Analog Terrors

Welcome to the first instalment of Analog Terrors (which is the name of this blog and not to be confused with Analog Horror, the topic of it), where I will introduce you to the world of analog horror with two goals in mind: Firstly, to get a deeper look into this subgenre and get into what makes it so scary, and secondly, to get over my squeamishness, with the pressure of an audience as a gentle push into the right direction.

Quite frankly, I have to start this first entry with an apology, as we will not be diving straight into any video game, web series or other material. Instead, we will start with a more theoretical approach. In order to be able to have a bit of an analytical look at analog horror, we must first be able to define the genre and identify its examples accordingly. So, today is going to be all about the question: What exactly is Analog Horror? And where does it come from?

Analog Horror as a defined genre with its own term is a fairly recent one, having been around for about a decade now with most of the first media emerging somewhere in the early 2010s. However, it should be noted that the essence of it has been around for longer. For that reason, analog horror is said to be a subgenre from found footage as well as internet horror. In 2015, the release of the web series Local58 popularised the genre immensely, inspiring other media like The Mandela Catalogue, Gemini Home Entertainment or The Monument Mythos, all of which have evolved into analog horror staples.

The name itself stems from the analog aesthetic that defines this genre: whether video or audio footage, it seems as though recorded on an analog device like a camcorder or audio tape. Other key elements include lo-fi graphics or static as if from antenna interference. The end result is not necessarily acquired through such means, but it is made to look as if created with obsolete technology that existed sometime before the digital age. Other examples may not look like home videos, but instead like old TV broadcasts or public service announcements, or even as a completely different medium, like an old cartoon.

In any case, another key component to this is the element of intrusion. The horror rarely ever comes from the analog aesthetic itself, but from the fact that something – paranormal or not – is interfering with it: corrupting the audio, hijacking the broadcast, cutting the video feed. Each of these mediums, or vessels if that’s what you like to call them, has limitations which can be used to acquire the desired scare. Why is that scary? Well, because the intrusion turns something seemingly mundane and familiar into something off-putting and possibly dangerous. This is taken a step further by the analog nature of the vessel. For those generations that remember or have used pre-digital technology, the analog aesthetic evokes a sense of nostalgia, which, with the intrusion, is being corrupted. And that’s the off-putting thing.

What ties into all of this, is the categorisation of Analog Horror as a subgenre of yet another bigger genre: Unfiction. Here, the stories are told as if they are real (invoking something called pseudorealism) with the reader (or viewer or listener, depending on the media format) immerged into it as the protagonist, which is a characteristic of most analog horror media. And what else classifies as ‘Unfiction’? Creepypastas, found footage media, cryptic puzzles and (video) games. All things that have in some way influenced analog horror as a genre. So, let’s have a look at these different influences and what aspects they have brought with them.

Found Footage is the genre I have found to be the most accredited inspiration for analog horror, with the prime example being the 1999 movie Blair Witch Project. The biggest influence of found footage horror is the voyeuristic style. Through the lens of a camcorder (to stay with our movie example), the audience directly perceives what is happening in the movie as if personally present, causing a much deeper immersion into the plot than within a ‘regular’ horror movie. The production and marketing teams of Blair Witch Project took this immersion a step further by alluding that what happens in the movie is real, through, for example, posting missing person posters of the protagonists and flyers calling forth for witnesses or anyone knowing of the protagonists’s whereabouts. All this was done to blur the lines between fiction and reality, and to add a layer of terror to the movie.

The same tactic is used in analog horror. Though not to the extent of the missing person posters, but by adopting that sense of voyeurism. The audience is directly perceiving the story as if present in it and, in video games of that genre, even an active part of what is happening. There is no escape or hiding for the viewer, except for maybe shutting off the PC. This level of immersion, combined with the reliance on the camera or whatever device is used, is creating an off-putting atmosphere, where the horror doesn’t stem from jumpscares or gore, but from the sense that something is wrong. What differentiates found footage horror from analog horror (and the line here is very blurry) is that while both rely on the ‘perceiving through another vessel/device’, analog horror additionally relies on the analog aesthetic and invoked nostalgia that comes with it. Found footage on the other hand doesn’t necessarily.

Creepypastas and Online/Internet Horror spread through the internet of the late 2000s and 2010s, likely popular thanks to the easy public access and, at that time, free range within the world wide web. For those unaware, creepypastas are essentially horror urban legends that shaped the internet horror culture. They came in different forms, from games to videos, but I’ve personally had the most contact with creepypastas in written form. Many of these were posted on message boards, blurring the lines between fiction and reality by placing the stories into very real, but also very untraceable contexts.

Many of these creepypastas took inspiration from beloved childhood shows and games, leading to famous tales like Squidward Suicide or the Lavender Town Syndrome. Both these examples showcase the previously mentioned corruption of nostalgia in which something familiar is twisted into something dark and unnerving. In these specific cases, it is childhood memories which lose their innocence through this subversion and, in turn, inflict incredible, gut-wrenching horrors onto the viewer.

