Eno's Razor
On the trend of "Analog Horror" and how Brian Eno was right.
Content Warning: though the genre analog horror is known for his restrained use of graphic or violent imagery, this article does show screenshots of uncanny or otherwise potentially frightening/disturbing imagery which may be uncomfortable for some readers. Otherwise this one is pretty tame.
This article also contains spoilers for Maple County and Home Safety Hotline (2024).
Author’s Note
As I’m typing this, we just reached over 200 subscribers on Resident Anna! Now, I know that in the grand scheme of things, this number is not considered particularly large, but the fact that 200 people are interested in my analysis work is genuinely so heartwarming. I could fill a room at GDC with that amount of people! Yowza!
We’re still a couple months out from the official one-year anniversary of this blog’s existence, but I really want to thank you for reading and coming along on this journey with me. I promise that Resident Anna will always continue to be a free/PWYW publication. As I’ve always said: I’m the first person who is willing to yell about horror online for FREE, so put that in your orb and ponder it!
Thanks again, and without further ado: let’s get into it.
Overview
In his 1996 collection of essays, diary entries, and miscellaneous ramblings viscerally titled A Year With Swollen Appendices, musician Brian Eno staked a bold yet highly poignant claim about the evolution of media.
“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.”
- Brian Eno, A Year With Swollen Appendices
Though it’s not called this in any official capacity, from this moment forward, I’m going to be referring to this as “Eno’s Razor” (SHE SAID THE TITLE OF THE ARTICLE WHOOAAAA).
In the mid-1990s at the time of his writing, Brian Eno was living at the height of the VHS era. VHS (short for Video Home System), was a video-cassette-based system of film capture, and made watching recorded programs easier than ever before. Additionally with the invention of blank VHS tapes for "taping," a person could even pre-program their television to record broadcasts and save it for watch at a later date, if not indefinitely. I remember having done this with a specific episode of Avatar: the Last Airbender that I missed the premier of, and wanted to make sure I could still watch it the moment I got home from whatever surely important event had prevented elementary-school me from watching it in the first place.
At the time, VHS technology was the best option for watching anything. Entire franchises of rental stores such as Blockbuster and Hollywood Video populated urban sprawls and suburbs across the nation (if not the world), allowing for the closest thing to on-demand streaming that the time period could shoulder. And it was big business.
In retrospect, VHS was hardly the modern marvel that it had felt like at the time. Especially as they have aged, VHSes now appear grainy, are prone to skipping, and heaven forbid the tape gets uncoiled from its cassette. These days, they mostly can be found at Goodwills and garage sales. But the plastic squeak of opening a VHS case, the distinct hum of fast forwarding and rewinding, and even the way sound would distort on occasion have gone from an irritating annoyance to a fond memory. And with the return of "Y2K aesthetics" in the past few years, everything from VHSes to iPods are suddenly back en-vogue. People are finding them more endearing than the effortless, blemishless streamed-on-demand media of today.
In short: Brian Eno was right.
It’s Not A Phase, Mom!
Here at Resident Anna, we've talked pretty extensively about the indie horror scene in recent years. But one particular trend that we haven't addressed yet is colloquially referred to as "analog horror." (Hilariously, “Annalog Horror” was an alternate title I considered for this very blog, but was worried it might be too limiting.)
Similar to indie horror being reflective of "themes and variations" of current horror market trends, analog horror is the natural co-mingling of two existing trendy concepts of the 2000s-2010s: found-footage style horror content, and creepypastas.
The found footage film technique has been around for a while, but really cemented its place in the zeitgeist with 1999's The Blair Witch Project and subsequently Paranormal Activity in 2008. The way that these films mirrored the “home movies” of the era made the horror feel much more intimate, as though this wasn’t a million-dollar production, but instead something that someone down the street could have filmed in their everyday lives. Because million-dollar productions, they weren’t!
Found Footage horror movies really had their moment in 2008: a year of notorious financial upheaval the world-over. These films were relatively cheap and quick to film at a time when producers were looking for any way to cut corners. Found footage just made sense!
However, this genre’s primary filming technique known as “shaky-cam” (wherein a camera does not use a dolly, tripod, or any other stabilizing device) has been routinely criticized for its ability to induce motion sickness in some people, especially when combined with fast/jump-cuts from moment to moment. This creates a major accessibility concern.
Found footage movies naturally tended to gravitate toward supernatural forms of horror: from monsters, to witches, to zombies, and even demons. This is likely because these sorts of subjects can be easily conveyed with a lower production-value and practical effects, but it left a lot of viewers and critics dissatisfied. Many critics at the time said that these sorts of films were merely an adolescent media phase that we will likely just have to wait out.
