The Future of Horror
The mediums and the message
I was recently introduced to the web series ‘Greylock’. It’s an occasional YouTube series about the creepy and mysterious goings on around the area of the titular mountain. It’s become something of a cult hit with videos amassing hundreds of thousands of views and the channel having nearly 93 thousand subscribers at time of writing. Initially it shares a lot of aspects with so-called internet ‘creepy pasta’ such as the SCP Foundation, but it’s main selling point, revealed by the channel’s own subtitle, is that it is “analog horror”. This means the ‘content’ (bleurgh) is shot either using video cameras or with digital footage made to look like old video cameras, along with audio made to sound as if it were recorded to tape or broadcast through a radio.
This technique of using older ‘analogue’ technology to portray horror has become quite common over the last decade or so, with movies like Censor, V/H/S and rec, podcasts like The Black Tapes, video games like Resident Evil VII and Stories Untold, and even other viral horror videos/series like The House Has People In It, Don’t Hug Me, I’m Scared or Too Many Cooks and many others, all utilising this aesthetic to get scares. But why is ‘analogue’ deemed to be so much more scary than modern recording technology, enough so that an entire industry has grown up around it?
