The Machine We Can Still Unplug

The Guardian ran a piece this week on horror's obsession with obsolete tech, walking through the summer's two indie breakouts — Obsession and Backrooms — and their steady drip of analogue production design: the mom-and-pop music store, the self-help cassette hawked on a late-night infomercial, the character who smacks the TV to fix the signal, a gesture nobody has performed since the HDTV age began. The standard explanations were all available. Nostalgia. Aesthetic. Grain hides a budget; a camcorder frame excuses bad coverage; VHS artifacts do for a first feature what fog did for Universal in 1931. All true. All too small.

Because look at who's making it. Kane Parsons directed Backrooms for A24 at twenty. He was born in June 2005, posted the found-footage short that started the whole thing at sixteen, and has never in his life loaded a tape into anything. He isn't remembering the format. He's inheriting it — a hand-me-down dread for a world he arrived too late to live in. Parsons is the vivid case rather than the whole scene; the creator side of analog horror is generationally mixed, and plenty of the people making it did own a camcorder. But the audience skew isn't in dispute, and the audience is enough: the format is doing its work on people who have no memory of it. That's not nostalgia. Nostalgia requires a memory. This is grief for a past you only have secondhand, which is a specific and increasingly common condition, and the aesthetic didn't invent it. It just found a delivery system.

Here's the part nobody says out loud: dead technology is comforting.

Not the images — the object. A VHS tape has edges. It ends. You can eject it, burn it, bury it in a field. The entire premise of The Ring is a cursed thing with a location — the horror is that it copies, and the relief, buried in the terror, is that copying is a physical act somebody has to perform. A CRT can be unplugged. The signal comes from a tower you could theoretically drive to. Every haunted machine in this genre has an off switch, and the plot is usually the characters refusing to use it.

Now name the machine in your hand.

The obvious objection is that people have been writing horror about that machine for over a decade — Unfriended, Searching, Host, the whole screenlife shelf, a subgenre with its own producer and its own conventions. So look at how those films end. The call drops. The session closes. The account is deleted, the lid comes down, the feed cuts to black. Screenlife has to manufacture an off switch to get a third act, because the thing it's filming doesn't come with one. The counterexamples don't break the rule. They pay it, every time, in the last four minutes.

And the edge that mattered was never physical anyway. It was proprietary. The tape was yours. You owned the copy, the copy was the whole thing, and that is precisely why The Ring works: a possession that duplicates itself is horror because possession was supposed to mean containment. The phone has a power button. What it doesn't have is you as its owner. The storage is rented, the library is licensed, the device is a terminal onto somebody else's server, and "restore from backup" is the quiet admission that the thing you thought you were holding was always somewhere else. There's no third act because the object was never where the story lived.

So the genre isn't grieving obsolescence. It's grieving enclosure — the last era when the machine in the room belonged to the person in the room. Mark Fisher called this kind of haunting hauntology: being stalked not by the past but by the futures that got cancelled. The retro-tech ghost isn't the ghost of 1987. It's the ghost of ownership.

Which is why it's worth noticing where you're watching this. Analog horror lives on YouTube and TikTok. The algorithm serves you a beautifully rendered nightmare about the last machine in order to hold you a few more minutes on this one. Nobody wrote that as a joke, and it isn't quite an accident either — it's what the arrangement is built to do. The system will happily fund your fear of its predecessor, because that fear is not competition. A ghost story about a dead format is the safest possible thing to be haunted by, and the platform knows it even if nobody there ever said so.

None of which makes the work fake. The dread is real, the craft is real, and the instinct underneath it is more accurate than the surface reading gives it credit for. Artists reach for imagery that fits a feeling before they can explain the feeling. This scene reached for machines with bodies and edges and owners — reached for them hard, obsessively, for a decade — which is what a culture does when it needs to talk about something it can't yet look at directly. Displacement isn't a lie. It's a first draft.

So the invitation, and you can decline it: notice which machine you're willing to find frightening. It's usually the one you already put down.

And here is what would prove me wrong, because an argument that absorbs all evidence isn't an argument. If someone lands the current machine as genuinely frightening without inventing a way to switch it off — no closing lid, no deleted account, no last-minute exit, the thing simply continuing — then the missing boundary was never the obstacle and this whole piece was decoration. I don't think it's been done yet. I'd like to be wrong, because the day someone manages it is the day the thing becomes visible.

The good news is that the horror was never in the tape. The bad news is the same sentence.