Matt: Who is it?
W…Who’s there?
Monster: It’s me, Matthew.
Matt: Who?
Monster: It’s you.
Me.
Matthew.
Matt: Who are you?
Who are you!?
Monster: It’s time for you to RECORD THE EPISODE, Matthew.
Matt: No!!
No, You stay away!
YOU STAY AWAY!
NO!!!
*MatPat Breathing heavily*
Hello Internet.
Welcome to Film Theory, the show that definitely isn't standing right behind you.
If you've spent any time watching the Channel recently, you know that we are in love with
the world of analog horror.
There are countless incredible independent filmmakers here on YouTube telling some of
the most compelling and scariest stories in modern entertainment right now.
I'm talking stuff like the Walton files, the Backrooms, the Mandela catalog, stories that
all have an iconic look and feel because they're largely set in the eighties, nineties and
early aughts.
This was a time when video tech was first becoming widely available and finding its
footing.
Camcorders were giant boxes that you had to cart around with you.
and if you actually wanted to film something, well, you also had to bring along a library's
worth of physical tapes to record on.
No exaggeration.
My family had a literal cooler sized bag just to carry everything we needed to film, like
30 minutes of the family Christmas.
And even then, the footage we got was ROUGH.
When something moved, the footage got blurry.
When it was dark, it got grainy.
Most of the time you just left what you shot on the recording tapes because transferring
it to an actual VHS tape you could play required a masters degree in arranging wires and cables
from the camcorder to the VCR.
And then once you actually watched what you made, your mileage varied.
I’m guessing no one watching right now has ever even heard of a tracking button on a
remote control before, rights?
That ringing bells for anyone?
Well, you know, those blurry lines that go across the screen and pretty much all analog
horror uploads.
Those were most often caused by a misalignment of the tape inside the VHS and the playback
head inside the VCR.
And tracking was the button that used to help sync those two things up.
This is the awkward puberty era of tech that I'm talking about, and that's what I love
about these analog horror series.
They're videos that take the early limitations of tech from the era and use them to create
genuine, authentic, memorable scares.
Now, at the top of the episode, you heard that this video is being sponsored by the
Google Pixel 7 pro.
In fact, that whole opening was filmed on the phone's camera, a camera that just has
a ton of amazing features.
We had to work really hard to make the footage from this thing look old and scary, like analog
horror.
Just take a look at this.
This is the final shot, but watch as we remove one filter, two, get rid of the vignette and
a final effect.
Boom.
This is the original footage that we were working with and it looks fantastic.
Which got me thinking what would modern analog horror look like?
The esthetic of analog horror is built off these technological limitations of eighties
and nineties home video: Motion blur, no ability to see in the dark, things that are just barely
visible off in the distance.
But those limitations don't exist today.
Just look at the Google Pixel 7 pro, a phone small enough to fit in your pocket, but equipped
with a camera smart enough to challenge tech ten times its size.
Motion blur isn't a problem because it has image stabilization.
In fact, the blur is in your control with features like Cinematic Blur, keeping the
subject in focus and blurring the background.
Is it too dark?
Not a problem.
The Google Pixel 7 Pro has night sight, where you can take a picture in almost absolute
darkness and still wind up with something to show for it.
Oh, is there something off in the distance that's too far to truly make out?
Again, it's not a problem.
This itty bitty piece of tech now has a five time zoom telephoto lens and records in 4K,
so that scary pile of pixels off in the woods is just the non scary pile of rocks that it
always was.
I gotta be honest with you, we have great cameras here in the studio to film on, but
most of the shoots that we do at this point are on pixel phones because the cameras are
high quality, they're easy to use and they're smart.
The shots look better because the camera is largely doing a lot of the work for us.
So this then begs the question, is modern technology too good to make effective analog
horror?
Could an analog horror series take place in the modern day when everyone in their grandmother
has access to a high quality camera sitting in their pocket?
Today we're looking at the tropes of analog horror to see what the equivalent would be
if it was themed around today.
In 20 to 30 years.
When people look back at this era of entertainment, what will the retro tech horror stories look
and feel like?
