S1E7: Why is Old Tech Creepy? (Analog Horror, The Gothic & Hauntology)

Apr 10

Intro:
Welcome. You've got … Digital Folklore.
[Mysterious music plays. A dramatization of the Candle Cove creepypasta.]
Skye:
Does anyone remember this kid show? It was called Candle Cove and I must have been like six or seven. I've never found reference to it anywhere, so I think it was on a local station around '71, '72. I lived in Ironton at the time. I don't remember which station, but I do remember it was on at a weird time, like 4:00 PM.
Mark:
It seems really familiar to me. I grew up outside of Ashland and was nine years old in '72. Candle Cove. Was it about pirates? I remember a pirate marionette at the mouth of a cave talking to a little girl.
Skye:
Yes. Okay. I'm not crazy. I remember Pirate Percy. I was always scared of him. He looked like he was built from parts of other dolls, real low budget. His head was like an old porcelain baby doll head. It looked like an antique that didn't belong on the body. I don't remember what station this was. I don't think it was WT F though.
Jane:
Sorry to resurrect this old thread, but I know exactly what show you mean. I think Candle Cove ran for only a couple months in '71, not '72. I was 12 and I watched it a few times with my brother. It was Channel 58, whatever station that was. My mom would let me switch to it after the news. Let me see what I remember. It took place in Candle Cove and it was about a little girl who imagined herself to be friends with pirates. The pirate ship was called the Laughing Stock and Pirate Percy wasn't a very good pirate because he got scared too easily and there was calliope music constantly playing. Don't remember the girl's name, Janice or Jade or something. I think it was Janice.
Skye:
Thank you. Memories flooded back when you mentioned the laughing stock in Channel 58. I remember the bow of the ship was a wooden smiling face with the lower jaws submerged. It looked like it was swallowing the sea and it had that awful Edwin voice and laugh. I especially remember how jarring it was when they switched from the wooden plastic model to that foam puppet version of the head that talked.
Mark:
I remember now too. Do you remember this part? "You have to go inside."
Skye:
Oh, I got a chill hearing that. Yes, I remember. That's what the ship always told Percy when there was a spooky place that he had to go in like a cave or a dark room where the treasure was and the camera would push in on laughing stock's face with each pause, "You have to go inside," with his two eyes askew and that flopping foam jaw and the fishing line that opened and closed it, it looked so cheap and awful.
Jane:
You guys remember the villain? He had a face that was just a handlebar mustache above really tall, narrow teeth?
Mark:
I honestly, honestly thought the villain was Pirate Percy. I was about five when the show was on, nightmare fuel.
Jane:
That wasn't the villain, the puppet with the mustache. That was the villain's sidekick, Horace Horrible. He had a monocle too, but it was on top of the mustache. I used to think that meant he had only one eye. But yeah, the villain was another marionette of a skin-taker. I can't believe what they let us watch back then.
Mark:
The skin-taker. What kind of a kid show were we watching? I seriously could not look at the screen when the skin-taker showed up. He just descended out of nowhere on his strings, just a dirty skeleton wearing that brown top hat and cape and his glass eyes that were too big for his skull.
Skye:
Wasn't his top hat and cloak all sewn up crazily? Was that supposed to be children's skin?
Mark:
Yeah, I think so. Remember, his mouth didn't open and close? His jaw just slid back and forth? I remember the little girl said, "Why does your mouth move like that?" And the skin-taker didn't look at the girl, but at the camera and said, "To grind your skin."
Skye:
I am so relieved that other people remember this terrible show. I used to have this awful memory, a bad dream that I had where the opening jingle ended. The show faded in from black and all the characters were there, but the camera was just cutting to each of their faces and they were just screaming. And the puppets and the marionettes were flailing and just all screaming and screaming. The girl was just moaning and crying like she had been through hours of this. I woke up so many times from that nightmare. I used to wet the bed when I had it.
Jane:
I don't think that was a dream. I remember that. I remember that was an episode.
Skye:
No, no, no. Not possible. There was no plot or anything. I mean literally just standing in place crying and screaming for the whole show.
Jane:
Maybe I'm manufacturing the memory because you said that, but I swear to God I remember seeing what you described. They just screamed.
Mark:
Yes, the little girl, Janice. I remember seeing her shake and the skin-taker screaming through his gnashing teeth, his jaw careening so wildly. I thought it would come off its wire hinges. I turned it off and it was the last time I watched. I ran to tell my brother and we didn't have the courage to turn it back on.
Skye:
I visited my mom today at the nursing home. I asked her about when I was little in the early '70s when I was eight or nine, and if she remembered a kid show, Candle Cove. She said she was surprised I could remember that and I asked why. And she said, "Because I used to think it was so strange that you said, 'I'm going to go watch Candle Cove now, mom.' And then you would tune the TV to static and just watch dead air for 30 minutes. You had a big imagination with your little pirate show."

