Get Nebula using our link for 40% off an annual subscription! go.nebula.tv/talefoundry Or click here to watch the first episode of The Sojourn ➤ nebula.tv/videos/thesojourn-s1e1-the-cold-divide?ref=talefoundry
Minor misinformation. In the beginning, you say that none of the video clips are any older than 2020. This is not true. The clip of the "Follow me" minigame from fnaf came out 2015 as it's from fnaf 3.
Saying that seeing things perpetually recycled is like a séance doesn't seem entirely the right word. Being in a land of ghosts, surrounded by those that can't pass on, is Purgatory. Except in this case instead of having "unfinished business", these dead can't pass on because they're not being let go of.
I don't have sth to say about the video, but for some reason, I think that if the Stormlight Archive was ever adapted you should be the one to voice Pattern.
Yeah, because people are using the present as a basis for what the future will look like. It's getting kind of scary right now, with how chaotic the presidential election has been so far, and the horrible stuff happening in Palestine right now.
@@WildWinterberry No, there's tons of shit happening around the world other than what the News stations tell you. Everywhere there is some conflict happening.
@@Ostan-jw2bgOr you can past generation who become become adult and old person disappointed how future nothing just bad so people rememberly those old times even though past era was not good
Same goes for Star Trek. It's the 24th Century and much of humanity has easy access to bespoke AI generated holograms. But every ship in Starfleet seems to have "movie nights" showing 500 year-old films and crewmates form bands that still play Mozart and standards from The Great American songbook. Human culture in Star Trek seemingly hasn't produced anything profoundly "new" since the Third World War.
@@GrizabeeblesI think Star Trek tries to avert it, though, and in Ready Player One it's the point. Have you noticed whenever Star Trek lists famous examples of anything, they almost always start with a couple real human examples, and then add an alien or a future human or both? It wants there to be future culture, it just also wants to be comprehensible. When Tom Paris is a fan of 20th century cars and movies, it's something he has to introduce his friends to, and they don't always get it. Classical music gets played, as does Shakespeare, but then those are already longlasting pieces of art today. It's not crazy to assume they'll last another 300 years. Ready Player One, though, INTENTIONALLY lives in the past. Its media references are, canonically, the result of one man's nostalgia, and they're found through the dedication of the main character's dedication to the same nostalgia. But it's not just a simple niche hobby; the era the protagonist is obsessed with is the one the entire digital world is built around. The digital world may be accessed in exciting new ways, but nostalgia is its beating heart. Even when the book takes a political turn, the guys who wind up in charge are real people from today, just aged up. NOT fictional future people with new ideas. Plus, Wil Wheaton's heyday, no offense to him, is already in the past. Cory Doctorow, despite having really interesting ideas about the evolution of the internet, does think it's being enshittified right now and was freer and better before. The closest thing to forward thinking Ready Player One has to offer is today's Old Reliables, rather than what was new forty years ago, which... isn't actually much better. It promises to remake the world in this nostalgic vision, but where's the real cultural future? Still nowhere to be found.
What I think is the kick of nostalgic horror is the feeling of things being left behind, abandoned, forgotten. The distortions, the glitches, the songs that feel like in a different era, they carry with them a sense of something once being important, being trends, being attachment to people, yet now something damaged, found from the attic.
I completely agree. Part of why people can get so fascinated with retro IPs and creations is because there is more revealed about the process behind them, which in turn reveals more of the people that made it. So when those things are forgotten, I think part of our subconscious recognizes that part of a person is being forgotten too.
@@smartsmartie7142 lmao that doesn't exist unless it's abuse or fears being passed on from parents who never got over their own pasts and think their children shouldn't be over it either.
Isn’t it interesting that a lot of people who are fans of this “haunted media” weren’t even alive when it was first popular, nostalgic for a memory that isn’t even theirs?
It's all hand me down. With VHS this is the most obvious. It's not nostalgia for the movies a seen in theaters at release, it's nostalgia for a well worn recording. A ghost stuck repeating the same actions it did in life. It's not perfect recall, it's a faded memory.
The word you're looking for is anemia, but the last film to be produced in a VHS format was in 2006, 18 years ago. People still had VHS players and tapes for all their already existing VHS tapes, especially poor folk as money often determines if you're buying new devices and throwing the old ones out. There are plenty of young people still around with some early memories of watching VHS.
@@thepinkestpigglet7529yes, but the actual kids of today all had DVD. I'm by no measure wealthy, but my kids hadn't seen a VHS played until around 2016, and even then it was at my grandma's, and was so worn it barely played. Even the DVDs of my youth often are too worn down to work.
Lots of people also watched older media on TV or because their parents had physical copies. So they absolutely can associate those with their childhood, even if they didn't really experience those times themselves.
The concept of “running out of nostalgia” has crossed my mind many times. In a world of reboots, remakes, and reimaginings, what happens when stories and characters from the 80s/90s/00s don’t register anymore? It’s like pop culture has peaked, and many of us don’t feel we have what it takes to dethrone the cultural sensations from decades ago that are still lingering with us.
I have a '94 vehicle that is basically an 80's vehicle made into the 90's. It's odd seeing so many new vehicles borrow from the 80's. It's like the time my truck was made in is eternal.
Ironically, the book version of Ready Player One is *both* a tribute to the nostalgia it features, as well as an examination of this very concept. It's set in the 2040s where the world is falling apart and people spend all their time in VR engaging in the secondhand nostalgia of a man who was a child in the 80s while ignoring the problems around them. People see the movie and think it's only a nostalgia trap cash-grab, but it's so much more than that. It really is one of my favorite books. I think it's possible to carry the good things forward and use them to build an identity of our own. Like this video talks about, the (Italian) Renaissance was a celebration of Classical Greek art and philosophy. Now the Renaissance is renowned as a monumental part of art history.
This sounds almost like a daily existence for me. 1) I'm autistic so I find myself recalling things from my own childhood. 2) I'm also a trauma survivor. Without knowing, I'm suddenly haunted by my past. It's like I'm in an odd Groundhog Day setting within my mind.
"If they never leave, you can't miss them" is actually the best explanation for why I rarely feel nostalgic for anything in my life and the craze with nostalgia seems kind of crazy to me. In fact, I reflect on past memories and experiences quite often and, seemingly, with high fidelity. Not because I miss the past, but because I wonder what lessons I could still learn from it, and how it can inform how I might want to change myself for the future. So instead of seeing something and being like "Oh that's like that thing from x decades ago", it's just "oh that's like that thing". I'd just as soon feel nostalgic for my tea kettle as I would for the 90s.
For a minute, I thought I saw something that looks like a clip of Lisa Frankenstein in there, but it was probably something else. I'll have to pay attention to the beginning later
Horror of nostalgia is horror about losing yourself. Losing people you loved, places you've been in, experiances you had... yourself as you used to be in the past. All of that looks so much more beautifull now when it is gone. Future is uncertan and potentialy threatening, past is not, that's why we love it more. So many times I have been creeped out by beautifull memories while watching them from the time distance... It almost feels like I am looking at my dead self... And my parents, my friends, everyone I remember, even though they are still alive, their past selfs are dead... But also... living... frozen in time... just like ghosts...
