Burn Book

 Hauntology: A Burn Book

A book bound, designed, and printed by Vienna Lang

The original Burn Book from Mean Girls is infamous—a scrapbook of cruelty, filled with insults and gossip, designed to tear people down. It’s a weapon of social hierarchy, a reminder of the toxicity of high school culture. But when I set out to create my version of a Burn Book, I wanted to flip the concept on its head. Instead of a book that destroys, I wanted to make something that uplifts, that takes the edgy, rebellious aesthetic of the original but redirects its energy into something positive.

From the beginning, the process felt deeply personal. I knew I wanted a strong visual identity—something that evoked the messy, chaotic, but undeniably compelling style of scrapbooking, with layers of text, handwritten notes, and raw emotion. The book couldn’t just be a neat, structured project; it had to feel lived in. I also knew my professor valued research and artistic inspiration, so I looked at bookbinding as an art form, exploring artists who combined photography, collage, and text.

The requirements for the project added another challenge: I had to create three books—one with only photos, one with only text, and one that combined the two. Each version had to feel cohesive while still serving a unique purpose. My chosen image—a Halloween photo of myself as a sheet ghost in pink heart-shaped glasses—became the foundation for everything. The ghost, faceless and expressionless, symbolized something powerful to me. Without an identity, it couldn’t be insulted. It was untouchable, existing outside of judgment. That idea resonated with the themes I wanted to explore: self-perception, resilience, and how one internalizes (or rejects) the words of others.

One of the biggest considerations was the text-based book. I wanted to capture the energy of the Burn Book’s ransom-note aesthetic, using insults that were once used to hurt me. Having these insults next to the ghost figure is powerful since the figure can not feel the burns of these words. I also use one of the books to write a short poem about ignoring the hate that was once written about me.

Some ideas didn’t make it into the final version. At one point, I considered including actual negative words or insults, then physically defacing them—crossing them out, scribbling over them, rendering them powerless. Another idea I had included drawing on the ghost images, giving them horns, evil eyes, tear marks or goofy faces. I also thought about adding scrap booking details to the pages but ultimately decided less is more.

The final Burn Book isn’t about burning others—it’s about burning away self-doubt. It’s a reclamation of an aesthetic that was originally designed for harm, reshaped into something that celebrates personal strength. And in the end, the faceless ghost, standing in defiance, says everything it needs to: words can’t touch me.