On the Semiotic Meaning of Analog Horror
Including some precautionary words on "Analog Horror" as an internet subgenre
I.
A while back, I wrote a little discussion on the horror film “The Ring” (2002), an American remake of a Japanese horror film. I called it an “Analog Media Horror Masterpiece,” and claimed that its high quality was to an extent accidental, since it didn’t seem as though the filmmakers were aware of what was making their own film work so well (many such cases, as we’ll see). At the time I wrote this thing, I was unaware of something I probably should have realized, namely that there already is a sub-genre called “analog horror,” and people talk about it all the time. In fact, among horror fans its conventions are well-known enough to generate mockery and satire. And this makes sense. I was aware of quite a few older online creepypastas in which American pop culture iconography is played for horror while accompanied by analog effects (like “Suicide Mouse,” a story of a mythical long-lost Mickey Mouse cartoon that causes people to kill themselves, the idea of which was later adapted into a static-filled, distorted video). And I knew of assorted creepy things that could have been classified as examples of “analog horror” (like the old, distorted, 78-RPM record soundtrack for BioShock, a metapolitical thriller video game about a zombie-filled underwater ghost city that was once a thriving metropolis based on Ayn Randian principles). But I simply hadn’t put two and two together.
Instead, I just tried to answer the question, “What makes analog media so scary in this one particular movie, and why would digital fail so badly to achieve the same effect?” So I wound up with this attempt at theorizing about it:
With a digital signal, information is converted into a finite series of discrete pulse units that manifest as 0s and 1s, or a binary sequence. Thus, the fluidity of the analog waveform is simplified into straight lines with right-angle edges, and only by making more and more pulse units within a given expanse of time can a digital signal adequately represent the original information. But because a digital signal is so easy to replicate, signal interference rarely happens, and thus there’s no more static; no more noise. Once the information is finally audible or visible, it returns to a fluid wave (since all waves in nature are fluid), but nonetheless, throughout the process it’s captured in an “unnatural” state. All of this is to say, an analog signal shows us more nakedly the transmission of information from the sender to the destination. It’s akin to a marionette show in which one can see the wires animating the puppets. The static on a television screen conveys the ambient noise that is always present in nature, no matter the circumstances.
In The Ring, the cursed two-minute video tape is continuously interrupted with little splotches of signal interference. It is book-ended by static, and when the time comes for someone to die, a television somewhere will show static at first, and then show images that are apparently so horrible that they physically kill the victim, warping his or her face and body into an unnatural shape. One might think that for an audience dimly aware that VHS tapes are about to go away, it might be a little reassuring that we’re dealing with “dead media” here. But not so. The static shows us something about the noise inherent in nature as well as the radiation inherent in the atmosphere, and thus we can make a thematic connection between the vengeful ghost and nature herself. The film’s total effect is to force us into a headspace in which we accept the premise that all forms of electronic information are linked; connected by some cosmic presence, and thus we can more readily accept the idea that the video and a phone call are part of the same process. In this mode of thinking, they each have the same location of origin: an electronic ghostly otherworld whose contours are everywhere and center, nowhere.
Not bad, if I say so myself. But I wasn’t addressing “analog horror” as a genre, so I’ll try to explain it here briefly. As an established genre, analog horror typically refers to short 2-20 minute web videos that often make up a series and resemble found footage material. One example is Local 58 TV, a YouTube channel featuring short unsettling videos that resemble broadcasts which one might’ve seen late at night on television in the early 1990s or so. Another is the Mandela Catalogue, which uses a nonlinear narrative format consisting of quite a bit of “found footage” to tell the story of a county in Wisconsin plagued by “alternates,” inhuman doppelgangers who assume the form of people whom they’ve tortured and displaced.
There are, of course, other elements at play in some of these kinds of “analog horror” presentations, since some make extensive use of body horror, surrealism, uncanny valley effects, and so on. But I think at the most basic level, analog horror registers as frightening because the final product shows its own traces of creation, and these traces are the distortions that come from nature’s own ever-present noise that pervades our atmosphere at all times. My explanation forms a stark contrast to the theories floating around that nostalgia plays a big role in the effect of analog horror, and it’s clear to me that this notion forms a guiding principle for many of the artists who try to make it. So, I’d like to restate my case that the inherent properties of the media are more significant in contributing to its effect than the feeling of the distant past. Although we do need to have some basic familiarity with the old analog technologies for the horrific effect to register, I don’t think the feeling of nostalgia is part of why analog horror works. I think the further away we as a society develop from the kind of primitive electronic media that analog horror features, the greater the potential it will have… but it won’t be for the reasons that many think, including its own creators.
