Our recent post on analog horror brought out a lot of folks to comment.
It was especially edifying to get more of the Millennial view on the genre.
Related: Analog Horror: The Past as Nightmare, Not Nostalgia
The most copious treatment of the subject comes from commenter Rudolph Harrier:
This all goes back to Marble Hornets (aka the series that made Slenderman popular), or at least that was the first popular series in this vein. The aforementioned Night Mind got his start doing analysis videos of Marble Hornets. At the time it was seen in the vein of ARGs or “Unfiction,” but with the focus on VHS tapes and analog distortion effects it’s hard to not classify it as “Analog Horror” now. You can also trace a lot of the tropes directly back to this series. The use of analog distortion for distortion in reality doesn’t come directly from Marble Hornets itself (where only tapes were distorted in that way; people experienced other effects) but rather from the popular Slender: The Eight Pages game which kept in the iconic effects despite not being taped. Though I guess if you want to dig further, David Lynch did use distortion effects in a similar way in his works, particular in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, so it’s not like the idea was completely unknown.
What’s interesting about tracking things back to Marble Hornets is that it provides a direct link from Gen Y nostalgia to Gen Z horror. Tapes are used in Marble Hornets simply because that’s what you’d have in the time period: it started in 2009, but revolves around the filming of an eponymous in-universe student project from 2006. Tapeless camcorders didn’t enter the market until 2006, and they would have been out of the budget for a group of college students. Of course events recorded before that period would be on VHS as well, and tapes continue to be used for most things past that point because that is the equipment that the characters have been established to have (and the equipment itself gains importance over the course of the story.)
Note that having the characters be in college in 2006 puts them firmly in Gen Y, and the main actor (Troy Wagner) was born in 1988. It’s also worth noting that the fictional Marble Hornets student film was nostalgia based: it’s about a guy returning to his hometown after college and finding that despite his childhood memories he can’t go back to the way things were. I don’t know if old slenderman himself is meant to represent the pernicious effects of nostalgia, you can make a case for it but it’s somewhat of a stretch, but the series was definitely made through a Gen Y lens.
However the audience of the series largely was much younger. I can’t find it now, but I remember an interview where Troy said he was surprised that the audience was not so much the SA college crowd that he expected, but kids around 12 years old watching it while hoping that their parents wouldn’t find out. For a series that was popular around 2010-2016 that would mean people born in 1998-2004, i.e. younger millennials and older zoomers. This audience would have viewed internet videos like youtube as the natural way to watch video content, and so the tapes lost their logical and nostalgic aspects, and instead became a symbol of horror.
You can explore the haunting world of Marble Hornets here:
It occurs to me that Generation Y’s view of the past is distorted by their own nostalgia, which has in turn distorted Gen Z’s.
Which gives the analog horror trope of using image distortion a whole other layer of meaning.
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You should check out “The Oldest View”. It’s an analog horror series about which is arguably about nostalgia itself becoming a monster which pursues and desires to live in a happier past.
Thank you for the recommendation.
I second that. I mentioned this yesterday, albeit brain-farting the title into “The Longest View.” Oof!
Oh, this actually does remind me of what I did in my story “What’s It Like in There?” in Sidearm & Sorcery 3. The difference is that it’s not VHS or ’90s related.
Interesting to see how nostalgia plays such a big part in modern horror, though.
Hmm. I’d never thought about it explicitly, but yes, most of the truly creative horror in the modern day is based on nostalgia, or memory more generally.
-Old local analog TV and/or tapes (Marble Hornets, Local58, Clear Lakes 44, Midwest Angelica)
-The Monument Mythos is based on the idea of American national monuments secretly being monsters, or the lairs of monsters (literally being killed by the past)
-The Mandela Catalogue’s horror is partially based on the idea that someone’s identity could be fundamentally falsified (being replaced by a shapeshifting demon)
I wonder what the underlying reason is? Hmm.
The Establishment has starting cosplaying 1984 in certain segments of our society, particularly where history and identity are concerned, so the concern in analog horror about memory and identity makes sense to me. While the street muscle aren’t in an iconoclastic frenzy right now, their war on statues has left its mark. They conclude to falsify our past for their own ends in the academy. Things that happened last week end up down the memory hole. The enemies of the death cult are slandered into unpersonhood as a matter of course. We can’t trust everything we read and see any more – least of all the nightly news.
They’ve been cosplaying Orwell’s 1984 while also cosplaying the other 1984, i.e. the real one. What I mean is that 80’s nostalgia has been pushed as something mainstream since the late 90’s. This means in particular that zoomers have lived their entire lives in a period of 80s nostalgia. It’s went on for so long that most 80’s throwbacks are not really made to resemble the actual 80’s, but rather previous 80’s throwbacks. (Much like how a lot of people who try to write “classic pulp fantasy” end up just using tropes from later editions of Dungeons and Dragons.) It’s always interesting to see zoomers watch actual movies from the 80’s. They might be fans of several works that are supposed to be throwbacks to these films, and not really make the connection because so much has shifted in the throwbacks through cultural osmosis and the attempts to wokify the past.
That is, there are a lot of analog horror series that use some variant of “I always thought I knew how things were, but then I found an old tape that showed me things were completely different.” If a zoomer actually gets hold of a VCR, he can get the exact same experience simply by popping in some VHS tapes from a thrift store.
This whole phenomenon is also why 90’s nostalgia hasn’t really gone anywhere mainstream. The few attempts that they have made (such as Captain Marvel) didn’t grab anyone because they skipped straight to the fake version before having any genuine depictions of the 90’s to reference.
Oh, I just remembered another instance of this trend: the deliberate use of PS1-era early 3d graphics as a horror medium. The uncanny, blocky nature of that graphical style has revealed just how deeply unsettling it is now that it’s no longer “modern”.
According to the standards of the throwback scene, any video game console over ten years old is officially considered “retro”. So that would not only include the PS1, but everything up to the PS3, the DS, and the Wii U.
To be fair, I think DS graphics (being comparable to N64 graphics) would make good horror. But to be completely accurate, “PS1 Horror” has become the dominant aesthetic and has become a flourishing sub-scene in and of itself. It’s kind of cool seeing older things reborn in a newer form, with a new purpose.