The Story of Analog Horror
If I asked you what came to your mind when you thought of horror, what would you think? You might think of famous horror classics, like Stephen King’s ‘The Shining’. Or, you might think of horror subgenres, like Sci-Fi Horror or the Slasher subgenre. When thinking about these things, it’s more than likely that you would not have said anything about a more recent horror subgenre that creeps you out to the bone. This mysterious new subgenre is called ‘Analog Horror’, and is what I will be talking about today.
A poster for "The Walten Files".
Analog Horror, known most commonly by the name of Found Footage horror, is a horror subgenre whose creation is mainly credited to YouTube channel LOCAL58TV, with horror mainly relying on low-fidelity graphics, cryptic messages, and visual styles reminiscent of late 20th-century television and analog recordings, with the original subgenre creator ammasing 558,000 since its channel creation in 2017. Its story is about a mysterious entity simply addressed to as “HIM” is trying to destroy humanity by hijacking a fictional news channel called Local 58, located in West Virginia and brainwashing and misinforming the people watching the news. This series is already pretty terrifying and is pretty reasonably sized despite how new the type of video is. After Local 58’s popularity died down for a bit, the analog horror type of video did not have the exact same hype as it did for a while. Since Local 58, there were a few notable series that came after, such as The Walten Files and The Mandela Catalog. “I didn’t know about the Walten Files until about first grade," says Callen Robertson, a student at EJHS. “I heard about it from one of my friends. What he described was enough to give me chills!” The popularity of this genre rose drastically soon after.
The reason of this mysterious craze for this subgenre of horror was the fault of Kane Persons, known on YouTube as Kane Pixels, who posted a video of a mysterious place called ‘The Backrooms’ that had seemingly infinite rooms filled with yellow colored walls, buzzing fluorescent lights, and moist carpet in a first person environment that took the entire YouTube platform by storm. The video's popularity skyrocketed, sitting at a whopping fifty-three million views since the time of the first episode’s release back in January of 2022. The Backrooms series did not stop at one episode, because there have been 12 installments in the series since, with the entire series sitting at an impressive 203 million views. Jackson Warren, a sixth grader says, “What makes the Backrooms scary is that there’s a feeling of endlessness mixed with monsters trying to kill you.”
Original image of "The Backrooms".
That was most of the popular analog horror series and their stories of success. This subgenre is still one of the scariest subgenres of horror, whose fame came by popular social media platforms, like YouTube, who rose the subgenre to popularity where it still stands as one of the most respected and scariest sources of horror to this day.