Integrating Analog Horror Into Modern Movies
how Late Night With The Devil blends the best of modern digital folklore
Late Night With The Devil is a celebration of so many of my favorite ways to tell a scary story -- found footage, late night TV, throwback aesthetics, discretionary narration, the all-seeing-all-knowing demonic presence that reveals all...It's a feast for anyone who also delights in the boundless whims of 70s and 90s exploitation horror. Coupling the campy, the cliche, the confounding, and the catastrophic into a miasma of feel-bad trauma-fueled thrills.
I'd rather not give much away, as I hope the film does well and receives enough praise by word of mouth to last in theaters for as long as possible. The trailer is intentionally obtuse and does a great job of letting you in on the gimmick without telling you anything about the REAL story.
But I didn't come away from Late Night With The Devil with just a huge appreciation for good stories, throwback visuals, and a feast of great acting (It is, intentionally, the HAMMIEST thing you’ve ever see on the big screen.)
I actually came away with a reminder of something that I’ve wanted to tackle for a while. Something that I was going to wait on until closer to next spooky season, but now feels so relevant and worth dissecting.
This movie made me remember how much Analog Horror absolutely fucks me up.
Analog Horror, for those unaware, is what younger generations say in reference to horror that takes place around the late 80s, 90s, and early 2000s — stories that delve into the early incarnations of the digital world. The last of the physical media era. Our childhood -- when everything was being recorded on bulky cameras and transposed onto VHS tapes or shotty DVD discs. Tangible objects that could be scratched, manipulated, and erased.
The granular static of a bad recording, the crackly sound from cheap microphones, the painfully low speeds of dial up internet or weak phone reception, and so on. They all make for good atmosphere, but kids today have taken these minute aspects of a bygone era and elevated them into a whole new form of terror.
Our upbringings are now a subgenre of horror in the eyes of GenZ and Gen Alpha. I don't know what to tell you.
I personally think this is a good thing. Because, as a child of the 90s and the 2000s, I remember growing up thinking similarly. That any photos or videos I saw from the 80s, 70s, and 60s that weren't of a professional grade always seemed just a bit off. Not just cheap or poorly handled, but almost as if they were from another realm. The photo albums buried in my grandparents' houses containing the summation of my parents' upbringing. Wedding videos that were disintegrating a little more and more every time they were replayed around the holidays. Everything about them just didn’t seem human. Maybe because I literally wasn’t alive for it or because the technology seemed so alien in retrospect. But artifacts like that always feel unearthly.
There is something inherently creepy about peering into a past that isn't your own. A voyeuristic endeavor that makes you feel like you're seeing something you shouldn't -- even if it's being forced on you.
So there's a bit of a strange disconnect once you become old enough to witness younger people experience this creep factor with your own history. For kids nowadays to see a VHS tape or a DVD and get weirded out by the lack of clarity, poor camera work, and wooden performances of people who weren't used to be recorded every second of every day…You can take offense to their reaction until you realize it’s just the next iteration of something we all go through.
It didn't totally make sense to me for some time -- I understood how and why time affected us in different ways and that younger people would think dial up modems, bulky cordless phones, answering machines, and blackberries would be goofy, weird, and maybe inherently off-putting. But I hadn't expected them to be seen as flown blown scary.
Not until the rise of Analog Horror, recently.
This is a genre still mostly contained within online platforms like Youtube. Analog Horror, by and large, hasn't made the leap into mainstream media.
If you're familiar with creepypastas, then the idea of Analog Horror won't be all that hard to understand.
The gist is that Analog Horror started as a means of longform storytelling over Youtube channels. Episodic videos detailing a series that could stretch out over weeks, months, or years, designed to engross and ultimately terrify the fanbase like a good campfire story. This could technically be done with any genre of horror you like, but Analog Horror took off primarily for the aforementioned reason of younger generations being creeped out by the now antiquated methods of we Millennials and GenXers. The offputting aesthetic of those early years where everything was becoming digitized.
The originators of assimilation, wherein all media, recordings, and identities would start to be force-fed into the machinery of the internet. Against one’s will, and among malevolent forces.
There are a LOT of analog horror series out there now. I wouldn't know enough to give you a concise list. Merely search the term and explore the depths of Youtube for yourself. Just like with every genre, there are diamonds, and there are turds.