Yeah, even with my rubbish memory. I remember stories better. I saw a picture of Robert Picardo the other day and I spent the rest of the week mourning Voyager. Was he my favourite character on that show? Does it make a difference? Should I pause my forward looking self and pull out some old DVDs? Then i get these "lost" moments. Things I've done, that I should do again, all of them at once and while I'm at work 😅. Not me sitting in a pub as I haven't done in decades. 😅😅😅
This is a good comment. Also makes sense with the whole dementia talk at the end about the song. Is like we all are living some sort of dementia (with obvious differences from real one) were we are slowly losing ourselves in a sea of online content. Instead lf just living the real world were we do matter, we are stuck in a dystopian cultural nonsense were NO ONE matters. And is only there to profit the ones already millonaries. I think we should really shut down the digital world more. For me has been cooking and cleaning around my house. My brains hates it bc there is no over stimulation but is so much peace. I still need music or a video of course but I can disconnect a little from the computer, were sometimes I felt physically trapped...
Yes, there is also a natural horror of death and the process of forgetting. As we grow older, we unfortunately always lose some parts of our past selves. At elderly age, some of us may even start to forget people close to us. And there is also the fact that 99,9% of us will eventually be completely forgotten by new generations after our death.
I don’t necessarily think nostalgia fuels these creations; certain influences like the 80’s styles, pixel art games, and certain tv shows simply never left. They have always continued to influence us because they were always great. The Super Nintendo and PlayStation 1 games continued in development and even evolved into something better. I recently bought Souldiers on the PS4 online store and I love how similar it is to the Super Nintendo era while showing an evolution on the art style. Nostalgia is comforting to many of us but certain trends never really left. Music from the 80’s and 90’s are sometimes more popular than some of the modern releases.
Sure, but look at why. For example, Kate Bush experienced a huge surge in popularity not thanks to her music and importance of her role as a major female pop star, but because her song "Running Up The Hill" was used in Stranger Things. There were people after the last season who unironically said that this new Metallica band should be ready to blow up, before learning they've been around since the 70s. And if you want a reason why they've never left, again look at nostalgia and ease of production. You say they never left because "they were always great," but shows don't experience resurgence just because they were great. The emotions and memories they stir in older audiences meet with the history known about them to fascinate younger audiences. If making something new, it's quite hard to find success just by remaking the old. Souldiers is a great example of a modern game borrowing an older visual style. If you look at the design of the game, the devs clearly learned from the decades since the SNES in how to adjust balance and impact game feel.
With videogames in particular, the practical reasons for simple graphics are huge, especially for no-budget hobby creators. And when you decide that you want to go with a low-fidelity look as a practical necessity, you automatically look at old 90s games for references. Those old games show us numerous great examples of how such low-fidelity graphics can be made to look good. It's a great starting point instead of trying to reinvent low-polygon graphics from scratch. I don't know about deliberately faking glitches and errors cause by 30 year old hardware, though. That definitely feels purely nostalgia-driven and has no practical purpose. It's additional unnecessary work.
Feels like society's last Big Leap started around the time society started to expecting the average person to own a smartphone. 24/7 internet access, always buzzing for people's time and attention.
Having access to the sum total of all human knowledge at the tip of our fingers at all times would've seemed like a futuristic utopian concept a few decades ago. But with the technology being owned by the biggest profit hounds in history it's become pretty much the opposite. We live in a boring dystopia.
@@KalCounty honestly I’m just looking around at the Sheer Humanity around me and just think to myself “so this is what it looked like when powerful civilizations of the past collapsed” They fell in a paradoxical storm of anger and blissful, willful ignorance. It ends with no one knowing what’s happening, ignoring the problems in front of them and if they can’t do that then spend that time pointing fingers.
as someone who is a kid of the 80s and 90s i feel that after the 2000s there is no distunging factor for the decades and we keep revisiting old decades70S, 80Sand 90S mostly
I disagree. There was a lot of nostalgia for the 90's in the last decade and I'm seeing a bunch of nostalgia for 2000's internet culture right now. You just need about 20 years of distance before you can make out what defined a decade.
The thing is, we are in an era where people have a warped nostalgia about a time they never lived in that they think is better than now, so they try to bring that memory back without understanding that there are reasons why things aren't that way anymore. And honestly, how many horror stories involve someone digging up something from the past only for there to be terrible consequences they never imagined?
Funny you brought up Ready Player One here, because it could be argued that those references in the context of the larger world are themselves an examination of the "why" of nostalgia. After all, the book and film both take place in a society on the brink of dystopian collapse, a late-stage capitalist nightmare where people's motor homes are stacked on top of one another, where corporations can essentially kidnap you and subject you to forced labor despite not breaking any real laws, and where there are no new characters in the largest video game on the planet. The nostalgic references, and the game as a whole, are the only escape for normal people stuck in this world, the people who have nothing else to do but revel in living inside a digital world with their friends and favorite characters, chasing the ticket to an escape that is ironically still locked in the game behind the nostalgic challenges of its creator. I remember being fascinated with the film when it came out because Spielberg was able to capture the drab mundanity of the real world, juxtapose it with the fantastical nature of the game, and then still tie the characters and their actions back in the real world. I think everyone who simply dismissed it as a nostalgic cash grab completely ignored the point of why those references were there in the first place.
Thank you! You practically took the words right out of my mouth. Yes, I did watch the movie just for the nostalgia but also for that fact alone. Like I've seen how much accelerating technology is effecting our lifestyle and not the good way I was hoping. It really is both fascinating and terrifying.
That's crazy, next your going to tell me that the book Starship Troopers that inspired the movie is actually an allegory for America's invasion of Iraq and meant to be a warning about how a democratic society can become a military autocracy.
@@catdogmousecheese hey man, it's pretty insane how this not-even-submerged thematic material can go completely overlooked by viewers if they aren't looking for it. There are people who you could talk about Starship Troopers with who would balk at what you just said (and be wrong, of course). I mean look at Helldivers, a game that just amplifies Starship Troopers' core message to a deafeningly ridiculous degree, and some people still don't get it.
I always have considered the "Second death" as in being truly forgotten a horrifying thing, and all these old horror pieces feel like they are dying that second death, and we are here to stand and witness it.
I think TUNIC is a perfect example of optimistic use of nostalgia. The game uses its influences to accelerate it, the way that an instruction book becomes a new way to experience a game is amazing.
It is perhaps fitting that the meme status of “It’s just a burning memory” has become my own personal poltergeist. I’m a bit older than the generation who made it a meme (middle millennial) but still largely traverse the same parts of the internet. Only, because of my age, I’m at a place in life where that song means something very different from noclipping into the backrooms or Mr Incredible becoming uncanny. My mom is dying from alzheimers. Not dying now. Not yet. But dying. Slowly. And that goddamn song, which so perfectly conveys the devastating, bottomless sorrow of that unavoidable situation, the grief that underlies every inncuous situation in my life now, it is everywhere. I can not escape it. It permeates what used to be my home of a sort, turning what used to be a familiar, reassuring place into a danger zone. A once-comforting place I now feel compelled to escape from. So yes. Haunting. It’s strangely appropriate.
My dad was a generation late to have a gen Z kid, and the result was when I was 14-16 i had to watch my grandmother develop dementia. Lots of people my age had lost their grandparents already, I had already lost three, but I was the only one who was losing one to that. So that album comes out and gets popular online years later and it's bringing up trauma I didn't even realize I had and...my peers are laughing at it. At best they're scared in theory but they don't actually know. And I hope they never have to.
I'm so sorry... I lost my dad to dementia earlier this year, and this song has haunted me similarly, popping up in video after video for laughs or for spooky ambience... Each time it reminds me of the pain and dread I felt when I realized the true horrors he was going through in day to day life as the disease progressed... He's no longer suffering now, but I never want to be reminded of that time again.