And then the internet really took off.
Digital scary stories known as “creepypastas” (a portmenteau of “creepy” and “copypasta”) began to pop up on a specific host of message boards that will remain nameless on this particular blog. You can probably guess who it is.
These viral quips could be written and uploaded by anyone. Suddenly, bored teenagers and young adults around the world were logging on and telling scary stories around a digital campfire, illuminated by the light of their screens instead of flames. These internet urban legends often focused on a unique intersection of digital and supernatural elements, including bespoke creatures (such as the case with Marble Hornets and the Slender Man mythos), haunted or otherwise cursed pieces of technology (see Ben Drowned), or even old, forgotten, or abandoned media (see Candle Cove). And unlike how those film critics sneered back in the 2000s: this fixation on everything lowfi and supernatural was very much not a phase.
All of these combined with Eno’s razor would create an emerging genre that has reached a fever pitch since 2023: analog horror. As with its cousin mascot horror, this genre really took off thanks to YouTube. Since analog horror doesn't require much high-fidelity technology and can be uploaded by anyone online, it was a very approachable and accessible genre for anyone who wanted to try their hand at crafting a spooky, Y2K experience in their free time during the lockdown phase of the pandemic. The early 2020s gave us now-foundational analog horror series, such as Gemini Home Entertainment featured in the screenshot below, The Mandela Catalogue, and The Walten Files.
And where YouTube goes, the indie game space often reacts.
So let's take a look at a couple indie games within this space, and see how they play with, or interact with the "ugly, uncomfortable" elements of yesteryear's technology to create compelling, modern horror experiences.
Maple County
The Mandela Catalogue as mentioned above is a series of YouTube compilations made by filmmaker Alex Kister. They began primarily through a series of odd public service announcements, detailing an ongoing threat of something known as “alternates.” …And for some reason, they have emerged in Mandela County, Wisconsin.
Sure. Why not?
“Mandela” here is in reference to the social phenomenon of the Mandela Effect, where a large portion of the population has a false memory or false recollection of an event. It gets its name from the former President of South Africa Nelson Mandela, as the term originates with the popular false memory that he had passed away in the 1980s (when in reality, he didn’t die until 2013). Similar “glitch in the matrix” type viral posts, such as the Berenstain Bears thing tend to circulate quite frequently as “evidence” of the Mandela Effect - but that might give you a hint about these “alternates.”
Alternates appear to be similar to the folkloric tradition of having a supernatural double, often known by its German name: doppelgänger (literally “double-goer”). In various world folklores throughout history, these beings are not outright antagonistic. Sometimes they come bearing messages, as a premonition of the future, or a harbinger of death (as with the common superstition that if you and your double were to look at each other, one of you dies).
However, in The Mandela Catalog, alternates appear to be more of a Dostoyevsky sort of doppelgänger, wherein they are hostile and will seek out and kill the “original” and attempt to assume living their life. This short, An Unforseen Threat, is the first clip from The Mandela Catalogue Volume 1, and gives you a good overview of what alternates are and how they function in the series in just about sixty seconds.
The short indie game Maple County by Throne Baker is based around this Mandela Catalogue mythos, only alternates are threatening individuals of, where else: Maple County. While we don’t know for sure, we can infer that Maple likely borders Mandela County as they are experiencing a similar “threat.” Who knew Wisconsin was this cursed?
What makes Maple so engaging is the interactivity of the analog experience as opposed to the solely video-based Mandela Catalogue. The game is postured as a training module for staff of the Maple County Police department. It reminds me of those games or quizzes that would sometimes come on DVD “extras” menus, where you would use the play and pause buttons to make your selections. It’s the evocation of these nostalgic memories and the subversion of the almost childlike teaching that “the police are there to help you and always understand what’s going on” that makes this experience so unnerving.
A crackly recording of a man’s voice instructs the player to “select the image that is more unsettling” but to do so “on instinct alone.” Love when the police are told to act on instinct, am I right? :)
After a few rounds of this with increasingly uncanny/disturbing faces on the righthand side, the man’s recorded voice congratulates you - you completed the exercise! The player also gets a short lesson regarding “the threat,” which they are told is highly classified and has not yet been revealed by the media. Note the similarities to the information of An Unforseen Threat.
Cut intermittently with the phases of this module is the story of one young man, and how he believes that someone shady has broken into his home where he lives with his mother. We hear him calling the police and saying he believes someone is snooping around his house, and we see the cryptic text on the screen: I think there’s someone in my kitchen.
This game is very short, so I can’t give everything away, you know! You’ll just have to play (or watch) it for yourself!
