Internet Horror – Changing Fear and Technology’s Role
How do you talk to evil?
In the days before the 90s, you’d probably think of Ouija boards, staring at mirrors, or even, if you’re more of a realist, in the interviews of our most infamous iterations of human cruelty that once roamed this earth. But with the invention of the internet, not only did humans get a faster, vast and speedy form of communication, evil also got a new vessel.
It is important that “evil” in the world of online horror does not inherently hold a religious context, not yet, anyway. The early days of internet online horror stories were written in a way that reflected the ambiguity of the internet: You don’t inherently know where it comes from, what exactly it is, or how to reconcile with it, you just know that something about the image, or the video, or the text that you’re seeing on your screen is very, very wrong.
A great example of this is Smile.jpg, an internet story that talks about a jpeg image of a smiling dog that will curse you if you don’t spread it to other people, a chain mail story made into a horrifying reality. This story is an urban legend that has since fallen under the label “Creepypasta”, originally based on the term “Copypasta”, which was a proto-label for memes that someone will spam on a chat or comment section, creepypastas were the same, but they were short, online horror stories that were often under the posts of creepy images. These stories began to take on a life of their own, and started to develop into stories that went beyond the digital page.
One of the biggest examples of early analog horror was the online web series Marble Hornets, a franchise that took the online Creepypasta of Slenderman to an actual narrative story. The story is set more akin to a Blair Witch style horror, but with a major twist. While not the only way in which entities communicate with the audience, a huge visual factor that is designed to showcase to the audience that a supernatural force is being manipulated is through visual or auditorial editing that makes it seem like the footage is being warped in some unnatural way, using art to create a type of computer error that never should have naturally existed in the first place. This idea presents to an audience the idea that, beyond the inherent presence of a monster, something is naturally very wrong.
So, I reiterate, how do you talk to evil?
Analog horror, or the use of conveying horror through a perceived analog device seems to change that question, opting instead for the question: How does evil talk to you?
A lot of analog horror relies on the idea of research, of searching through old footage, files or other mediums, designed to present the idea of finding something hidden, an old evil that is being displayed safely through the screen. Newer analog horror, however, decides to take this a step further and showcases forms of media that are often warped forms of very commonplace communication: Public service announcements, emergency broadcasts, videos that were clearly meant to be seen by a series of people, that are telling you information that you, the viewer, know can’t be true, but make you wonder, why was evil lurking there in the first place?
Older forms of analog horror tend to focus on a type of fear of technology, asking us as the audience what horrors could be hidden in an abstract space like the internet, a place that has the potential to be as big as the mind itself. Newer forms of analog horror seem to hold more of a fear of the past, using older footage to convey to an audience that something from your memory isn’t fully correct, it’s warped. The fear presented in newer analog horror is more determined than anything by the 2020 Pandemic, a cultural shift that made and encouraged a lot of people to retreat inward, and feel the deep effects of isolation. These fears and these ideas are ultimately more reflective of the younger generation that spent a large amount of their early years on the internet, using that place less as a vast space they don’t know the rules to, and more of a dark reflection they know all too well. Many people say that a large chunk of horror comes from a fear of the unknown, and when it comes to the world of online, or analog horror, that is a half truth. We, as the audience don’t fully understand the eerie visuals upon first watch or engagement with a particular material, and that inherently creates a space of the unknown, but as we watch the material, it becomes clearer to us what that horror really is, and the more we understand it, the more a part of us slowly begins to dread it.
Horror is a genre that has existed practically as long as we have had cognizant thought to comprehend it, but the horror stories we see online are a special brand of horror that can only exist through the media sharing techniques of modern mechanisms and technologies. A lot of these stories are explicitly told through the medium of media, working to convey the sentiment that the media you are seeing is real. With this in mind, online horror is a feat that could only be achieved in this modern age of the internet.
Camdrome – My Favorite Marketing Campaign
On writing my last blog post, I was reminded of one of my favorite online horrors that was actually a marketing campaign that I haven’t seen before or since. How good was the campaign? Thirteen years later, I’m still talking about it! This is the story of Camdrome.
Back at the convention Pax Prime 2013, a gaming convention where new games were being presented, there stood something vile, not a booth, but a computer with a web cam, on top of trash cans, covered in blood.
The computer seemed to be running a software called Camdrome, a live chat website that showed glitching, gore and death at the hands of a mysterious masked figure. Fun for the whole family!
