I’m a big fan of VHS.

Yes, I’m also a big fan of V/H/S, as a series, but we’re tabling that for now, stick with me.

The clicking and whirring of the tape spindles and the movements of plastic across metal scratch an auditory itch for me. The scanlines and color saturation of the films put on a little visual grime I can’t help but like. It’s all very scrappy and humble-looking, which is partially why I find it a bummer when I see how limited of a lifespan they really have.

The VCRs of yesteryear are an aged tool that has now become fragile after years in dutiful service and aren’t going back into production. Their ever-dwindling numbers put this medium in a bizarre limbo, leaving us with a surplus of content on tape that is easy to find but increasingly hard to view. For those of us who grew up with VHS before trading up to DVDs and Blu-Ray, it’s a bittersweet sensation, staring at the contents of these clamshell and cardboard cases that one day, sooner than later, will become impenetrable. This leads me to the crux of why I found V/H/S94, the newest Shudder exclusive installment in the found-footage horror anthology franchise, so compelling.

V/H/S94 returns to the ethos of the first film and delivers a great collection of shorts that are rewatchable both together and on their own. It stays far and away from Viral’s cringe-worthy social media angle in favor of a more grounded narrative, involving a gruesome tape-obsessed cult and the SWAT team sent in to deal with them. This collection of shorts sticks to a formula while still planting itself firmly within its ties to retro media and the new kid on the block in horror, the subgenre that is analog horror.

For those out of the loop, analog horror was born out of creator Kris Straub’s smash-hit web series, Local58, an apocalyptic late-night local broadcast depicting various end-times, along with the victims of eldritch entities and government experimentation alike. I really cannot do it justice here in so few words, so I highly recommend anyone who hasn’t seen it to go check it out.

Since then, many creators inspired by Straub have brought in that candid quality of analog media to their own projects. The slew of successors has shown that, just like the horror of yesteryear, this pioneering wave of horror creators are in the same boat as many traditional horror directors and writers; they’re creatives with visionary ideas on micro budgets and they have serious potential to be the future of horror.

And while V/H/S94 is admittedly not as small scale as those productions, it maintains that energy; it has a low-budget charm while retaining a fine polish. It embraces the particular dirtiness embodied by the technology of the decade its set into great effect. “Storm Drain” feels like a small production between a handful of people about an urban legend, dripping with atmosphere and terror. “The Empty Wake” is presented on both vintage security footage and the funeral home attendant’s personal camera, giving it that necessary grit and silent tension of someone unsure that the corpse they’re looking over may not be dead. And the frame story of “Holy Hell,” with its grisly final hours of police being picked off one by one by deranged snuff film producers brings all the stories together with a distinct nastiness brought to the table by the artificial deterioration of the footage. This analog horror, contained in the tapes of people forced to record for their own sanity and safety, lends an effective level of realism viewers can get lost in, as well as providing an uncomfortable level of intimacy.

And it was upon making that connection, one of intimacy, that I realized why V/H/S94 and analog horror at large has become so popular. This type of fiction stands at the center of an offputting world, not of the current media we have, but of the analog media we know we’re going to lose, the world of lost media. After all, the rediscovery of something that was lost and changed has been the driving force behind the popularity of the V/H/S films thus far.

We see the obsoletion of things like VHS tapes, and in turn, observe not just the inevitable death of the mechanisms, but the memories inside of them. We lose not just the cartoons and movies of your childhood, but home movies, school recital recordings, weddings, and baby showers. Good times end up cursed to wither in the confines of something we can’t use and gain a new life only as a reliquary for vague familiarity. Analog horror takes that familiarity we have with the quaint and personal, removes their markings, and exploits our nostalgia before it turns it on its head to give us a gruesome, twisted version we can’t look away from. It adds a dark tinge to a medium that is obscuring itself from us in real-time and implants the thought that these tapes, the tapes that used to be ours, might just hold as much fear as they do nostalgia.

You can watch V/H/S 94 on Shudder!