Not unlike the Found Footage subgenre, Analog Horror's greatest asset is its ability to be seen as entirely true. Found Footage thrives off of working on as cheap of a budget as possible -- using handheld cameras, natural surroundings, and unfamiliar actors to evoke a documentary feeling. Everything you're seeing definitely happened and these people really did disappear or die or what have you.
Analog Horror operates the same way, but on an even smaller scale. So much of Analog Horror is made on a computer/phone. They rarely deploy cameras and recordings, but instead rely on digitally rendered infographics, crude drawings, AI simulations, and podcast-level-campfire-style She Said He Said They Said folklore storytelling to build an unreliable, yet entirely believable atmosphere. Analog Horror isn't necessarily meant to be seen as the lost footage of a real event, but rather the rendering of an artifact — something left behind in the annals of assimilation. The leftovers from the early days of the internet — either accidentally discarded or placed with malintent.
It can easily fall into cheesiness, and it often does. Not unlike with most art, for every diamond, there's probably ten or twenty turds. It's the nature of creation. But I cannot stress how much those diamonds in the rough absolutely work on a visceral level that I have yet to see properly crossover into mainstream big budget Horror.
If you've ever made the mistake of watching videos about True Crime or Analysis of a Scary Scene while home alone, late at night, with the lights off and the volume up, then you can imagine the spine-tingling feeling Analog Horror is getting at.
There's something to be said about DIY Horror on Youtube that's designed to unease and unnerve. To not just scare you, but to assure you that you, your computer, and your digital essence are now corrupted for having witnessed something taboo. It's a digestible form of dark web content. Rather than watching ACTUAL scenes of grotesquery online (something my fragile ass still can't handle) these stories illicit such realistic nightmares by way of "watching someone else watch it'“ or “bearing witness to the aftermath.” But you yourself are now corrupted by being party to this cult.
Analog Horror's strongest narrative asset is its reliance on mystery. Creepy images of AI generated faced laced into the fabric of a viral video can certainly get under the skin, but it rarely holds any weight without context. We’re all weirded out by the shitty faces and hands that AI is creating. Anyone can manipulate an image in Photoshop and make it look really offputting. But the masters of this new methodology have learned that discretion is their best tool. To only briefly show the abstractions, and to keep them as obscured as possible — be it by the glitches baked into Analog media, or by the poor lighting and angles that come with the territory of early public access to cameras. And rather than a standard Haunted House affair, Analog Horror creators tend to play it smart and start with something Lynchian. An ordinary town that seems pleasant on the surface. The mere disappearance of a single person who no one is worried about. The subtle growth of a trend in a community that seems harmless until suddenly it isn't. A single face that doesn’t quite fit in, watching from afar.
These stories ease you into the disintegration of reality. Not unlike our experiences as Millennials, the real tension and terror comes in the slow realization that everything we've experienced is slowly being taken from us; amassing into something bigger, worse, and entirely uncontrollable, on a plane of existence no one can fathom.
Up until Late Night With The Devil, I had only seen a few films tackle this theme with any real success. The Empty Man, Skinamarink, certain stories from the V/H/S saga...
And again, I don't want to spoil Late Night With The Devil. The film itself isn't simply an Analog Horror story with a bigger budget. It's a full blown Exorcism Gone Haywire tale that is everything the reviews say it is and more.
But I do appreciate something that goes on throughout Late Night With The Devil. Its nuanced visual approach to Analog media. Its perfect manipulation of 70s Late Night aesthetics, wonky lighting, bad sound, etc. Once things start to go downhill, small visual references start to take hold in the form of single frames that threaten to consume the film and everyone watching it. Blink and you'll miss them, but they're there, and they're very much telling their own story aside from the primary narrative. It's not as explicit as the workings of Analog Horror on Youtube, but it's unmistakably playing in the same ball game.
And it absolutely creeped me out. David Dastmalchian’s performance is already a career Scariest, coupled with some really fantastic editing that led me to believe every second of the film was going to be exponentially worse than the last…The effects are killer and the sound is harrowing…But it was those small touches -- those references to a recent trend in online creepypastas -- that really made the film stick with me. Those little blips; glitches, splices, single frames, subliminal images, all trying to warn you.
The idea that something is lurking within the footage itself, refusing to acknowledge the story at hand and instead just linger in your presence. Watching you watching it.