II.
I was recently reading a mostly unimpressive book, Semiotics: The Basics by Daniel Chandler, 3rd ed. (2017), but there was at least one interesting section that stood out to me. It had to do with the principles of analog and digital information beyond electronic media. Chandler recognizes that in analog media, the waveforms being generated take the same shape as the waves one encounters in nature: they’re smooth and continuous. Although they’re merely an imitation, they’re still analogous to what’s actually in the atmosphere, hence the name analog. Digital, by contrast, chops up the waveform into discrete, angular pulses, as I said in the above block-quote.
As Chandler puts it,
We have a deep attachment to analogical modes and we have often tended to regard digital representations as less real or less authentic – at least initially (as in the case of the audio CD compared to the vinyl LP). The analogue–digital distinction (which generates a host of oppositional connotations) is frequently represented as natural versus artificial – a logical extension of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s argument that continuous is to discrete is as nature is to culture (1969, 28). The privileging of the analogical may be linked with the defiance of rationality in romantic ideology (which still dominates our conception of ourselves as ‘individuals’).
Now, already, you can see why I’m not too crazy about this book. Three parenthetical statements tucked into just three sentences, which sadly make up only about a third of the paragraph — who the hell edited this? Anyways, the point registers nevertheless. There’s a general awareness that analog suggests a form of representation closer to nature while digital is equally understood as a departure from it, and the preference for analog media is often held by romantic types. I could understand the argument that vinyl genuinely sounds better than compact disc, and the packaging does make for bigger cover art paintings to stare at while you listen to the music… but there are still certain people who prefer listening to tape cassettes over CDs (that is, if they’re going to purchase a physical music-containing artifact in the first place), so that’s a point in the author’s favor.
Chandler runs with the distinction of discreteness versus continuity that characterizes the analog-digital divide, applying it to all sorts of communication. But it’s important for me to mention that he couches the discussion under a broader section about codes. In structuralist semiotics, i.e. semiotics influenced primarily by Ferdinand de Saussure, a code is the arrangement of physical matter that allows a message to go through. It’s a governing system that supports the framework for communication. In a very loose sense, it’s just a set of conventions, and if I’m being honest, this tends to be the way cultural semioticians use the term. So, human “body language” is a code, spoken language is a code, and written language is also a code. And the concept can be applied to more minute subdivisions, as well. Within written language, additional codes can be found: phonetic alphabets, ideographic scripts, hieroglyphs/pictographic scripts, writing in manuscripts, writing on computer, writing on clay tablets, writing through the printing press, etc. etc.
One could criticize the manner in which semioticians use the term due to its imprecision, as it sometimes takes on a metaphoric quality, not referring to anything necessarily “physical” but rather a particular arrangement of physical properties that theoretically could have been used to construct some other code. In other words, the code and the message corresponds to the “ground and figure” of media ecology, but I don’t think cultural semioticians always adequately keep it that way, as sometimes a code seems to constitute its own message. For instance, comic books, baroque paintings, and paleolithic cave scrawls are all different “codes,” but do they remain that way if you’re accessing each of them on a computer screen? Technically there’s no meaningful physical difference between one and the other — it’s merely the idea of how they materially originated that makes them qualify as different codes.
Regardless of the conceptual blurriness, Chandler makes a number of interesting claims using the digital/analog distinction. For instance, he says that a denotative, precise code should be construed as “digital,” whereas a connotative, suggestive code is “analog.” So, while a clock with hour and minute hands is quite literally analog, its lack of discreteness and precision is reflected in how it presents a pie-shaped model of a whole 12-hour time cycle to the viewer, whereas a digital clock just shows the exact numbers without visually providing that holistic context.
Chandler takes this analog/digital binary further still. Gestures, facial expressions, posture, and voice intonation are all “analog” codes, because while they communicate plenty about the person to whom they belong — arguably more than spoken language, as various romantics and vitalists would surely agree — nothing in them is precise or otherwise reducible to a binary opposition. As he puts it,
Analogical signs (such as visual images, gestures, textures, tastes, and smells) involve graded relationships on a continuum. They can signify infinite subtleties which seem ‘beyond words’. Emotions and feelings are analogical. Unlike symbolic signs, motivated signs blend into one another. There can be no comprehensive catalogue of such dynamic analogue signs as smiles or laughs. Analogue signs can of course be digitally reproduced (as is demonstrated by the digital recording of sounds and of both still and moving images) but they cannot be directly related to a standard ‘dictionary’ and syntax in the way that linguistic signs can. This is of course a semiotic difference, not a shortcoming based on a linguistic benchmark, and it highlights the importance of a general model of the sign.