[Dramatization ends]
Perry Carpenter:
Hi, I'm Perry Carpenter.
Mason Amadeus:
And I'm Mason Amadeus.
Perry Carpenter:
In today's episode, the folklore of Analog Horror and the Gothic.
Mason Amadeus:
This episode has no content warnings.
Perry Carpenter:
This is the Digital Folklore Podcast.
[Sound of someone flipping through stations on an old TV or radio. The person stops on what sounds like an old jazz-ish soundtrack… Mason starts speaking in the cadence of a noir-genre detective voiceover]
Mason Amadeus:
Let me tell you a story. Monday, April 10th, 2023… far enough along to where the shine of a new year starts to dull. All the little pieces of protective plastic film pulled from the shiny patches of new beginnings, year-end planner book's bathing in the fluorescence of the clearance aisle. The time of year when spring stands in the doorway, lazily smoking a clove cigarette while winter searches for its lost coat.
Far enough into 2023 that I find myself restless. In my haste to clear the house of evidence, I feel lately as though I'm living on a set piece. The floors are too clear. The tables no longer resemble castles at war, and frankly, I'm still not used to sleeping without the relaxing sounds of dig, beat chewing through my audio cables.
So I decide to make a mess. I don't get more than 45 minutes into disorganizing my home when what slips from a box and lands heavy at my feet, a VHS tape. I bend down to pick it up, blow off a layer of dust so thick. It might have been a carpet sample, Candle Cove, it reads in colorful block letters. Candle Cove. I blink twice. This can't be real. Candle Cove can't be taped. It's just static. And regardless, Candle Cove is just a creepypasta. Anyway, where did I get this? The black plastic case feels dry and fragile in my hands like a takeout sushi container forgotten in the sands of the Sierra Nevada.
The next three hours are a blur as I tore through my house like a bowl in a candy store. I could have sworn I had one somewhere. I can't bear to throw away anything that works or anything that doesn't. I have a therapist. That's not the point. The point is I find myself standing in the center of the studio, a VHS tapes stuffed impossibly and precariously into the top of my back pocket, no closer to a VCR than when I started.
At a time like this, there's only one place to go, Perry's house. Having never been here before, I was expecting some kind of elaborate security system, but I wasn't expecting a mansion. After buzzing in at the gate and making my way up into the ornately gilded entrance hall, I see Perry poke his head from a distant doorway.
Perry Carpenter:
Hello.
Mason Amadeus:
He's making tea. 16 kinds of tea in 16 small glass jars. He told me what he was doing, but I don't remember. Though when I asked him about his mansion, he only replied...
Perry Carpenter:
Eh, Airbnb.
Mason Amadeus:
After a bit of chit-chat, I pull out the tape. It was just sort of in my stuff. I have no idea where I got it.
Perry Carpenter:
Well, there's no way that it's real, right? I mean this has to be a prank or some kind of novelty thing. What's on it?
Mason Amadeus:
I don't know. I don't have a VCR.
Perry Carpenter:
You don't have a VCR?
Mason Amadeus:
I know, I know. Somehow I don't.
Perry Carpenter:
Well, neither do I. Well, yeah, but I mean after last time.
Mason Amadeus:
But we have to know what's on the tape.
Perry Carpenter:
I can't think of anywhere else that would have one.
Mason Amadeus:
Yeah, me neither. Let's go see Todd?
Perry Carpenter:
Go see Todd. I mean, we can take the van. You got to see the paint job. It did come out pretty awesome.
Mason Amadeus:
I can't pretend to understand Perry or how he comes up with all of his schemes, but he really follows through. It did come out awesome. The van had shed its former dirty maroon paint in favor of a slick sea foam green, emblazoned on all sides with a smattering of various emojis and social media logos. A big white digital folklore painted on the back right below a YouTube play button.
By any reasonable sense of taste, it shouldn't work. But the design swings all the way past cringe and right back around a cool. We piled in and rumbled off down Perry's checkerboard, cobblestone driveway and out towards the freeway.
Perry Carpenter:
So I've got a thought. Let's make this our an analog horror episode.
Mason Amadeus:
Like right now?
Perry Carpenter:
Yeah. I mean you did literally find this VHS of Candle Cove this morning, and I do have somebody in mind that we could interview, so just do it on the drive.
Mason Amadeus:
And before I knew it, Perry had punched a few buttons on the steering column. Microphones extended out from the headrests and the infotainment display had started up a call.
Diane Rodgers:
Hi. I'm Diane Rodgers. I am a senior lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK and I'm one of the Center for Contemporary Legend, which is a research group interested in folklore and contemporary legends. My own particular area of interest is folklore as communicators in the media, particularly film and television.
Perry Carpenter:
The theme of this is analog horror, and by that what we're trying to refer to is there are certain horror movies, certain tropes that when you look at it, one of the indicative pieces within that is old technology that just the sake of it being there, VHS tapes or CRT monitors or whatever other artifacts bring out the creepiness in some way. I was wondering if somebody with the background that you have, if you've got insight into what makes us feel that creep factor whenever we look at these older artifacts of technology?
Diane Rodgers:
Well, just thinking out loud about it because I love that stuff. I love the physical media of it and I think that is a big part of it is that older media, physical media, we can have a physical connection to it, but it also deteriorates. It can also deteriorate in the same way that our bodies can deteriorate. Video wears out or has scratches on it and has the possibility of a level of transient. It can be there, but it's only fuzzy or you can only quite partially make out what is there.
Some of the research that I've done is very directly related to the pre-digital age, so before the internet and digital media came about and thinking about why media from that time period is so creepy and haunting to people or why it's been so impactful. One of the things that I've talked about is the idea of fuzzy memory because you maybe saw something or heard a radio play or saw a TV show or a film that you couldn't then instantly watch again. There's no ability to immediately rewind and rewatch and catch up.
So you're stuck with the initial impressions, however strong or blurry, and they might change over time. It's kind of your fuzzy memory of it and maybe it gets scarier because you can only remember bits and pieces of it. You can't fill in the gaps and you just remember some horrifying image or a feeling or something that made you feel a certain way. And that only comes with not just physical media, but older media because it was a time period in which it was broadcast and then it was gone or the video cost a hundred pounds because videos were really expensive or it was only on at the cinema and then you couldn't see it again for three years till it was on TV. I think there are lots of different elements there going on.
Mason Amadeus:
I wonder if anything to relating to the fact that it's physical media, I wonder if the reason that what seems like a lot of analog horror, at least what is popular currently has a very late '80s, early '90s aesthetic. I wonder if that's just because that was sort of the last of the era of physical media in a lot of ways. Because something that I think is interesting is that it's popular even among people who at this point didn't really have a childhood where that was prominent.
