By Arlene Sanchez

Especially around this time of year, we love scaring ourselves silly watching horror movies and attending horror nights. There’s one subgenre of horror that scares me the most, though.

Analog horror is a subgenre of horror fiction that draws inspiration from vintage and retro technology, especially from the 1980s and 1990s. It often features low-quality graphics to mimic outdated recording mediums such as VHS and television broadcasts. 

Analog horror often takes the form of found footage which allows the author to build a story from there. With the use of low graphics, the viewer is left wondering if the entity or person they are seeing is real.

 The retro-style graphics also elicit a sense of nostalgia, particularly among older viewers. The combination of nostalgia and the unknown is what drives each video. This is exemplified in “Local 58,” a web series about a fictional TV station created by cartoonist Kris Staub. Local 58 recreates the ambiance of old television and even features vintage movies.

“Local 58” regularly tells of a world on the brink of total annihilation of the human race, playing on modern fears due to war and pandemics. 

“Gemini Home Entertainment,” similar to “Local 58,” is a web series that is presented as a collection of clips from VHS tapes. The series by Remy Abode details the downfall of the human race and what emerges after including “fake people” also known as doppelgangers, and a disease that slowly kills its host. 

“The Walten Files” is a series loosely inspired by the Five Nights at Freddy’s series. It follows Sophie as she is haunted by the animatronics of Bon’s Burgers. The creator uses graphic imagery to express the horrors the protagonist sees as all creators in this genre do.

Analog Horror series frequently have similar concepts, as shown by “Local 58” and “Gemini Home Entertainment.” There is always a main antagonist in these stories who has a big impact on the invasion of mankind. This entity is frequently an alien. Analog horror series also make big use of jump scares, which is one of the reasons we keep coming back as fans.

“Analog horror is fire, but I feel as though the genre becomes redundant as it is hard to encapsulate that feeling of uncanny nostalgia,” senior Ethan Francisco said.

Many fans of analog horror lament the lack of variety in the genre. For example, “Marble Hornets” is an 87-episode series, but all the episodes tell the same basic story. 

Overall, it is the horrors that draw this subgenre together, whether aliens or doppelgangers. It is a captivating genre, despite its repetitive nature, because it binds elements of nostalgia with the unknown. It plunges viewers into a world that feels eerily authentic and makes us feel as if things like this could happen.