I should have a big puzzle piece nailed to my forehead for this take, but within the past week I've come to the conclusion that one of the few places the tropey predictability of the analog horror trend works naturally is, of all things, Five Nights at Freddy's.
This is an embarrassing revelation to have. I am not a furfag or a zoomer and until very recently avoided fnaf shit like the plague. I wasn't interested enough to play it when it was new and then it went from new to saturating horror let's plays to the point of fatigue at light speed. Annoyance being coupled with one of the cringiest fanbases in Internet history, I've been avoiding anything to do with mascot horror for years.
The other day I got the movie trailer as an ad on YouTube and to my surprise it looked like good clean popcorn fun. Is it going to be a masterpiece? Fuck no. But it's something I'd probably get my money's worth going out to see for Halloween with the other horror fans in my family. I watched Wendigoon's lore video to catch up and Jesus Christ what a ride that was. So I watched the next video, since he had stated in the first one that the video he had actually set out to make for his channel was specifically about the VHS tape fan content and the lore was such a mess that he had to make the one explaining it first. And when I finished that, already a couple hours into the rabbit hole of the night, I was pretty much sold.
The dissonance between the cute jack in the box gameplay that really offers nothing but "Boo!" and the story of corpses leaking fluids into props in a children's restaurant people until customers complain about the smell is really something. Most people are unsettled by the concept of decomposing bodies being in places decomposing bodies are not supposed to be. Even more so if the dead body is a child. I get particularly skeeved out in true crime cases when they just can't seem to find the source of a suspicious smell only to find that the victim was merrily bloating away in some weird place all along. The Cleveland Strangler story about how everyone on the street could smell it to the point it drove a sausage shop next door out of business because people thought they were the source is peak crime horror to me. The mysterious drippage from the ceiling and bad smell from an upstairs neighbor's unattended death story that went viral a while ago is repulsive and fascinating. Imagining mixing that with a Chuck E. Cheese setting as if it were true is brilliantly fucked up. Divorced from the cutesy shell that is one nasty story and I can dig it.
Cringe jumpscare tropes and all, that dissonance is where I think the fnaf vhs tapes actually pack a good use of analog horror aesthetics. Fnaf by reputation conjures up images of bright colors, shitty edgy gay angst art, and poor quality fan animation. Taking it to a realistic setting, giving the visuals a quality bump, and focusing on the horror elements makes for great mood whiplash. In general the ones I've seen have been timeline appropriate to the media format with few exceptions. One sticks out as taking place in a modern setting and has the employee bitching about why the fuck his boss gave him an old janky camcorder to film content for the haunted attraction, and I don't really remember home videos being that widespread until the 90's, not the 80's, but it still works better than a lot of weak retroscary premises. There's a contained universe with an established yet fucky timeline which leaves a bit of leeway for original storytelling but reduces the likelihood of story drift and scope creep which both seem to plague the recent waves of analog shit. Some of the kids making these are genuinely talented and I hope they go on to produce some non-fandom content. I think it's Spectre who's got a behind the scenes video about how he's homebrewed a motion capture system with camera tracking out of a kinect and how he uses greenscreen effects for his videos. That's a wild amount of effort for what amounts to an animated fanfic, goddamn.
Wendigoon's videos are a good overview, Battington and Spectre are two of the channels that are consistently good. Theft king seems to be permanently balls deep in drama (these people all seem to hate each other) but his channel makes for a decent directory.
I think this one is done well. The Battington sound response video with one of them coming into the bathroom after a little girl starts strong but the switch to forced storytelling in that one ruins it for me.
They're not exactly the pinnacle of modern horror and the majority of fnaf fans are still crazy gay furries who make mpreg out of dead kids, but after being steeped in the oversaturation of "scan lines are scary for no reason" for like the past year I can genuinely appreciate finding something with scan lines that's scary for the right reasons, even if it's born out of overwhelming cringe.