It makes sense specifically for me when I remember from early childhood was watching VHS tapes. So there's a big part that feels like it might just be nostalgia, but it doesn't seem to exists because it's still weirdly popular even amongst people who are younger.
Diane Rodgers:
I talk to my students about this because I teach alternative media a module and as part of that I talk to them about music and film and all sorts of different formats. I don't know if it's the same in the US, but there's been a revival of vinyl. Buying records has come around again and cassette tapes. Cassette tapes were never that good to start with. I mean, I'd like the plastic junkiness of them. Like you say, I think it's interesting. There is a kind of nostalgia for... This is what I would call hauntological. There's a strand of study called hauntology where there's almost a nostalgia for lost futures is the best way to describe it.
We were promised all this stuff that was going to happen and it never really came about. So there is a lot of media being made that is being described as hauntological. There's a record label that makes new music by young people that sounds like it could have come from the '70s or '80s. It's almost like we were promised all these flying cars and utopian futures, but it never really came about. So I think there is some, like you say, the idea of nostalgia for something that never really existed or something that never really paid off. I think physical media is a connection to that or trying to recapture something.
Mason Amadeus:
I am fascinated by hauntology. I've never heard of that.
Perry Carpenter:
I've not heard that phrase or that term either. That is so cool.
Diane Rodgers:
I've written a fair bit about that. It's really interesting. Mark Fisher wrote a book called Ghosts of My Life, and that's a really interesting book. He was one of the proponents. He's one of the most interesting writers on hauntology. Sadly he's not around anymore, but people who write about hauntology and talk about it often reference his work as he described. He talks about the concepts of what is weird and eerie and a lot of unsettling things in not just media, but generally ties into notions of the uncanny, things being present where they shouldn't be or things being absent where you'd expect to find something.
It's like that the hauntological notion of it is being haunted by a presence of something, by a presence of a past that never really came to fruition. It's quite complicated. I'm struggling to explain it in a succinct way.
Perry Carpenter:
It sounds super relevant though because there's a lot there. As we were brainstorming about our theories on why some of this seems to have so much traction and why people do feel this weird spooky effect with looking at old things. There is kind of an uncanniness. There is a degradation of memory as we look with our rose-colored glasses and then we actually look at the technology that was there that was supposed to... The future is in Technicolor. And then you look at it and it's old, nasty, grainy.
You can see the pixels and everything when you look at it. The colors that we thought were so bright and everything are now faded and look off and yellow. Even when they're presented in their original color scheme, they don't look like the way that we represent color today. So we remember these things very fondly. And then you look back on it and you're like, "That doesn't live up to my expectation." Then you're trying to reconcile with all of that in some way and it becomes a little bit creepy.
Mason Amadeus:
This seems to speak to that persistence of it too as to why it has a sticking power because even for people who didn't grow up in that time, it's still a notable part because it was the last of the physical media era and also it's still recent enough that people are caring about it, I guess?
Diane Rodgers:
It's like it's in the popular memory. There's something in the general consciousness. I like to use the word weird with a Y because I think there's a crossover because people talk about folk horror and hauntology have separate things, but I think they've actually got a lot in common because I think not everything that I might think of as folk horror is necessarily horrific. It might just be a bit unsettling or unnerving and you're not quite sure why.
I think it's usually because it's got some kind of hauntological aspect to it. It's unsettling and it's haunted by the specter of memory of a different time or a different era or notions that ancient paganism or ancient religion, which isn't really ancient paganism isn't really ancient. The way we think of it, it was invented in the 1930s for example.
Loads and loads of things titled, but I like to use the word ‘wyrd’ because I think it has a crossover between what is folk horror, what is hauntological and dystopian kind of narratives as well. So I think all of those crossover in this, "Ooh, I'm not sure why this is creeping me out, but it is creeping me out." And I say, "Well, that's wyrd TV or wyrd film."
Perry Carpenter:
When you think about this from a horror trope perspective and you're looking at old technology, one of the things that people typically find is an old reel that has a singular announcer that's supposed to be this trusted authority or shadowy figure that is then presenting the, quote, unquote, "truth" for that segment. And I'm wondering if there's something about the medium that gets presented on or the fact that back then there was a time when it was a person in a suit and tie presenting the, quote, unquote, "truth" that carries an interesting psychological weight if there's some baggage that we're trying to address with ourselves there.
Diane Rodgers:
I think it's both of those things, but I think what you're saying about... I think the medium itself is significant because it exists physically. There's a piece of celluloid that's got this story on it. It's not just something ephemeral that is there and gone and lost in a Twitter thread or something like that. I think things seem more real if you can hold it in your hands and thereby more plausible, you can buy into it more because it physically exists even if you've not got it in your own personal hands, the fact that you know it exists in some real way that maybe that adds to the believability or the plausibility of it.
Mason Amadeus:
Just a quick aside that what you made me think of is I'm sure you've seen the trend where people will print out a meme and then staple it to a telephone pole and take a picture and share it. It seems so much more like it might be a real thing just because in the physical world.
Perry Carpenter:
As you were talking through that, one of the things I was thinking is if you pop in a VHS cassette and then now you watch this person, it feels a little bit like you're resurrecting something. There's a little ritual with it. There's steps that you put in and it's taking something that is ephemeral and then bringing it into the real world. There's a little bit of ostensive property with that too.
Diane Rodgers:
Yeah. You're literally bringing something to life or raising a... It is like getting an old family photo album out of a box or blowing the dust off it or there's something leafing through those pages feels very different and much more ritualistic like you say than flicking through some photos on your phone. Again, that feels in opposition. It feels so ephemeral and they're there and gone. But if it's in a physical form and you can handle it or push the tape in the machine and listen to it... Because it's not just about the physicality of it, it's all of the sensors, isn't it? 'Cause the sound, it makes, the smell of it has all of that stuff is a sensory memory that you're building.
So maybe that's interesting actually because that's a lot to do with how memory works, isn't it, about if you have a sound or a smell, you are much more likely to remember something vividly than just one sense. So our interaction with the media physical medium as well is a big part of it.

