Urban Fantasy in the Age of Smartphones: How the Genre Hides Its Monsters—or Stops Trying
There is a quiet assumption at the heart of much urban fantasy: the supernatural can remain hidden. A vampire feeds in an alley, a werewolf crosses a road at night or something impossible appears for a few seconds before vanishing. The witness is frightened, alone or easy to dismiss, and the evidence is poor. Smartphones, CCTV, doorbell cameras, location records and social media appear to have broken that arrangement. A strange event in a contemporary city may leave several traces before anyone understands what happened. Yet visibility is not the same as explanation, and documentation is not the same as an accepted account of reality. A video can be partial, badly framed or detached from its origin. Police can classify an attack as an animal incident, unexplained death or psychiatric crisis. A clip can circulate to millions of viewers while attracting mutually incompatible explanations. Technology has not made the hidden supernatural impossible; it has changed what hiding requires....