The emotional mechanism of the horror genre largely relies on the temporal and visual organization of the film. Through shot staging and montage, film can control what the audience sees and when the threat will appear. From the terrifying monsters and uncanny ghosts in early horror cinema to the intense and sensory style of contemporary horror films, the genre has undergone stylistic changes, but it still mainly depends on strict control of the spectator’s gaze. Framing, editing, and point-of-view structures guide the viewer’s visual experience, allowing fear to be carefully presented through the sudden appearance of threatening figures.

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The emergence of virtual reality changes these narrative conditions. The VR series The Faceless Lady, made by Meta, is often regarded as one of the earliest live-action VR serialized narratives. Because VR viewing relies on head-mounted displays and immersive 360° or 180° imagery, spectators are no longer fully constrained by the camera’s control of vision but instead gain a relatively free viewing direction. Under these conditions, the conventional horror mechanisms that depend on editing and visual control become difficult to sustain, and the organization of fear begins to shift toward a spatial one.

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In VR narratives, horror can be generated through spatial relations. Instead of utilizing many loud sounds and jump scares, The Faceless Lady adopts a more spatial approach to fear, offering audiences an immersive environment to look around in some scenes and discover ghostly movements in the shadows. The immersive environments are rich in detail, with atmospheric lighting to gradually build tension. This spatial design enables viewers to feel as if they are standing beside the characters, immersed in the same environment rather than just watching the development of a horror story on the screen. Through the case study of The Faceless Lady, the paper argues that immersive VR reorganizes the traditional visual and temporal mechanisms of horror by foregrounding spatial relations among the spectator, the environment, and the threatening figures.

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CVR Films: The Faceless Lady (2023)

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Rui Liu is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Arts at HKU. Her research investigates the evolving portrayals of AI in conventional cinema and immersive VR experiences, exploring how these representations reflect attitudes toward technology, identity, and reality. Through an interdisciplinary approach that draws from philosophy of AI, film theory, and posthumanist studies, she analyzes AI's cultural significance and its impact on our understanding of human-machine relationships and ethical concerns in the age of advanced technology.

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Yuqing Liu is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Arts at The University of Hong Kong, with research interests in cultural studies and film studies. My research focuses on affectivity in VR films and how these films evoke affective experiences in viewers. She examines how VR films construct these experiences through cinematic language and technological design, as well as their broader implications for individuals and society. Additionally, she investigates their narrative boundaries in relation to other emerging media, analyzing how varying degrees of interactivity and directorial control shape affective engagement.