The Surprising Folklore of Analog Horror

On October 26, 2015, Kris Straub uploaded a video to YouTube titled “Weather Service.” At a length of just two minutes and thirty-three seconds, it depicts American late-night television on a cable channel called Local 58 being interrupted by an emergency broadcast from the county weather service, warning viewers about a dangerous meteorological event not to be seen with the naked eye. The warning is in effect until sunrise. After briefly returning to ordinary programming, the warning returns but is quickly hijacked, with the hijacker claiming that the danger is over, and urging viewers to go outside. There is a struggle for control over the message, with the first party now frantically warning viewers not to look at the moon, and the second attempting to sabotage these messages. Ultimately, the hijacker is successful, and the video ends with a series of cryptic messages from a speaker seemingly possessed, including “THE MOON CAME IN,” “I DROWN IN HIM,” and finally, “IF YOU ARE AFRAID WE WILL LOOK TOGETHER.” The channel then cuts to a live feed of the lunar event, with distant screaming audible, before abruptly ending.1 Thus began a new subgenre of horror cinema native to social media: analog horror.Analog horror is a type of short amateur cinema made and circulated on social media for free, primarily on YouTube, but also on platforms such as TikTok and Instagram. Its name derives from the digital fabrication of analog-video aesthetics, including defects like grain, noise, snow, and shudder, presented in an aspect ratio of 4:3 that mimics the screen dimensions of older generations of televisions. Audiences experience analog horror as viewers of cryptic and sinister tapes, which often take the form of training videos, documentaries, or children’s television, endowing the subgenre with a characteristic tone of dark or uncanny nostalgia. This is contrasted effectively with threatening elements, often supernatural in nature. Videos are short, ranging in length from just a few seconds to twenty minutes. Acting is rare, often replaced with computerized text-to-voice speech (an anachronistic aspect for audiences familiar with predigital media and aware of when the text-to-voice feature was popularized). Analog horror is produced by independent individuals referred to in the community as “creators” instead of “directors,” often without formal training or film equipment, and frequently using stock footage and software such as Blender and Photoshop.The most popular format for analog horror is the web series, released incrementally and often over longer periods of time. Key examples include Gemini Home Entertainment (Remy Abode, 2019–), The Walten Files (Martin Walls, 2021–), and The Monument Mythos (Eve Casanas, 2020–23). As a relatively new subgenre, there has been little critical academic work yet published on analog horror, although fans have been actively analyzing the movement for years.2 Despite this, analog horror may be usefully contextualized through other relevant fields such as found-footage horror. Shellie McMurdo defines found-footage horror in her monograph Blood on the Lens as horror in which the camera exists within the diegetic world.3 Although McMurdo does not mention analog horror directly, most analog horror can be understood as a type of found-footage horror, distinguished by its insistent emphasis on certain narrative modes and formal qualities. Many of McMurdo’s observations on found footage are readily applicable to analog horror, such as how the artificial defects of found footage become realistic “markers of authenticity,” creating an effective pretense of veracity.4 Cecilia Sayad also works on concepts of reality and ontology in found-footage horror, and though she has not published any work on analog horror, in one presentation she points out that analog horror has a heightened-reality effect due to its coexistence online alongside recordings of real broadcast hijackings.5There are several important distinctions between found-footage horror and analog horror, however. Most importantly, unlike a lot of found-footage horror, analog horror rarely features a narrator or frame narration contextualizing where and how the footage was discovered. Audiences experience the content without any explanation, compounding a narrative mystery that drives them to undertake elaborate theorizing in comment sections and response videos on YouTube, as well as on active and dedicated fan spaces on Reddit, Discord, and series-specific wikis. This expanded audience-based storytelling world becomes a valuable and inseparable element of analog horror. The experience of analog horror, therefore, is a transmedial one; and its reception by social media users and online communities is not only contextual, but essential and formative to the subgenre.Despite the contemporary online context of the subgenre, however, analog horror has much in common with a far older tradition of narrative storytelling. It bears a close relation to folklore. Ordinarily, there are serious limitations to fully and accurately describing horror cinema as folklore. From the perspective of academic folklorists, folklore is circulated for free among community members, usually for the benefit and approval of the group. It is unofficial, informal culture, defined in opposition to—although often operating alongside—formal and official cultures. This clearly contradicts the highly organized commercial imperatives of the film industry. Unlike folklore, horror cinema is passed down to consumers by strangers, or “fabricated by technicians hired by businessmen” for an audience of “passive consumers, their participation limited to the choice between buying and not buying.”6 Folklorist Richard Bauman concludes that although the mass media could perhaps represent folklore, they can never truly become folklore, on three counts: “(1) they are not rooted in community life, but commodified and imposed from without, (2) they are not participatory but are meant to be consumed by a mass audience, and (3) as with print, they are not variable but fixed by the media in which they are communicated.”7Analog horror, however, presents a complicated case insofar as it is produced and circulated among an online community of fans who are both its producers and consumers. Creators are transparent about their methods, generating a low barrier to entry that is aided by an accessible and formulaic format, and the texts feature a call to participation that generates strong fandoms/folk groups online. The folkloric context of analog horror’s reception and circulation is fundamental to the appeal of the subgenre, and a closer look at it illuminates the popularity of this new medium.Analog horror is arguably better understood through the folkloric traits of vernacularity, repetition and variation, distributed authorship, and community. All of these have been considered definitive concepts in the analysis of folklore. Simon J. Bronner’s introduction to the subject specifies that, as “part of the ‘vernacular,’ … folklore evoked an image of intergenerational transmission and localized culture. Unlike the pantheon of literary and art works attributed to a single author, often anonymous folk productions represented variable, multiple existence across time and space.”8 These features can be demonstrated through several of the most prominent analog-horror series: Local 58 (Kris Straub, 2015–), The Mandela Catalogue (Alex Kister, 2021–), and Backrooms (Kane Parsons, 2022–). Local 58 features a collection of eerie outputs from its eponymous cable channel, including the corrupted weather report described above, as well as children’s television shows and public-service announcements. It established the creative use of stock footage in the subgenre, inspired many subsequent web series, and coined the term analog horror in a teaser that promised “ANALOG HORROR AT 476 MHz.”9The Mandela Catalogue is less technically complex, but nevertheless became “the supreme example of what analog horror looks and sounds like.”10 The narrative revolves around a demonic race of doppelgängers or “alternates” who attempt to replace humanity. They are led by Lucifer, who deceived the world at the Ascension and has been disguised as the Archangel Gabriel ever since. Creator Alex Kister draws extensively on children’s television throughout the series for an unsettling effect, especially drawing on footage from an online children’s religious cartoon called The Beginner’s Bible to establish the lore of the demonic race.11Finally, Backrooms is a series about a sinister extradimensional expanse of endless empty rooms that unsuspecting victims may accidentally teleport to and become trapped in, and a mysterious government-funded research institute, Async, that attempts to understand and exploit this uncanny sidereal space. Backrooms is remarkable for its success; at the time of writing, the first episode has over 66 million views. To fully understand the folkloric dynamics of these texts, however, it is necessary to first describe the context they emerged from: the online horror storytelling tradition of creepypastas.Creepypastas are a form of online horror storytelling that developed in the early 2000s. 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