‘LOCAL58’ And The Birth of Analog Horror
There’s a very unique, often unsettling feeling that comes from waking up in the middle of the night with the TV still on. Whether it’s a blue light bathing the room after the end of a night’s programming, the jarring burst of sound from an advert that’s much louder than the show you were falling asleep in front of, or that strange feeling of stumbling across something that you really shouldn’t be seeing. It’s this feeling that permeates “Contingency”, a YouTube horror short, and one of the most famous videos broadcast from LOCAL58, a fictional public access channel based in Mason County, West Virginia.
The Most Famous Episode of LOCAL58
At the beginning of “Contingency”, the title card for the station appears on screen, and the announcement that, at 3 AM (the time of this broadcast), broadcasting is over. Over a backdrop of the channel’s logo and the American flag, which looks a little decayed, torn, and fraying at the edges, there’s an all-caps declaration: THIS CONCLUDES OUR BROADCAST DAY. Then there’s a high-pitched whine of a lost signal, the crackling and coloured blocks of a weak broadcast.
Emerging from this is an emergency message, one not to be used after 11/13/1970, for when the US has surrendered to insurmountable enemy forces. Its message is simple: every US citizen must take their own lives, for the sake of the country. And this does have that uncanny feeling of something forbidden that’s been stumbled upon; a broadcast that ought to be locked away somehow being shown. This feeling is at the heart of LOCAL58, and the analog horror genre that it helped to codify a decade ago.
A New Form Of Horror
There’s a formal complexity to analog horror; often using ideas of found footage—the LOCAL58 broadcasts, or documentation from alternate reality in web series like The Monument Mythos and The Mandela Catalogue—and lo-fi aesthetics and visual language to create uncanny horror, with the visual language and coherence of a video often decaying as it goes on.
In “Contingency”, the broadcast becomes increasingly violent, increasingly unhinged; what begins as an explanation of the broadcast becomes a series of brutal instructions and unsettling fragments of text: THIS MESSAGE WILL REPEAT UNTIL THERE ARE NONE LEFT TO READ IT. It’s this degradation of both the form and content of analog horror that makes it so unsettling, often tied to the technology at the heart of the shorts.
You Are On The Fastest Available Route
Nowhere is this at its most abundant and effective than in the LOCAL58 short ‘You are on the fastest available route,’ which follows an ill-fated driver as their GPS takes them off the beaten track and towards something monstrous and deadly. These include instructions like “follow signs for do not enter,” or “turn off your headlights” (which the driver does). ‘fastest available route’ captures what makes LOCAL58 so unsettling; the way it captures the degradation of this technology, and the way it seems to be overwhelmed by a hostile, otherworldly force.
There’s a deep lore and ongoing story to LOCAL58, at a scale that might seem surprising given the brevity of the videos themselves. Each video is full of cryptic references to the moon and the night sky as some kind of supernatural entity, brainwashing viewers of the station. In the ‘Weather Service’ short, the station seems to be attempting to communicate with viewers, in tension with an outside force that’s attempting to hijack the broadcast.
Analog Horror And Elaborate Lore
This elaborate continuity appears throughout the analog horror that’s sprung up online in the past decade. The Monument Mythos is the exploration of an alternate United States history where statues and monuments are imbued with a kind of cosmic horror. Both that series and The Mandela Catalogue deal with alternative timelines, the found footage acting as relics or pieces of hidden knowledge. This is more oblique in LOCAL58, and is at its most effective when something seemingly normal becomes corrupt and degraded.
The short “Night Walk” does this to great effect. Beginning with the airing of a 1977 documentary about supernatural sightings in the West Virginia town where the station is based, it introduces The Woman in Profile, a figure from urban myth. This documentary broadcast is intercut with home video footage of someone who sees The Woman in Profile off in the distance. But the closer he gets, the more her strange form becomes clear.
The Progenitor of LOCAL58
While this particular brand of horror mostly exists online, and is born from the traditions of internet culture—LOCAL58 is a spin-off from an earlier creepypasta by creator Kris Straub —its genesis can be seen in a very specific combination of found footage and mockumentary: the BBC film Ghostwatch (1992), where Michael Parkinson, playing himself, hosts a TV show about finding a ghost in a suburban British home. Like the internet analog horror that would come in its wake, Ghostwatch uses the trappings of reality and found footage as the basis for its horror (and the legitimacy that Parkinson, an institution in British broadcasting, brings to the affair) in a way that forces you to question what’s real and what isn’t.
An early scene in Ghostwatch shows Parkinson and his panellists discussing footage of the allegedly haunted house on Foxhill Drive, one where viewers are calling in to insist that they’ve seen a figure standing in the corner of the room. And it seems, only when they go back to the room, does the figure emerge. There’s a constant second-guessing of what’s true, even as the show increasingly leans into the fictional. Certain LOCAL58 episodes do this as well. “Contingency” goes to a place that seems too unreal. But the thrill, the uncertainty, exists in the build-up to that moment. Horror is often described as a rollercoaster ride, something frightening but safe. Here, analog horror acts like a kind of magic trick: you allow yourself to be deceived.
Analog Horror In Contemporary Genre Cinema
One of the best contemporary continuations of analog horror engages with this deception and the idea that what you’re seeing is a dark magic trick: Late Night with the Devil. The 2024 found footage film presents a “real” broadcast of Night Owls, a late-night show hosted by Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian), the program itself interspersed with behind-the-scenes footage, and station title cards that feel deeply reminiscent of LOCAL58.
The viewer and the studio audience become complicit victims as the narrative goes on and, like Ghostwatch and LOCAL58, Late Night With The Devil also presents an escalation in its final act that becomes so wild that its formal constraints seem unable to hold it; the spell is broken and becomes something else. Here, Delroy experiences a long night of the soul as a demonic presence threatens to overwhelm him and his show. It feels deeply reminiscent of the Ghostwatch climax, this moment where the facade of realness must fall away in order to contain the horror.
LOCAL58 and The Unknowable Legacy of Analog Horror
The legacy of analog horror—whether in its codifiers as an internet sub-genre like LOCAL58, or the more traditional films that came before and after it—will always be a difficult thing to define. This is a horror that can only ever exist with an eye towards the past, as lo-fi aesthetics and the degradation of old school media (terrestrial broadcasts and VHS tapes; early GPS technology and public service bulletins) are instrumental in its language.
The question of how a genre like this can evolve is a curiosity that we’re still seeing unfold in a wave of films that seem to want to haunt more contemporary technology (the Zoom found footage Host, and minimalist Skinamarink). But for this genre to work, it needs to find a way to the technology that is one generation older than we are, in order to create that uncanny feeling of stumbling across something forbidden in the middle of the night, something strange and decaying that we’re unable to look away from.
Categorized: Editorials
