Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 8 (Local 58)

(CW: suicide)

Now we're really jamming with something weird and wild. Well, I should say we're going to be jamming with something weird and wild. Gotta get there first, so let us go through the process of getting there. The video linked above is how I found out about this series, a few months ago. I made a mental note to myself to come back to it for the spooky season on the blog, because with some of the concepts and sources of horror involved I felt obligated to. You'll see. You'll all see. So, for the uninitiated, Local 58 is a series of short horror videos created by the guy what did the famous Candle Cove creepypasta story. Lots of spooky bullshit about old TV and late night public access TV is at play within Local 58, and before I jam with the real wild stuff that's resonant to the blog, let's talk about the rest of the shorts for a little bit.

Of the seven shorts, three tie into what I want to talk about, one is very brief but contains what I feel is a main hook of the horror, and then the other three are just sort of there. I'll talk about those three now. "You Are On The Fastest Available Route" is a pretty simple one that glitches from TV footage to dashcam footage, with a GPS giving a driver directions before sending them into the woods to turn off their lights so a monster can get them. It works, and is retroactively tied into the rest of the shorts via the theme of technology betraying humanity. "Contingency" kind of crosses a line into outright disturbing territory as an emergency broadcast message. There's a fun scene I didn't talk about in Gremlins 2 where the Clamp Network airs a saccharine "end of the world" emergency broadcast message. "Contingency" is a way darker version of that, urging the preservation of American dignity in the face of nationwide defeat in war by encouraging mass suicide. It's fucked up, is what it is. "Real Sleep" is a later short and possibly deals with the theme of technology betraying humanity, and is decently creepy business about trying to suppress dreams via subliminal messaging, but doesn't scratch an itch for me personally.

What does scratch an itch, though, are those other three shorts. I'll talk about that brief middle one first, as it'll make everything else click. "A Look Back" is only a minute long and is a rapid montage of spooky clips from the other shorts up to that point, but contains a bit in the middle, flashing across the screen, that I will repeat verbatim in text form:

WE SEND SIGNALS TO OURSELVES

THRU THEIR DOMAIN

DID WE REALLY BELIEVE

THEY WOULDNT ADD THEIR OWN

Which brings us backwards, nicely, into "Weather Service", a short in which broadcasting is interrupted by a back-and-forth weather alert, first urging people to stay inside, then go outside, and so on and so forth. A creepy freak meteorological event that eventually takes over the station, urging all to go look at it. What is this nightmare weather event that insists we look upon it and go mad? It's the moon. There's even, in big black letters at one point, the words AVOID MIRRORS. You begin to see, given the magical girl exegeses we have covered here, why a creepypasta video series about the fucking moon going bad and trying to drive humanity insane is dark and spooky and something I had to write about, yes? "Show For Children" is a quick but effective descent into the spooky, a cartoon about a little skeleton boy peeking into graves and seeing other skeletons, all the while a cartoon anthropomorphized moon in the sky with big eyes watching. At the end, the skeleton boy lays in his own grave, the moon mirrors his peeking into graves, and the skeleton boy turns into a more detailed skeleton. The moon got him. "Skywatching" is the most horrific use of the moon as an object of madness, an astronomy show hacked into by malicious technology with close-up shots implying something is in there, and it ain't a fucking egg. 

In a wild way, this creepy video series feels made for me and the brand I've cultivated. The implication that TV signals are being used against us to communicate nefarious ideas to drive us mad alone is wild. It's the same driving force that made me appreciate John Carpenter's Christine, and how the titular car communicated her nefarious intent through rock and roll songs on her radio. Something is trying to make itself understood through the airwaves, using the moon as a source of horror and madness to get us. Local 58 is brief and often times ambiguous, but one can find worse ways to waste 20 minutes watching spooky short horror videos online. Just be careful the next time you go moonwatching. They say moonlight shines eternal, but eternity can be quite nasty when you think about it...