Kris Straub
- 2015Weather Service
- 2016Contingency
- 2018Show for Children
- 2019Skywatching
A webcomic artist who makes three-minute hijacked TV broadcasts, and whose channel's tagline gave analog horror its name.
Straub was born in Los Angeles in 1979 and made his name in webcomics. He started Checkerboard Nightmare in 2000 and Starslip in 2005, then ran the black-and-white gag strip Chainsawsuit for 11 years from 2008. In 2012 he began Broodhollow, a serial horror comic.
In 2009 he posted Candle Cove on Ichor Falls, his horror fiction site, under a Creative Commons licence. It reads as a forum thread where people remember a children's puppet show that, it turns out, was only ever static. Fans copied it across the web, and Syfy adapted it as the first season of Channel Zero, which premiered in October 2016.
Local 58 grew out of Candle Cove. Its first videos, Weather Service in October 2015 and Contingency in January 2016, went up on Chainsawsuit Original, a channel Straub co-owned, and the series moved to its own LOCAL58TV channel in 2017. Each short plays as the feed of a West Virginia TV station whose signal keeps being taken over, and Straub writes and edits them from stock, public domain and his own footage. The channel's tagline, "Analog horror at 476 MHz", gave the genre its name.
Films
Where to start with Kris Straub, in the order they were made. Runtimes are approximate.
Weather Service
A late-night schedule is cut off by emergency alerts warning viewers not to look at the night sky, while a second voice seizes the broadcast and tells them to go outside. It ends on a live shot of the Moon.
Contingency
After sign-off, colour bars give way to a government message set to the national anthem, telling Americans to die rather than live under a foreign army. The station then calls it a hoax, over a slide telling it to say exactly that.
Show for Children
A rubber-hose cartoon skeleton, drawn by Straub and scored with a Carl Stalling cartoon soundtrack from 1935, peers into open graves. The music drops out and the drawings turn real.
Skywatching
An amateur astronomer's camcorder footage replaces a stargazing programme. He zooms in on the Moon, which grows larger as a siren starts up.
CLOSE
The longest Local 58 piece, a mock livestream of a space probe landing on a spinning comet nicknamed the Comet Skull. The picture and sound break up the closer it gets.
Night Walk
A 1977 local documentary about sightings of a figure in profile, staring at the sky at twilight, cuts to a 1996 home video of someone trying to talk to her.