[Archive] Splitting at the Seams

The Double-Hauntedness of Analog Horror

Originally published in Grim, Sep. 2022

On October 26, 2015, a new, hyper-accessible subgenre of video horror was born. Kris Straub, a sci-fi web cartoonist and the mind behind the notorious Candle Cove creepypasta, released the first installment of his horror anthology YouTube channel Local 58, titled “Weather Service.”

“Weather Service” establishes the fictional West Virginia public access channel of Local 58, taking place (based on context clues in later installments and mass fan speculation) in roughly the late twentieth century. It begins with a standard broadcast schedule, which is interrupted by an EAS weather warning urging viewers not to look at the night sky due to a “meteorological event.” After a brief return to the broadcast schedule (now reading “2:15 AM…Blood of t…” before it is cut off), there is another EAS interruption, this time a civil danger alert, set against a startling red backdrop. It emphatically urges viewers, again, not to look at the night sky. Then, the screen glitches and is interrupted by more text, emphatically urging viewers to look at the night sky. A tug-of-war of text ensues: “GO OUTSIDE NOW”; “LOOK AT THE MOON,” which is revealed to be “DO NOT LOOK AT THE MOON” hidden by a large shadow; “STAY INSIDE / DON’T LOOK AT THE NIGHT SKY” and “FACE AWAY FROM ALL WINDOWS” then “AVOID MIRRORS” then “DO NOT LOOK UP.” Then moments later, the weather warning returns, bearing the cryptic message:

ITS IN THE LIGHT / THE MOON CAME IN / HE FOUND ME / THRU THE MIRROR / MOONLIGHT WHITE / WHITE LIKE EYES / NOT LIGHT BUT BLOOD / I DROWN IN HIM / IF YOU ARE AFRAID / WE WILL LOOK TOGETHER

This outside force (a cult? Aliens? The moon itself, or whatever lurks inside of it?) has prevailed. A clip of the moon in the night sky is shown. It glitches, becomes distorted, and the faint sound of screams can be heard. 

Still from Local 58; 'Weather Service'

This grainy image of the moon is the only video camera footage in “Weather Service,” and the rest of Local 58 follows the same pattern of using mostly simple graphics and stock or public domain footage (along with text and visual distortion effects) to craft a narrative. The notable exceptions are the episodes “Show For Children,” which is a short animated cartoon featuring Cadavre (a skeleton lad also present in Straub’s webcomic Broodhollow), and “You Are On The Fastest Available Route,” which is told through dashcam footage. Local 58 is not a blockbuster project by any stretch of the imagination. The credits of “Weather Service” list only Christopher Huppertz as the source of its VHS glitch footage. The rest of the audio is public domain, with Straub alone writing, directing, editing, and producing.

Beyond Local 58

If you are familiar with the web phenomenon that has come to be known as ‘analog horror,’ you’ll know that Local 58 has countless imitators, and no episode is more often or more easily replicated than “Weather Service.” I wouldn’t dare suggest that this is because Local 58 or “Weather Service” are unexceptional. On the contrary, Local 58 codified analog horror, the lovechild of A) earlier, more ‘traditional,’ more visually robust found-footage cinema and B) pre-existing categories of web original horror fiction (Local 58 has often been called a creepypasta, which it only is if you use ‘creepypasta’ as an umbrella term for web horror, or an ARG/alternate reality game, which it wasn’t until its most recent entry). The term exists to distinguish it from both. As a result, analog horror creators, many of whom are hobbyists due to the subgenre’s low barrier to entry, look to Local 58 (which at the time I’m writing, is still less than seven years old) as a sort of how-to guide, a litmus test for which conventions are allowed, required, forbidden. 

Alex Kister is the nineteen-year-old filmmaker behind analog horror series The Mandela Catalogue (2021-), which saw a meteoric rise to success thanks at least in part to the r/analog_horror subreddit and the attention of horror commentary YouTubers. A member of the budding community around analog horror, Kister also releases a series parodying the subgenre titled The Scrimblo Catalogue, wherein he self-consciously skewers his own Mandela Catalogue (which in my opinion, is wholly competent and interesting) and lovingly ribs beginner analog horror auteurs for their over-reliance on the news alerts and distortion effects first popularized by “Weather Service.” 

