#and swoocey :3

[fruitsofhell]

Anyways, this was just the preliminary ramble for my further discussion of my original story which has be thinking very hard about how to incorporate these emotions which the analog/digital horror genre rests on into my non-horror project.

Like I said in a near copy of this post where I also brought up the much less horror-focused series Angel Hare, there is a lot to explore in the aesthetic tropes and emotional cues of the genre. My project is a lot more like Angel Hare in that way that it is somewhat of a thing that tells you that the recordings are watching, but not that they want to harm you, if anything as a child would like to believe, they want to help you. I think Angel Hare's pinch of horror is more just on the unsettling side than anything, basically a 'The Toys/Media Are Alive' bit with some Implications.

The thing I'm going for is a mix of that with a heavier dive into that accusatory side. It begins as a blend of toys, media, and imaginary characters are real and aware of their duty to children, but gets a bit more creepypasta with it. Specifically, one of the characters begins to cut through the vague and undefined layer between the "player"/in-universe child and themself to remind them of their existence having been a forgotten toy/character. See this is like Disney's Turbo levels of shit, but I have been GRIPPED by the language of analog and digital horror for so long and have always wanted to use THAT as the reveal.

Specifically, we come back to what I was saying is such a potent and exciting theme in these works - being demanded to remember. The way these series do this is so delightfully gruesome and creative, through innocuous glitches which build into increasingly direct and haunting imagery.

I haven't watched it (pussy ass) but I've heard great things about the cinematography of Skinamarink and how so much of it is literally just shots into dark, barely lit corners of a house, sort of a purposeful play on Liminal Space visuals. The disconnected clips I've seen despite - as said - LITERALLY JUST BEING SHOTS OF DARK HALLWAYS has really stuck with me and I think regularly about how so many of my memories of my childhood home are those kinds of snapshot memories of random angles I used to sit in as a child. And of course, those pleasant daytime memories would not exist without the parallel flashes of my childhood fear of the dark when creeping around those same rooms.

In The Walten Files too one of the images that sticks with me most is from Bunny Farm when the cabinet (which for no reason is actually housing a PC edutainment-like game) shows Sophie her mother's death. And by shows, of course like Skinamarink we simply have a shot staring into an unlit corner as a genuinely blood-curdling scream and blood spills out of the void. There's almost the implication that Sophie was there to see that if I remember right, which then argues that we're bringing in some traumacore elements - the blurring and black spaces representing the repressed and unthinkable.

I'm not planning on going that far, but as I'm trying to point out, I'm very into the use of those odd memory snap-shot like angles to say "remember". As if the game itself is trying to drag recognition wildly out of the depth of your mind and can only muster these broken pieces of nostalgic geometry - the purpose of the related liminal space movement of course.

This also blends with the other theme of my work that being play/imaginary spaces, in this story being the imaginary world of the child expressed as a video game one. That comes from my experiences being hopelessly obsessed with the most mundane of video game spaces and wishing to live in them despite their whimsically surreal and non-euclidian character. I really do think the medium offers a kind of immersion because of that lived-in factor of interaction. The way I used to live in those virtual spaces I sometimes find myself trying to rehabit my old homes in my mind, and as said I am sometimes left only with those eerie snapshots. But I think because of my familiarity with the brokenness of video game worlds I don't find them repulsive.

But the problem is that unlike those spaces of video game and other media creation which are at least made with people and characters in mind, there is something incredibly unstable feeling about those corners of my memory. That same feeling that liminal spaces tap into exactly, and sometimes I feel that analog horror-like call to Remember. Something. To be brought back, to have a past sense of self invade on my current person.

That feeling I first experienced some 7 years ago now, and it scared the FUCK out of me. It was not from an analog horror or a liminal space, it was genuinely just from my own stupid head and its fascinated me enough to inspire this project I've been working on for nearly that long. That ability for a space I once considered safe, my own mind, to... implode and intrude on itself and draw that deep psychological pull into some void out of me is what I see in these indie art movements and I wanna eat them.

It's fucking crazy when you watch an Analog/Digital Horror piece so good it retroactively makes others scarier because it just executes upon the ideas so well you better understand what others were going for.

Like yes this is still about fucking Fazbear Toddler Fun because it is definitely the one I've seen with the highest level of detail in replicating a very niche old style of media in late 90s edutainment games. (Not always but by the end it's like never missing). And seeing such a pristine replica - so good that when nothing spooky is going on it actually brings YOU back to YOUR childhood - START DOING THE BIT is fucking ghastly.

Especially the end of the last episode with its beautiful clumsy uses of CG reminded me a lot of shit from the time that leaked into my childhood later. I think namely this showz 3-2-1 Penguins, a really fun kids series made by the VeggieTales team. And then when the video started being spooky it hit me how goofy but absolutely fucking horrific it would be to watch something stupid like that and feel it watching you. Feel it judging you. Feel it asking you to remember. Remember *something*.

Like it now has me looking back on shit like Walten Files which always scared me cause I can't stand (/pos) the way it plays with faces to represent harm done, but now that layer of context, or purpose of image is so much worse. It's not just that you or Sophie are seeing a spooky face, it's that that grotesque image plastered over the innocuous experience is asking you to remember something. To know something terrible and horrific that your mind and this game/media are struggling to even form into a coherent image.

As I've said before, I think this wave of indie horror is playing on the sort of hyperawareness any generation born after the invention of home video or VHS has of their past. The fact that so much of it is so easily traceable either vicariously through recordings of old children's media or literally through family-made (and with YouTube, self-made) archives of ourselves. I think we feel how often media these days more intimately than ever asks us to remember. It's not as literal as displayed in this horror, but it's an implicit message that reaches us at various volumes and with different tones.

The analog/digital horror/creepy pasta trope - with its tendency to conflate the personal and the commercial (especially with the FNAF-like "game I just found was made by the brand extension of my family's old business") - is the fear of that ask becoming louder and clearer and more sinister. Its nostalgia becoming an accusation, of accidentally treading upon demons from your past hiding in the cracks of what most made you feel safe at the time.

Or in the case of Fazbear Toddler Fun, a demon you left in your past has tried to find solace in something and you with your nostalgic yet cynical prodding have awoken it.