Horror has always been the home of haunting nostalgia. That's why horror films age so gracefully compared to other genres. When the Universal monster films came out, Frankenstein made his monster in a medieval castle. The Count emerged as an obsolete and vanished type of aristocrat existing in a cobwebbed stone keep. In the 1960s The Haunting of Hill House and Psycho solidified the 1920s era Second Empire home, so many of which fell into decay with the Depression, as "the haunted house." In the eighties Kubrick memorably played "Midnight, the Stars and You" in the echoing, vacant halls of the Overlook Hotel. Even science fiction in horror dates better. Lucas foolishly tried to update his Star Wars (itself a ghost of '50s Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon serials) with CGI that aged worse than the footage it replaced. But Alien ages more gracefully, provoking the makers of Alien: Isolation to copy chunky '70s tech and static-filled NTSC screens. The headlines of the day will always produce new horror. The First World War gave us the shattered visages of the Phantom and Frankenstein. The atomic bomb gave us Gojira. The Manson family gave us Michael Myers and all the rest of the slashers. The "greed is good" eighties gave us Dr. Lecktor. The Northridge Earthquake of '94 affected many Hollywood creators and its imagery ended up in many films, like the crashing of the Enterprise in Star Trek: Generations. Do I need to even discuss how 9/11 imagery found its way into films like The Dark Knight or The War of the Worlds? The Trump era and COVID has already spawned a new generation of nightmares. Horror will always lag by about a decade as we process our traumas.
Perhaps the horror aesthetic is just being cemented into our collective psyche as being set in the 1980's-90's. Much like medieval high fantasy or a spaghetti Western, it's easy to staunch some stories in a certain setting. So perhaps it's not always so much of a callback of nostalgia, but is instead just making something that fits in with that aesthetic, so it just feels right?
@@VeritabIlIti Surely there can be more than one era / style in horror. found footage has its roots in blair witch. some have roots in freddy kruger or other cheesy 80's horror. Some go back to hammer studios. or even the original 1930's frankenstein cheesiness.
@@tsm688 that's exactly my point. I was countering OP's statement about horror being rooted in 80s/90s aesthetics. You are absolutely right, horror exists in lots of periods and styles.
In my opinion why I think nostalgia is so fitting with horror is that looking back at some of the fond memories from when you was a kid but with a more knowledgeable filter you realize the little horrors hidden under your childish inacence
I always said there was a lot of horror to be recovered from abstract images, low resolution models and jittery graphics. As our brains often have to fill in the gaps of what our eyes can't fully make out, and whatever our mind is able to create tends to be way more horrifying and personal than anything a dev could model.
@@elisehalflight Like the first Jurassic Park the dinosaurs were barely visible half the time, obscured by lighting and rain. This made it very effective visually.
@@tsm688 Word, I really loved how they kept the visual of the velociraptors hidden for a good chunk of the movie, sold them as intelligent stalker killers like no other film on the franchise.
Nostalgia won't ever go away - because it's mostly people wanting to be reminded as an adult, of something they perceived as children. If a person in 2050 is given 1980s cartoons to watch, then yes they will be nostalgic for that as an adult. They'll be nostalgic for whatever they took in, and which helped form their child worldviews. I guess my view is that nostalgia is a personal thing to each individual, that we can analyze writ large as a cultural thing - but it isn't primarily a cultural thing. If the vast majority of adults watched the same cartoons as kids, they will have a similar nostalgia - but only because they by happenstance watched the same thing. I think analyzing nostalgia as a cultural phenomenon primarily, loses some of the point though - and might make a person make assumptions that aren't true. As for the album thing, I think that was scary not due to nostalgia, but because it captured what it might feel like to lose your mind, your faculties. That's scary independent of nostalgia. It'd be like someone intentionally blurring, slowly, their photographs, to simulate what a person with a degenerative eye disease experiences.
I think you're missing a significant part of the argument here. Nostalgia has taken on a cultural significance specifically because of what you're talking about: if the majority of kids watch similar things, they will then have nostalgia for it as adults - that IS pop culture in a nutshell. What you're describing as individual adults having nostalgia ceases to be individuals because it is so widespread. Talebot isn't talking about a conscious nostalgia in the classic sense, but a cultural nostalgia, where creators and consumers are both shaping media around older aesthetics that they likely grew up with - a retrospective zeitgeist, if you will.
This is one aspect of why I love The Amazing Digital Circus. It's got some nostalgic types of gaming features (that's as well as I can describe it) like with the second episode where Pomni glitches around, the abstractions being similar to MissingNo in that they're distortions of what they were supposed to be, even Ragatha's face becoming Pong when Caufmo's abstraction makes her begin to glitch around. But it deals with more than just that. There's problems being looked at that are very old, but coming around now as something new (body dysmorphia and gender dysphoria), dealing with loss of loved ones and memories, fear and panic of the unknown, sociopaths, and more. It's universal feelings that have a certain timelessness to them perceived in an old gaming light. It's neat.
Unfortunately, Gooseworx doesn’t treated her 3D animated show as semi-horror, despite using couple to pretty close few existential horror elements with its main cast, except Caine, and one episode is fully exploring horror itself in two subgenres, Kid and Survival Horrors in the form of game difficulty modes???
@@Chadjr2009 They never claimed it was a kid's show, and you can very clearly tell that from episode one with the existential crisis of "Where tf are we and what is this vast void". It's up to parents to review things first. Even the pacing in the first few moments tells you it's not for kids. Besides, lots of us grew up with The Secret of NIMH, Land Before Time, Watership Down, Plague Dogs, The Simpsons, Family Guy, Futurama, South Park, Jurassic Park, Jaws, and many other things that may have "traumatized" us at first, but we quickly recovered if we had loving and attentive parents or understood that all that was just fake. Videos/movies/shows are a great medium to scare kids because it explores new topics for them in a safe way that they can pause at any time and ask questions to trustworthy adults. Or pause and just explore on their own later when they feel ready.
@@nykole1963 Oh no. I was referencing to third episode of TADC, where Caine make two sub genres of horror as game difficulty modes for haunted mansion-theme challenge, with easy mode representing Kid Horror.
@@Gigitheeternal That's not Castlevania, that's Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon 2. which came out in 2020. That's not Ocarina of Time. I don't know what it is, but the HUD is different.
@@Rhomega oh dang, I got totally played, I forgot bloodstained was so recent since it was hyped up for so long, and I'll be honest I couldn't see the other clip well enough either, I just saw the mini map and the hearts in the top left and felt smart......smort
At 2:18 , the moment that backing track plays all I could hear was the soothing southern drawl of Wendigoon reading a bedtime story to PapaMeat lmao. "Who up creepin they cast?"
Everywhere At The End Of Time broke my heart in ways I didn't think possible. Losing people you love to dementia/Alzheimer's is a slow-burning kind of hell, with deaths and grief both internal and external scattered like breadcrumbs on the path.
Nostalgia can indeed be damaging if one allows themselves to be consumed by it. I feel like there’s some good potential for a horror film based around this concept, like a monster that victimizes others by trapping them within an illusion representing the era about which they feel the most nostalgic, and if they can’t break free then they die and have all trace of their existence erased from everyone’s memories.
0:01 Heartaches, heartaches.... My loving you, they're only heartaches.... Your kiss was such a sacred thing to me.... I can't believe it's just a burning memory.......
It makes sense than in an increasingly connected world that has us constantly plugged into present issues and an increasingly bleak future that people would look to nostalgia as an escape, but that kinda feels like a trap. Get lost in the haze of an idealised past so you don't have to deal with the present or even think about the future.
one of the songs from the metal band "Lamb of God" has a line that says "nostalgia is grinding the life from today" and that applies perfectly here I think
We can't always be mourning the past. We have to celebrate the present too. It's like that Queen song, "Those days are all gone now/But one thing's still true/When I look and I find I still love you."