[Noir music kicks-in again]
Mason Amadeus:
We wrapped our call with Diane a few minutes before we arrived at Todd's pawnshop, a place that neither Perry nor myself had even spoken of, let alone visited since our last unsettling encounter with the owner. The bright light of beckoning bargains breaks through the busted glass and the boarded windows. The door hangs crooked on its frame. Even outside, this place exudes an energy of sinister familiarity, reluctant nostalgia.
It's like the faint smell of cigarettes in your grandma's 1994 Pontiac Grand Am every time you turn the heat on. Walking in is remembering something that you tried desperately to forget. And yet the siren song of knowing draws you closer.
Perry Carpenter:
So this is just a quick in and out. We're here for one thing and that's it.
Mason Amadeus:
In and out. Just the VCR.
Perry Carpenter:
And no browsing?
Mason Amadeus:
Yes. No browsing.
Perry Carpenter:
Not even a quick check? Do not get sucked in?
Mason Amadeus:
Okay. Yes, I get it. We're going in one thing and we're coming out.
Perry Carpenter:
Okay.
Mason Amadeus:
We pushed through the half-busted crash bar door walking with purpose like a couple of hard-boiled detectives hot on the heels of a killer case, rusting, mismatched shelves from a dozen closed down businesses, hawking, scratch and dent wares with their bright color-coded price tags waving in our wake. Near one of the far corners we find our treasure nestled between nine generations of video game consoles stacked in descending order of care, and a crate of wireless keyboards without receivers. A small gray, Panasonic PV-C1320, a 13-inch CRT TV with a built-in VCR. Jackpot.
Perry Carpenter:
Hey, this looks like it'll do.
Mason Amadeus:
Oh, bingo. Nice.
Perry Carpenter:
What if it doesn't work?
Mason Amadeus:
Oh, Todd tests everything before he puts it out.
Perry Carpenter:
I want you to say that again and tell me why I'm not reassured.
Mason Amadeus:
Okay. Yeah, fair point. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work, I guess.
Perry Carpenter:
Grab it. Let's get out of here.
Mason Amadeus:
We're doing so good. Man, I forgot how heavy these things are.
Perry Carpenter:
You'll get over it. Let's just scoot on out of here.
Mason Amadeus:
Yeah, yeah. Okay. Cradling the TV like an unruly dusty baby, we start to head towards the front desk. The home stretch. I can see the cashier ahead over the top of a mountainous rat king pile of extension cords. It's not Todd. It's some gangly teenager working the desk today. I'm just a few feet away when I hear Perry calling out to me from a distance.
Perry Carpenter:
Mason, hey, it's the people from Carterhaugh again.
Mason Amadeus:
I stopped in my tracks. We were so close. The television grows even heavier in my arms as I turn to face them. Perry beckons me over to join in. So I set the TV down next to a candelabra made of discarded baby doll heads and sidle over. Perry makes the introductions. And before I can protest, I'm pulled into.
Dr. Brittany Warman:
I'm Dr. Brittany Warman.
Dr. Sara Cleto:
And I'm Dr. Sara Cleto.
Dr. Brittany Warman:
And together we are the Carterhaugh School of Folklore and the Fantastic and online school dedicated to bringing folklore outside of the academy. We earned our PhDs in folklore from the Ohio State University in 2018.
Dr. Sara Cleto:
And we earned our masters in folklore from George Mason University in 2012 somehow.
Mason Amadeus:
That's awesome. So I know one of the things you two have focused on and studied is the gothic. And I was wondering before we get too deep in anything, how would you describe the gothic to someone who is not familiar with it? Because from my understanding, it's something that's both very nebulous and also very concrete. So what's the best way to envision the vibe of what gothic is?
Dr. Brittany Warman:
Well, To me, the word I keep coming back to, to describe it is haunted. It's haunted by the past. It's haunted by family secrets you don't want to come out. It's that feeling of being haunted. So anything that you associate with that feeling gives a general impression of what the gothic is.
Dr. Sara Cleto:
There's an amazing writer named Angela Carter who wrote a bunch of gothic fairy tales that we adore. They're so good. But she describes the gothic as dread glamour, and I always thought that was really good. It gives you that vibe in two words. So go Angela.
Perry Carpenter:
Dread glamour.
Mason Amadeus:
I really like that.
Dr. Sara Cleto:
Isn't that good?
Mason Amadeus:
That's awesome.
Dr. Sara Cleto:
I wish I could take credit for it but I can't.
Perry Carpenter:
One of the episodes that we are planning is the concept of analog horror. Why when we look at old VHS tapes and CRT monitors and this kind of older technology, why do we feel this sense of dread and intrigue? As I was reading some of your descriptions about crumbling castles and things that are a little bit tattered that were once really clean representing gothic, it started to click in. Is the nostalgia that comes with a show like Stranger Things, is that kind of a modern gothic take?
Dr. Sara Cleto:
That's a really good question. I do think it's playing with similar ideas at the very least. And I think you could make a good case that something like Stranger Things is at least gothic adjacent, if not like full-on gothic itself. Where I would start with this, Brittany might dive in somewhere else, but there's a scholar of the gothic named Fred Botting, and his explanation for the gothic is basically that it is the past coming back to haunt the present. So if you think of it in terms of old technology that is sort of like [inaudible 00:29:38] that we maybe don't have ways to access it quite so readily anymore, you can definitely think of that as a newer vehicle for potentially exploring the gothic. But where we diverge from this, take it, Brittany.
Dr. Brittany Warman:
So where we diverge from this is that we would go a little more specific and say that it's not just any past, it's the folkloric past. More often than not, it's these ideas of superstition and monsters and things like that that come back and break through our modern world, our civilized world, our world of rational thinking and remain, even though we tell ourselves that we've moved on beyond that.
Dr. Sara Cleto:
And also, I mean to bring it back around to technology, I mean, you can see why old technology is so often like a vehicle for gothic or for sometimes horror that splits from gothic a little bit. But because it's stuff that we are theoretically passed, but that used to be so integral, that used to be something we interacted with all of the time, but that now is inaccessible and that creates the space for it to potentially become gothic.
Perry Carpenter:
So much of the folklore that exists is a reaction to some inflection point within culture, some low grade thing that's irritating society in some way. What are some of the low grade things that would kind of create gothic anything?
Dr. Brittany Warman:
Well, to me the gothic is always rooted in anxiety and sometimes those anxieties are small things, but sometimes they're really big things too, that are really difficult to talk about. It's the kind of things that you don't want to bring up at the dinner table like questions about sexuality, about colonialism, about racism and bigotry in all kinds of senses. And for the gothic, it seems like they use small things to talk about big things.
It's easier for us. I think this applies to most of humanity. It's easier for us to tell a story about something than to confront it directly. And the gothic is all about doing that and folklore is often all about doing that, finding ways to engage with the world in a personal and artistic way with a lot of other people.
Dr. Sara Cleto:
I am halfway through rereading The Castle of Otranto right now, which I haven't read in years, and that is arguably the first gothic novel, or at least first supernatural gothic novel. And the family that it's about is just, they're absolutely bananas.
Dr. Brittany Warman:
Creepy. They're terrible.
Dr. Sara Cleto:
It's all completely ridiculous and over the top, but it lets you explore, "Okay, what happens if the family structure is destabilized? This is a completely melodramatic way of thinking about... In a way sort of exploding all of the different institutions that we expect to hold society together. I do want to note at this point that it has been frequently argued that the gothic is ultimately a pretty conservative mode because at the end of the story, all of these things, all of these questions are usually resolved without anything changing. The status quo is reinstated, but there's this period at extreme instability in the middle where all of it is questioned that I find very interesting and in a lot of more contemporary gothic literature, these institutions explode and then stay exploded. There is no reinstitution of the status quo in the same way.
Mason Amadeus:
That's really interesting.
Perry Carpenter:
Yeah. Does that come back to maybe in some of this earlier literature, the person writing it had a sense of helplessness or hopelessness of we can do all this stuff, but it's all going to stay the same no matter what? So they saw that as realism or what do you think is the heart of that?
Dr. Sara Cleto:
I think it varies depending on the person who told it. I'm thinking as Mary Shelly who wrote Frankenstein and was incredibly radical for the time period. So I don't think that when she was writing Frankenstein, she was thinking, "Well, everything is always going to stay the same. Nothing will ever change." But I also don't know that Horace Walpole of the murderous, supernatural falling helmet was really envisioning a lot of social change himself.
Dr. Brittany Warman:
When you talked about Mary Shelley, I think that that is a good one to bring up because Mary Shelley at the end of Frankenstein, there's a certain amount of restoration to the status quo because Frankenstein and the monster go off into the snowy tundra and are never seen again, but there's also an open-endedness there. She really doesn't shut it down completely.
Perry Carpenter:
Having not read any of these recently, I'm wondering if there's almost, then... If it's not a resolute kind of, "Oh my God, it's going to stay the same no matter what," then I'm wondering if it's wanting to unsettle the reader and say, "Imagine a world where all this stayed the same." Wouldn't that be horrible?
Dr. Sara Cleto:
That's what we think.
Dr. Brittany Warman:
Yeah, I think so.
Dr. Sara Cleto:
And I think that's why when we come across a lot of the scholarly arguments that say, "No, the gothic is still conservative." I'm like did you read that?" There's so much possibility, so much instability in here and in a lot of them it feels sort of nightmarish at the end for nothing to change, but also sometimes nightmarish for things to change. It's just that it's all about this unsettledness that never really completely dispels.
Mason Amadeus:
I was wondering, and it might be a little bit of a basic thing, but I was wondering for the sake of introducing the concept of gothic, which is something I don't know much about. My initial reaction, I imagine a lot of people's would be that it's tied to that very specific aesthetic and architecture was a medieval time in Europe. How much of gothic is married to an aesthetic and an architecture versus the other hallmarks of it as we've been talking about?
Dr. Brittany Warman:
The gothic is very difficult to define super precisely because there's just a lot of differing opinions about what makes something gothic. But what it ultimately comes down to is sort of a bunch of things put together and reaching a critical mass where it tips over into gothic. So if you see things like decaying castles and deep dark forests, family secrets, curses, all that kind of stuff.
Dr. Sara Cleto:
Thread of the supernatural?
Dr. Brittany Warman:
Yes, of course. Once you reach that critical mass, the story really just tips over in there. And that's pretty much the only thing people can agree on when they're trying to define what the gothic is. We do like Fred Botting's idea that it's the past coming back to haunt the present, but again, we would take it even more specific and say that it's often related to folklore when that past comes back.
Dr. Sara Cleto:
The folklore past coming back to haunt the present. And to complicate things further, everything that Brittany mentioned in that list, any one of those things or are a couple of those things could show up in something else and a story, and it wouldn't necessarily be gothic at all. Not all stories that happen to have a castle in them are gothic. Not even every vampire story is necessarily gothic. It really is that sheer accumulation of stuff that makes it gothic, which sounds ridiculous. But another key thing about the gothic is that it is a mode of excess. There's too much. There are too many feelings. There's too much stuff. There's too much melodrama. It's completely over the top, and that excessiveness is part of what makes a gothic.
Perry Carpenter:
When we think about some of the social issues that may make one of these genres spring up or one of these folkloric expression styles spring up, do you see those types of tipping points as being critical or is that kind of a red herring?
Dr. Brittany Warman:
When I think about when the gothic has really been popular, there were things that sort of directly precipitated it. So when it was first getting going at the end of those 1700s, there was romanticism, which was direct reaction in the enlightenment. There was a resurgence of it at the end of the 1800s. It was a reaction to a lot of different things, but a lot of political things like the rapidly declining power of the British empire was a big, big reason why people felt scared, why people felt like they were on the precipice of change and wanting to... And maybe wanting to clinging to those things and then realizing some of the things from the past are pretty scary when you look at them. And now I think that there are things in place that could signify some sort of gothic resurgence, but it would be a very different form.
Dr. Sara Cleto:
Yeah, the gothic often resurgence in times of instability or times of rupture, so I would not be surprised if we saw some kind of technological gothic resurgence. I mean, who knows? We could be in the middle of one right now.
Dr. Brittany Warman:
Right. Also where we are right now, I think we're almost to the place where things are starting to get a little bit scary. I'm thinking of things like self-driving cars.
Dr. Sara Cleto:
I'm thinking of AI art.
Dr. Brittany Warman:
That's a perfect example. What does that mean for society? What does it mean for art? And these are the kinds of questions that the gothic is really good to try to come up with some sort of answer with.

