Good lord, have I got an interesting one before me tonight. We've dealt with the idea of "analog horror" before in these marathons, with pieces like Local 58 or the WNUF Halloween Special. Media which aims to weaponize that lo-fi VHS aesthetic and glitch it out to create something unreal and terrifying in its simplicity. We've also dealt with the spooky side of the creative mind behind this, Lewis Lovhaug, who some may better know by his online handle of Linkara. He was a major part of A Voice From The Dark, a horror-themed audio drama where he and other people formerly of the Channel Awesome website worked out their feelings about that mistrust in a Lovecraftian nightmare house.
Got all that? Okay, so on April Fool's Day of this year he releases this thing, the gag being "ha ha ha I am going outside my usual wheelhouse of comic book reviews to do an analog horror film, April Fool's!". Then he manages to make his genre-hopping [[shitpost]] actually a pretty effective piece of analog horror. It's not quite as esoteric as Local 58, but it doesn't frustratingly break its own aesthetic rules like the WNUF show. It would fall somewhere between those, but higher on the quality scale. You get a little bit of everything with Winter Of '83. Obviously you have the analog horror of an 80's public access station getting its signal intruded upon and glitching out to broadcast sudden shocking images and creepy text overlays, but this... movie? Miniseries? It originally aired in parts but I watched the 70-minute compilation, so let's just call it a movie for now. It does more than just a TV signal flashing gore and disturbing text. You have elements of both found footage and the audio drama like in Voice From The Dark, and it all mixes together to form this patchwork of panic.
Maybe it forms that patchwork a little too neatly. I don't know, I do like a certain level of ambiguity in these sorts of things. I can't help but compare this to Local 58, which practically made no damn sense aside from the implication that the moon was haunted. On the one hand, Winter of '83 explains itself pretty well, using recovered tape from lab experiments to pretty clearly define what the force causing all the fuckery in this Minnesota town in 1983 is and what its abilities are. On the other hand, it is simultaneously an ordinary threat that can't be avoided in a place like Minnesota and completely fucking gonzo. The malevolent force of the film is sentient bacteria which possesses snow and can manipulate UHF and magnetic tape signals to mimic speech and make its presence and desires known. This is a movie where killer snow stalks the people of a tiny town in Minnesota and makes snowmen out of itself that have shitty lo-fi copies of other people's faces.
Look, when you just say it like that, it sounds absolutely absurd. I know, trust me. If I'd known going in that this was a movie about killer fucking snow, I'd have skepticism too. It actually kind of works, which is the crazy thing. I loved the found footage segment of a random girl filming B roll and talking to herself, who is then killed by the snow, which then picks up the camera and starts to use snippets of her earlier commentary to praise the cold and the snow. It's a creepy and effective cut-up method, and snow itself for anyone not too far south is sort of this inescapable thing. Now this movie imagines snow that's trying to get into your warm house and kill you. In many ways, the movie's indebted to The Thing (indeed, Channel 83 is playing the 1951 original in one segment, so you know it's on Lovhaug's mind) with a chilly atmosphere and something inhuman mimicking humanity for its own unknowable ends. The fall isn't quite right for this movie, nor is April Fool's Day. No, this fucker needs to be thrown on in January or February, right in the heart of winter.
I really did enjoy this movie, and I'd urge you to save that link above and check it out. There's a lot more wild shit I didn't talk about, but I have to say I was impressed. Just the oppressive cold atmosphere, and the thought of winter, and all the glitchy signal intrusion shit... it all comes together to make something special. God damn, I didn't know Lovhaug had it in him, but by God did he have it in him. As for next time... Hell, I don't know, maybe I'll confront zombies again in the wake of Zombie Land Saga.
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