Analog Horror

So the central idea of Local 58 is that it's a community broadcaster in Mason County, WV (where the Mothman is from) and that some hostile force has taken control of the moon and is weaponizing it against the people in the three cities Local 58 broadcasts to.

You know most people are turned off by copy, right, OP? it's devoid of the personal and tells you what to think/feel.

By far the creepiest one, to me, even though it uses the most banal technology as its inspiration.

What if your GPS lied to you?

This is the most famous one. Me? Eh.

It has Fallout vibes to it.

R2 You try to some it up in a couple of sentences! Sorry I'm a strong writer. Damn.

Why aren't the emergency messages sent by text? Do people actually get these on TV?

R6 Short answer, yes.

R2 is an imitation of what the Emergency Broadcast System looked like before 2011. Now we have the Emergency Alert System, which includes text messages.

A weather alert pops on TVs as a crawling Chiron underneath whatever show or commercial is already playing and has the same fucking alarming beeping tone and computerized voiceover.

Sorry, R1 not R2. Weather Alert.

Hollywood is copying the idea of a sentient Moon attacking Earth without borrowing any of the insight about the semiotics of American media and America's tragic dependence on parasocial interaction.

Look at this retarded dog shit:

R2 Looks like EBN were thirty years ahead of their time. I'd never heard of them, thanks for linking.

This is a supercut of a real incident where Sinclair Broadcasting Group forced all member stations to read the same script. Makes my skin crawl:

Every artist/creator on this thread is ripping off Videodrome, which was ripping off Marshall McLuhan's "Counterblast."

R4 has a bit of an Atomic Cafe vibe to it, captures that disturbing tone that U.S. nuclear safety materials had in the Pre-Vietnam era.

Somewhat OT because it’s not exactly direct horror, but I have always found ‘end of analogue’ recordings to be very poignant and simultaneously a little bit spooky.

Especially weepy are the ones from my home in Britain. Our digital switchover (from 2010-12) for whatever reason was treated like a massive sentimental deal, and people became very emotional and fraught about it, still not sure why—perhaps because it took over a bloody decade and far too much taxpayer money just to sort out the job so we deserved a catharsis😂

Really it makes me sick to have to praise the chuffers at the BBC for anything, but even I have to hold my hands up and say that their handling of the farewell to analogue was moving and respectful. On the final nights of analog, some lovely things were said and screened to commemorate the history of broadcasting and its important to the development of culture.

The way you can hear the voices of all the announcers slightly crack as they say the final goodbyes.even through the reassuring patter and businesslike tone, just never fails to get to me. Mary! me, but if ever I feel like I need a really good cry or an outlet for nostalgia grief, I just need to stick a playlist of these on and I’m in bits😭

^^^saying goodbye to Ceefax/Teletext was one of the saddest moments of U.K. analog shutdown. Didn’t actually use the service that much, myself, but it was just the fact that you knew it was always there. And how you could rely on it having the info you needed when you needed it, with no worrying about good connectivity or having enough data or Google stalking you or whatever.

The Pages always delivered. Weather forecasts, TV guides, pollen counts, flight arrival times, cinema listings, news headlines, sports results, music chart rundowns and review, games & puzzles, satirical columns & comics, even personals & erotic stories if you knew where to look. It was a free, more innocent and crude precursor of the Internet, really.

Picture a downmarket flat in the mid-1990s with an indoor aerial, rubber plant in a pot full of ashes, dodgy downmarket lava lamp. Days when you could put tat on top of the massive tube telly and get away with it. What Brit of a certain vintage doesn’t really miss coming in from the pub Friday night to listen to some mad Japanese jazz fusion, obscure lounge downtempo, or MIDI classics such as BART playing over those garish neon pixels? Or drinking your last few tins in front of TOP OF THE POPS 2 with the nonsense closed-caption subtitles from P.888 on? Or trying to book a cheap package holiday to Ibiza from scam companies that you knew would get cancelled last minute? Or having a quick fumbling hungover wank to the porny letters on P.699 and feeling like such a loser? Or getting up Saturday/Sunday morning and going straight to P.303 to wait an hour for the football scores to load? (sometimes text letters didn't appear properly due to poor reception—always laughed seeing the score of a certain Notts C unty...)