Curl up and hide under the blankets loyal theorists, we're about to find out.
So before we can really jump into the idea of modern tech being too good to make analog
horror, we should first take a step back to fully understand what makes the eighties and
nineties tech so perfect for this type of storytelling.
Like I mentioned in the intro, series like The Walton Files, Back Rooms, Mandela catalog,
all of them were made to look like they were filmed on ancient camcorders.
They have that iconic, jittery, blurry VHS look.
This sort of technology became cheap enough to mass produced by the 1980s and were fairly
common by the 1990s.
That's why so many of these series take place in this era of content.
It's also where we get the “analog” part of the label “analog horror”.
These old camcorders used analog signals to write information onto actual magnetic strips.
An analog signal is basically some sort of thing that constantly changes to represent
different data points.
This could be the heights or frequencies of wavelengths, like with radio signals.
or even stuff.
That's simple, like a record where it reads the heights of grooves on the record and then
translates that into an audio output.
Because analog recordings are literal waves, there's an infinite amount of detail that
you get in there, but it also makes it more likely to have interference like you see with
television static.
That's why old TVs had antennas that you could use to fine tune the signal.
By contrast, digital signals are discrete packages that are stored as units of ones
and zeros.
A digital recording takes snapshots of the analog signal at a certain rate, the higher
rate, the closer to the original signal you're going to get instead of encoding information
onto a physical tape like with analog, digital signals store it onto memory cards.
Anyway, at that time, analog tapes had the potential to be decent quality.
But it turns out that the tech wasn't exactly the ideal solution for long term storage.
See, magnetic tape begins to degrade after 10 to 20 years if it isn't stored properly,
meaning the footage gets blurry, it
gets glitchy, corrupted.
Here's a friendly reminder to convert all your old home videos into digital if you haven't
already here, folks.
What's more, the footage from these old cameras and camcorders was often interlaced.
Have you ever pause an old video and noticed that any motion blur seems to have this weird
series of horizontal lines running through it?
That means that the footage was interlaced.
Each single frame of the video only had about half the information needed for the full image.
The rest of the image used the previous frame, meaning that any motion would be slightly
offset and thus the horizontal lines.
This drastically cut the amount of data needed for the full video, making it easier to both
store and broadcast.
But it also resulted in huge losses in quality.
The opposite of this is known as Progressive Scan, where an entire images worth of video
is shown in each individual frame.
You ever notice when you select the quality of a YouTube video, it says something like
1080P?
Well, the “P” stands for Progressive Scan, and almost all video shot today uses that
as the standard.
Regardless, the lower quality interlaced video being played on a big old CRT screen helped
to create the iconic, flickering look that we now
associate with old videos from this era.
And you see, that's why it works so well for horror made on a budget.
Not only is this sort of technology really cheap nowadays, but the look is easy to recreate
in post-production using modern editing software.
Like here, our editors just threw a bunch of effects on this to make it look like an
old VHS.
And it's, what, like two layers in after effects?
This lets young filmmakers create something that's immediately stylish, atmospheric, set
in a clear time and place in history.
What's more important, though, is that they're also able to use this esthetic to amplify
what makes the series scary.
This look creates an intentional lack of clarity.
See, when you introduce a scary idea, but you don't show that scary thing.
What your audience imagines in their head is far more horrifying than anything you could
possibly come up with yourself.
It doesn't matter what medium you're in.
The idea is used to great effect in the Cthulhu Mythos books, and a ton of the most iconic
horror movies of all time have embraced this exact idea.
Is your mechanical shark animatronic not working?
Don't worry.
Just don't show the shark for the majority of the movie and it's going to wind up being
way more effective and way scarier.
And it's this lack of clarity that really intensifies the actual horror that analog
horror is based on that what's familiar can be deadly.
Look at the three series that I keep using as examples.
The Mandela catalog is all about our friends and neighbors being impostors.
The Walton Files is about a family friendly burger restaurant that turns deadly, and the
back rooms is about the horror of mundane walls and fluorescent lights.
These aren't supernatural creatures.