[Glitch sound to ad break. Noir music reappears]
Mason Amadeus:
We part ways and exchange information, heads swimming with new ideas and all urgency forgotten. Perry and I chat casually as we go retrieve the TV and head towards the counter. It takes me until the very last second to notice that the gangly teenager is gone and in their place.
Todd:
Hey, hey. Well, well, how are you two doing?
Mason Amadeus:
We're both too stunned to speak for a moment. Perry recovers first.
Perry Carpenter:
Good, good. Just lost track of time.
Todd:
Yeah, that's easy to do here.
Mason Amadeus:
I see Todd sneering knowingly.
Todd:
Nice, fine. This TV used to be mine. Kept in my bedroom.
Mason Amadeus:
Oh, good.
Todd:
I used to watch David Letterman and then Johnny Carson every night. Dave on channel 2, Johnny on channel 5. Yeah, that's right. This thing got two channels.
Mason Amadeus:
Yeah, wow. Wicked cool. Does the VCR still work good?
Todd:
Oh, better than good. Honestly, I didn't want to get rid of it.
Mason Amadeus:
All right.
Todd:
I prefer watching stuff on VHS, but you know, times change.
Mason Amadeus:
Okay.
Todd:
It's just so much more tangible.
Perry Carpenter:
What's our total?
Todd:
Oh. Oh, yeah. Now, it's 200 bucks.
Perry Carpenter:
200?
Mason Amadeus:
200 bucks?
Todd:
Hey, you know what, the lowest I can do is 190. Any idea how rare these things are? You're not going to Walmart and get one of these.
Perry Carpenter:
They can't be that rare.
Todd:
Oh yeah? Well, there's only one of this one, and that's what I call sentimental value.
Perry Carpenter:
Ah, take it.
Todd:
Pleasure doing business.
Perry Carpenter:
Of course.
Todd:
Don't let the door hit ya where good Lord sits.
Mason Amadeus:
Perry slapped the money down on the desk and we hightailed it from the shop. Neither of us spoke for the entire ride home. The discomfort of talking with Todd and the growing dread of what we might discover on the tape hung in the air between us, like a fart that just won't go away.
We rolled up just outside my place, lugged our new TV into the studio, and I endured a slew of disparaging remarks about the state of my previously clean house while I searched for an extension cord of the proper length. And then we sat down. Neither of us certain of what would come next. The Candle Cove VHS resting in limbo just over the threshold of the VCR door, the TV staring menacingly back at us. It was ready to bite down and snap the cassette in half.
Perry Carpenter:
We should probably...
Mason Amadeus:
Yeah, but what if...
Perry Carpenter:
What if what?
Mason Amadeus:
I don't know. This is going to sound stupid, but I'm a little bit wigged out. Okay? The Candle Cove VHS in itself is weird, but playing it on what used to be Todd's personal TV just makes me feel like something scary is going to happen.
Perry Carpenter:
It's just a TV. It's just a VHS. Candle Cove is just a creepypasta and Todd is just a creepy person. Neither of us is going to be happy, not knowing, so let's just do it.
Mason Amadeus:
It's been a while since I've played a VHS, but I swear I don't remember it taking that much force to push in. I jumped when the automated jaws grabbed hold of the tape and sucked it inwards and then latched it down to play. We sat back. I grabbed a nearby mic stand and held it at my side like a club just in case I needed to smash the TV in self-defense.

