10 Best Analog Horror Series Of All Time, Ranked

At a time when storytelling feels trapped in the past, analog horror is one of the few filmmaking movements genuinely pushing the artform forward. It's also one of the most underrated and underseen.

The subgenre gestated almost exclusively online before emerging fully formed in 2015 via "Local 58." It would be nearly a decade before it came close to the mainstream entertainment industry. The 2023 film "Skinamarink" introduced the curious masses to the subgenre's aesthetic conventions: old camcorder footage, an uncanny attention to verisimilitude (almost in an attempt to convince the audience that what they're watching could be real), and a terrifying use of liminal space. Three years later, Kane Parsons brought even more moviegoers into the fold with his A24 hit "Backrooms."

But if you only watch these two films, you aren't experiencing the full breadth of what makes analog horror so disturbing. The subgenre's exemplars frequently use such peculiar tropes as doppelgängers, conspiracies, invasions, and apocalyptic forecasting in ways that attack contemporary anxieties more than most mainstream horror films. 

If you're prepared to sleep with the lights on tonight, it's time to take a dive into the 10 best analog horror series of all time.

To paraphrase one YouTube commenter who described the impact of our first series as perfectly and concisely as anyone could, "No Through Road" was like The Velvet Underground of horror webseries. Their debut album didn't sell that many records, but everyone who bought one started a band.

Indeed, the original "No Through Road" short film never charted in the same way "Marble Hornets" did, despite being uploaded to YouTube just months before the latter series. Both were found footage projects first and foremost, though "Hornets" adhered to that specific subgenre (already on the verge of oversaturation thanks to "The Blair Witch Project" and its successors) much more closely. Its serialized plot grew to be so complex that it undermined the fragile "is this real?" factor that made "Hornets" and "No Through Road" genuinely terrifying to stumble upon in 2009. By contrast, "No Through Road" was basically analog horror before anyone knew what analog horror even was.

Rather than just presenting found camcorder footage that happened to have captured scary events, filmmaker Steven Chamberlain explored how many different ways he could use the metatextual premise implicit in the subgenre to frighten viewers. There were visual and audio distortions brought on by shoddy equipment; presentation that includes an unsolved, plausible mystery with ominous intervention from the government; a narrative rhythm that intentionally favors unpredictable realism, including extended shots of outdoor liminal spaces where the emptiness of the space itself is what's meant to terrify viewers. These are all components that would soon become essential to the analog horror movement as a whole.

The connection between horror webseries and indie horror video game fandoms has been strong for as long as the two communities have coexisted. (Just look at "Marble Hornets," a Slenderman-inspired project that went on to inspire one of the defining horror games of the 2010s in "Slender: The Eight Pages.") In the case of "The Walten Files," this widely beloved analog horror series began its life as a fanmade offshoot of "Five Nights at Freddy's."

That fact does mean readers' mileage will vary with "The Walten Files," depending on how much they can enjoy the vibe "FNAF" fans seem to thrive in. At first glance, the two projects appear to be nearly identical, as the first episode of "Walten" begins with an employee training video that feels ripped right from the "FNAF" video games and makes it obvious that the overarching threats of this nostalgic nightmare will be murderous, spiritually possessed animatronics that have taken over a pizza arcade. As the plot unfolds, viewers also learn that the specific method of killing is lifted straight from the game as well.

But where "The Walten Files" justifies its existence as an independent project is its emotional ambition. In the earlier stretches of the series, creator Martin Walls uses the unique ideas of the "FNAF" franchise to tell a twisted, tragic story about trauma, grief, and obsessive regret. Its central twist regarding the past of primary figure Jack Walten is genuinely dramatically compelling, and it helps make the case that "The Walten Files" is the best non-video game "FNAF"-inspired narrative project ever made.

There's no clearer evidence of how far analog horror has come than the fact that we can talk about it in the same sentence as some of the best body horror ever made. It isn't uncommon for the subgenre to break out of old VHS tapes and into the real world with whatever live-action sequences these projects can afford and/or narratively justify. Darian Quilloy's "Vita Carnis" earns a place on this list for its exceptional ambition in the realm of practical horror filmmaking.

Airing on YouTube since 2022, "Vita Carnis" is largely presented as snippets of an unearthed, intentionally buried documentary produced by research scientists studying the titular biological phenomena. Vita Carnis is (for the taxonomists out there) a newly discovered genus of "living meat" that consists of a wide range of creatures that resemble raw game. This includes seemingly benign wildlife like "Crawls" (fungal, ivy-like plants that look, feel, and taste like intestines, and are encouraged to be used as food and fertilizer) and "Trimmings" (six-legged meat-turtles that can be kept as pets). At the other end of the spectrum, however, are such horrors as the murderous, humanoid infiltrators called "Mimics" and the dread-inducing Harvesters.

"Vita Carnis" is the only analog horror series that commits wholeheartedly to making body horror its main dish. The use of puppetry and props is remarkable, especially compared to other webseries. (In one particularly stomach-churning episode, a cooking demonstration shows someone attempting to cut pieces of Crawl for a casserole dish. It is disturbingly uncanny.) At the same time, it doesn't skimp on the subgenre's staples. Nightmare-inducing monsters, government conspiracies, and corrupt corporations somehow fit perfectly within a story largely fed by the unknowable, unforgiving terror of nature.