These are series that rely on the normal people and places around us, but made unnatural and
scary.
This idea that the familiar can hurt you is probably best exemplified by another trend
that came out of this era.
Stranger danger.
Though the term dates back all the way to the 1960s, it didn't catch fire until 1979,
when a child in Manhattan was tragically kidnaped while walking to school.
News media grabbed hold of the story, who spread it nationwide and soon began widely
reporting similar cases of missing kids.
This culminated in 1982, when it was widely reported that nearly 50,000 American children
were being kidnaped by strangers every year.
And just so we're crystal clear on this, that number is wildly inflated, but it managed
to cement the idea that all strangers can be potentially dangerous in the minds of the
nation.
And there were PSAs and school assemblies drilling that idea into people throughout
the eighties and nineties, even up through the mid 2000s.
But these analog horror series also play off another innate human fear, the uncanny valley.
This is a phenomenon that many psychologists have noticed where people have strong negative
reactions to things that look almost human but
aren't quite all the way there.
Insert any low budget, poorly executed CGI here.
But again, this is where analog horror shines.
Without the budget to pay for pristine, photorealistic computer generated worlds, these stories lean
into the unsettling nature of things that are slightly off from reality.
The alternates from Mandela catalog are stretched, deformed human monsters.
They're almost human, but not quite.
The animatronics of Walton's restaurants exhibit jerky movements and speak in dead, emotionless,
prerecorded phrases.
The Backrooms takes the generic office layout, but then twists it into something that's not
built by human hands.
Something that on the surface looks familiar.
But where the nuances don't match up, the layout doesn't quite work with what those
spaces would actually look and feel like if it was actually made by humans.
Things are just slightly off, which keeps us off balance and nervous.
But having laid all of that out, you can start to see the problem here, right?
Modern technology just isn't super compatible with that flavor of classic analog horror.
Our cameras are too good and there's just a lot of them everywhere.
And even if you are working with older, blurry footage today, there are upscaling programs
that are able to use complex algorithms to increase the quality of footage near flawlessly.
So if we were to sit here and think about what modern analog horror would be, what would
it look like if current analog horror thrives on the limitations of
the technology from the past?
What will the creators of the future be?
Leading to scare us with stories about today.
Since clarity of image isn't an issue anymore, we need to find something about contemporary
technology that IS scary.
Honestly, I had to really think about this one.
I mean, there are some obvious answers, like social media and that everyone shares a ton
of information about themselves online and not everyone is what they seem.
But that's not super unique.
Those stories are already being told by Hollywood.
We all understand the scare potential there.
It's also not a true parallel to analog horror.
Again, the genre is about the limitations of filming equipment, equipment that today
seems to have no limitation.
And therein lies the answer, I think.
That right there is the point.
Not that the video gets blurry in the dark or that a shaky camera obscures the movement
of a monster as it comes towards you.
In an ironic twist where analog horror, as we know it's rooted in the limitations of
technology from the eighties and nineties.
I expect creators of analog horror in the future to lean into the idea that technology
became too good in the 2020s, that what we define as photo realism has actually evolved
beyond reality now able to create realities that never even existed in the first place.
What made me think of this was actually the Pixel 7.
There's this feature in the camera called Magic Eraser, which lets you go into your
photos after you take them to remove small objects in the background.
It does this using AI, filling in the space left by the object with information about
the space around it.
It is, without exaggeration, an incredible tool.
It helps you to create the perfect moment, even if you weren't able to capture it at
the time.
I cannot tell you the amount of times that Steph and I have woken up at 4 a.m. just to
get a picture in front of some landmark without hordes of people lingering in the
background.
Magic Eraser solves that problem instantly, getting me extra sleep while we're on vacation,
which I am so thankful for.
But Magic Eraser also shows how instantaneous this sort of tech is getting.
Literally, you rub your finger and stuff in the background disappears.
It erases people out of a moment in time.
It is literally creating a new reality with just the touch of a finger.
And sure, this sort of stuff has always been possible to some extent, thanks to photo editing
software.
