Our recent post on analog horror brought out a lot of folks to comment.
It was especially edifying to get more of the Millennial view on the genre.
Related: Analog Horror: The Past as Nightmare, Not Nostalgia
The most copious treatment of the subject comes from commenter Rudolph Harrier:
This all goes back to Marble Hornets (aka the series that made Slenderman popular), or at least that was the first popular series in this vein. The aforementioned Night Mind got his start doing analysis videos of Marble Hornets. At the time it was seen in the vein of ARGs or “Unfiction,” but with the focus on VHS tapes and analog distortion effects it’s hard to not classify it as “Analog Horror” now. You can also trace a lot of the tropes directly back to this series. The use of analog distortion for distortion in reality doesn’t come directly from Marble Hornets itself (where only tapes were distorted in that way; people experienced other effects) but rather from the popular Slender: The Eight Pages game which kept in the iconic effects despite not being taped. Though I guess if you want to dig further, David Lynch did use distortion effects in a similar way in his works, particular in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, so it’s not like the idea was completely unknown.
What’s interesting about tracking things back to Marble Hornets is that it provides a direct link from Gen Y nostalgia to Gen Z horror. Tapes are used in Marble Hornets simply because that’s what you’d have in the time period: it started in 2009, but revolves around the filming of an eponymous in-universe student project from 2006. Tapeless camcorders didn’t enter the market until 2006, and they would have been out of the budget for a group of college students. Of course events recorded before that period would be on VHS as well, and tapes continue to be used for most things past that point because that is the equipment that the characters have been established to have (and the equipment itself gains importance over the course of the story.)
Note that having the characters be in college in 2006 puts them firmly in Gen Y, and the main actor (Troy Wagner) was born in 1988. It’s also worth noting that the fictional Marble Hornets student film was nostalgia based: it’s about a guy returning to his hometown after college and finding that despite his childhood memories he can’t go back to the way things were. I don’t know if old slenderman himself is meant to represent the pernicious effects of nostalgia, you can make a case for it but it’s somewhat of a stretch, but the series was definitely made through a Gen Y lens.
However the audience of the series largely was much younger. I can’t find it now, but I remember an interview where Troy said he was surprised that the audience was not so much the SA college crowd that he expected, but kids around 12 years old watching it while hoping that their parents wouldn’t find out. For a series that was popular around 2010-2016 that would mean people born in 1998-2004, i.e. younger millennials and older zoomers. This audience would have viewed internet videos like youtube as the natural way to watch video content, and so the tapes lost their logical and nostalgic aspects, and instead became a symbol of horror.
You can explore the haunting world of Marble Hornets here:
It occurs to me that Generation Y’s view of the past is distorted by their own nostalgia, which has in turn distorted Gen Z’s.
Which gives the analog horror trope of using image distortion a whole other layer of meaning.
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