Or Rather, the Otherworldly Terror of a Television with Poor Connection

Boston, 1988. 

It’s pitch-black in the house. Dad forgot to change the bulbs again. If you could sleep this wouldn’t be a problem, you’d simply let the darkness smother you, but for whatever reason, tonight’s got you wide-eyed — itchy with unspent energy.  After hours of staring blankly at your bedroom ceiling, you decide the best hope to try and lull you to sleep (or at least kill time until dawn) is to watch some TV. 

It’s nearly three am, so the airways are all dead. Not even the informercials hawking get-rich-quick schemes were on. You nearly resign yourself to watching the static dance across the screen in some kind of mindless stupor when the dial clicks and ambient music fills the house. Channel 45, it announces, TV for You. With a shrug, you relax against the leather sofa and watch idly as the programming notes scroll by. 

2:45   Paid Programming          

3:00   City Council Minutes

3:30   Quiet Hours Gospel on…Apotheosis

4:00   End.

For a moment, something — a thought, a concern? — whispers in the back of your mind. Off. Turn it off. But the smooth jazz bleeds forward, lulling instinct into exhaustion and you drift into a dreamless sleep.

You wake up at a little before four. Just early enough to see the end of Quiet Hours Gospel. The Reverend — or who you can only assume to be the Reverend, as streaks of black and white static rip across his face — paces frantically across the pulpit. His hands wave wildly, arms stretched in supplication.  

Dark stains bleed from where his eyes should be.

The Reverend’s mouth opens to speak, yet, his words are scrambled by a sharp buzzing sound. You try to adjust the volume, raising it higher and higher, but only increase the intensity of the buzz. Only the subtitles, slowly trailing across the screen, reveal the content of his sermon.  

“And unto mankind, THE DIVINE BODY bestows upon us a BLESSING. A BLESSING which will transform the FLESH to REFLECT the likeness of THEIR OWN!”

With each line, the Reverend’s movements become faster, more frenzied. The distortions follow suit, blurring and binding together in spools of thin light. Through the static, you can see flashes of a face. Wide, wide eyes stare through the screen, and you cannot help but stare back.  

“DARKNESS shall be our new body. SILENCE shall be our new mind. We will JOIN TOGETHER in the FROST of THEIR NIGHT!” 

You can make out hands now too. Long spindles of black stretch forward. They appear to press against the screen, distortion pulling against the pressure of their fingertips. A different voice, one softer, gentler than the warning before, urges you forward. 

I want to touch.  

“The APOTHEOSIS is HERE, my children. Once you ACCEPT THEIR BLESSING…”

Accept it. Become one with me. 

The screen flashes white.

I want — 

Y  o  u   w  i  l  l   b  e   h  o  m  e. 

And then. 

Nothing.

Source: Unsplash

As the last few scratches of visual static fall away, you, the viewer, are returned to a world outside of the confines of a manufactured retro television screen. A life, peaceful it seems, re-establishes itself. A life, decidedly antithetical to the events just witnessed. Yet, in those few seconds spent awash within an electromagnetic nightmare, a very real, very tangible expression of modern-day fears emerges.  

The fear of emergency. The fear of chaos. The fear of an indeterminate end. We seek distraction to balm the ever-present terror that suffocates our current era. Pandemics, climate crisis, wealth disparity, general existential malaise all seem to soften when relics of collective youth — the peaceful times, the better times — flicker onto our screens. We use nostalgia as an opiate, injecting it into every piece of media to remind us — deceive us — into remembering when annihilation did not seem so impending. 

This paradigm has forced us to live in a half-life, grasping for the vestiges of a bygone era to blind us to a rapidly approaching future. The present has become innocuous. Deprived of any bite of progress. How can we live then, change, transform, apotheosize as man if we are unable to segregate ourselves from the shackles of our past?  

The solution, I believe, is simple. We, the makers, must desecrate the altar upon which nostalgia rests. And wonderfully, the framework for such a movement has already been put in place. 

The Internet, from which it was born, calls it Analog Horror. Like the cinematic horror of found footage that came before, Analog Horror preys upon the discomfort of a forced gaze and blends it with the narrative ambiguity of surrealist literature. The result is a phenomenon of “perverted sentimentality” — a degradation of the nostalgic safety we crave and a reconciliation of the present-day chaos we attempt to avoid. 

In order for Analog Horror to be achieved, it must only acquiesce to three simple tenants: 

1. The form must depict or reference a pre-existing analog medium, such as film reel, television broadcast, or VHS.  

2. The form must use second-person perspective to drive the narrative.

3. The form must include horror elements within the narrative. 

It is also a crucial marker that the form in question be distributed on public platforms, be it YouTube, Reddit, Twitter, or other video-sharing websites. Accessibility is the most crucial tool in ensuring not just the spread of our nostalgic aberrations but to incite others to join the movement. Reclaim the horror of the banal for ourselves and open our eyes to the infinite terrors that lie in the future! 

Furthermore, we must reject the status quo of other avant-gardes. While surrealism might act as our closest ally — as we too aim to blend humanity’s subconscious fear with the (in)tangibility of artistic expression — we must be wary of their blind loyalty to the self. Analog Horror MUST be an extension of ALL who see it. 

While the use of the second-person perspective might appear like an exercise in self-obsession, in reality, it is a vehicle for communal experience. By placing one’s self as both the audience and the participant, the interpretative power of the form increases tenfold, and not only transcends the individual’s fear of obliteration but manifests the collective terror as well.  

It is the works of Local 58, Gemini Home Entertainment, and ALEXKANSAS that exemplify what Analog Horror can and should be: explorations of the flimsy veil of nostalgia that protects conventional suburbanites from their own tangible anxieties. 

And even as the aesthetics of Analog Horror flood into less niche online spaces (Brian David Gilbert of Polygon fame), the capability of the form does not dampen. It continues to press against the perceived security of memory, driving its sharp tendrils through any open crack it can find and exploiting it to ensure a complete annihilation of our blindly sentimental sanctuary.      

But, of course, to limit Analog Horror to the confines of a visual medium would be incredibly reductive. Music has proven to serve as an equally productive addition to the form, with artists like Sewerslvt and James Ferraro distorting late-90s/early 2000s dance conventions (loud, repetitive bass, high hats, synths) into piercing, shrieking, echoing beasts bemoaning isolation, ostracization, and a growing realization that the monotony of capitalist life only leads to an unspeakable internal despair.  

As such, the limitations of Analog Horror cannot be defined. It is only a temporary stage of being; it must continually adapt or risk becoming stagnant and stale — uncompromising like those damn ivory tower surrealists. And while the threat of oversaturation is imminent (as it is with all avant-gardes), progress, even in mockery, serves the greater purpose of our movement. 

With each incarnation, each new form Analog Horror takes, we are one step closer to crushing our rose-tinted glasses and stepping into the future, eyes finally clear.  

Then forward, I call! Forward! To the apotheosis! 

29 December 2021