ON THE THIRTY-FIRST NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … it is Samhain, when the veil between worlds thins and the uncanny outer-things known as the aos sí come through. And it is the eve of Día de los Muertos, when the dead return to walk among us.
… and I am watching short films in a new genre called Analog Horror. This genre began in 2015 with a YouTube series called Local58, created by Kris Straub. Local58 includes what is still the best work of its kind, “Contingency” (see below). In Local58’s wake came a number of imitators, the most interesting and innovative of which are: Gemini Home Entertainment, The Monument Mythos, Employee Tapes Archive, and Eventide Media Center. The premise with pretty much all works of Analog Horror is that a strange videotape from the predigital era of broadcast TV (hence “analog”) has been found and uploaded to YouTube. The contents of the tape allow the viewer to piece together a horrific narrative.
Analog Horror draws on the aesthetics of amateur and crowd-sourced horror fiction sites like Creepypasta (https://www.creepypasta.com/) and SCP (https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/). This is post-Lovecraftian horror that takes place in a liminal space where the wall between reality and nightmare is breaking down. It usually relies on faux-documentarian framing involving dedicated research scientist or journalist narrators who meticulously record the technical and procedural aspects of their excursions into the unreal, so as to insist that this really happened. As such, they cultivate a cultish ethos that closely borders that of hoaxes.
Analog Horror takes this quasi-hoax framing a step further by presenting its works as real VHS-era artefacts from a suppressed catastrophe. They mimic the static and tracking errors of degraded magnetic tape and the kitschy title fonts and muzak of channel sign-offs, public service announcements, training videos, and emergency warning messages. In doing so, they evoke the haunting isolation of after-midnight TV viewing in the 80’s, 90’s, and early 2000’s. Imagine drifting in and out of sleep while channel surfing and finding absolutely nothing on—doesn’t this seem an opportune time for entities from the hellish beyond to ride the interference surf between broadcast waves and human brainwaves straight into our reality?
Here’s a fairly comprehensive explainer video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=An1OJXIMCTo
Here’s a more recent work by an eighteen year-old filmmaker: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8d12w6pMos
Here are some playlists of other excellent Analog Horror:
Gemini Home Entertainment: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKgH3wc9NbYBwQJzaf1QQdL4q3z6i3Ct2
The Monument Mythos: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYEu-9YXzZuIFn8rtAYiE433KC5loEkrj
Channel 7: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pX5l7whVcZw
Employee Tapes Archive: https://www.youtube.com/.../UCiC_xc-OQf1wwWoCratfA-Q/videos
Eventide Media Center: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLja5Tq0NuYBm3ebyRJHNdRH97TvIYzwjp
Enjoy yourselves tonight, everyone! And thanks for joining me for this year’s 31 nights of horror films! See you next year! 🎃👻👹👽🧟♀️🕷🎃
No comments:
Post a Comment