It’s Halloween, and YouTube is celebrating what might be the next big era of spooky content with a spotlight on analog horror.
Over the last couple of years, we’ve seen a handful of horror content creators get picked up for major Hollywood studio deals, including analog horror creator Kane Pixels, whose YouTube short films about the backrooms–a liminal space of seemingly endless, empty-yet-claustrophobic rooms with a vaguely corporate vibe–helped solidify the setting as a well-known internet phenomenon.
Kane Pixels is one of thousands of creators producing analog horror–lo-fi short films that usually involve found footage, unsettling audio, glitch imagery, and set dressings like manufactured product commercials and news reports, all used to tell an interconnected narrative that slowly pieces together.
Subscribe for daily Tubefilter Top Stories
Analog creators’ styles go back to found footage classics like the 1999 film The Blair Witch Project, and though found footage got a bit played out in mainstream horror after Blair‘s success, these creators are poised to take horror as a genre (which is currently in an art house age with films like It Follows, Get Out, Midsommar, His House, and Longlegs as prime examples) to new heights.
YouTube’s nod to all these creators comes in fitting form: It tapped Spencer Lackey, the creator behind analog series a/s/l, to host a 10-minute spotlight video in the style of analog horror, with Lackey plagued by mysterious forces while he reviews other creators’ shows.
The platform says it chose to spotlight analog because the genre has generated over 500 million views so far in 2024.
“The rise of Analog Horror is thanks to a community of passionate creators who are unafraid to experiment with their storytelling, and as a result, have produced unique entries into the genre,” it said. “From wandering liminal spaces to unnerving company introductory tapes, these videos lean into people’s anxiety of the unknown and deploy uncanny nostalgic visuals to create immersive world building that fills viewers with a slow burn sense of dread.”
Lackey himself counts for a few million of those views; he started uploading a/s/l in December 2023, and since then has grown the series’ dedicated channel to 108,000 subscribers and around 8 million views per month.
Other analog creators YouTube surfaced include:
- nana825763, who’s been posting various horror projects since 2006 and nets around 500K views a month
- Local 58, a TV news station spoof series that, at its peak, was bringing 500K views a month, and now, w without a single new video in two years, still brings 150K a month
- Doctor Nowhere, who’s been posting analog concepts since December 2023, and with only nine videos has gotten to 424K subscribers and 3M views a month
- The Greylock Tapes, a fictional government conspiracy series about the real Mount Greylock in Massachusetts; it began in March 2023 and, in 12 installments, has gotten to 100K subscribers and 250K views a month
- Midwest Angelica, who started uploading videos about “a corpse [that] descends from the cosmos…right into your backyard” in 2022 and has 112K views in the last 30 days
- and Kane Pixels himself, with 2.5M subscribers and 6M views/month
While these creators are current (or at least somewhat current) leaders in the analog horror genre, we’re surprised YouTube didn’t mention some of the older series that went viral and helped make a place for analog on the platform.
There’s maybe the biggest analog series of all time, Marble Hornets, aka the origin of Slenderman, which started in 2009 and became one of YouTube’s most well-known webseries, even outside the horror niche. Then Alex Kister‘s doppelgängers-are-replacing-you series The Mandela Catalogue, which began in 2021 and helped drive his channel to over a million subscribers and 55 million lifetime views. And also Gemini Home Entertainment, a spoof of 80s and 90s TV stations that began in 2019 and hasn’t updated since June 2023, but has 343K subscribers and still brings 200K views a month. (At its peak, it was getting 800K/month.)
Despite the missed mentions, YouTube’s decision to recognize some forefront creators of analog is yet another stamp of legitimacy for indie filmmakers we might see dominating theaters in the next decade. But even if they don’t end up going on to Hollywood–as that’s not every creator’s dream–it’s clear they’ll continue making some of the best spooky content out there.