Still from The Scrimblo Files

The Mandela Catalogue consists of in-universe case files relevant to an investigation by the U.S. Department of Temporal Phenomena of a kind of demon called “alternates.” When not killing victims directly, they induce M.A.D. (metaphysical awareness disorder), instilling primal feelings of terror by adopting the physical features of targets and loved ones to one of three identifiable degrees of success; type one, doppelgängers, are undetectable to the naked eye; type two, detectables, will often have “physically impossible” characteristics, stretched eyes, Cheshire cat smiles (rendered by Kister in horrifying uncanny detail); type three, kept intentionally vague even in this official USDTP footage (this vagueness being another characteristic of the subgenre, to its detriment or to its benefit), might perhaps appear entirely faceless, or as smudged shadows capable of human-like movement. According to the installment “Exhibition,” the first season of TMC takes place in the early 90s, hence the stylized VHS quality.

Still from The Mandela Catalogue; 'The THINK Principal.' A type three alternate (right) pictured next to its victim (left).

While much of Local 58 takes place in the late twentieth century due to its now-defunct setting in a local access analog station, I start to wonder what motivates The Mandela Catalogue to be set in the 1990s—aside from the fact that good cameras are expensive and grainy VHS filters are often free. The Local 58 episode “Real Sleep,” a training video from the fictional Though Research Initiative made to sublate the viewer’s subconscious and prevent them from dreaming, uses a repeating distorted TTS recording of the phrase “there are no faces” over images pulled from the 2011 Flashed Face Distortion Effect experiment (Tangen, Murphy, and Thompson, 2011). Watching “Real Sleep” makes me feel like I’m exposing myself to a real-life SCP cognitohazard. Meanwhile, TMC’s Department of Temporal Phenomena uses TTS voices in its official government messaging for reasons that I don’t quite grasp, from a narrative perspective; in the six years between “Weather Service” and TMC’s “The Think Principle,” TTS has just become taken for granted a staple of the subgenre. But The Mandela Catalogue is not one of those several hundred Local 58 clones. Where Local 58 grounds itself in cosmic horror, TMC explores religious horror, pulling and distorting scenes from 1990s Beginner’s Bible cartoons to craft a narrative where alternates have not only infiltrated this world, but the next one. Kister has warped the foundations of a creation story, and destabilized his own assumed socio-religious origin.

Ghosts in the Machine

The simplistic visual style associated with analog horror often belies an extremely high-concept monster-figure, and these stylistic limitations will serve to make a potent source of terror even more potent. I’m reminded of the Japanese techno-horror of the late 1990s and early 2000s; Serial Experiments Lain (1998) head writer Chiaki Konaka, one of the central discursive voices of the J-horror movement at the time, suggested that “the ghost’s voice is most scary when mediated through technology of mechanical reproduction, such as recording and broadcasting” (Kinoshita, 2009). This ethos is at the core of analog horror, and while Konaka was speaking about ghost stories, there is something to be said for how ephemeral many analog horror monster-figures are. As I mentioned, the subgenre has been criticized in web horror circles for being formulaic, overly-reliant on conventions set by its Ur-text of Local 58, and also, for having sources of terror so ill-defined that it calls into question whether or not their creators actually know what they are. 

From the SCP Wiki "Writing Style" guide. Keeping your audience in the dark doesn't mean never providing context...

Local 58 has no discernable characters in-universe, thus, it forces its viewer to assume the role of in-universe viewer (which could be why it was often called an ARG even before it had an associated ARG). Many of its imitators fail to have any kind of hook because of this, any source of narrative tension. But more competent analog horror adheres, perhaps unknowingly, to the so-called ‘Konaka Theory’ that “horror stories with clear causal explanations are not scary at all,” and that “terror is absurd” (Kinoshita, 2009). Local 58 is predicated upon a fraught coupling between an ill-defined (perhaps undefinable) threat in its monster-figure, and a weaponized folksy nostalgia in its framing.

The first episode of Local 58 I ever watched was “Contingency,” which is the second entry in the series. If “Weather Service” was the first fuzzy spring bud on the tree of Local 58’s potential, “Contingency” was where it blossomed. I encountered it in the form of two gifs on Tumblr in late 2017, and I found the mere gifs so jarring that I had to know more. “Contingency” takes place in roughly 1969 or 1970. Over a waving American flag and images of the 1969 moon landing, the station informs viewers that the broadcast day is concluded, wishing them a “great night.” Then, like “Weather Service,” there is an emergency interruption: 

“CONTINGENCY MESSAGE REEL…TO BE USED ONLY IN THE EVENT OF UNITED STATES COMPLETE SURRENDER TO INSURMOUNTABLE ENEMY FORCES / PUBLIC BROADCAST ONLY UPON CONFIRMED CONDITION / TWELVE OMAHA SOLEMN CERTAINTY” 

Stills from Local 58; 'Contingency.' The first images I ever saw from Local 58.

