Analog horror
Horror told through fake broadcasts, VHS tapes and emergency alerts posted online, where the degraded format carries the dread.
Analog horror passes itself off as old media: a TV station's late-night feed, a public information film, a training tape, an emergency alert. The stories are short and rarely explained. Static, tracking errors, test cards and blunt on-screen text do most of the telling, and the viewer is left to work out what went wrong.
The name comes from Kris Straub's YouTube series Local 58, which billed itself as "Analog horror at 476 MHz" and, from 2015, did most to popularise the form. It had forerunners: Steven Chamberlain's No Through Road (2009) on YouTube, the Polish channel Kraina Grzybów TV (2013), and fake broadcasts on television such as Ghostwatch (1992). Straub's own Candle Cove, a 2009 story about a children's show that was only static, set out many of its ideas in prose.
Local 58 led to a wave of series on YouTube, among them The Mandela Catalogue and Gemini Home Entertainment, and Kane Parsons's Backrooms videos became an A24 feature in 2026.
Films to start with
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.
Nearby
Movements, forms and techniques that share filmmakers or methods with this one.