Nothing, but ominously. — Nothing, but *ominously*.

I need to take my mind off of politics for a bit, so let’s talk about fiction – specifically, the weird brand of horror fiction that has cropped up on the internet.

Recently, when I do have free time, I’ve been listening to the podcast The Magnus Archives to take my mind off of the different horror-show that is the news. I wrote an internet horror podcast (with Edgar as my co-writer) and have listened to a fair number – for a long time I was a fan of PNWS/Minnow Beats Whale, and I’ve listened to a lot of Welcome to Night Vale – and read a fair amount of the SCP Foundation. I feel like I’ve got a pretty good grasp on the genre tropes that play online.

At the same time, I read, watch, and play a fair amount of horror media, and I see that the internet branch of the genre is rather different.

Listen to an episode of TANIS by Pacific Northwest Stories/Minnow Beats Whale, compare it to the way an episode of The Magnus Archives. What do you hear?

An adaptation of fiction to the podcast format. The former is like Serial or S-Town, while the latter might be thought of as more like This American Life (on the other hand, Welcome to Night Vale, the most popular of these podcasts, is very clearly Prairie Home Companion for people who love slasher movies and monster flicks.)

But the type of horror presented is a very particular one. Most of the examples that I have seen are of supernatural horror, and a fair number of them skew away from traditional monsters such as those found in Hammer and Universal Horror. If you see Vampires or Werewolves, they’re not going to be of the sort you recognize. Even the most traditional example – the demons found in The Black Tapes – are ultimately shorn of their religious context and more closely connected to Pythagorean mystery religions and MKULTRA.

So what defines these works?

Well, let’s examine a more digestible format – I’m not going to make anyone listen to a half hour of audio to know what I’m talking about. Let’s look at the twitter account “Sexts from the Void.” This is, admittedly, more of a horror-themed weird twitter comedy account, but it has the stylistic markers of internet horror (more properly, I should call this “New Media Horror” but that’s a lot more keystrokes.) It was abandoned in 2015, but it’s still a fairly good example of the type.

The last one posted was “sext: i got as many openings as u got fingers” (sic). Shortly before that, we have “sext: as dawn breaks u slip out the back door & cross the field to the old stone wall, the grass cool & wet under ur bare feet. mmm so wet” (sic). And a few before that is “sext: hey baby, the thing back at my place is shaped like a bed today” (sic).

It’s honestly a brilliant – if somewhat raunchy – comedy premise. The basic idea is that everything is marked by the completely unsexy marker “sext” at the beginning, and then weaves between the enticingly sexual and the uncanny – either one or the other acts as a punchline. The format of the tweet isn’t long enough to allow much weaving, but it either begins sexual and ends creepy or begins creepy and ends sexual (we see examples of both in the three examples from above.)

I consider this to be the best encapsulation of the format of “internet horror” because horror functions as a sort of symbiotic genre – nothing is really pure horror. It’s a horror riff on community radio (Nightvale) or on investigative journalism (Tanis, other PNWS content,) or on the genre of the sext, for example. Even the most straight example of internet horror (in my opinion, The Magnus Archives,) frames things as being stories collected by a foundation that are being recorded – in short, it’s a storytelling podcast with a horror edge.

Southern Reach is possibly the premiere example of the “lying context” aesthetic in traditional media. Taken from a review in The Atlantic. — Southern Reach is possibly the premiere example of the “lying context” aesthetic in traditional media. Taken from a review in *The Atlantic*.

That’s because the genre of internet horror isn’t about the horror in a vacuum – it’s about the confusion of boundaries, the uncanny invasion of horror into a completely different kind of story (in our terminology, it might be better to call it an unheimlich invasion than an uncanny one, though. It’s not a lying thing but a lying context.) It’s the way it’s handled that so often leads me to mentally bridge between the uncanny/unheimlich and camp – so few of these stories are presented in a wholly serious fashion, many of them feature protagonists that are simply not psychologically in the mindset of the horror protagonist to begin with. Oftentimes they begin completely ignorant of the dangers that they are confronted with.

This boundary-confusion does have antecedents in preexisting horror media, and there’s very clearly a line that can be drawn from these sources (House of Leaves, the Southern Reach trilogy, Silent Hill and through that Jacob’s Ladder and Twin Peaks.) There are some notable shifts from more mainstream horror: Lovecraftian cosmicism, while often present, is diavowed to the point that it is present as a thematic referent with very little content attached to it.

A keen-eyed reader (or one with a good memory,) will probably note that most of these referents are things that fall under the heading of what a lot of critics call “the weird” (defined, succinctly, by Mark Fisher as something roughly along the lines of “an overabundance of presence” – at least that’s the Wyrd Signal shorthand for it.) So here we are brought to the most important question about this particular topic:

Why is it that the weird is resonant enough that it can fill multiple auditoria for live shows, rake in money for merch, and be used as the dominant affect for dozens upon dozens of projects?