[They press ‘play’ on the VCR]
The moment lasted for eternity as the screen slowly jittered to life. A black bar wiped vertically like a rag clearing a table. The auto tracking indicator painted itself on the screen, and then the picture stabilized on a scene that looked like a small recording studio. And then...
Eric Molinsky:
You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Molinsky. Analog horror stories take place in the age of VCRs and VHS tapes, but they're made today and they're looking at the past through the lens of the present.
Mason Amadeus:
Oh.
Perry Carpenter:
Yeah. Wait.
Mason Amadeus:
What?
Perry Carpenter:
Eric. Eric Molinsky, he hosts this show called Imaginary Worlds. I reached out to him ages ago about doing a collaboration on analog horror, so this must be that.
Mason Amadeus:
Okay. But why is it on a VHS and just mysteriously inside of my house?
Perry Carpenter:
Well, I gave him your address for mailing. He must have thought that this would be a funny way to do the whole thing.
Mason Amadeus:
Maybe next time, tell me about the collaborations that you plan with people who-
Perry Carpenter:
He never confirmed. I think that this whole thing is just fun for him.
Mason Amadeus:
I dropped the mic stand. I should have suspected this was somehow one of Perry's schemes and we sat back to watch the rest.
Eric Molinsky:
One of the people that I talked to was Alex Hera. He made a documentary called The History of Analog Horror. Alex is in his 20s, and some of the filmmakers he talked to are in their 20s, and I asked him, "Why are you guys so into analog horror?"
Alex Hera:
I would say there's three main reasons that people my age or younger are interested in analog horror. The first of which is obviously the fact that there's a very low barrier of entry for creators. So just off the bat, the idea of being able to just make a video really simply, you don't need actors. You just need some pictures and some text. And theoretically, you could make an analog horror video. That appeals to a lot of people.
Eric Molinsky:
And he says, the second reason why a lot of young people do this is basically the reason why anybody would make something and put on the internet.
Alex Hera:
A lot of people are doing it just hoping to get fame or popularity, but there are also a lot of young people who are doing it just because they don't have a lot of resources and they want to tell a story. They want to make videos. They want to make an alternate reality game.
Eric Molinsky:
That's actually a key part of these web series like there's a puzzle to solve. The videos have dropped online with just enough breadcrumbs for you to follow and figure out what's the grand conspiracy behind these videos that are supposedly found after being lost for decades.
Alex Hera:
The third main reason is that there is a sense of mystery about the analog technology that exists in analog horror because they didn't grow up in it, or they only very vaguely remember it when they were very young. And obviously it's from a completely different time period, a completely different world. Literally, just the infrastructure of towns and cities, the idea that you couldn't instantly communicate with anyone you wanted to, you couldn't instantly find out where someone was.
Eric Molinsky:
Analog horror really blew up, really blew up in the internet in the last maybe like three years and he thinks that it's not a coincidence that it was over the course of the pandemic. I mean, first of all, you get a lot of young people that are home, and so they're online all the time. They've got time to kill. So they're making, consuming analog horror, but he thinks there's like thematic elements of the pandemic in this stuff.
Alex Hera:
There is something about the fact that analog horror blew up in the pandemic that makes me think that that whole era of the media and the news, and the government messaging and all that, there's something about that. Obviously, that made people distrust the media. There was so much disillusionment with the media that obviously still remains today. Disillusionment with the media, with the government, and analog corps reflect that significantly.
A lot of those videos are about government organizations messaging and saying untruthful things that can't be trusted, that will harm you if you trust them.

