How YouTube Became a Horror Playground

YouTube is a scary place these days; Horror content is gaining popularity on the video-sharing platform, sparking a burst of creativity as creators explore new ways to scare their viewers.

YouTube has helped launch new creators and even new genres like “analog horror.”

What is analog horror?

Analogue horror is a twist on the found-footage genre, steeped in ominous nostalgia.

In these eerie videos, the recent past (often the 90s) is explored through glitchy, distorted lenses; haunted home videos, newscasts, and cursed video game footage all over YouTube.

Inspired by creepypastas, liminal spaces and movies like The Blair Witch ProjectOver the years, analog horror has gradually become more popular, and YouTube has played an important role in its growth.

YouTube’s head of trends and culture, Ernest Petty, told me that “horror content has been on YouTube since the beginning, but the content itself has evolved in interesting ways and the way people interact with it.”

Petty explained that YouTube’s trends have changed: “We’ve gone from a world of just single viral videos to a bunch of videos on one topic.”

“For a long time, people would share a certain video and the conversation would be about that particular video,” says Petty. “But now that video can be a topic and people are creating content related to that video. It allowed creators and their content to create massive fandoms and turn those things into their own intellectual property.”

Before becoming household names, Skibidi toilet and Amazing digital circus started life as original YouTube animations and quickly grew into a collaborative experience, inspiring thousands of fan-made videos based on original ideas.

Horror content has become very popular on the video sharing platform, and it’s not just for Halloween.

Petty mentions fans breaking down horror movies by creating kill count videos and ending explainers, as well as original horror made for YouTube.

“You have unscripted content like Sam and Colby going out and experiencing haunted houses and scripted content like Kane Parsons from the channel”Kane’s pixels”, whose Backrooms series has garnered millions of views. There’s this second degree thing where other people make movies and videos inspired by something that’s gotten billions of views.”

YouTube is cultivating new horror franchises

The horrors created on YouTube can even go beyond the video-sharing platform.

A24 is currently working on Backrooms feature film with Kane Parsons, and Sam and Colby hit the big screen Legends of paranormal phenomena.

Even blockbuster success with Five Nights at Freddy’s originated from the popularization of the franchise on YouTube, where “Lets Play” videos allowed young viewers to experience the horror with their favorite creators.

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

Sam and Colby explore haunted locations

Sam and Colby (Sam Holbach and Colby Brock) told me that their content has evolved from exploring abandoned buildings to exploring the supernatural, which has proven extremely popular on YouTube; today, their channel has over 13 million followers.

“We went to abandoned places. That’s how we got started on YouTube. Sometimes we heard things in these abandoned places and thought that maybe there could be something more, something paranormal. Eventually our content evolved from exploring these places to actually exploring them.”

Colby notes that YouTube’s low-budget video format creates a more authentic experience compared to the ghost hunting shows you see on television.

“YouTube lends itself to two guys and a camera running around and actually documenting their actual experiences, rather than a whole production team,” says Colby. “It creates a really authentic feel for this kind of investigation.”

Sam and Colby’s experience even made them reconsider their own beliefs. In 2018, after visiting the haunted ship, the Queen Mary, they stayed in a room called B340, which is known to be the most haunted room on the entire ship.

Late at night, the two engaged in a conversation with what they believed to be some supernatural entity that communicated by knocking.

“It completely changed my life,” says Sam. “There are videos of me crashing on my bedroom floor feeling like… I just don’t know what to think.”

Queen Mary video was a big hit; After that fateful night on the haunted ship, Sam and Colby have explored many haunted locations and experienced many unexplainable things.

“We’ve been hearing voices in our ears that we can’t explain,” says Colby. “We had an experience that brought us to tears. We even had a Ouija board experience. It’s just that—it changes your beliefs.”

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

For Sam and Colby, it’s not just about delving into the history of the haunted place, but the experience of spending the night there – Colby describes the experience as being like riding a “roller coaster”.

“We go in there wanting to find answers, but it’s fun to be scared. I think a lot of our audience benefits from that as well. It’s like they’re going on an adventure with us.”

Sam and Colby’s hands-on approach impressed viewers; both started their journey by breaking into creepy 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 to hundreds of paranormal investigators as one of the spookiest places they’ve visited in America,” says Sam. “However, no deaths or anything like that have been reported. One of the reasons we bought it is to solve this mystery.”

Analogue horror is nostalgia

Petty believes that the rise of horror, especially analog horror, can be explained by nostalgia; exploring abandoned places and seeing children’s video games as cursed objects can indicate a “longing for something that has been lost.”

“There’s the angst that young people go through as they grow up, and the sense of losing innocence and childhood,” Petty says. “So much analog horror is driven by the aesthetics of technologies that no longer exist, especially in the gaming world.”

“If you think back to when you were a kid, it was also like the pre-internet era. There is simply a feeling that the world is different. How do you deal with these feelings? I think it’s because of this current crop of horror content.”

With the emergence of horrific trends on YouTube and beyond, shared narratives emerge that can be called digital folklore.

Characters like Slenderman and otherworldly spaces like Backrooms were collectively conceived online and popularized by YouTube creators who gave them their own attention.

As in the digital realm, many horror trends originate in video games; pixel spaces can be as ghostly as abandoned ships.

“The most exciting trend is this act of co-creation, which has led not only to franchises like Backrooms, but also to new characters,” says Petty.

“One of the most interesting things we’re seeing right now is the appearance of this character, Shin Sonic, from the analog horror series called Audio tapes. Sonic himself has undergone many reimaginings for the horror world, such as “Sonic.exe”, a digital folklore character. It has been around for a long time.”

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

Petty believes creativity thrives on YouTube because of the low risk of publishing on the video-sharing platform.

“Anyone can make a video and post it on YouTube. When you work for a movie or TV studio, you’ll usually be encouraged to do things that have worked in the past. But on YouTube you can create a channel, Local 58— one of the first great analog horror series — and just leave it at that. Eventually people find out about it, it becomes popular, and the risk is lower and the reward is higher. It just makes YouTube a more conducive environment for this kind of thing.”

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