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Oct 27, 2024

How YouTube Became A Horror Playground

Horror has been rising on YouTube, leading to new genres like “analog horror,” and big opportunities for creators such as Sam and Colby, and Kane Pixels. An image capturing the vibe of analog horror

Horror has been rising on YouTube, leading to new genres like “analog horror,” and big opportunities for creators such as Sam and Colby, and Kane Pixels.

An image capturing the vibe of analog horror on YouTube

YouTube is a spooky place these days; horror content has been rising in popularity throughout the video-sharing platform, sparking a surge of creativity as creators explore new ways to frighten their viewers.

YouTube has helped usher in new creators and even new genres, such as “analog horror.”

Analog horror is a spin on the “found footage” genre, imbued with sinister nostalgia.

In these eerie videos, the recent past (often the 90’s) is explored through a glitch-ridden, distorted lens; haunted home videos, news broadcasts, and cursed video game footage are all over YouTube.

Inspired by creepypastas, liminal spaces and films such as the Blair Witch Project, analog horror has been steadily becoming more mainstream over the years, and YouTube has played a major part in its rise.

YouTube’s Trends and Culture Lead, Earnest Pettie, told me that “horror related content has been on YouTube from the beginning, but the content itself has evolved in interesting ways, and the way that people interact with that content has evolved.”

Pettie explained that YouTube trends have shifted: “We've moved away from a world of just individual viral videos to a bunch of videos about a topic.”

“For a long time, people would share a specific video and conversation would happen about that specific video,” Pettie says. “But now, that video may be a topic and people create content that's related to that video. It’s allowed creators and their content to generate massive fandoms and to turn those things actually into their own kind of intellectual property.”

Before becoming household names, Skibidi Toilet and The Amazing Digital Circus started life as original YouTube animations and quickly exploded into shared experiences, inspiring thousands of fan-made videos building on the original ideas.

Horror content has become widely popular across the video-sharing platform, and it’s not just limited to Halloween.

Pettie mentions fans breaking down horror films by creating “kill count” videos and ending explainers, along with original horror being created for YouTube.

“You have unscripted content like Sam and Colby where they're going out and experiencing haunted houses, and scripted content like Kane Parsons of the channel “Kane Pixels,” whose Backrooms series has generated millions of views. There's this second degree thing where other people have made films and videos inspired by that which have generated billions of views.”

Horror created within YouTube even has the potential to move beyond the video-sharing platform.

A24 is currently working on a Backrooms feature film with Kane Parsons, while Sam and Colby have branched out into the big screen with Legends of the Paranormal.

Even the blockbuster success of Five Nights At Freddy’s stems from the popularization of the franchise on YouTube, where Lets Play videos allowed younger viewers to experience the jumpscares with their favorite creators.

Pettie is confident that “the horror franchises of tomorrow will start on YouTube today.”

Sam and Colby (Sam Golbach and Colby Brock) told me that their content had evolved from exploring abandoned buildings to investigating the supernatural, which proved hugely popular on YouTube; today, their channel has more than 13 million subscribers.

“We used to go to abandoned places. That's how we got our start on YouTube. Sometimes we heard stuff in these abandoned places, and we thought maybe there could be something more out there, something paranormal. Eventually our content evolved from going to explore these places to actually investigating them.”

Colby notes that the low-budget format of YouTube videos make for more authentic experiences, compared to ghost-hunting shows seen on network TV.

“YouTube lends itself to having two guys and a camera run around and actually document their real experiences, not having a whole production team around,” Colby says. “It creates a really authentic feel for this sort of investigation.”

Sam and Colby’s experiences have even caused them to reconsider their own personal beliefs. In 2018, while visiting a haunted ship, the Queen Mary, the two stayed in a room called B340, known to be the most haunted room on the entire ship.

In the late hours of the night, the two engaged in conversation with what they believe to be some sort of supernatural entity, which communicated by knocking.

“It completely changed my life,” says Sam. “There's videos of me breaking down on my bedroom floor, feeling like .. I just don't know what to think anymore.”

The Queen Mary video was a major hit; since that fateful night on the haunted ship, Sam and Colby have explored many haunted locations, and experienced more of the inexplicable.

“We've heard voices in our ears that we can't explain,” Colby says. “We've had experiences that have brought us to tears. We've even had Ouija board experiences. It's just so—it changes your beliefs.”

Their exploits even caught the attention of Joe Rogan, who accompanied them on one of their adventures.

For Sam and Colby, it’s not just about delving into the lore of a haunted space, but the experience of spending the night there—Colby describes the feeling as similar to riding “a roller coaster.”

“We go in there wanting to find answers, but it's fun to be scared. I think that's what a lot of our audience gets out of it, too. It's like they are coming on an adventure with us.”

Sam and Colby’s hands-on approach has struck a chord with viewers; the two began their journey breaking into spooky buildings, but now they can buy them outright.

For their Halloween special, “Hell Week,” Sam and Colby bought Farrar Elementary School in Iowa, and camped out in their new cursed property.

“[The school] is known through hundreds of paranormal investigators as one of the most haunted places that they've visited in America,” Sam says. “However, there aren't any recorded deaths or anything like that. One of the reasons why we bought it is we want to solve this mystery.”

Pettie reckons that the rise in horror, especially analog horror, can be attributed to nostalgia; exploring abandoned places and revisiting childhood video games as cursed objects could represent “a craving for something that was lost.”

“There's anxiety that young people go through just with growing older and feeling like a sense of loss of innocence and childhood,” Pettie says. “So much of analog horror is driven by aesthetics for technologies which don't exist anymore, especially within the gaming world.”

“If you're thinking about when you were a child, it was really like a pre-modern internet era as well. There's just this feeling that the world is different. How do you process and deal with those feelings? I think it's through this current crop of horror content.”

With horror trends emerging inside and outside YouTube, shared narratives emerge that could be described as digital folklore.

Characters like Slenderman and otherworldly spaces like the Backrooms were collectively conceived by the internet, and popularized by YouTube creators who had their own spin on them.

Fittingly for the digital realm, many horror trends emerge from video games; pixelated spaces can be just as haunted as abandoned ships.

“The most exciting trend is this act of communal creativity that has resulted in not just these franchises like the Backrooms, but the emergence of new characters,” Pettie says.

“One of the more interesting things that we're seeing right now is the emergence of this character, ‘Shin Sonic’ from an analog horror series called The Sonic Tapes. Sonic himself has been subject to a lot of reinterpretation for the horror world, like ‘Sonic.exe,’ a digital folkloric character. That's existed for quite a while now.”

While Hollywood increasingly leans on sequels, reboots and remakes, original ideas keep emerging from YouTube; even popular characters like Sonic can inspire strange stories, far removed from the source material.

Pettie believes that creativity flourishes on YouTube because of the low risks of posting on the video-sharing platform.

“Anybody can make a video and put it on YouTube. When you're a movie or TV studio, you're typically going to be incentivized to do what has worked in the past. But on YouTube, you can create a channel, Local 58—one of the first big analog horror series—and just leave it there. Eventually people discover it, it becomes popular, and there's lower risk and higher reward. That just makes YouTube a more fertile landscape for this type of stuff.”

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