[Someone presses stop on the VCR]
Mason Amadeus:
Well, that was cool.
Perry Carpenter:
Yeah. I mean, I think it's interesting to try to look at something like analog horror and pull it apart to see its component parts. I think it's interesting to me that it's still pervasive, even for people that didn't grow up with the technology. I mean, they look at things like a VHS tape or a CRT monitor, and it immediately brings all this weird nostalgia-ridden something to the way that they perceive it.
Mason Amadeus:
Yeah. It's like a nostalgia they didn't really get to have, which is interesting. It's almost like trying to describe a feeling. There's a specific feeling that comes from that generation of technology.
Perry Carpenter:
Yeah, it's weird. I do wonder in a hundred years or a thousand years even, what, if anything, takes its place?
Mason Amadeus:
Yeah. I mean, it's like Diane said, imagine a world without...

[Sounds of their conversation fade as noir music fades in. Mason’s narration begins again]
We decompressed for a while before parting ways. The vet called me later that night. Digby's procedure was a success. I can't wait to get the little guy home. I still felt unsettled by that little TV though, like a curse had descended upon it the moment it began to play that tape. I found myself filled with dread every time I looked at it. And I worried that I'd never escaped the fate it had in store for me, or at least I didn't want it in my house anymore, but I wanted to make sure I kept a record of the tape.
So before bed, I went down and hooked up the video and audio output from the TV into my computer. The plan was to let the tape play out overnight, silently being recorded, and I could chuck the whole thing in a dumpster the next day. I rewound the VHS, double checked it would be recorded, and then when I went to hit play, it was only static.