What later got people’s attention, however, was the fact that Camdrome seemed to have a website, and on top of that, a live Twitter, where it seemed like our masked figure was sending out messages and codes.
What would follow for the next 3-4 years would be an engaged game on Camdrome’s social platform of coding (language), coding (computers), and seemingly talking with something that may or may not be a human murderer run by a cult that is seeking to establish a new world order through Omegle with a Spirit Halloween rebrand.
In truth, this was something called an Alternate Reality Game, or ARG, a type of online engaged story or game that blurs the lines between reality and fiction. On the internet, this is so much more achievable than something in, say, a book or television. In some way, everyone is a character or “persona” of themselves online, so why is it so hard to believe that a video chat cult is posting their daily happenings on Instagram?
This practice has been done as a marketing campaign as early as this year, with the ad campaign for the movie Obsession, where it seemed like the warped version of the character Nikki was bleeding into reality. One of the most effective, and fully realized ARGs, was the ARG for the 2008 film The Dark Knight, where people were following Gotham’s “dark web” paper trail to get early images of the Joker, and go to local “Gotham” websites.
In reality, Camdrome was planned to be a video game, originally planned to be made by Edmund McMillan, the man behind games like Super Meat Boy. The game was planned to be akin to the game Night Trap, a game that was predominantly made with live footage. This explains why the footage was live action back at Pax.
How effective was the Camdrome marketing really? In my opinion, highly successful. I think people were talking about it all the way into 2020, and we still talk about it today. The only reason people lost interest was the fact that Camdrome’s twitter stopped posting. The momentum was there, and it is sad that we’ll never see it in full, but Edmund McMillan said he hoped to make Camdrome a reality, and it would make my kid self so happy to see all of that childhood anticipation realized, if not, I can always look to Camdrome for my own artistic inspiration for how to make an effective and engaging ARG platform.
How Can Modern Tech Be A Help Over A Hindrance With Mental Health?
It is very common to see people talk about mental health and talk about the negative aspects of how it influences our mental health for the worse rather than for the better, and it honestly has far more cited harm than help:
Phones are known to be addictive, social media fosters artificial and unhealthy attachments, and algorithms care about profit over the safety of the users, what else is new?
But, in my experience, the internet and technology on the whole has fundamentally helpful facets that can actually help one’s mental health.
First and foremost, access to resources. We are living in a time where people can access anything at any time and anywhere, so by doing so intentionally, we have more access to ever before than mental health resources. There has been a drastic shift in culture with the internet to make mental health resources a fundamental and free access point, and that has made mental health such a more obvious priority now more than ever.
People can access papers, lectures and studies on mental health that can help them to better understand themselves. Throughout history, people did not have access to knowledge relating to understanding mental health, but the growing access of information has made the ability to understand your situation has made self-awareness more possible, which is the start of any journey.
Though, it is important to recognize the difference between resources, the validity, accuracy and context of information, and studying papers is not the equivalent of getting trained help. But in a world where mental health resources have varying rates of affordability, building up a relative understanding of mental health, specifically your own speculative mental health, is a key factor.
Along with information, general connection is also much easier with technology. Instead of just hotlines, now there are online support groups, servers, and supplementary resources that can serve as a platform and way to foster healthy support groups. Support is always touted as a huge factor in mental health and even physical health, but real life can have varying degrees of success when dealing with people in a healthy environment to foster connection. For example, if you are gay in a very homophobic environment, and that is putting stress on your mental health, forming a connection in real life can not only be a struggle, but in some cases life-threatening.
The internet has given people so much social mobility, and has given spaces for people who have historically had very little access to community in smaller areas. By fostering connections with real, human people online, while not a fix-all, it is a form of mental health, just as long as those connections are mutual, and not one-sided.
Lastly, one of the most ironic ways technology has fostered techniques to improve mental health, is the apps and mechanics they have developed to combat their own problems.
Screen-time apps, meditation apps, therapy apps. There are so many new applications designed to encourage a more healthy lifestyle, and many of them have proven to be effective, but you have to admit, it is kind of funny that they created a problem to sell the solution. Though, I can’t argue with what works.
I have a tendency to have struggling mental health that often manifests in physical symptoms, so maintaining my mental health is more than just something I’d like to prioritize, not doing so has historically caused what I often mistake for illnesses. With that in mind, technology is a paradox: In many ways, it has helped me process so many of my struggles, in other ways, it has been the cause of it. But if we focus on the aspects of technology that can genuinely help us, we can work to build on those areas and grow them into something more impactful than before.
Tech Dawn 