"Horror has no borders": borderveillance, resistive mockumentary, and the evidentiary photograph in Savageland (2015)

Despite ongoing efforts by activists at the U.S.-Mexico border to provide care-oriented surveillance resources to migrants crossing the dangerous and precarious borderlands (e.g., technologies that assist them with finding water or safety), migrants themselves demonstrate distrust of these technologies because of the increasingly proliferation and omniscience of state-operated surveillance networks at the border, or “borderveillance.” This material reality is reflected in the symbolic realm, as border reality television shows work to inculcate American viewers into believing the characterization of migrants embedded in borderveillance networks: that migrants are inherently suspicious, permanently visible, and inevitably arrestable. In both material reality and in the reality constructed by these TV shows, migrants are the subject of dehumanizing surveillant gazes, ones that reduce them to a mere body that can be banned indiscriminately from U.S. borders. The 2015 mock-documentary horror film Savageland, directed by Phil Guidry, Simon Herbert, and David Whelan, is a compelling example of a film that offers a symbolic, counterhegemonic response to dominant representations of migrants as they are perpetuated by borderveillant reality television. This thesis combines theoretical approaches from surveillance studies and horror studies to illuminate how the mock-documentary horror film can symbolically disrupt the constructions of hegemonic “reality” constructed by contemporaneous non-fiction media like reality TV. Through a comparative close reading between the film and Border Wars, this thesis contends that Savageland creates an inversion of the hierarchy of credibility that exists in the show, one that places the migrant at the bottom and the border agent at the top.