Horror storytelling

Analog horror: make every damaged frame matter

A battered recording needs a history, an audience, and something worth losing. Build a short analog-horror scene around those choices before reaching for more static.

Whimsical Woes editorial · November 2, 2026

A VHS filter can make a grocery list look ominous. It cannot decide why somebody recorded the list, who kept it, or what has vanished between copies. Those are story decisions. Analog horror becomes more interesting when the recording has something to do and the damage changes our ability to understand it. More static is a very convenient way to avoid deciding what the clear picture would mean.

UNESCO’s October 27 World Day for Audiovisual Heritage offers a useful prompt after Halloween: recordings matter because they preserve things people value. Its 2026 coverage concerns safeguarding memory at risk. That is a better starting point for a fictional tape than assuming everything old is sinister. Give somebody a reason to have made it, and somebody else a reason to want it back.

1. Decide what the recording was meant to accomplish

For an original exercise, invent a miniature railway club’s closing-instructions video. Its audience is a volunteer who already knows the layout. It shows how to count the carriages, check a signal, and switch off the display. Ordinary competence gives the video its rhythm. We need to understand what a successful evening looks like before a departure from it can carry much weight.

Now add one instruction: wait for the last passenger. The railway is a model. It does not carry passengers. That small disagreement is the beginning of a story, not its complete explanation. Who recorded the instruction? Has the volunteer misunderstood its audience? Is the tape describing another version of this place? Pick one question to develop rather than answering all three with a file of monster facts.

2. Give the damage a particular consequence

The Canadian Conservation Institute’s VHS bulletin describes dropout as a brief signal loss, with possible causes including debris, physical damage, and lost magnetic material. Its listed appearances include streaks or spots and brief audio loss. These are specific failures, rather than a general instruction to make the whole image fuzzy. The technical distinction is useful to an artist even when the fictional recording is made digitally.

Choose one missing piece for the railway tape. Perhaps the picture briefly disappears while a hand points toward a platform; the voice continues normally. The instruction survives but its destination does not. A different version could preserve the platform and lose one important word. Those versions create different problems. Neither requires every surface to wobble throughout the scene. The effect earns its place by changing what the volunteer can do.

3. Choose a constraint you can actually use

LOCAL58 creator Kris Straub explained in his 2019 process post that early work used iMovie, with a later move to Final Cut Pro for faster repetitive tasks. He valued finding possibilities inside a tool’s limits. That is a useful production lesson without turning a particular program into a requirement. A small set of images can be enough if their order changes what we understand.

In his 2024 AMA, Straub also described an early restriction against speaking voices, later abandoned because it became too limiting. Constraints can be revised. For this exercise, try three still images and one recorded instruction. If the crucial distinction needs a fourth image, add it. The point is to make a deliberate choice, rather than proving that suffering through an inconvenient rule makes better art.

Storyboard the clear version first

Draw the club’s ordinary closing procedure in three panels. Then draw the same panels with the passenger instruction. Finally, remove one piece of information from the middle panel. Ask another person what they think the volunteer knows at each stage. If the only answer is that something looks creepy, the sequence may need a clearer relationship between its parts. Confusion about what a character should do is more useful here than difficulty reading every word.

There are limits to this approach. Not every horror image needs to become a solvable clue, and sheer texture can be expressive. An obsession with perfectly explained equipment can squeeze the dream out of a scene. Use the technical detail to control an uncertainty you care about; leave room for the image to suggest more than its mechanism accounts for. This is one method, not a definition of the entire genre.

Keep the maker visible outside the fiction. In that same AMA, Straub explicitly defended credits and described his work as horror fiction rather than a hoax. An unsettling imagined archive does not need to erase its actual artist. Our Ghostwatch and Stories Untold reviews explore other troubling relationships with media; the video-essay guide can help turn this railway exercise into an argument someone can follow. Let the recording keep its mystery. Let the person who made it keep their name.

Questions from the crypt

Do I need a real VHS camera to make this kind of analog horror?

This exercise can be built with digital editing and original still images. Straub’s account of early LOCAL58 work describes ordinary editing software, not a requirement to obtain a particular camera. Choose tools that let you control the sequence and the information it withholds.

Should tape damage hide the monster?

It can, but that is only one use. In the original railway example, damage removes a destination or an important word, changing an instruction. Ask what information the effect takes away and why that loss matters to the character.

Does analog horror have to pretend it is real?

No. Straub explicitly distinguishes horror fiction from a hoax and argues for crediting its makers. Fictional presentation can sustain a mystery while the work’s description and credits make authorship clear.