I think the existential horror here is that our media seems to be aimed towards emulating/reanimating the past, instead of creating something that can be emblematic of the present. Just look at the success of X-Men '97.
I have a precious memory. I know that I will never experience anything like it again and as I am still quite young I can feel this one precious memory fading while my other memories are still functioning quite well.
Candle cove is a good example of nostalgia horror. People reminiscing a kids show from when they were kids, slowly remembering the weird things that occured, then finally finding out that it was watchable only for them. It was made by Kris Straub who also made Local 58 which really kicked off analog horror.
The nostalgia is being here and now that's why the 90s 80s 70s and 60s work with aesthetic so well and it is getting to be redundant and repacking to the point of cringe oblivion. Just live in your future, just live in your moment.
Can it also be said how the present seems to poison artists' motivations? Some wild stuff just changed in Twitter's TOS about AI training and I sense another migration out of that site. As for myself I don't even want to share my art digitally anymore.
Idk about running out of nostalgia, I mean my generation is now starting to become nostalgic for things like the Wii, ps3, 2010 music, etc. People will always be nostalgic about things from their childhood (I'm 20). Whereas for media like games and video/film I believe the main draw of copying retro media is the limitations they give, these limitations make room for creativity to shine. I don't think these retro styles are only popular due to nostalgia, I never grew up with most of it and I also love it. They simply make a good platform for creativity.
Agreed. There's all sorts of inspirations being pulled from the last 40 years of media, and as time marches on people will get nostalgic for the unique stuff made now. Tolkein's works could be described as farming nostalgia, describing a world of fantastical monsters and roughly medieval tech levels. I don't think culture will get "stuck" in a nostalgia loop. Things will echo and repeat, but change every time by the nature of how creativity works. It seems misled to say that nostalgia is harmful to culture based on the misconstrued conclusion that it will cause a spiral.
I feel like this is an accurate definition of modern day culture and really society as a whole. Even politics can't help but use nostalgia and past events as arguing points for their campaigns. It's like the present day is a blank canvas in comparison to the fully illustrated canvases of past decades. Our world is very much in a lack-luster, mundane state. We all want something to look forward to but have been met with mere nonsensical technological advancements, politics that make absolutely no sense, and so many crises that we've almost become desensitized to everything the world has to offer. I do, however, think there is something special about the modern day being a blank canvas. It has endless possibilities. Endless ways to enjoy and appreciate life. Endless ways to inspire and create positive change in our communities. The world has never been perfect, but that doesn't mean we can't make it better. "Carpe diem" is a phrase that I think summarizes my point. We should all live our lives to the fullest and appreciate every moment we're given because we never know what we have until it's gone. Hope this bring at least some comfort to anyone who reads this. Much love to you all. ❤️❤️❤️
The past is a country we can never return to, so we treat it like a fantasy playground: a safe space where we dress up as whatever emotion is tickling our soul , be it fear, hope, sadness or whatever. The fact is, we already know how things play out, so we can forget uncertainty while we romp around in grandpa's suit.
This is one video where I think you've got it wrong. We're mining the past for the gems that didn't resonate when they were created, not pining for the lost past.
The nostalgic attachment is how Object Yokai are made. Once forgotten they will take a life of their own and wreak havoc at being abandoned, haunting either their former owners or anyone they come across. Haven't I served you well?
On the off chance anyone reads this, this video reminded me of Kane Pixels' series "The Oldest View." One of the main themes of that series is how quickly the past is forgotten. Even someone who had done so much, like Julien Reverchon (who was a French Botanist), is unknown to most of the modern world. And when we try to dig old memories back up, what have we turned them into? Admittedly, "The Oldest View" is fairly cryptic, but that's what I've taken away from it.
As someone who came from the later years of the Analog Era (90s-early 2000s), I can always tell when something is actually from a later time. It’s hard to put into words, but most media meant to emulate earlier times often lacks keys details that sets it apart. One needs an actual living knowledge, though. Because I am from the era, I can easily say things like “Oh, they *never* would have made something like this,” or “The colors are a bit off fro something from the era,” in other words, it lacks the feeling of being genuine. I have a distinct feeling that as the years go on, the 70s-90s are just going to be remembered as a monstrous amalgamation, much like how we remember the distinct eras that make up “the Middle Ages”. If I had a penny for everything from a “Renaissance” Fair that was actually from a much earlier or later time, I could buy Disney. But such is the ravages of the monstrous abomination that is warped memory.
I never knew of this as "nostalgia" horror, I always thought these games and videos were just a subgenre of horror made in a retro style. Although I do see how horror can take advantage of nostalgia; taking some old beloved things, highlighting and overemphasizing the unsettling bits that were mostly overlooked, or outright twisting even the happy bits into something terrifying. The early Pixar baby looks so unsettling now, or we finally realized how unsettling it actually was all along, both because of how much CGI has progressed and the degree of separation from when stuff like this was commonplace. There's also the fact that adults, who knew this stuff as kids, can come back to it a decade later and often pick up on things they didn't before. Or even the simple phenomena of having the mental energy to scan for other things you might've miss after you've already experienced the first run and know basically what to expect.
Another scary part, too, is how quickly these processes are happening now compared to then. The Pixar baby, while undeniably uncanny, still represented a major leap forward in computer generation, and the majority of people were willing to overlook the creepiness to appreciate the advancement. It inspired awe. Now we get people fighting over CGI that would have blown those 2000s animators minds, saying it looks sub-par. The closest analogue I think we have now is the advancement of visual generation, but instead of feeling excited or impressed we mostly just feel disturbed.
8:38 I was lucky enough to be born about 10 years before the internet was easily accessible for everyone and I don’t think I could ever put into words what a game changer it was, like sure I was 10 but I could tell how world changing it was, I spent the rest of my childhood absolutely glued to the family computer, with our terrible 2kb/s internet, 8kb/s if we were really lucky.
On this topic I always pointed to the pragmatic reason rather than the essentialist one. Like in the modern era, you need a lot of workaround to overcome the fact everyone has in their pocket a device for comunication, with access to ton of info and other features. we are surrounded by infrastructure to offer us services... And it's hard to remove those from you. So you either use a supernatural element to remove it or you set your story where those stuff arent present (either in time or space)
I suppose one thing going for nostalgia horror is that it refers to a place and time long past for those who never experienced it first hand or lived along side it but didn't know the goings ons. A time full of mysteries, wonders, and limitations that risk fading away into the depths of time. Personally, I was born after the 80s and I was too young to soak in the culture of the 90s, yet there are things from those eras that I grew fond of through the recollections of those who did.
This very much relates to how one of the defining horror works of the 80's, Stephen King's IT, had half its story set in the 1950's. Nostalgia is always with us, and it's always potentially terrifying.
I'm sketching a drawing while I listen to this video. In my sketch, in a digital medium, I'm using a brush that purposefully mimics the sketchy style of a regular pencil. With that, I avoid using any shape tools. When using a medium made to clean up art, somehow, I and many others still find ourselves drawn to those imperfections that make it seem real. I think a part of this "nostalgia frenzy" is a desire for those intrinsically human traits that we've lost by making everything neat and tidy. Everything is so organized that we now fantasize of chaos and messiness. It's why Into the Spiderverse was so revolutionary for animation; it embraced stylization over realism. It's just expressive without trying to be perfect, and I think we yearn for times when things couldn't be perfect.
