Analog horror is a subgenre of horror fiction and offshoot of the found footage film technique, often cited as originating online during the late 2000s and early 2010s with popular titles such as No Through Road, Local 58, and Marble Hornets.
Characteristics
Analog horror is commonly characterized by low-fidelity graphics, cryptic messages, and visual styles reminiscent of late 20th-century television and analog recordings. This is done to match the setting, as analog horror works are typically set between the 1960s and 1990s. The name "analog horror" comes from the genre's aesthetic incorporation of elements related to analog electronics, such as analog television and VHS, the latter being an analog method of recording video.
Analog horror may also be influenced by found footage horror films, such as The Blair Witch Project and the original Japanese version of The Ring. David Lynch's Inland Empire heavily influenced both No Through Road and Petscop, the former of which is a short film from which analog horror originates, and the latter of which is a web series rooted in analog horror.
History
Analog horror could be regarded as a form or descendant of creepypasta legends. Many creepypastas anticipated analog horror's themes and presentation: Ben Drowned and NES Godzilla Creepypasta, among others, featured manipulated or contrived footage of "haunted" media, and Candle Cove, a creepypasta from 2009, focused on a mysterious television broadcast.
The subgenre is typically cited as originating from late 2000s/2010s Internet (mostly YouTube) videos, specifically from Steven Chamberlain's No Through Road in January 2009, and gaining substantial popularity with the release of Kris Straub's Local 58 in October 2015, from which series' slogan ("ANALOG HORROR AT 476 MHz") the genre received its name. The series, which quickly became successful, would later inspire works such as The Mandela Catalogue and The Walten Files. Another YouTube channel, Kraina Grzybów TV, anticipated many main themes of the genre, as in December 2013 it began publishing videos stylized as a TV program from the 1990s that contained disturbing and surreal imagery.
In 2020, Netflix announced that it would adapt the analog horror podcast Archive 81 into a series of the same name. Despite its positive reception, the show was canceled after a single season.
Examples
No Through Road
No Through Road is a YouTube series created by then-seventeen-year-old Steven Chamberlain of Hertfordshire, England, in 2009. Set within the real-world private "no through road" at the entrance of Broomhall Farm, it follows four teenagers driving home at night as they find themselves trapped in a space and time loop, eternally passing the same two road signs marking an intersection between Benington and Watton between miles of liminal space countryside, while threatened by a figure who can manipulate the loop back to an archway at the road's entrance. Other plot aspects include all footage of the events being stolen from MI6 and uploaded online to YouTube.
Composed of four shorts, No Through Road has attained a cult following, and is considered a foundational work of the analog horror genre.
Local 58
Kris Straub's Local 58 is a series of YouTube videos presented as authentic videotaped footage of a television station that is continuously hijacked over the course of several decades. While there is no main plot in this series, episodes include messages related to looking at the Moon or the night sky, as well as the in-universe Thought Research Initiative (TRI). Local 58'''s first video "Weather Service" was published in 2015 as a stand-alone short and then added to the dedicated YouTube channel when it was established in 2017.Local 58 is frequently credited with creating and/or popularizing analog horror. Additionally, the series is responsible for naming the genre through its slogan, "ANALOG HORROR AT 476 MHz".
CH/SS CH/SS is a YouTube series that was first released in 2016. It was created by an individual known as Turkey Lenin III, a Singaporean user who was 15 at the time of its first upload. The series starts as various uploads from and about a mental health program sponsored by the United States government. As it progresses, details and mysteries are slowly revealed, alongside additional content provided through MediaFire download links and an accompanying Twitter account.