[Sound of static as the Digital Folklore theme song begins for end credits]
Click to download a fully formatted PDF version of this episode’s transcript.

Why is Old Tech Creepy? (Analog Horror, The Gothic & Hauntology)

Mason finds a mysterious VHS copy of Candle Cove. Not having a VCR, he heads to Perry's Airbnb mansion only to discover that Perry is also VCR-less. After a short debate, they hop into the FolksWagen and head to Todd's pawn shop. And that's where things get a bit strange...

In this episode:

A dramatization of the Candle Cove creepypasta.
A discussion about Analog Horror and how it intersects with folklore.
The Carterhaugh School breaks down Gothic.
The term "hauntology" as explained by Diane Rodgers.
Imaginary Worlds host Eric Molinsky makes an appearance.

Guests:

Diane A. Rodgers PhD, Senior Lecturer in Media at Sheffield Hallam University
Dr. Sara Cleto and Dr. Brittany Warman from the Carterhaugh School of Folklore & the Fantastic
Eric Molinsky, creator and host of the Imaginary Worlds podcast.
Alex Hera, filmmaker. Creator of the documentary, "The History of Analog Horror", and a 100 Episode webseries called "Walker Creek", which was later re-edited into a feature-length video, and was the basis of a feature-length documentary titled "Making an ARG: Walker Creek".