Ceefax/Teletext got the subtle send off it deserved, mind—nothing over the top, just a very deliberate and grateful nod to the not so distant past. 38 years was an incredible lifespan, considering its early obsolescence; it outlasted every other service of its type in the world, from Oracle to RAND to SEGA.

Back in the day, they used to show scrolling Pages From Ceefax/Teletext after midnight closedown on the main BBC TV channels, which was a comforting sight if you had fallen asleep on the sofa. Today if you're looking to pull an all nighter in front of the box, you have to be willing to put up with hours of bombarding and alarmist BBC News repeats (which for the last two years have been only about COVID-Brexit-BRF) with the shit graveyard newsreaders, or endless blaring loops of creepy pretentious trailers for their rubbish in-house programming. Just how many of the conditions of the BBC charter can you actually get around, by sticking on a cycle of assorted clips showing weird boring depressing stuff at half 3 mornings? Cheapskates.

R14, R15 It's like a person dying, right? They get their appropriate tributes- eulogies, video packages of all of the happy memories of their life. It's like giving these technologies funerals.

You're very on topic, by the way!

R16 yes, you’re quite right! In all these years I’ve never thought of it like a national funeral send-off, but it really was, wasn’t it?

Ceefax/Teletext was sort of like a weirdly knowledgeable reclusive Aspergic grandad who could tell you whatever info you needed on demand because he never got out his chair or stopped reading the paper/TV guide.

R16 that was a very convincing edit, especially in terms of graphics and music. Looks totally authentic and must have taken a lot of work to get right, so hats off to the kid who made it.

That said, the end made me cringe a bit. Again, it’s very creative and clever and creepy, but if we’re being totally honest it sort of took me out of the frame and made me feel depressed more than scared. Also, the captions reminded me a bit of a vague pseudo-Revelations rant by Bray Wyatt (pro-wrestler) in a promo vignette. Perhaps the horror genre is not for me!

R17 My guess would be that teenagers now, who would have been born after 9/11 and mostly grown up watching streaming services, don't relate to that anthropomorphism of TV stations.

I'd find the idea of a amorphous friendly persona talking through the TV deeply creepy if I hadn't grown up with it. Their assumption seems to definitely be that the person in the TV is sinister.

R18 I'm not familiar with wrestling, that would probably make more sense if I knew who those guys are.

That tone and rhetorical style is pretty typical for American sermons, especially Evangelical ones. Sermons are a form of folk literature in the U.S., we studied them in English courses when I was in College.

TV station engineers resent this corruption of our precious bodily fluids.

The real Channel 58 is KLCS in Los Angeles. They played REM for their digital transition.

r12 r10 red dot

R23 I'll assume you mean click the red dots. That site would be fantastic fodder for some Analog horror, it has the graphics and the undertone of something big and sinister hiding in its banality. I noticed a couple of pages hadn't been updated since the week of 9/11.

How do you keep getting red tagged and then not, by the way? I've never seen that here.

I'll repost your link in case you get red tagged again.

Markiplier spells it "Analogue."

Archive 81 on Netflix seems to be along the same vein. Solving a mystery by tracking down old tapes.

I guess this genre of fiction has always been around, but Gen Z is glomming on to it.

John Tutor was hunting for an IBM 1500 way back in 2000, so he could save the world in 2036.

Titor. Oh dear me.

The biggest indie video game this year is a hunt for "old data" hidden by a gaming corporation inside their videogame software.

The Army, of all people, have borrowed the analogue horror aesthetic for their new recruitment video "Ghosts in the Machine."

Considering this video is aimed at young people in their teens and early twenties it's actually a solid, if weird, choice.

Ooh, OP, I've just started watching these. I think I'm going to enjoy going through them - this kind of thing hits the right spot in me when it comes to horror. Reminding me of things like Scarfolk Council, Kraina Grzybów, the Max Headroom Incident, shortwave radio intervals and much more along these lines.

Thanks for sharing!

This may sound like a weird thought, but on thinking about it, analog stuff (tv, the way music is recorded etc) seems to have much more feeling in it than digital. I think that's why it can move us more in some ways, and in certain ways, creep us out more. With analog you feel like you can also feel the humans behind it really using the equipment, rather than just pressing buttons and everything instantly happening. I know I'm probably being fanciful, but it does seem that way to me.

R5 You try to "some" it up in a couple of sentences!