Home Safety Hotline
If Maple County stood out because of its interactivity via a little quiz, 2024’s Home Safety Hotline by Night Signal Entertainment would take things to the next level. The premise is self-explanatory: you work for a (wait for it)… home safety hotline. Your job is pretty simple. People call in and give you information about what they are experiencing. Using your trusty database and deductive reasoning skills, the player must determine the nature of their concern and give the caller the associated information packet already drawn up for you. And it’s all done on a fun, Windows 95-esque interface! Easy enough, right?
The use of deductive reasoning, referring to documents, and requiring accuracy for things to progress is very reminiscent of the modern classic Papers Please (2013) by Lucas Pope. However, instead of trying to figure out the constantly-changing requirements for immigration and making difficult moral choices, Home Safety Hotline asks you to deal with… the public.
The household hazards that callers are concerned about will vary, and will become more complex as the nights go on. The first night, it’s a lot of everyday concerns as you can see on the left sidebar of the image above: bats, mold, mice, and carbon monoxide. Your accuracy identifying these concerns is what determines your ability to progress, but in a Five Nights at Freddy’s style arrangement, each subsequent night you’re on the shift presents new oddities for folks to call in about.
Home Safety Hotline really shines in its unique “bestiary.” Rather than build off of existing mythos like Maple County, many of the eerie creations of Home Safety Hotline run the gamut from cute and harmless to absolutely horrifying. Some of my favorites include the various hobbs, boggarts, cellar grottos, tea sprites, and false rose bushes. And although they aren’t strictly related to bestiary of course, I love all the prank callers and their unnerving character portraits (I won’t spoil it).
Similarly to how Maple County has bits of narrative cut between portions of the police training, Home Safety Hotline has some really excellent video reels that can be found on the player’s desktop. These are also added throughout the course of the game as the nights progress. And I know that this game takes place in the 1990s, but the zilennial in me wants to lie down on the floor when I see the price on this little house - and peep the nod in the emergency alert banner!
Some of these clips are stranger than others, but it doesn’t take long to begin realizing that something unusual is happening at the HSH. And we’re not just talking about the hobs and spriggans. The player also begins to receive strange emails in their inbox, appearing to come from a previous employee of the company. This employee is also named “Mike,” which could be a FNAF reference, but I’m not entirely convinced due to how common the name is. I digress.
The way the game’s simple user-interfaces emulate early PC operating systems is consistent with Eno’s razor. Sure, those operating systems were kind of clunky, didn’t offer much in terms of aesthetics, and were really only built to handle the fundamentals of computing at the time: databases, email inboxes, etc. And yet this style is so iconic in its plainness that we almost long for its simplicity in a world where everything is UIed but not necessary UXed to all hell. In our age of aesthetics over practicality, it’s easy to put on your nostalgia goggles and not see the mystery that’s unfolding right in front of you.
Because just what is the Home Safety Hotline? Where does their funding come from? How did you end up with this job, anyway? Are you even making minimum wage? Why are you told not to talk to Mike? And why does a guy named Buzz Goober keep calling??? Well, if you can stomach the Windows 95 interface, you’ll just have to clock in and find out.
Thanks for tuning in to another installment of Resident Anna! I’m really curious to see where the trend of analog horror goes from here, and how long it will remain in the spotlight. Or, if like its predecessor genres, will continue to grow, intersect, and transform into something else entirely?
What about you? Do you have a favorite analog horror game or YouTube Series?
Thanks again for reading (and for the 200+ subscribers), and we’ll catch’ya in the next one where things get a little… misfortunate.
Great dive into this style. I recently spent some time trying out X-Files (1998) on PS1 and it's very much a time capsule of the sort of thing some of these aim to nail - old school computer UI's, lower-grade FMV/audio, etc. Though it may not be analog specifically, that vibe certainly comes through, and I can see hints of it in what you've shared above.
I love Maple Catalog! I hope we get to see more analog horror-inspired videogames soon. It's such a fascinating subgenre with a lot of potential for interactivity. I'm excited to check Home Safety Hotline out!
Although not quite analog horror, I can see how Who's Lila? might've been influenced by those aesthetics. It basks in all its uncanny valley weirdness—at least partly created by the player, since the main mechanic is to manipulate the player character's face to show appropriate emotions in each situation. The low-poly, dithered look has some of the retro crunchiness of other analog horror. Most importantly, though, it really pushes those themes of identity, being replaced by an unnervingly similar other, and eldritch beings that analog horror loves. (My favorite thing about it is the ARG elements though—that's another thing more horror games could really be enriched by!)
Water Womb World is another great one! Retro look, horrible eldritch beings, and losing your mind to the incomprehensible terrors. It's short but sweet!