If you found the last few sentences confusing, I’ll level with you: I think the slipperiness of the whole idea of a “code” is showing here. Why does he bother to mention that you can digitally record an “analog” sign when we’re dealing with entirely different domains of signification? If you decide to watch Kramer vs. Kramer on a VHS tape, does that change the acting from how it would appear on a DVD, or something? I don’t think its possible to see “digital” and “analog” used in the way Chandler does as anything more than a metaphorical extension of its original meaning pertaining strictly to the wave forms captured in electronic technology.
But at the same time, that’s perfectly alright because metaphors can have great explanatory value, and I actually do think there’s some value to this one. It’s also important moreover to recognize that everything that we perceive in nature comes to us through fluid wave forms. Some say this means that everything we encounter, both audio and visual, is thus analog, but this is not right, since analog is merely analogous to what resides in nature, as it’s an imprecise representation. So technically nothing we actually encounter in our lives falls into either category of analog or digital. We’re dealing with context-specific categories here that don’t actually inform our perception at the most basic phenomenological level. So again, what matters is more the idea being invoked than whether the final product is actually digital or analog.
Now, having said all this, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that analog horror often involves the same lack of communicative clarity that Chandler describes when it builds up its overall effect. There’s a direct parallel between the noise and distortion that always resides in nature and the imprecision of how its birds and beasts communicate. Analog horror tends to honor this correspondence. For instance, there’s a somewhat popular YouTube five-minute short called “Doors,” and it relies on a person standing there with a creepy, unnatural smile for its climax (they also spoil it by blatantly showing it in the preview thumbnail, but whatever). In that little movie, you’ve got the ambiguity of the scary facial expression compounded by the feeling of uncertainty informed by the use of static, white noise, and VHS camcorder distortion. All of these things work well together.
Now, let’s complete Chandler’s metaphor by looking at what’s digital: if imprecise communication is “analog,” then any kind of precise, rigid communication is going to be “digital” by nature. Chandler goes on:
Although the appearance of the ‘digital watch’ in 1971, and the subsequent ‘digital revolution’ in audio- and video-recording have led us to associate the digital mode with electronic technologies, digital codes have existed since the earliest forms of language – and writing is a digital technology. Signifying systems impose digital order on what we often experience as a dynamic and seamless flux. The very definition of something as a sign involves reducing the continuous to the discrete.
Again, I’m not buying that writing is literally digital. But as a metaphor, there’s some value here. In the analog horror examples I’ve found most impactful, the use of language tends toward the open-ended. Another short, from Local 58 TV, comes in the form of a weather warning urging viewers not to stare at the moon because something dangerous will be happening, but then it devolves into a sort of obscure poetry about how they should, in fact, stare at it after all. There’s plenty of “digital” communication in the form of language, but when it becomes poetry, it’s in the spirit of “analog.”
Alternatively, in analog horror productions, the use of clear and precise communication, as in language, might struggle against the inscrutability of the analog artifact. The Ring, for instance, is very dialogue-heavy, and it takes the form of a mystery in which rational calculation ultimately falls victim to the eerie and inexplicable. In fact, this whole point about language is why I argued that the American version of The Ring (2002) was superior to the Japanese version (1997), which was itself probably superior to the original novel. In the original novel, the videotape that kills people explains to them with text on the screen that they have seven days to live. In the Japanese film, they change the text to a phone call from an evil demon girl, but they still have various words on the screen during the video. And in the American version, they eliminate words from the entire video altogether, and when the phone call is made, the girl simply says, “Seven days.” Murky and open-ended — an absolute minimization of “digital” communication in any sense of the word.
III.
Now, when looking for explanations as to why analog horror works as well as it does, I find myself pretty unconvinced by the most popular one. In this long YouTube documentary on analog horror, the interview subjects all appear to agree: nostalgia is the key to its success. Some of these guys are creators of popular analog horror series themselves, and they mostly share personal memories of being little children and watching VHS tapes and antenna television, and that sort of thing. But the documentarian surely understands that these series are popular among young kids from Gen-Z who never actually had such memories, and so he builds on their point by introducing the concept of “collective nostalgia” (which seems to be a term often used in academic writing on political psychology), as well as anemoia, the feeling of nostalgia for things one hasn’t directly experienced. Now, don’t get me wrong: collective nostalgia is an intriguing concept, but I don’t think it needs to be invoked here. The reason analog horror works is in the simple fact that it involves both analog media and “analog” communication, to borrow Chandler’s metaphor.
