There are many names for the television set. Telly. The tube. The boob tube. And, of course, idiot box, the title of Donna Steven‘s series of chilling portraits of children engrossed by cartoons flickering on the screen.

The children, most of them no older than four, are illuminated by the sickly blue glow of a television just beyond sight, their mouths agape, eyes glazed and faces slack. They wouldn’t look out of place on The Walking Dead. It’s creepy—and thought-provoking. “I wanted to get people talking about the role of technology in our children’s lives,” Stevens says.

Stevens noticed the all-engrossing power of a glowing screen during the winter of 2013. She and her family had moved from Melbourne to New York when the polar vortex socked the city. Her two young boys spent hours passing the time watching Netflix. The 3-year-old in particular grew quite attached to the family iPad, “which slowly somehow became his iPad.”

Stevens wanted to capture other children in the same state of entrancement, so she enlisted 3- and 4-year-olds from her son’s school and from around the neighborhood. The setup was simple: Stevens seated the children in front of a plasma TV, turned on Netflix and invited them to choose any cartoon they liked. She asked the kids not to cover their faces or look at the camera, but she needn’t have worried. “None of them did anyway,” Stevens says. “So is the power of the screen.”

The photographer positioned herself in front of, but slightly to the side of the TV. She didn’t speak to the kids as the cartoons rolled, and they didn’t speak to her. The only light was cast by the screen, and each shoot lasted the duration of the children’s show of choice. The resulting photos recall Robbie Cooper’s Immersion project, which recorded children’s reactions to onscreen stimuli, like movies and violent video games. What makes Steven’s project stand apart is the power of the still image. The faces revealed in Idiot Boxare chilling.

Stevens doesn’t claim to be an authority on how much screen time might be good, or bad, for children. She doesn’t own a TV, but the family has laptops & iPads. She’s made screens off-limits until after 4 pm, but the rule is more flexible on weekends. And even she finds it hard to resist the siren song of the screen now and then. “The relationships we share with technology intrigue me. Personally I have a contradictory relationship with technology,” she says. “I use it everyday, it’s extremely useful but there’s still a techno paranoia which tells me it’s not good for me.”