TBF, I am nostalgic for the 2000's and even early 2010's. Maybe in 20 years we can look back at the 2020's be nostalgic for something missing in 2040's, something we took for granted but only miss it when it is gone.
I very specifically miss like 2014. Cell phones were for convenience and you weren’t expected to be tethered to them 24/7, wifi was pretty good, the internet felt like an interesting place to explore and was full of resources, socials existed but they also weren’t all consuming or nearly as highly curated as they are now, sigh, I could go on but it does feel a little like I’m dwelling too much. 2020’s could definitely end up being nostalgic in the future but from here that prospect feels dystopian and depressing but only time will tell.
I personally don't miss anything from the past (born in 1996) i don't miss the mean spirited humor that dominated that era, nor the teen dramas and reality shows that populated the TV at the time, even less I miss the people i had to go to middle school with, nor living in a culture where being gay or trans made you a phenomenon. The videogames were great, but now we live in an era where you can play anything from the past with just a few clicks, and more indie games are made than ever, opening the doors for countless experiences full of creativity and innovation. I love how far we've come. I don't have any nostalgia to cling to.
For me the best horror is the stuff that lurks in the dark and never gets seen. It stays hidden but makes you aware of it's present. And really really good horror makes you feel stuck. In some way simply stuck and takes away the possibility to get out. That is the best horror for me. I remember vividly the stories about doki doki literature club where the game at some point "takes over" your pc and makes you feel like your stuck with that really unnerving and unsafe characters. And I think having kinda low poly stuff with all that simmering and distortions makes you feel stuck in the past. It makes you uncomfortable cause you are stuck in another time. I really like "world of horror", but I also need quite a lot of time passing between my playing sessions of that game. My boyfriend actually wanted it and bought it to play after asking me if he could sometimes use my switch... To this day HE didn't play the game and I kinda believe he actually bought it more for me than himself. Cause I can't stand gore and splatter, but I love some psychological, supernatural horror, even if it will trouble my sleep scedule a lot. I also freaking love the little nightmare games cause they are only a tiny bit with real boss fights and a lot of tension while trying to sneak away from the grotesk looking... Things... But it also shows you some glimpses of what's happening and it doesn't tell you the gruesome truth directly. You really need to puzzle it together and I am still not sure what the ending of the two games really were. They ARE simply nightmares. Theres just no real solution or resolution in the end. And that's horror I love. Making you feel stuck, having a lot of "I can hear you/about you but I never REALLY see the truth behind all" Though world of horror is leans more into the fighting monsters than the pure psychological disturbances, it's good. It makes you feel trapped in the stories I've played and I think the low poly makes the monsters only better, cause it's up to you to imagine how they were intended ro actually look like and your imagination is always more horrifying than the truth. And I still vividly remember a mouse that found it's way into our house literally haunting my sleeping time. I had to go sleep on the couch in the living room to get some sleep, cause I heard their little paws running on the wooden floor of my room, scratching on the wooden boxes where toys lied under my bed cause they weren't used most times. But every time I stood up, would make light and look under my bed, that mouse was gone. I would hear it running away through my room, but never catched a glimpse of it... And now that I think about it... It may have been inside the floor... That would explain the really loud noises near my head. The noise traveled through the walls and when I stood up the mouse would get scared of the noise and run... It was TERRIFYING. And I am absolutely no way scared of mice. I would pick one up and pet it, when it's a domesticated mouse and I have not to fear bites and infections. But that mouse really haunted me at nights... Till my mom put out poison... We never found it, we cought glimpses of it still alive in the living room and even attempted to catch it through any means... It was simply a ninja mouse haunting me in my bedroom as a somewhere between 10 and 14 I think child. So yeah, I get why the asthetic and I think it's way better than having it look like a tripple A title. Cause that way it makes you feel way more stuck than good graphics.
I'm haunted by my own past writing; From the ages of 12-17, a friend of mine and I used to create stories together, so many plotlines and arcs over time, and the story grew up with us I broke off that friendship with them due to them not being able to see me as just a friend, And to this day, our world still plagues my mind, i keep coming up with new arcs and scenes, and sometimes I am tempted to write the story down, re-writing it to make it into a cohesive novel series But rewriting it would cause a loss of much of what made it great to me, and it could never be the same story Especially when the co-writer wouldn't be there for it Yet the world and its characters won't leave. They haunt my daydreams and my imagination, offering me an escape from daily life
As an outsider looking in, when I see the kind of art that thrives on nostalgia gives me ambiguous feelings. To me is another way of mass control, one that subliminally tells people that the good old days were best. Isn't that even a political slogan nowadays? The point is, it takes people out of the present moment and what possibilities there are and move them into circumstantial victimhood. That is the truly horrific part. So what would future generations be nostalgic about this times? The chaos of discovering how much dirt under the carpet everything significant in current society is hiding and how it helped create something new.
It’s funny, by this sort of thought process, I collect ghosts. I take care of them. I put them in a shelf. That’s my entire hobby. It makes it seem off thinking about my obsession with retro technologies in this way. Especially when most of them were created before I was even born. I grew up with a 3ds and I went out of my way last year to find a GameCube in the wild. I’m intrigued in times long past, but I never actually experienced these technologies first hand. So it’s like collecting and taking care of ghosts of people and times you never even knew properly. Only ever getting a vague description from someone who was there. Man this is oddly deep. I have a cold and it’s midnight- 😭
16:45 culture has been stagnant and thats been pretty clear in youtube as well with og youtubers speaking out on feeling burntout and hell even recent ones like tommyinnit feeling the burn. theres really nothing new that is being made even if there is one it will be copied over and over and over until that new thing isnt popular anymore.
I disagree with this point of view. See one thing many people forget is the fact that the 80's were inspired by the 50's and the 50's by the 20's and so on. We don't just recall stuff from the past, we transform it and morph it, even if we do so unintentionally. Let's take the example with indie video games. Although they are definitely INSPIRED by older times, they are NOT like the games of older times and they couldn't be, because we are mixing OLD styles with NEW technology. A game that started development a few years ago and that is a great example of this is ULTRAKILL - in case you haven't heard of it, it is a First Person Shooter where you play as a robot travelling through hell murdering everything in it's way. It's graphics are a direct call to the ps1 artstyle, it's gameplay to older fps titles like Quake, and even it's game concept has led many people who haven't played it to brush it off as a DOOM clone! However, despite borrowing many elements from older media, it still does many things of it's own, which make it unique to today. It expands and twists ideas from other games. It combines aesthetics and techniques both new and old in ways only today's technology allows. It reinvents the genre and the game as a whole has had a HUGE impact on the indie gaming scene. That is to say, that when the present eventually becomes the past other people long for, the footprint left by the 2020's will look much different than that of the past. The same way that the 90's has it's own aesthetic, and the 2000's and even the 2010's. Heck, I'd argue nostalgia exists in an even stronger form today than centuries ago, the way that we look back not at past eras, but at past recent decades! There is already tons of art, which borrows from the technological artifacts of the 2000's! I can imagine how 30 years from now, people will look back on what we create today and will be nostalgic about things we probably aren't even noticing right now!
One other reason why nostalgia might be on the rise: the baby boomers are very old now, meaning there are a lot of old wealthy consumers compared to previous times. And as we age, we tend to become nostalgic.
It's death, grief, and stagnation. The realisation that a true idilic society like we used to imagine is not possible and will never be possible. It is the fear that true progress has plateaued, and soon comes the inevitable cliff. In other cases, it may be Our past looks back at us and tells us that we will soon join them. Momento Mori.