"Sorry I'm a strong writer"

Um

Fine. Fine. I can't write. Jesus.

R14/R15, thank you dear but this thread isn't about you, or your country. Please sit down now.

Excuse you R35! This is a thread about spooky YouTube videos and R14/15 was lovely and had interesting things to say. Sit down.

R31 Scarfolk Council is eerie and well done, I'm sure I'm missing a lot of it but I'm still enjoying reading it.

There's an American version of the same thing called Welcome to Nightvale which I wasn't a fan of. It was done as a podcast and they tried to add a lot of humor. It didn't really work.

[quote]they tried to add a lot of humor.

I could definitely see how that could destroy the effect of it. Some of those other things I mentioned like Scarfolk and Grzybów have a kind of warped humour in them on occasion, but it's not that sort of comforting, reminder that it's all a joke, type humour. It just adds to the creepiness, like "there is something really not right about all of this".

[quote]I have always found ‘end of analogue’ recordings to be very poignant and simultaneously a little bit spooky.

Mate, if you haven't heard the final broadcast from Radio Berlin International, you should check it out. Think it would be right up your alley.

I have to thank the OP, because I never knew this stuff had a name ("analog horror") and now I know where to look for more of it. It's the one thing left out there that can truly creep me out still.

Yes, R38, that's the difference. Nightvale wasn't witty, the jokes seemed more aimed at comforting the listener every few moments. It was wildly popular and you can see the influence they had on shows like Rick and Morty. All of these projects draw a lot from H.P. Lovecraft and his Eldritch Abomination, it seems to be a requirement almost for millennial horror that the foundation of your story has to be Lovecraftian cosmology.

Part of what I like about Analog horror (so glad you like it too!) is it's a refreshing departure from vague supernatural horror.

They take all of this banal technology we're surrounded by and twist it.

The Dodleston messages are absolutely wild, I'm shocked they aren't referenced in popular culture more.

An English teacher borrowed a BBC Micro from his school in 1984 and received mysterious messages purporting to be from the 17th century which were saved on the primitive word processing program.

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

P.

Kraina Grzybów is lost on me. I do like the Soviet TV aesthetic, though. The video has English subtitles.

R42, the video where Agatka is shown dancing around with another girl called Karolina and an older man in an all denim outfit seems kinda funny at first, but leaves you with a very creepy feeling too. I really like the aesthetic too, I showed it to a friend of mine who is half Polish and she was saying how odd it is because Polish TV is always so cheesy and bright, so this is a really warped version of that.

The apotheosis of this genre, to me, is The Conet Project. It's twice as creepy because it's all real. When I want to get that weird creepy feeling, I just listen to this.

YES, R44! I downloaded all those tracks years ago and they're around somewhere. Very creepy in the best way. A couple of favourites of mine are Ciocarlia and Tyrolean Music Station.

Shortwave radio stuff and it's associated creepiness was the whole reason I bought OMD's Dazzle Ships album, haha!

R44 Numbers stations are that perfect mix of horrifying and mundane- the sweet spot! Plus they are real- what could these people possibly be up to that this is a logical way to communicate? They must have zero fear of law enforcement or civil authorities.

There's a famous numbers station near Portland, Oregon that is still sporadically active. They also play odd tones and occasionally speech that sounds like codewords.

[quote]Plus they are real- what could these people possibly be up to that this is a logical way to communicate?

Oh yeah, they are fascinating for a whole number of reasons. And they bring back a kind of cold war/spy feeling that I suppose thrills the little boy inside all of us.

The thing about radio is that it's impossible to trace who's received it. Nowadays it's thought that some messages are transmitted through innocuous-seeming YouTube comments or various internet sites. But it's possible to trace what sites someone's visited, which could blow someone's cover on either end.

I read OP’s subject line as Aging Horror.

I need to rest my tired, old eyes.

An explanation of Kraina Grzybów (as much as it can be.)

It's a computer game, but it's mostly point and click so anyone could play it. I just played this and really enjoyed it. The story relies heavily on analog tech and 80s computing, and there's a real variety of technology that they bring into it. There's a story that revolves around microfiche.

You're traveling through someone's memories trying to solve the mystery of a broken home.

^ Also available on console.

This House Has People in It.

Behavioural Management Program: Stage 4

Annie is Typing...