Horror, as a genre, is designed to incite strong emotions. Those feelings are not limited to just fear; they may be joy, sorrow, rage. This intense collection of sensations allows horror creators to better manipulate the audience at their most vulnerable. It is what generates the best frights and delights from viewers brave enough to click on play or turn the page.
A modern era of analog horror has taken the internet by storm over the past few years, and it is hard not to see why. Designed to emulate old VHS tapes with extensive usage of found footage, the subgenre creates the fear in what was once safe, the fear in what was once familiar. The human mind is something that can be so easily controlled; it is why horror is endlessly effective [1].
Analog horror’s surge in popularity stems from the numerous series that have recently been uploaded onto social media platforms such as YouTube and TikTok. These videos feature grainy footage, elaborate worldbuilding, and mysterious entities that feed on a viewer’s inability to decipher what is real and what is not.
The YouTube series No Through Road, uploaded in 2009, is often credited as being the internet’s first analog horror. It features four shorts, detailing the story of four teenage boys as they are stuck in a time loop and stalked by a liminal creature [2]. The tale is told through found footage, a form of cinematography made infamous by the film The Blair Witch Project.
Local 58, created by Kris Straub, is highly regarded as the series that officially coined the term analog horror through its slogan, “ANALOG HORROR AT 476 MHz”. The channel has a variety of shorts, all depicting a local news station that appears to be influenced by extraterrestrial beings. With cryptic government announcements, indiscernible dashcam footage, and subliminal messages about the moon, it is no wonder that the series rose to such popularity [3].
Perhaps the most notable series comes in the form of Alex Kister’s The Mandela Catalogue that presents creatures known as alternates that can take the form of humans and manipulate them into taking their lives. Kister utilizes elements of the Christian Bible to weave a narrative based on sin, fallen angels, and the devil himself. His channel has since garnered over 45 million views since the upload of the first video, overthrone [4].
With these channels accumulating over so many views in so little time, it’s not hard to see why other creators were eager to create their own horror stories within the genre. The general premise appeared simple enough: create a monster, plant them in an everyday suburban town, place a VHS filter over the work, and finished.
Series such as The Smile Tapes and The Monument Mythos draw inspiration from Kister’s shorts, down to even their titles. The similarities in content is hard to miss; the quality, the shaky camera footage, and the elaborate storylines with alien antagonists. While this is in no way trying to discredit the creators, it would be difficult for them to deny the influence that previous analog horror series had on their work.
One series in particular, titled The Painter and created by user UrbanSPOOK, has gathered significant social media attention. The videos describe a serial killer that consistently evades the police and leaves unsettling paintings of his brutalized victims at the scene. It is certainly an interesting premise, and had a decent following in its early days. However, opinion would soon shift after controversy surrounding UrbanSPOOK himself.
Viewers began to criticize the series for its repetitive nature and unnecessarily grotesque accounts of the victims. They believed that the creator was growing lazy and using the same formula over and over again using gorey descriptions as cheap scares.
Critics cited the story of the character Cory, an 11-year-old boy who was brutally murdered and mutilated by the killer. They claimed this was a needless addition, and the fact that the creator went on to sell merchandise of the victim’s painting only added to the depravity. UrbanSPOOK responded on Twitter, claiming that they simply couldn’t handle “extreme” horror and referring to their sheltered view as “autistic furry horror”.
Clearly, UrbanSPOOK had some choice words for those who found his series heavily flawed, and it is normal for a creator to feel defensive of their work. But the extent to which he chose to respond to critics left his series and himself open to more disapproval. Martin Walls, creator of the popular analog horror The Walten Files, publicly denounced UrbanSPOOK, and many content creators stopped covering the series altogether.
While this was just one isolated instance of a reply taken to the extreme, there is a conversation to be had on the current state of analog horror. The genre appears to have taken a more formulaic direction, with recent series sacrificing a cohesive narrative for the sake of disturbing imagery. Analog horror has simply become too saturated, with truly creative works being less and less easy to come by.
That isn’t to say that there are none left – series such as GREYLOCK and The Backrooms are examples of modern analog horror that have compelling stories to tell. But for every captivating video, there are dozens of others that fall short of gripping their audience.
It has gotten to the point where multiple channels are creating analog horror parodies, playing on the common tropes of the genre. One example would be The Hotdog Archives, a clear reference to The Mandela Catalogue, that uses glitchy VHS footage with silly captions in order to create a satirical rendition of the analog horror style [5].
Analog horror has been a wonderful creative outlet for people who wish to tell chilling and mind bending stories. They are unique in their aesthetics and various mediums, and leave viewers haunted and afraid to turn the lights off at night. But there must be substance behind the content, as without it, analog horror ceases to be horrifying and turns instead to a genre that exists purely for haphazard shocks.
[1]https://georgiastatesignal.com/analog-horror-the-bizarre-and-the-unsettling/
[3]https://robots.net/entertainment/local-58-the-analog-horror-series-an-introduction/
[4]https://www.gq.com/story/the-mandela-catalogue-youtube-horror-series-18-year-old-interview