Some nostalgia I miss the overall experience when it's not the same anymore...like going back to visit my elementary school when I was in middle school, or playing Runescape. However, I still laugh 100% of the time whenever I watch Monty Python or Mel Brooks movies, and I still obsess over LOTR or Star Wars or Legend of Zelda as if it were the day I was introduced. Some music tends to work this way too with me.....some stuff will stick forever and I'll always find myself circling back to it, while others fall off and I grow out of.....some spiral out, some spiral deeper within, it all just depends. Either way, I try to flow with whatever resonates with me the most...although I still am subject to FOMO. I do miss the concept of Runescape, but it doesn't feel the same. If that experience were optimized to be even greater, the new experience would pull people in for sure. However, what I will never reexperience again is playing Runescape WHILE in middle school. Environmental patterns make a huge difference. Runescape was a fun pass time between homework and other things I had and wanted to do, while also it was a medium to talk about with my peers while I was at school. It's easy to obsess over what you wish you had access to but can't around people who mutually feel the same. I learned really quick though that talking too much is how to get hacked though haha for my child self I started learning basic player trading materials that weren't just pokemon cards. Runescape was a huge stepping stone that helped me get accustomed to mmos and rpgs in general that wasn't directly a linear story and combat driven experience.
Part of the “retreat” to “older styles” is that the endless tech race to have a smoother, less polygonal, more detailed style means that there’s a lot with those “old styles” that simply wasn’t fully explored. A great example is how Ocarina of Time and other bright N64 games had a “pop-up book” style. And I’m not talking a moving pop-up book, like Paper Mario; it feels like you’re a little cardboard model in a carefully crafted diorama. There’s room to explore with this as an intentional style choice, as opposed to the direction Nintendo went - to smooth plastic toys - or where everyone else went, to endlessly more realistic plastic toys.
What's interesting to me is how these nostalgia horror pieces mostly draw in those not from that time, almost as if they want to be a part of a period they were never a part of
Great video, I think you put a lot of my own thoughts into words. I've always felt a little crazy for not wanting to revisit movies or TV I like in the past as much as other people I know. There's an indescribable sadness in mulling over what could have been and a feeling of stagnation in never wanting some things to change. And I can never tell if others feel it too, if they just don't, or if it's a sort of "comfort in the darkness" sort of thing. I've always maintained an attitude of this: you can't stop yourself or anything else you love in this world from growing old, being replaced, not being the center of attention in popular culture, whatever. But you can control what you want to experience. I think what's important is that whatever it is, it would do you well to experience something that challenges you, that makes you feel alive. With so many existential uncertainties, I can't say that's a winning strategy. I won't pretend I have the answer on what a life well-lived is. I can't even say that what I consume is better or worse for being nostalgic, not nostalgic, whatever. But as that one famous person once said, "Fuck it, we ball."
Videos like these really do remind me that we all live in our own echo chambers. Like the song played/album mentioned, I'm the only person in my group of friends and people I interact with on Discord, who's heard of it. Even a friend of mine who interviews bands and is super into music never has, but I have a crap ton. Nostalgia isn't dead, it'll always be around. It's just always going to be different for every person. Right now a lot of people between 30-40 are having that nostalgia moments where we play old games and ones with that old style feel, but there's plenty of people who don't even know about these games, and wouldn't ever play them. There's a bunch of games that are still utilizing game engines powers and not just remaking stuff, yes there's a lot of remakes and whatnot going on, but like, who cares? That's not the only thing being produced. When you go out and look at it all, it's not even half of what's being produced. When all you do is consume nostalgia, that's all you'll ever see. This video did make me think about it all, and it helped me realize that nostalgia isn't dead, and people are just creatures of habit. In 10-20 years a different generation will be nostalgic for the 2010-2020s, thinking about the rise of smart phones, some dope animated shows, some really good sitcoms, and really fantastic books and games that are all original for that time. It's all about perspective
Nostalgia is definitely a powerful force I would be lying if I said I didn't fall victim to it from time to time. I think that Nostalgia in horror and other genres can be okay if you're trying to tell a story in a certain time period where it wouldn't work in the present. I also think Nostalgia in the sense of aesthetics is fine too if you keep to the idea of what the aesthetic is about. For example, I am writing a story that takes place in the future where humans and nature live in harmony and I drew on aspects of Solar Punk and Fruitiger Aero cause those are themes of the aesthetics. In those cases, it is not just nostalgia I am trying to make something new with them. There is substance in it. All art is adapted from something else and changes over time as long as you try to add a new spin instead of recapturing the old.
11:52 I made this exact argument about my Minecraft nostalgia being almost non existent. I do feel nostalgic over Minecraft, from time to time. But due to Minecraft still always getting updates and being in the public eye, the Minecraft I’m nostalgic for never truly has the chance to rest peacefully and be something I want to go back to. I’ll have the weird mix of feeling that I’m missing out, yet if I play the latest one, I’ll feel either overwhelmed or under impressed. I can never truly go back to the Minecraft I want to visit because the company in control won’t let me have it the way I want or need it. I want to love Minecraft, but it’s not where it needs to be.
As soon as I heard the song in the beginning I got chills up my spine. A while back I watched a video of another TH-camr that listened to the whole track and showed highlights and feelings and it definitely makes me feel sickly
Never have I been more terrified of the future than when watching this. I’m not one to dread the direction humanity is going; I’ve always thought that we’re making more progress than regress, but man, something about this just hits different. So… job well done?
Get Nebula using our link for 40% off an annual subscription! go.nebula.tv/talefoundry
Or click here to watch the first episode of The Sojourn ➤ nebula.tv/videos/thesojourn-s1e1-the-cold-divide?ref=talefoundry
Great use of the Caretaker's music in the intro. Love it.
Minor misinformation. In the beginning, you say that none of the video clips are any older than 2020. This is not true. The clip of the "Follow me" minigame from fnaf came out 2015 as it's from fnaf 3.
Saying that seeing things perpetually recycled is like a séance doesn't seem entirely the right word. Being in a land of ghosts, surrounded by those that can't pass on, is Purgatory. Except in this case instead of having "unfinished business", these dead can't pass on because they're not being let go of.
Nebula doesn't have community/comments 😢 didn't know I would miss them so much! But I will continue my support 🫡
I don't have sth to say about the video, but for some reason, I think that if the Stormlight Archive was ever adapted you should be the one to voice Pattern.
No one can comfortably imagine the future any more, so we imagine the past instead.
Yeah, because people are using the present as a basis for what the future will look like. It's getting kind of scary right now, with how chaotic the presidential election has been so far, and the horrible stuff happening in Palestine right now.
@@Ostan-jw2bgyou really think the world is just America and Palestine?
@@WildWinterberry No, there's tons of shit happening around the world other than what the News stations tell you. Everywhere there is some conflict happening.
@@Ostan-jw2bgOr you can past generation who become become adult and old person disappointed how future nothing just bad so people rememberly those old times even though past era was not good
@@WildWinterberry Those are examples...
15:40 the fact that "Ready player one" is set in future, but there is no new IPs, just nostalgia brands, is the most realistic part of the movie
It's one of the elements that turns it from a fun nostalgic romp into dystopian horror.
The book is exactly like that as well. It was really well done - the dystopia of it felt real thanks to the really old 80's video game refs.
Same goes for Star Trek. It's the 24th Century and much of humanity has easy access to bespoke AI generated holograms. But every ship in Starfleet seems to have "movie nights" showing 500 year-old films and crewmates form bands that still play Mozart and standards from The Great American songbook.
Human culture in Star Trek seemingly hasn't produced anything profoundly "new" since the Third World War.
