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Erika Kvistad is a literature and media scholar working on digital horror narratives. Her previous publications in this area include work on haunted spaces on the internet, Gothic interactive fiction games, and horror webcomics, and her most recent work is on the early-2000s horror hoax YouTube series In the Dark. She is Associate Professor of English at the University of South-Eastern Norway

She reveals the origins of Cursed Content online, and how they are designed to stick with us by tapping into our deep set, subconscious fears.

Line Henriksen is Senior Lecturer in Literature and Creative Writing at Malmö University, Sweden. She is the author of the monograph In the Company of Ghosts: Hauntology, Ethics, Digital Monsters (2016), and co-author of the forthcoming book Feminist Reconfigurings of Alien Encounters: Ethical Co-Existence in More-than-Human Worlds (Routledge 2024) together with Nina Lykke and Katja Aglert. Her research interests include monster theory, hauntology and creative writing as method. 

She tell us how Smile Dog exposes the dark underbelly of the internet, and challenges Aleks on the ethical nature of sharing content that could infect, and consume people.

Michael Lutz is an academic and writer whose research focuses on the dialog between contemporary media theory and the long history of humanism. He is also a podcaster on the Ranged Touch network, where he regularly discusses everything from academic game studies to the complete works of Stephen King

He tells us how he created Smile Dog and spread it to the unsuspecting people of the internet, and how in following it’s evolution, he got an unexpected insight into the disintegration of the internet as we know it, as a more malevolent curse swept in to take it’s place.