The contingency message begins, informing the viewer that the United States has been “forced to surrender.” Like the broadcast sign-off message, it plays over a waving American flag, now accompanied by patriotic music. The video and audio are distorted by the analog medium, and where that might have seemed like a warm reminder of a bygone era only moments ago, it’s another defamiliarizing force now, as the contingency reel calls upon all citizens of the United States (every “man, woman, and child”) to “ACT.” The president has already “TAKEN ACTION.” Johnson’s euphemistic preamble ends, “Even in defeat we claim VICTORY.” 

The “ACTION” in question, the following slides (courtesy of the U.S. Department for the Preservation of American Dignity) reveal, is mandatory mass suicide. “ACT IMMEDIATELY…YOU TAKE AMERICA WITH YOU.” Over a haunting, barely intelligible rendition of ‘My Country ‘Tis of Thee,’ the tape informs viewers that if they do not comply with the stated instructions, they will be forced to do so. It details how to ‘act’ most efficiently, and how to “tend to” children and pets first. It urges viewers, if there is time, to assume the “VICTORY POSITION…FRONT LAWN / FACE UP / FEET TOGETHER.” The music gradually slows, then ceases when the contingency reel is interrupted by a message with the same Department for the Preservation of American Dignity seal over a plain green background, with text that reads only “THE 51^ST STATE IS NOT A PLACE.” Presumably, this refers to the moon, and this interruption was once again caused by the moon itself or whatever force lurks within it. At the end of “Contingency,” the station confirms that the contingency reel was played in error, and was in fact a hoax, apologizing for any “confusion” that may have arisen as a result. Local 58’s lack of POV character (forcing its audience to be the POV character) and obfuscation of said force dissolves standard diegetic boundaries; “Contingency” must be understood as a message directed at you, the viewer turned in-universe viewer, and the effect is stomach-turning. You are not watching someone encounter the ghost (so to speak) mediated through mechanical reproduction; you are encountering the ghost mediated through mechanical reproduction. Local 58 is a work of fiction, and its viewers know that. But when I first saw those gifs of “Contingency” out of context on Tumblr (though keep in mind, I was a teenager with little exposure to horror media), I sincerely wondered if the contingency message was an actual declassified video, made by an actual Department for the Preservation of American Dignity.

Local 58’s mediating mechanical reproduction is also, crucially, not the dominant mechanical reproduction technology of its own moment; analog horror is a necessarily digital form that necessarily mediates through analog technology. Though I don’t interpret the moon-monster of Local 58 as a ghost, it does haunt, acting as spectral energy upon the mediating technology, transforming the analog broadcast into the haunted space. But the broadcast is not merely a haunted space, rather, it is a haunting object to the Local 58 viewer. The analog broadcast is itself a sort of ghost, already residual at the time of its representation. When you watch Local 58, you are not merely watching a spectral force warp a space in a way that it isn’t meant to be warped. You are watching the mediating object itself return from obsolescence. This double-haunting, the phenomenon of the spectral figure which haunts the spectral object of mechanical reproduction, will always necessarily occur in analog horror. 

Analog Nostalgia

Returning to Japanese techno-horror circa 2000 gives us another site of double-haunting (though here, it is typically unintentional). Take Kurosawa’s Kairo (or Pulse, 2001), the monster-figure of which is an overwhelming assemblage of nevertheless eternally isolated ghosts, who haunt computers, replicate themselves through emails, and say very little aside from their compulsive cries for help. They reach out, desperate for someone to free them from the “eternal loneliness” of death, but any outsider with whom they communicate will be damned to the same bleak afterlife. Witnessing these ghosts nearly always drives victims to suicide (much like the M.A.D.dening alternates of The Mandela Catalogue), and when it doesn’t, said victims will simply dissolve into ash, leaving only a pseudo-nuclear shadow behind. Psychologically harrowing, obviously, but you might be tempted to think that Kairo’s now outdated mediating technology cheapens its horror. Emails as the new hottest form of casual communication? Dial-up internet; the same dial-up internet that seems so twee and defanged in a comedy like PEN15, where the main characters have to wait for the modem to dial up before they can log on to perfect their AIM profiles? 

But despite being visually inextricable from the era in which it was made, Kairo inspires very little cheery nostalgic recognition. Instead, the dial-up noises become a haunting score, familiar and defamiliarized like ‘My Country ‘Tis of Thee’ in “Contingency.” The ghosts in Kairo glitch, the tech they haunt mutilates itself, like the VHS-style footage of analog horror. The seams of our technology rarely show to such a degree anymore. In fact, the boundaries between ourselves and our technology seem to dissolve as the technocapitalist surveillance state becomes more totalizing, as we become ‘extremely online,’ as we’re implored to update our tech at increasing speed. Planned obsolescence towards the end of increased shareholder profits and at the expense of everything else always looms on the horizon.