@@GrizabeeblesI think Star Trek tries to avert it, though, and in Ready Player One it's the point. Have you noticed whenever Star Trek lists famous examples of anything, they almost always start with a couple real human examples, and then add an alien or a future human or both? It wants there to be future culture, it just also wants to be comprehensible. When Tom Paris is a fan of 20th century cars and movies, it's something he has to introduce his friends to, and they don't always get it. Classical music gets played, as does Shakespeare, but then those are already longlasting pieces of art today. It's not crazy to assume they'll last another 300 years. Ready Player One, though, INTENTIONALLY lives in the past. Its media references are, canonically, the result of one man's nostalgia, and they're found through the dedication of the main character's dedication to the same nostalgia. But it's not just a simple niche hobby; the era the protagonist is obsessed with is the one the entire digital world is built around. The digital world may be accessed in exciting new ways, but nostalgia is its beating heart. Even when the book takes a political turn, the guys who wind up in charge are real people from today, just aged up. NOT fictional future people with new ideas. Plus, Wil Wheaton's heyday, no offense to him, is already in the past. Cory Doctorow, despite having really interesting ideas about the evolution of the internet, does think it's being enshittified right now and was freer and better before. The closest thing to forward thinking Ready Player One has to offer is today's Old Reliables, rather than what was new forty years ago, which... isn't actually much better. It promises to remake the world in this nostalgic vision, but where's the real cultural future? Still nowhere to be found.
"if dreams are like movies, then memories are films about ghosts"- counting crows
Man... 😢
Great use of a Mrs. Potter's Lullaby quote, my fave song of theirs ❤❤❤
I understand completely.
What I think is the kick of nostalgic horror is the feeling of things being left behind, abandoned, forgotten. The distortions, the glitches, the songs that feel like in a different era, they carry with them a sense of something once being important, being trends, being attachment to people, yet now something damaged, found from the attic.
I completely agree. Part of why people can get so fascinated with retro IPs and creations is because there is more revealed about the process behind them, which in turn reveals more of the people that made it. So when those things are forgotten, I think part of our subconscious recognizes that part of a person is being forgotten too.
I like this take. It makes a lot of sense.
starts off with talking about nostalgia horror, ends with an existential crisis. wouldnt expect anything less from you
It’s the perfect Tale Foundry 1 - 2 punch
And we are living in it. 🗳️🟦
This is the most horrifying take on "the past never truly dies" I ever seen after watching this video.
True
Nostalgic horror seems to be extremely existential: by repeating the past you become lost in it
Really puts a new meaning to the phrase "Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it."
@@question801 ah generational trauma, it's like fulfilling a prophecy some distant ancestor set up by pissing off a witch
@@smartsmartie7142 lmao that doesn't exist unless it's abuse or fears being passed on from parents who never got over their own pasts and think their children shouldn't be over it either.
@@lainiwakura1776So…this was a fictional illustration of the feeling of the reality. A parable. A story.
And you didn’t get it.
Isn’t it interesting that a lot of people who are fans of this “haunted media” weren’t even alive when it was first popular, nostalgic for a memory that isn’t even theirs?
It's all hand me down. With VHS this is the most obvious. It's not nostalgia for the movies a seen in theaters at release, it's nostalgia for a well worn recording. A ghost stuck repeating the same actions it did in life. It's not perfect recall, it's a faded memory.
The word you're looking for is anemia, but the last film to be produced in a VHS format was in 2006, 18 years ago. People still had VHS players and tapes for all their already existing VHS tapes, especially poor folk as money often determines if you're buying new devices and throwing the old ones out. There are plenty of young people still around with some early memories of watching VHS.
It's like how boomers were nostalgic for the late 1800's.
@@thepinkestpigglet7529yes, but the actual kids of today all had DVD. I'm by no measure wealthy, but my kids hadn't seen a VHS played until around 2016, and even then it was at my grandma's, and was so worn it barely played. Even the DVDs of my youth often are too worn down to work.
Lots of people also watched older media on TV or because their parents had physical copies. So they absolutely can associate those with their childhood, even if they didn't really experience those times themselves.
The concept of “running out of nostalgia” has crossed my mind many times. In a world of reboots, remakes, and reimaginings, what happens when stories and characters from the 80s/90s/00s don’t register anymore? It’s like pop culture has peaked, and many of us don’t feel we have what it takes to dethrone the cultural sensations from decades ago that are still lingering with us.
I have a '94 vehicle that is basically an 80's vehicle made into the 90's. It's odd seeing so many new vehicles borrow from the 80's. It's like the time my truck was made in is eternal.
Funny that only a few weeks later the guy in charge of Star Wars said it runs of off nostalgia and they are running out of it
Ironically, the book version of Ready Player One is *both* a tribute to the nostalgia it features, as well as an examination of this very concept. It's set in the 2040s where the world is falling apart and people spend all their time in VR engaging in the secondhand nostalgia of a man who was a child in the 80s while ignoring the problems around them. People see the movie and think it's only a nostalgia trap cash-grab, but it's so much more than that. It really is one of my favorite books.
I think it's possible to carry the good things forward and use them to build an identity of our own. Like this video talks about, the (Italian) Renaissance was a celebration of Classical Greek art and philosophy. Now the Renaissance is renowned as a monumental part of art history.
This sounds almost like a daily existence for me.
1) I'm autistic so I find myself recalling things from my own childhood.
2) I'm also a trauma survivor. Without knowing, I'm suddenly haunted by my past.
It's like I'm in an odd Groundhog Day setting within my mind.
People like us are damned to the past.
Or so sayeth the NTs responsible.
"If they never leave, you can't miss them" is actually the best explanation for why I rarely feel nostalgic for anything in my life and the craze with nostalgia seems kind of crazy to me. In fact, I reflect on past memories and experiences quite often and, seemingly, with high fidelity. Not because I miss the past, but because I wonder what lessons I could still learn from it, and how it can inform how I might want to change myself for the future. So instead of seeing something and being like "Oh that's like that thing from x decades ago", it's just "oh that's like that thing". I'd just as soon feel nostalgic for my tea kettle as I would for the 90s.
0:54 "None of it is older than 2020"
My dear friend, you showed a mini game from FNaF 3. That came out back in 2015.
They also showed a game called Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon, which came out in 2018
@@Kitsune_Cat Sounds like an interesting game.
you're correct, although I think the point was that they weren't from the time period they looked like they would have belonged in
@@n00dles4 That's fair.
For a minute, I thought I saw something that looks like a clip of Lisa Frankenstein in there, but it was probably something else. I'll have to pay attention to the beginning later
Horror of nostalgia is horror about losing yourself. Losing people you loved, places you've been in, experiances you had... yourself as you used to be in the past. All of that looks so much more beautifull now when it is gone. Future is uncertan and potentialy threatening, past is not, that's why we love it more.
So many times I have been creeped out by beautifull memories while watching them from the time distance... It almost feels like I am looking at my dead self... And my parents, my friends, everyone I remember, even though they are still alive, their past selfs are dead... But also... living... frozen in time... just like ghosts...
Yeah, even with my rubbish memory. I remember stories better. I saw a picture of Robert Picardo the other day and I spent the rest of the week mourning Voyager. Was he my favourite character on that show? Does it make a difference? Should I pause my forward looking self and pull out some old DVDs? Then i get these "lost" moments. Things I've done, that I should do again, all of them at once and while I'm at work 😅. Not me sitting in a pub as I haven't done in decades. 😅😅😅
This is a good comment. Also makes sense with the whole dementia talk at the end about the song. Is like we all are living some sort of dementia (with obvious differences from real one) were we are slowly losing ourselves in a sea of online content. Instead lf just living the real world were we do matter, we are stuck in a dystopian cultural nonsense were NO ONE matters. And is only there to profit the ones already millonaries. I think we should really shut down the digital world more. For me has been cooking and cleaning around my house. My brains hates it bc there is no over stimulation but is so much peace. I still need music or a video of course but I can disconnect a little from the computer, were sometimes I felt physically trapped...