To start off with a seemingly obvious point: how can analog horror be nostalgic when the whole idea of it is that these sorts of media are inherently unsettling? Is anyone actually saying to themselves, “Boy, oh, boy… take me back to the good old days when I was a little boy in my pajamas, and I’d put a VHS tape into the VCR, and then the FBI copyright warning would show up before the movie… ah, memories… and, furthermore—oh, I know! I’ll watch something about how all of that’s actually bad!” I just can’t believe it. To the extent that horror invokes the past, it’s generally anti-nostalgic, if anything at all. It corrupts one’s nostalgic feelings rather than nurtures them. And that’s really part of its value; it’s something we should all be celebrating, especially since nostalgia badly distorts one’s ability to think clearly about the past. But even then, typically when horror creators consciously try to be anti-nostalgic, it still messes up their work by removing the element of horror altogether. One of the problems with analog horror as an internet genre is that sometimes it’s merely interesting rather than frightening. Worst of all, the endorsement of “nostalgia” from both its creators and critics contributes to an environment in which we’re getting painfully stupid cash-grab movies like Winnie The Pooh: Blood and Honey (2023) and Mickey’s Mouse Trap (2024) — the latter of which hasn’t been released yet at the time of this writing but is guaranteed to suck.
The other big problem with this argument is that analog distortion has been used for horror long before analog media became outdated. One of the first movies I can think of in which TV static was used to unsettling effect was Poltergeist (1983), in the scene where the static comes on as the TV stations have gone off the air, some ghosts come out of it, and the little girl says, “They’re here.” No one was nostalgic for TV static then, because it was a regular part of people’s everyday viewing experience. Additionally, The Ring and The Blair Witch Project both came out at a time in which people were still regularly renting and purchasing VHS tapes. So it clearly isn’t the “pastness” of analog media that matters here, as much as people may want to insist upon it.
Instead, I think it has a lot more to do with the more direct closeness to nature that analog media of all forms suggest. There is always noise in nature, and there’s always lots of uncertainty. And analog horror, when it’s executed well, has plenty of both. What makes analog horror work is therefore in no way a departure from the time-tested components of what makes horror work in general. The horror genre, we should always recognize, thrives on uncertainty. Think of Night of the Living Dead (1968). Why are there zombies? What exactly is happening? A satisfactory explanation is never given. There’s no elaborate back story or anything like that — just the vague implication that perhaps radiation from an exploding space probe brought the dead back to life, a theory mentioned just once and whose dubiousness is laid bare from the onset. But the problem with horror is that when any franchise grows and expands, the fans show interest in the “lore,” which is really just an extended set of explanations for every little once-obscure detail, and when the producers acquiesce, that’s right about when the value of the original product has been tarnished.
We’re currently living in the digital era — a time in which noise and uncertainty are more unsettling to people than ever before. Nowadays, when people discuss a topic and there arises a mild dispute over an unimportant factual detail, it’s not uncommon for someone to whip out his smart phone, look up the information, and delay the conversation by a good 30 seconds or so just to get that one trifling controversy settled. The German quasi-occultist Rudolf Steiner predicted in the early 20th century that our era would be the age of Ahriman, and it would be an age characterized by an excess of rationality and factual certainty that atomizes people and makes them less communicative, even as language grows increasingly precise and the sum total of our knowledge expands. Looking at how people form micro-communities on the internet, I find it difficult to argue with his point.
So when something like analog horror becomes a trend, I just don’t get the sense that it’s all about the scary return of the 1980s, or something like this. The use of old records, VHS tapes, and other antiquated media instead function as a reminder of something more basic and more important: namely, that despite our best attempts to create a world of absolute certainty and clarity, and our overwhelming faith in digital technology as the means with which to do it, there’s still an inalienable primordial chthonic force lurking underneath the surface, underneath every piece of information we take in. And although I think in the future it will become harder to find a motivated reason for using analog effects to engender a sense of horror in a mainstream movie, web video, video game, or whatever, I nevertheless don’t think the effects themselves will become any less unsettling — quite the opposite; they’ll only grow creepier.
I’m writing this, by the way, at a time in which horror movies are becoming increasingly stupid — I’m expecting a sizeable backlash pretty soon — and lots of people who once trumpeted the greatness of analog horror subgenre in particular are now saying it’s also becoming pretty dumb. So consider this post my friendly attempt at a memorandum not just about why analog horror makes intuitive sense, but also more broadly about how horror works in general, and why we ought to do it a proper service. Analog effects aren’t about reminding the viewer of any particular moment in history; they’re about reminding the viewer of something much deeper, something that only horror can adequately convey. “Monster” derives from the Latin “monēre” — to remind.