But the ease and speed at which it's possible now with the Magic Eraser is incredible.
And we're not just talking about correcting photos either.
I'm sure you've seen the news about A.I.
with the ability to create artwork from using just a few key words.
My friends over at Corridor Digital have been experimenting with this sort of content creation
for a while now.
And let me tell you, A.I.
Image Generation is even getting to a point where you feed it a bunch of pictures of an
individual person and you can get it to spit out high quality artistic interpretations
of that person in
almost any style you want.
No joke.
Companies are already starting to talk to me about how this sort of technological advancement
could be used to automatically generate video thumbnails in the near future.
And it's not just stopping at still images either.
We've already done two episodes dedicated to the ways that Hollywood is taking people's
likenesses and putting them onto other bodies, how we're now able to synthesize voices from
audio clips, things like that.
There are even computer programs that allow you to take the voices of real people and
convert them into A.I.
voices so you can then get
those voices to say anything you want.
And again, people are contacting me about this exact sort of thing so that my auto generated
voice can exist forever reading these scripts as the eternal online theorist.
And this is no longer a cumbersome process either.
It's getting to the point where you can literally deepfake someone in real time on video calls.
I mean, can you imagine how frightening it would be if these technologies combined and
you could speak with someone's actual voice and face?
That's not only terrifying, it's also incredibly believable in the near future.
And if I were to make any sort of modern analog horror set in the present day, it would embrace
this technology for its storytelling.
It would have to be about “A.I. is creating a reality that was never actually real in
the first place”.
So say we wanted to make something similar to the Mandela catalog.
The alternates, an intruder could be people deep faked in real time.
On the surface, they look normal, but something about them is just off.
Or they don't sound quite right.
It could be about tricking you into false memories, about your own life.
An A.I.
serving you up videos of things that you've said and done that you know that you have
never said or done before.
Your memory is being gaslit and your physical body being erased from moment in time that
you know you were there for.
But slowly, bit by bit, the evidence starts to stack up against you, pics or it didn't
happen, you know?
And the pics don't show you.
For whatever reason, the Backrooms are even easier to work with here.
Our running theory has been that the world of the Backrooms is just one big simulated
reality that's become glitched.
Something that becomes a lot scarier if we imagine an A.I.
overlord tweaking things and people in real time, changing a face here, creating a neighborhood
out of thin air there.
When it detects a problem, it overcorrects its reality, perhaps leading people to glitch
out in the first place.
Instead of the intentional lack of clarity like with the eighties and nineties era tech
here, we're leaning into the hyper reality of all of this.
There's too much detail, there's too much precision, so much, in fact, that you begin
to doubt yourself, your memories, your own identity.
Humans are fallible.
The computer's memory, meanwhile, is not.
The big themes of this modern analog horror would come down to having your viewers question
if what they're seeing is even real and whether or not we're just seeing a reality through
computers, or if we're seeing what's actually in front of our faces, now, THAT is terrifying.
Someone should probably do a series like that someday, huh?
But hey, you know what isn't scary?
The brand spanking new Google Pixel 7 Pro.
Real talk.
I adore the Google Pixel series of phones.
I've been using them since Gen one
and like I said at the top of the video, a lot of team theorist is like me and have been
using them for years.
Lee, who's been on the team longer than almost anyone here , he's been using a Pixel 2 XL
since it came out and loves it to pieces.
And after getting some hands on time with the Pixel 7 for this video, we can't wait
to upgrade and get one for himself.
The phone has a ton of other awesome new features that we didn't get a chance to touch on today,
including a live translation feature that can interpret and translate 48 languages in
real time.
There's also a live caption feature that basically takes any speech, audio running through the
phone and captions it in real time.
We use captions a lot during our research, so this one is a life saver.
Plus, the phone itself looks gorgeous.
There's this new metal bar running across the camera that not only offers protection
but also really pops against the color of the phone.
Looks awesome.
Again thank you so much to Google and the Pixel 7 pro for sponsoring this video and
letting us film this video.
And as always, remember, it's just a theory, A FILM THEORY, aaaaaaaand cut.