The seams of old-tech horror represent, in my mind, not only what affectively should no longer be present, the ghostliness of the residual mediating tech, its equivalent of creaky stairs at the witching hour; they represent what has been lost to the aforementioned increasingly totalizing technocapitalist surveillance state. Isn’t it pushing us backwards, away from innovation, further into a box? Myspace, in its heyday, inspired its users to learn HTML and CSS so that they could edit their pages to be as gaudy and expressive as their hearts desired. Now, on most widely-used platforms, you can edit your banner (if that) and your profile picture (though on Twitter you can, of course, make that an NFT if you’re willing to shell out a small fortune). I used to covet candy-colored flip phones as a child, and I swore that once I got one, I’d text that number they advertised in Tiger Beat and download all those cool ringtones. 

From beckybedbug.com

Now, my phone is much better suited to browse the web (and track my every move), but it looks the same as everybody else’s, no matter the manufacturer, and it no longer has a headphone jack. I often wished that my old laptop had a built-in disk drive; my new laptop doesn’t even have a built-in USB port. Must ‘advancing’ mean flattening everything out? Who benefits from this streamlining besides the companies who can now sell me all these parts separately?  

I’ve detailed how Local 58 weaponizes and complicates its nostalgic imagery, but in a sense, I’m still drawn to the imagery because of my nostalgia for the unseamless tech for which I used to yearn. The techno-horror I’ve mentioned did not set out to be double-haunted, but it became such as its tech inevitably became residual. What analog horror is able to do, as a subgenre that is always already double-haunted, is understand its own seams metatextually. “Weather Service” was released in 2015 for an audience that identified more strongly with and even as their technology and their digital persona than was possible in the year it was set. I have mentioned the Local 58 ARG a few times now; that ARG was announced through a ninth installment to the series on Halloween 2021, titled Digital Transition. In Digital Transition, the Local 58 station is set to switch from analog to digital broadcast (“in accordance with FCG regulations”). As the switch occurs, the screen briefly displays an error message stating that the TV is not configured for digital broadcast before this is interrupted by the same cosmic force (or actors on its behalf) that has been targeting the station since the mid-twentieth century. Updating the tech, increasing security measures, criminalizing the “unauthorized reception of analog frequencies formerly allocated to broadcast television”; it cannot deter this primordial force. That’s frightening, that our air-tight, frictionless technology cannot deter this primordial force. It’s exhilarating, too: Local 58 invokes cold-war era fears (especially in “Contingency”) to remind its viewer that something is watching. However, as the series comes together, it seems possible that the something itself is fighting the surveillance imposed upon it by a hubristic humankind and an entitled United States of America high on manifest destiny. “There are no faces,” so stop looking for the man on the moon, because if he's there, then it’s none of your business. “The 51^st state is not a place,” keep away from this territory, just because you can capture its image with a satellite, doesn’t mean you can capture it. There are forces of nature you can’t control, and there is doom that will rise to meet you.

Loss in a Digital World

Still, tech increasingly complicates the inalienable truth of death itself. Andre Bazin suggested that the camera “embalms,” undermining the dependence of survival on “the continued existence of the corporeal body” (Bazin, 1945), enabling affective preservation even in the absence of the organic form. The web exists in this lineage, and it embalms ravenously and uncontrollably. A 2012 research study on bereavement in college students gathered detailed narrative reports from six undergraduates who had all lost at least one friend suddenly and unexpectedly between 2 to 20 months before the interview (Hieftje, 2012). The students discussed the role that social media played in their grieving process. Many of their responses suggested that viewing the Facebook profile of their deceased friend helped them reflect on their friend’s life, serving as both a digital gallery of their life and as a hub for friends and family to connect and remember the person they’d lost. In the ten years since this study, though, I’d suggest that the affective overlap between person and digital persona has grown, despite the decreasing mutability (customizability, jailbreakability) of the Web 2.0 social media landscape. I don’t view my friends’ Instagram profiles as galleries of their lives; try as I might not to, I view Instagram as a space where I meet with my friends, and their profiles as simply them, or at least a seamless extension of them. 