Most moviegoers first heard of the prodigious 20-year-old filmmaker Kane Parsons when A24 announced it was distributing a feature film adaptation of his "Backrooms" web series. Years before that unlikely and successful partnership came to be, however, /Film gave Parsons his flowers for a lesser-known project we hailed as the scariest movie of 2023.

Made and released while Parsons was taking a break from the Backrooms in 2023, "The Oldest View" stars the filmmaker himself as a YouTuber who discovers a stairway hidden in a forest which impossibly leads to a subterranean, anachronous replica of the real-life Valley View Center shopping mall. The location — once a popular, very much above-ground shopping center in Dallas, Texas — was destroyed around the same time Parsons began uploading episodes of "The Oldest View." The series is worth watching for his faithful CGI-reconstruction alone, as Parsons pays such close attention to detail that specific floor signage and defunct local businesses are preserved in his reconstruction.

In "The Oldest View," Parsons melds his usual photorealistic CGI filmmaking approach with a creative use of traditional live-action storytelling. It feels as though he's bending the conventions of analog horror to see if he can create something akin to a mainstream narrative feature without losing the singularly unsettling mood set by series like "Backrooms" — to that end, he's entirely successful. This series also sees him operating with a new level of restraint compared to "Backrooms." Sci-fi monsters and conspiracies are kept at bay where any other analog work (including Parsons' own) might rush to introduce them. Instead, he lets the environment itself carry an ambiguous and strangely elegiac sense of horror that makes "The Oldest View" arguably the greatest liminal-space series in the making.

Despite having no obvious tie to old technology or new media, the supernatural trope of body-snatching doppelgangers is so prevalent throughout the entire analog horror subgenre. No project gets to the heart of why this specific trope and subgenre pairing is effective better than "Gemini Home Entertainment."

Quickly, before digging into that component of the series, we need to acknowledge another trope of analog horror that "Gemini Home Entertainment" perfectly exemplifies: the false anthology format. Each episode of the series appears to be outwardly self-contained, more explicitly so than similarly formatted series like "Vita Carnis" or Kane Parsons' "Backrooms." "GHE" creator Remy Abode takes this customary formal constraint to establish the concept of his series, which is a collection of educational videos recovered from old VHS tapes dated to the '80s and '90s. However, while establishing the dramatic world of his project, Abode is also gradually conditioning the audience to look past the surface of each standalone installment to uncover the storyline unfolding underneath the static — one in which a group of strange, paranormal creatures is emerging from the woods to take over the Earth home by home.

The exceptional pacing of its anthology storytelling (especially compared to other analog horror series) is what ultimately allows the body-snatching plot of "Gemini Home Entertainment" to land most effectively. This trope appears over and over throughout the subgenre, because it evokes the fears of paranoia, self-deception, and reality distortion that unite each of these series thematically. By the time Abode has trained the viewer not to trust whatever entity is making these videos, they've become chillingly overt in their aims, subverting the viewer's comfort by proving that even a personal literacy with its psychological storytelling isn't enough to control its effects. In short, "GHE" delivers a terrifying feeling of powerlessness that's hard to shake.

As any analog horror fan will readily admit, the subgenre can often get a little ridiculous. Eve Casanas' "Monument Mythos" shows that embracing that ridiculousness head-on can allow a series to take the expected tropes to extremes no sane piece of entertainment would dare venture toward.

In what stands as one of the few definitively completed analog horror series on the web, "Monument Mythos" entered the underrated alternate history subgenre to satirize warped American myth-making. The expected elements are there and dialed up to 11, almost to the point where the series begins to act as a deconstruction of analog horror tropes. Here, government conspiracies aren't meant to provide cover for why the viewer hasn't heard of the "real" story — they're meant to point toward the outrageous nature of such thinking, and question why we become susceptible to it in the real world.

The series explores most of American history, but it introduces major changes along the way. The key claim it makes is that, since at least the Civil War, our leaders have been constructing elaborate monuments (the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, and, of course, the Statue of Liberty) to conceal incomprehensible monsters from another world. It delivers a clear, competent level of satire the subgenre usually avoids — the idea that America would hide atrocities inside monuments to its own greatness perfectly illustrates a reckoning the country began to confront en masse in 2020, when Casanas first began uploading videos.

The series' lore expanded through to its end in the months before the 2024 election, often commenting on the current political landscape. Whether or not it hits the mark is up for debate (even Casanas is conflicted), but lines like, "What are you made of?" remain some of the most haunting and effective to come out of the subgenre.

By 2022, a then-16-year-old Kane Parsons (known online as Kane Pixels) had more talent as a CGI filmmaker than many adults twice his age. He was also particularly captivated (as young, internet-fluent storytellers often are) by a creepypasta known as "The Backrooms." The rest, for the most part, is history — Parsons posted a short titled "The Backrooms (Found Footage)" which launched arguably the most popular and culturally impactful analog horror project of all time, even before he got the chance to turn it into a feature film for A24. But that widely known summary of events greatly undersells how brilliant Parsons' series is.