Another creepypasta which perfectly encapsulates this feeling is Candle Cove from 2009. This story takes place on a forum in which different users reminisce over their childhood experiences and memories on Candle Cove, a cheaply produced puppet-esque TV show from the 70s. But the more they discuss the show, the more users begin to recollect scary details that stir up terrifying, forgotten memories about the show. Eventually, one user decides to log off and ask his mother if she remembers him watching the show. Much to his horror, she confesses that she does remember him talking about the show, but whenever he’d tune into it, all the TV showed was static. Despite the shared memories, the show never actually existed. Candle Cove is a great example of how culturally remembered media from childhood can become visceral and volatile upon recollection, to a point where we begin to question if what we remember is actually true. While the mutual memories can serve as means to validate each other on the experience, the horror of these uncertainties and distortions is especially prevalent in types of media that only exist within these memory time capsules. Disturbing childhood media with pop cultural relevance can be revisited and renegotiated, but where the original material cannot be found, the same situation as depicted in Candle Cove arises. Warm, fuzzy memories are replaced by unnerving uncertainty. This is the distortion of nostalgia, the uncomfortableness, the very source of horror. And with this method of evoking fear, creepypastas eventually carved out the path for analog horror which operates on the same premise.

Overnight TV wasn’t initially part of my argumentation. It was more of a coincidence that I came across a video on YouTube detailing the absurdness of the shows and programs aired during night hours, specifically in a time before streaming services or even YouTube were a thing. These ‘graveyard slots’ on public television were cheaper timeslots reserved for advertisement, infomercials and shows of smaller budget and production, often left to run with little to no supervision, because, well, who is going to watch TV that late? Networks surely weren’t going to waste the prime TV spots for those shows! This resulted in a colourful and rather bizarre overnight program. I may be old enough to remember the existence of this overnight TV landscape, but too young to remember specifics, apart from an advertisement for fireplace DVDs at three in the morning and the leftover cooking utensil infomercials that played before the morning program on TV. Despite the lack of bizarreness in both of these shows, I do distinctly remember how off I felt watching them all alone in the dead smack of night or far too early morning. In his video The Horrors of Overnight TV, Farrell McGuire picks up that exact feeling of being lost and feeling this ‘off’ when watching overnight TV. And his disposition reminded me a lot of the method of distorting nostalgia.

He goes on to explain that Adult Swim, an American television channel with cartoons that focuses on adult audiences, went on to buy these graveyard slots and broadcast very strange but also weirdly accurate infomercial parodies, or ‘TV specials’, inbetween real infomercials. What started out with Icelandic Blue in 2009 quickly gained traction and evolved from the parodies into its own, more horror-leaning series. This would go on to inspire regular infomercials and overnight programs to explore similar ideas, thus shaping the overnight TV landscape. There is one distinct aspect within McGuire’s video (which can be found in my sources): Adult Swim partook in this idea of blurring the lines between fiction and reality by broadcasting real looking fake infomercials in between real infomercials, playing with the viewer’s perception of the familiar and their expectations.

Eventually, Adult Swim would move their content to the internet, where recordings of these infomercials can be watched and rewatched at any time, thus moving away from the overnight TV landscape and, in sorts, connecting to the horror content present online. Furthermore, the internet would eventually turn into the preferred mode of late-night entertainment for those unable to go back to sleep. Who in this day and age wakes from uneasy sleep and then picks watching infomercials over, let’s say, niche documentaries on YouTube to help them back to sleep? Looking at it from this angle, it does make sense that influences from the bizarre and experimental overnight TV programs and their satirical imposters made their way to online horror and then further into analog horror. The influence actually becomes pretty clear if we look at the usage of the late night ‘sending off messages/screens’, used by networks before overnight TV became prevalent, in Local58.

It has become evident that the feeling of nostalgia is truly a key part of analog horror, though it is not the only genre to make use of it. Just take a look at your local cinema and count how many upcoming movies are either remakes or the gazillionth new part of a series (bonus points if the last instalment of that movie series was released more than a decade ago). We are experiencing a want – maybe need? – for the familiar and comforting, which given the current state of the world is not really surprising, but I am not here to discuss that. My point is that not just analog horror makes use of that emotion. But instead of ‘nostalgia-baiting’ (that is a term, I did not make that up) its audience, as it is the case with many franchises that make use of it, analog horror uses this emotion in a different way. Apart from the aforementioned distortion of the familiar, analog horror is grounded in common nostalgia or “public memory”[1], meaning something we are all familiar with. That is why analog horror works so well for such a broad audience. Our memory is not always reliable. We fill in the gaps ourselves with half-truths or straight up false memories, which makes the deconstruction of that truth a terrifying experience, as it can make us question our whole ability of recollection. Furthermore, this gap filling is nothing new:

‘It’s something that fuelled the ethos of horror author T.J. Lea, creator of “The Expressionless” Creepypasta. “Everyone [back then] had an experience with Goosebumps, or Courage the Cowardly Dog, and then they’ll go to the playground to talk about it”, T.J said, in an interview with Uppercut. “A child’s mind will twist and pervert what it sees, expanding from ear to ear. It’s the pathogenic concept of a scary idea.” T.J’s recollection of generalized nostalgia is exactly what makes analog horror work.’ (Samie Tee, “Public Memory: Crafting Analog Horror in Video Games”)

In other words, analog horror plays with our inability to recreate memories to perfection and tendency to overcompensate when filling in the gaps, something the human mind does from an early age on.

Now, with all that aside, let us have a look at some common aspects within Analog Horror:

• Progressive horror: It usually starts off tame, mundane even and evolves into horror as the story progresses. This is usually where distorting the nostalgia or twisting the familiar comes into play.
• Vague meanings and the sense that something is missing: Stories told in this genre don’t give you everything handed on a silver platter. Nothing is stated explicitly, sometimes it even feels like there is information or whole parts of the story missing. The aim of analog horror is to get the audience thinking, talking and theorising. Things are left to the imagination and oftentimes beyond comprehension on purpose.
• Audial dissonance and deteriorated visuals: The audio-visual components of this genre are meant to do both, appear analogue and be disturbed. This, again, plays into the spiel of evoking and distorting the familiar and gives the audience a sense of unease.
• Bad endings: There is rarely a good ending in Analog Horror. This emulates the fact that there isn’t always a good ending in life either, but also the idea that there are evils beyond our understanding and power. The bad endings add a sense of hopelessness, which gives the horror yet another layer.
• Generally shorter run times: Analog Horror usually comes in the form of (web)series, short films, podcasts or even still images.
• Voyeurism or the inclusion of the viewer: The audience becomes a part of the story, often replacing the protagonist character, if there even is one. Analog Horror doesn’t have to be character driven to include the viewer. By doing so, a deeper sense of immersion occurs and the effects of the experienced lingers even after it is over.

There can always be exceptions to these common aspects, but generally this is what is found in Analog Horror and what distincts media within this genre from others. Now, I haven’t gone into a full, historical deep dive mode on this genre, as my aim was to give you all somewhat of an overview of what to expect. However, if any of you are interested in learning more about the history of Analog Horror, I very much recommend the documentary The History of Analog Horror by Alex Hera on YouTube (which will also be linked down in my sources).

Now, with our groundwork set, we can finally move on to more specific examples. While I have been going back and forth on which piece of media I want to look at first, and the coward in me really wants it to be something less scary that I am already familiar with, like Amanda the Adventurer, the research done for this specific entry has already given me the answer to my problem. We will start with where everything began: Local58.

Sources

alexpasquale. “Analog Horror: Analyzing an Eerily Nostalgic Genre.” The Artifice, 08.05.2023, https://the-artifice.com/analog-horror/.

Adeishvili, Luca. “Examining the Uncanny Allure of Analog Horror.” The Spectator, Issue 16, Volume 112, https://stuyspec.com/article/examining-the-uncanny-allure-of-analog-horror.

Bedard, Mike. “Static + Scares: What Analog Horror Can Teach You About Filmmaking.” Backstage, 15.02.2025, https://www.backstage.com/magazine/article/analog-horror-explained-examples-78326/.

Maison, Jordan. “Everything there is to know about the analog horror genre.” videomaker.com, https://www.videomaker.com/how-to/directing/film-history/everything-there-is-to-know-about-the-analog-horror-genre/.

Tee, Samie. “Public Memory: Crafting Analog Horror in Video Games.” Uppercut, https://web.archive.org/web/20230104093728/https://uppercutcrit.com/public-memory-crafting-analog-horror-in-video-games/. (Accessed via Wayback Machine)

Williamson, Samuel. “What Is Analog Horror? The Subgenre of ‘Skinamarink’ Explained.” Collider, 07.02.2023, https://collider.com/what-is-analog-horror-explained/.

Video Sources

Hera, Alex. “The History of Analog Horror [ft. Kris Straub, Nexpo, NightMind & others] | Documentary (2022).” Youtube, 30.07.2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-I_4ph-L19U.

Hollinger, Ryan. “The Web Series & Creepypasta That Defined Analog Horror.” Youtube, 17.06.2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zy_wOZnDJD0.

McGuire, Farrell. “The Horrors of Overnight TV.” Youtube, 10.07.2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gn9SzsM7FGM.

---

[1] Tee, Samie. “Public Memory: Crafting Analog Horror in Video Games.” Uppercut, https://web.archive.org/web/20230104093728/https://uppercutcrit.com/public-memory-crafting-analog-horror-in-video-games/. (Accessed via Wayback Machine)