Like the subjects of this study, I have lost a few loved ones suddenly in the past year or so, and since I have internalized their online profiles as them, I cannot visit these profiles without feeling like some sort of reanimation is occurring. A friend of mine who passed in November co-moderated an Instagram meme page, and the other moderator (who I don’t really know) is still alive, but that was her page, and so when the other moderator posts, I inevitably think for a split second, “oh, it’s her!” Then, I realize, an unpleasant jolt to my system, that it isn’t, and couldn’t possibly be her. Then, sometimes, I visit the page, scroll back to what she posted when she was still here, try to reconstitute her in my head, try to wrap my head around the fact that this person whom I cared for, whose spectral energy continues to act upon this mediating technology, is not somewhere I can reach her. She never will be again. And some of the students in the bereavement study, even ten years ago, felt that same sense, when looking at the social media profiles, that their friends were still “there.” One student explicitly described the experience as “eerie,” saying that it made her feel like she was “facing…a ghost.” This is another place where the double-haunting occurs. My friend haunts her Instagram profile: this digital space that is also herself. I always find myself looking through these archives of hers—which are also her—for longer than my grieving mind can truly handle. Here she is, preserved, here is the page, functioning as it did when she was alive. 

My urge to preserve often overtakes me when I’m online; I want to hoard data, I want to find and restore digital artefacts from my own digital history, and I want to play little thought games that let me live in a world where my dead friends are alive. But I know they aren’t alive. My tech and I are not a singularity to the degree that looking at an Instagram profile can undermine my very solid grasp of object permanence; I can almost trick my mind for a split-second before a fresh pang of sorrow rushes through me. My efforts to embalm are salt in my wounds. That sting is something, at least, but it mostly serves to remind me that this is not really reanimation. Mourning a person sucks hard enough without my inscribing a false promise of digital immortality onto an app that begs me to commodify every minute aspect of my life and won’t let me type the word “kiss” on my story without shadowbanning me. Maybe the singularity we’re approaching isn’t between person and machine, but between person and product. Maybe we’re already there.

The Internet is Haunted

Analog horror exists because the internet is haunted. The internet has always been haunted, in the purest sense of the word. Everyone who uses it will one day die, and if it still exists then, we will have been preserved outside of our corporeal bodies. Yay!

XKCD; ‘Admin Mourning’

Beyond that, who hasn’t received a chain email or read a comment about an avenging spirit desperate for likes and shares (or else the worst week of your life starts NOW)? The internet could just as well have been made for scary stories; it is a mediating object; it is a direct line. The ghosts of the internet will stay safely behind the screen, and also, they’re so close, and also, are we behind the screen? Analog horror often blurs the boundary between nostalgia and trauma, saying: your mediating technology has never been safe from ghosts, because it shares the ontology of the photographic image, and it is and is for ghosts, embalming more and more indiscriminately, swallowing souls. Analog horror is also a labour of love (making esoteric YouTube miniseries is rarely the most lucrative creative endeavour), the centre of a vibrant community of horror fans and creatives, and an excellent way for beginner filmmakers and storytellers to learn how to build suspense with nothing more than their laptops’ built-in video editing suite and some clip art. In a digital landscape that seems overrun with Elon Musk copycats, I find Kris Straub copycats refreshing (even if every other post on r/analog_horror is basically “Weather Service” with a slightly different colour filter). 

Local58’s most recent episode triangulates a warning that the security state will not protect us from impending disaster the way it tacitly promises (it might even make the disaster worse, and the disaster is already beyond human comprehension). Like the eternal and transmittable isolation of death in Kairo; like the alternates in The Mandela Catalogue capable of invading not merely the American mythology of the halcyon good old days, but the culture’s prevailing literal creation myths; the moon (or the force that dwells within it) in Local 58 has been there long before us, will be there long after us, and is not a threat that we are equipped to face. Metatextually, though, Digital Transition feels hopeful, like an assertion that the series (the granddaddy and it-girl and Jedi master of all analog horror) will stay a labour of love. So will analog horror itself, for as long as it continues to be made, in all its fundamentally anachronistic, often formulaic, viscerally terrifying glory.

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References

Bazin, A. (. (1960). The Ontology of the Photographic Image. Film Quarterly, 13.4, 4-9.

Hieftje, K. (2012). The Role of Social Networking Sites in Memorialization of College Students. In K. R. Gilbert, C. J. Sofka, & I. Noppe Cupit, Dying, Death, and Grief in an Online Universe: For Counselors and Educators (pp. 31-44). New York: Springer.

Kinoshita, C. (2009). The Mummy Complex: Kurosawa Kiyoshi's Loft and J-Horror. In J. Choi, & M. Wada-Marciano, Horror to the Extreme: Changing Boundaries in Asian Cinema (pp. 103-122). Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.

Tangen, J., Murphy, S., & Thompson, M. (2011). Flashed Face Distortion Effect: Grotesque Faces from Relative Spaces. Perception, 40, 628-630.