Given the number of series, short films, games, and stories that have been inspired by "The Backrooms," it's important to emphasize how much stems from Parsons' adaptation. The iconic visuals are all his: the specific shade of yellow that consumes the majority of the rooms, the hypnotic wallpaper, and the seemingly procedurally generated cubicle architecture all came from his mind. While other online storytellers took his ideas and expanded upon them further in the usual ways such storytellers do (more monsters, more blood, more rooms, more convoluted lore), Parsons always kept his "Backrooms" deliberately simple. Even when he delved into sci-fi territory and pulled in a scary clandestine corporation as the overarching antagonist, he never lost sight of the specific flavor of dread that made the concept special in the first place.

Again, it's something more "mature" filmmakers don't get. When "American Horror Stories" attempted to jack Parsons' style for a "Backrooms" episode, they filled it with cliches of moral judgment that Parsons rejected. Especially after his film, his "Backrooms" feels closer to a profound metaphor for existential dread — the idea that one can be trapped in a dissociative maze where numb acceptance of the absurd and surreal is the only option.

Kane Parsons' "Backrooms" is undoubtedly the most culturally ubiquitous analog horror project made thus far (it isn't hard to imagine a significant portion of people who use the phrase "backrooms" colloquially to describe an area or its vibe, yet haven't encountered the broader landscape of analog horror). Among the community's hardcore fans, however, "The Mandela Catalogue" has long been the flagship project of the mainstream analog horror movement.

A spiritual successor to "The Walten Files" and "Gemini Home Entertainment," along with the #1 pick on this very list, Alex Kister's "The Mandela Catalogue" tells the story of the fictional Wisconsin county of Mandela, after it's been infiltrated by mimic-like entities called "Alternates." The series is most unique in its use of Christian religious tradition and esoteric mythology. These alternates are heavily implied to be Satanic "angels" who are able to take the form of those closest to you — save for some unavoidable physical distortions.

These alternates have become the most recognizable and influential creatures in the analog horror subgenre online. Detractors will reduce Kister's uncanny work to basic photoshop, but they discount how effectively he's able to conjure this alternate reality in the collective consciousness of his audience through the use of basic images. They're scary in large part because they're simple, intentionally deployed, and aren't undercut by any self-consciousness on Kister's part. They almost intimidate the viewer into second-guessing their own perception of what looks "normal" or "safe," evoking the fear of losing one's sanity that drives the overarching storyline.

Of all the entries on this list, "Petscop" is the one that most tests the boundaries of what analog horror can actually be, and as a consequence, it makes the most compelling argument for its untapped potential. Creepypasta RPGs were nothing new when Tony Domenico debuted the series in 2017. "Lavender Town Syndrome," "Sonic.exe," and "Ben Drowned" were all popular within this space, and it's especially hard to imagine Domenico wasn't at least subconsciously inspired by "Pokémon: Lost Silver." But make no mistake, "Petscop" stands above its influences for being the most thematically sophisticated and narratively ambitious entry in haunted video game horror.

"Petscop" is presented to the viewer as a "let's play" (a genre of YouTube videos where the viewer watches someone play and talk over a video game), in which an unseen person named "Paul" talks about a strange game he received as a gift. The game closely resembles "Pokémon," with the central gameplay mechanic being the capturing of "pets." As Paul goes about his playthrough, however, he uncovers hidden messages throughout the game that allow him to access hidden areas with their own secrets. Analog horror almost always invites the viewer to piece together the "real" story on their own, but few do so with as much meticulous subtlety as "Petscop."

There is simply no other series that could sit atop a list like this. Every series below, save "No Through Road," owes an impossible debt to "Local 58," a genuinely groundbreaking webseries that essentially created the analog horror subgenre.

Creator Kris Straub was already a defining voice in online horror prior to "Local 58" debuting in 2015. He created the creepypasta "Candle Cove," a foundational work that was adapted into the ahead-of-its-time "Channel Zero" television series. Both the original prose short story and the TV adaptation contained elements of analog horror that Straub had pioneered before he formally coined the subgenre's name with "Local 58."

In the latter series, Straub picks up the legacy of "Candle Cove" (and his old station call sign, WCLV-TV) to introduce viewers to a lost public access channel that seems to be immediately delivering some kind of paranormal propaganda. Early episodes include a "weather service" alert that warns viewers to stay inside during a meteorological event that makes it unsafe to observe the moon — then contradicts itself and orders viewers to stare at the moon as soon as possible (they just need to ignore the screams in the distance). Another PSA, ostensibly leaked as a "hoax," urges Americans to take their lives following a national invasion. Straub even produces an animated "children's program" a la "Candle Cove" for one segment, which again portrays the moon in an eerily sinister light.

In these shorts, Straub proves why he's the master of analog horror. The plot is specific enough to be distinct and uniquely terrifying, but never so explicit that it provides the viewer with the comfort of familiar narrative conventions. It earns the top spot not simply because it's the best, but because it established the style that nearly every great analog horror series uses.