresent, designed to manipulate and perhaps replace the mind more than create mechanical outcomes or tactile benefit. The verdict on it as a net benefit will not come for generations, but no matter the benefits, that it has released new strange evils into the world is manifest. Like any demon worth his salt, the egregore of the internet will deliver whatever it is you want - the "dark web" just a last vestige of the old internet without the algorithms and streamlining. Virilio's digital disaster is mass access to psychic forces of indulgent temptation and self-obliteration beyond our current comprehension.
Longlegs was positioned by some as the foremost horror film of 2024, with its literal placement of a horned devil within its compositions. But we don't need the cloven hooves and horns to see an evil that might seek us out if we take the wrong distant road — click the wrong link, or open the wrong file. You're almost certainly reading this on a screen. The Devil is already here.