From 1926 to The Ring: How the First Televisor Birthed a Century of Screen Horror
- Alice Heaps
- 17 hours ago
- 5 min read
Exactly one hundred years ago, in a cramped Soho attic smelling of bleach and singed paint, John Logie Baird performed a mechanical exorcism that would go on to change the world as we know it. On the 26th of January 1926, the world witnessed the first public demonstration of television. This demonstration was not the feat of sleek corporate progress that we associate with digital media today, but a Frankensteinian assembling of tea chests, darning needles, and boiling sealing wax. While the BBC commemorates this as a milestone of connectivity (which don't get me wrong, it is), at Girl Horror, we see it as a moment in which the human form was first dissected into light and shadow.
This was the birth of what cultural critics might call a 'hauntological event' (Mark Fisher's idea)- the creation of a medium that exists to trap the "ghosts" of the living within the confines of a box. By using a ventriloquist’s dummy, Stooky Bill, as his first subject (because the searing heat of the lamps would have quite literally cooked human skin), Baird in a way inaugurated the era of the fragmented body. Here, the male gaze shifted from the canvas to the cathode ray, beginning a century-long ritual of breaking the subject down into the flickering orange voids. As we mark this centennial, we aren't just celebrating a broadcast milestone, we are tracing the origins of the 'electronic Medusa' - where the screen freezes us into flat, flickering images.
The Anatomy of a Monster: A Domestic Body Horror
The physical architecture of the first "Televisor" was not a triumph of industrial design, but a mutation of the Victorian home. In an era where the domestic sphere was supposed to be a sanctuary of feminine order, Baird’s workshop was a site of mechanical transgression. His prototype was a "Frankenstein’s creature" stitched together from the mundane: an old tea chest served as its skeletal frame; bicycle light lenses focused the dim, flickering light; and darning needles - the literal tools of domestic repair - were repurposed as electrical contacts. There is a profound, Gothic irony in using the tools of "mending" to tear the human image apart into jagged lines of light.
To borrow from Sigmund Freud’s theory of the Uncanny, the Televisor represented the ultimate unheimlich: the "unhomely." The televisor took the familiar, and starkly girl horror, objects of the pantry and the sewing kit and transmuted them into a machine capable of summoning spectral doubles that were recognisable but uncanny. The sensory experience was one of visceral abrasion: the high-speed whirring of the Nipkow disk like a frantic mechanical heartbeat, while the boiling sealing wax and ozone created a stifling, metallic atmosphere. This wasn't just innovation; it was a surgery. By using these domestic fragments to build a "window" into the void, Baird ensured that the television would never be just a piece of furniture - it would be a permanent, flickering wound in the wall of the modern home, a site where the private and the phantasmagoric collide.
The Mechanical Séance: Scanning the Optical Unconscious
The Nipkow disk, a rapidly rotating spiral of holes that dissected an image, was the 'eye' of the machine. By breaking the human form into thirty jagged fragments of light and shadow, the disk performed a literal atomisation of the subject. To borrow from Walter Benjamin, this was the birth of the 'optical unconscious' - a realm where the camera captures a version of reality that is invisible to the naked eye. The resulting transmission was a low-resolution nightmare, a bruised, neon-orange phantasmagoria illuminated by a flickering gas lamp. Those early television viewers were witnessing a spectral manifesting of sorts, a series of blurred outlines and shifting shadows that could've been a spirit caught between dimensions. The technology was sophisticated enough to mimic life, but crude enough to look like death - a beautifully horrific uncanny valley. In his pursuit, Baird laid a good groundwork for our modern, collective discomfort with the screen. He proved that to be televised is to be haunted by one's own self, hinting that the ghostly, disembodied nature of our digital existence long before we had the vocabulary for the virtual.
The Sacrifice of the Simulacrum: Stooky Bill’s Charred Apostleship
The first face to ever flicker into this electronic purgatory was not human, but a deliciously horror-adjacent ventriloquist’s dummy named Stooky Bill. Baird’s choice of a puppet was a dark necessity, as the blinding, unshielded lights required to register an image on his primitive machine generated a heat so incandescent it would have quite literally flayed a human subject. Bill was the sacrificial lamb of the digital age, a simulacrum, a copy of a human that preceded the presence of the humans it was meant to represent.
There is something deeply abject in the archival footage of Bill’s television debut. To make the dummy "readable" to the mechanical eye, Baird had to perform a crude, high-contrast surgery, painting the doll’s face in garish whites and obsidian blacks: a proto-cinematic death mask of sorts. Under the searing glare, Bill’s paint blistered and his features singed. He was a martyr to a medium that, still to this day, demands the consumption of the subject. While modern media theory often discusses the "digital ghost," Stooky Bill reminds us that television began with physical decay. He was a hollowed-out celebrity, a charred puppet representing the first time the "human" image was severed from the body and trapped in a box.
The Static Lineage: From Soho to the Silver Screen
The spectral echo Baird unleashed has since become one of the primary languages of our modern nightmares. The horror genre has long obsessed over the screen as a liminal space- a thin, permeable membrane between the living and the dead. We see the direct descendants of Stooky Bill’s flickering orange face in the "video-cursed" imagery of The Ring, where the television becomes a delivery system for a terminal haunting. We see it in Poltergeist, where the domestic sanctuary is violated by "TV People" emerging from the white noise. Even in contemporary Girl Horror masterpieces like I Saw the TV Glow, the screen is depicted as a site of dysphoric longing, a place where the subject is consumed by the medium, echoing the way the Soho floodlights consumed the paint on a ventriloquist's dummy. These films recognise a truth that Baird first glimpsed in his attic: the screen does not just show us another world; it threatens to pull us into its void.
Conclusion: A Century of Static and the Electronic Medusa
One hundred years later, the tea chests have been replaced by liquid crystals and the darning needles by microscopic silicon, yet the 'haunting' remains unchanged. As we mark this centennial, we must recognise that Jogn Logie Baird didn't just invent a consumer appliance, he opened a portal to a hyperreal existence where the image - the flickering ghost - began to supersede the flesh. In the world of Girl Horror, we understand that the screen is never a passive window. It is an Electronic Medusa: a force that captures our likeness, freezes our youth, and petrifies our lived experiences into a stream of data and light.
We are all descendants of Stooky Bill now. We live in an era of 'front-facing' existence, perpetually singed by the metaphorical heat of the digital gaze, our faces fragmented into pixels and 'scan lines' for an audience of millions. The abject horror of a charred dummy in a Soho attic has evolved into the polished, filtered uncanny of our social media feeds - a seamless, 24-hour seance where we are both the medium and the ghost. As the BBC celebrates a century of 'innovation', let us remember the darning needs and the smell of ozone. Let us remember that every time we look into the glow, we are peering back into that 1926 void, participating in a ritual that hasn't stopped for a hundred years. The television isn't just a box in a corner of the room anymore, it is a permanent piece of proverbail furniture in our reality, and the ghosts inside are finally us.
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