Digital Cultures of Horror in Mónica Ojeda’s Fiction

Abstract

The Internet is a world where all kinds of people with different interests, motivations, and worldviews browse and interact with each other. These interactions have given rise to diverse digital cultures, some of which can be called Digital Cultures of Horror. As an inhabitant of the contempo­rary world, Mónica Ojeda is aware of these cultures’ dark themes and envi­ronments and how they shape the lives of their members, so she has used them to create her fiction and depicts the dreadful side of human beings. Mónica Ojeda describes the horrors of the Internet and digital cultures in her novels Nefando (Nefandous), where she touches on the subject of the Dark Web and its perverse and violent content through a creepy video game, andMandíbula (Jawbone), where she unveils how the digital folklore stories of horror called creepypastas induce fear and affect the lives of a group of teenagers. With this in mind, this paper argues that Mónica Ojeda’s fiction represents the crossroads between horror and technology that reveal the digital cultures of horror that exist on the Internet.