Example of bad explanation: Why do they say they’re doing this? — Example of bad explanation: Why do they *say* they’re doing this?

One possibility is that it’s preferable to have no explanation for what’s going on: some critics who examine astrology and its resurgence discuss how our world has an overabundance of explanation to it – and the injection of mystery can help make life more satisfying. A similar – though oddly more socially conscious – explanation follows around the flat earth conspiracy theory. I think that the invocation of the weird is that our world is not necessarily burdened by an overabundance of explanation, but by an overabundance of bad explanation. See: the current political knife-fight in the U.S. over the postal service.

There is so much explanation, and all of it is boring, stupid, and malicious. Better to have an overabundance of inexplicable presence that makes the world interesting, if it can’t be good.

Though maybe it isn’t escapism: perhaps it’s a metaphor. The other possibility I see is that we live in a world where vast, complex systems effect our lives and it’s all too easy to feel powerless in the face of that. What’s the difference between catastrophic climate change and Yog-Sothoth? Climate change is real. Producing a story about strange and hateful gods influencing our day to day lives can capture the imagination – and prime people to talk about things like patriarchy and systemic racism: because those are the strange and hateful gods that we live under.

The repeating motifs that you see in these series – silent, still crowds just staring; grievous bodily harm, usually inflicted without the help of a weapon; rapidly accelerated aging; teeth; off-kilter reproductions of 1950s-vintage Americana; an emphasis on viscera where it should not be; unseen assailants and others – hammer home the anxieties of the people that make up their most common audience, and I feel invoke more the second explanation than the first. Of course, just because there are multiple explanations doesn’t mean that they aren’t all valid.

As an aside, I honestly think that a big part of why I like this development in the horror genre is the fact that it really doesn’t tend to foreground police and military characters. The protagonists tend to be journalists and everyday people: the sense of powerlessness that comes from this fact highlights the horrific elements that makes these stories more interesting.

So what do we do with this?

I’m looking forward to sitting down and watching this. I also need to read the book.

I think that this is a positive development in the horror genre, personally, and I think that it should be pushed further. There are already people making use of these tools in more traditional media. The film and television work of Jordan Peele draws from this well, I would say, and while I haven’t watched it, I think that HBO’s new series Lovecraft Country uses some of it (though, of course, I’m not really thrilled by the use of Lovecraft tropes, though I will take that from a creator other than a cisgender straight white man, honestly.)

All of this being said, I’m not sure that the diffusion of Horror New Media tropes into older media is necessarily the only way to go on this: It would be nice to see more creative teams jump into this space and play around with the tools already laid out, as well as fashioning new ones. For example, Night Vale is already incredibly diverse, but it has a more comedic bent. A more diverse podcast or video series that plays things straight would be good, and would allow for a more nuanced take on some of the issues that are implicit in this media.

Of course, it isn’t possible to just pick up a new identity for creative purposes – I definitely think that audiences should share their attention with diverse creators, but I’m also aware of the problem of trying to differentiate yourself in a field where everyone basically looks like you. What content-related innovations can be made?

The Process Aesthetics approach – the one I advise – is to par down elements of the syntax (the recurring motifs) and find new homes for the paradigm (the thematic elements.) Instead of leaning on subverting the imagined wholesomeness of the 1950s, try recouping the imagery of later eras for the same purpose (but skip over the 1980s, those haunt us enough as it is.) Can we find horror in the bright conformity of the Bush era? How about the abandoned suburbs and hollowed out malls of the 2008 financial crisis?

How about moving horror beyond mere disruption of the human form? I lean in on body horror a lot in my writing, but it seems that there’s more abstracted frontiers that we can move on to. What if, one day, you woke up and something was off, and every day it was just more and more off? The front door of your house was just a centimeter taller and narrower every day, until you had to exhale and squeeze through sideways to make it out? More weird and inconvenient than frightening. But what if no one else agreed that that was what was happening? All of a sudden, the strange, minor thing becomes a point of contention, a point where the whole world disagrees with you. The horror isn’t the change, it’s the loneliness. It’s the fact that you’re questioning your own perception. It’s the fact that there could be other things that you don’t perceive correctly.

Motifs of isolation and uncertainty are a powerful thing, and it’s possible to use them to drive much more. In my opinion, the disruption of one’s physical body is generally low-hanging fruit. The disruption of perceptions is much more fertile ground.

Of course, though, you could always do both.

※

If you’re a fan of this kind of media, you could always check out our recently published fiction. Also, please consider following our writing staff on Twitter, where you can find Cameron and Edgar. Just in case you didn’t know, we also have a Facebook fan page, which you can follow if you’d like regular updates and a bookshop where you can buy the books we review and reference (while supporting both us and a coalition of local bookshops all over the United States.)

If You See Something, Say Nothing and Drink to Forget: On New Media Horror