Grassroots Analogue Horror and the Crisis of Authenticity

This article examines the relationship between the nostalgia for analogue technologies and the crisis in our perception of audiovisual objects’ authenticity, especially when they are encountered online. It studies fictional YouTube videos presenting broadcast television shows that are suddenly interrupted by eerie images and messages, calling them signal-hijack horror videos and focusing on those that are elements in Alternate Reality Games (ARGs); specifically, The Wyoming Incident and Local 58. Produced by content creators in an industrial scale, these signal-hijack horror videos are part of what the article refers to as grassroots analogue horror. It proposes that the videos’ documentary appearance (a requirement in ARGs’ typical pretence that the stories are real) is enhanced, first, by their presentation on YouTube, which offers an assortment of fictional and real recordings of TV-signal hijacks; and second, by their digital simulation of analogue aesthetics, as the perceived ‘physicality’ of analogue images lends them an appearance of historical record. The article proposes that the requirement to search other websites and read forum threads to piece together information about the videos, characteristic of ARGs, combined with the initial (and, to many, prevalent) uncertainty about their fictional or factual nature replicate our experience of navigating information online. The signal-hijack horror videos’ rendition of this old technology as vulnerable dismantles the nostalgic idea of a safer, less complicated analogue world.