Yes, there is also a natural horror of death and the process of forgetting. As we grow older, we unfortunately always lose some parts of our past selves. At elderly age, some of us may even start to forget people close to us. And there is also the fact that 99,9% of us will eventually be completely forgotten by new generations after our death.
I don’t necessarily think nostalgia fuels these creations; certain influences like the 80’s styles, pixel art games, and certain tv shows simply never left. They have always continued to influence us because they were always great. The Super Nintendo and PlayStation 1 games continued in development and even evolved into something better. I recently bought Souldiers on the PS4 online store and I love how similar it is to the Super Nintendo era while showing an evolution on the art style. Nostalgia is comforting to many of us but certain trends never really left. Music from the 80’s and 90’s are sometimes more popular than some of the modern releases.
Sure, but look at why. For example, Kate Bush experienced a huge surge in popularity not thanks to her music and importance of her role as a major female pop star, but because her song "Running Up The Hill" was used in Stranger Things. There were people after the last season who unironically said that this new Metallica band should be ready to blow up, before learning they've been around since the 70s. And if you want a reason why they've never left, again look at nostalgia and ease of production. You say they never left because "they were always great," but shows don't experience resurgence just because they were great. The emotions and memories they stir in older audiences meet with the history known about them to fascinate younger audiences. If making something new, it's quite hard to find success just by remaking the old. Souldiers is a great example of a modern game borrowing an older visual style. If you look at the design of the game, the devs clearly learned from the decades since the SNES in how to adjust balance and impact game feel.
With videogames in particular, the practical reasons for simple graphics are huge, especially for no-budget hobby creators. And when you decide that you want to go with a low-fidelity look as a practical necessity, you automatically look at old 90s games for references. Those old games show us numerous great examples of how such low-fidelity graphics can be made to look good. It's a great starting point instead of trying to reinvent low-polygon graphics from scratch.
I don't know about deliberately faking glitches and errors cause by 30 year old hardware, though. That definitely feels purely nostalgia-driven and has no practical purpose. It's additional unnecessary work.
I think u really didn't get the point 😂
Feels like society's last Big Leap started around the time society started to expecting the average person to own a smartphone. 24/7 internet access, always buzzing for people's time and attention.
Having access to the sum total of all human knowledge at the tip of our fingers at all times would've seemed like a futuristic utopian concept a few decades ago. But with the technology being owned by the biggest profit hounds in history it's become pretty much the opposite. We live in a boring dystopia.
@@KalCounty honestly I’m just looking around at the Sheer Humanity around me and just think to myself “so this is what it looked like when powerful civilizations of the past collapsed” They fell in a paradoxical storm of anger and blissful, willful ignorance. It ends with no one knowing what’s happening, ignoring the problems in front of them and if they can’t do that then spend that time pointing fingers.
The only thing people felt when the cybertruck was unveiled was secondhand embarrassment
secondhand embarrassment? underscores reference???
@@meltingmug Is that some Hipster shit? I don't recognize it
@@orsonzedd ... depends on what you mean by "Hipster shit"
@@meltingmug if it were a question on Jeopardy what would its dollar value be
@@orsonzedd … little bit obscure, so… $600?
as someone who is a kid of the 80s and 90s i feel that after the 2000s there is no distunging factor for the decades and we keep revisiting old decades70S, 80Sand 90S mostly
Except, perhaps for our global politics; we’ve gone back to the 1930s for that.
I disagree. There was a lot of nostalgia for the 90's in the last decade and I'm seeing a bunch of nostalgia for 2000's internet culture right now. You just need about 20 years of distance before you can make out what defined a decade.
To some people, the future seems to have died before 2010. Those people are disproportionately loud.@@crow-jane
OK boomer
The thing is, we are in an era where people have a warped nostalgia about a time they never lived in that they think is better than now, so they try to bring that memory back without understanding that there are reasons why things aren't that way anymore. And honestly, how many horror stories involve someone digging up something from the past only for there to be terrible consequences they never imagined?
Funny you brought up Ready Player One here, because it could be argued that those references in the context of the larger world are themselves an examination of the "why" of nostalgia. After all, the book and film both take place in a society on the brink of dystopian collapse, a late-stage capitalist nightmare where people's motor homes are stacked on top of one another, where corporations can essentially kidnap you and subject you to forced labor despite not breaking any real laws, and where there are no new characters in the largest video game on the planet. The nostalgic references, and the game as a whole, are the only escape for normal people stuck in this world, the people who have nothing else to do but revel in living inside a digital world with their friends and favorite characters, chasing the ticket to an escape that is ironically still locked in the game behind the nostalgic challenges of its creator. I remember being fascinated with the film when it came out because Spielberg was able to capture the drab mundanity of the real world, juxtapose it with the fantastical nature of the game, and then still tie the characters and their actions back in the real world. I think everyone who simply dismissed it as a nostalgic cash grab completely ignored the point of why those references were there in the first place.
Thank you! You practically took the words right out of my mouth. Yes, I did watch the movie just for the nostalgia but also for that fact alone. Like I've seen how much accelerating technology is effecting our lifestyle and not the good way I was hoping. It really is both fascinating and terrifying.
That's crazy, next your going to tell me that the book Starship Troopers that inspired the movie is actually an allegory for America's invasion of Iraq and meant to be a warning about how a democratic society can become a military autocracy.
@@catdogmousecheese hey man, it's pretty insane how this not-even-submerged thematic material can go completely overlooked by viewers if they aren't looking for it. There are people who you could talk about Starship Troopers with who would balk at what you just said (and be wrong, of course). I mean look at Helldivers, a game that just amplifies Starship Troopers' core message to a deafeningly ridiculous degree, and some people still don't get it.
Except the part where they beat up the villains with nostalgia
RP1 is unintentional genius in this way.
I always have considered the "Second death" as in being truly forgotten a horrifying thing, and all these old horror pieces feel like they are dying that second death, and we are here to stand and witness it.
Love how you combine your story telling with your art
Me too
I think TUNIC is a perfect example of optimistic use of nostalgia. The game uses its influences to accelerate it, the way that an instruction book becomes a new way to experience a game is amazing.
It is perhaps fitting that the meme status of “It’s just a burning memory” has become my own personal poltergeist.
I’m a bit older than the generation who made it a meme (middle millennial) but still largely traverse the same parts of the internet. Only, because of my age, I’m at a place in life where that song means something very different from noclipping into the backrooms or Mr Incredible becoming uncanny.
My mom is dying from alzheimers. Not dying now. Not yet. But dying. Slowly. And that goddamn song, which so perfectly conveys the devastating, bottomless sorrow of that unavoidable situation, the grief that underlies every inncuous situation in my life now, it is everywhere. I can not escape it. It permeates what used to be my home of a sort, turning what used to be a familiar, reassuring place into a danger zone. A once-comforting place I now feel compelled to escape from.
So yes. Haunting. It’s strangely appropriate.
I know what you are saying. I made my "trabajo de fin de grado" about the musical semiotics of EATOT and how people used and understood the piece.
My dad was a generation late to have a gen Z kid, and the result was when I was 14-16 i had to watch my grandmother develop dementia. Lots of people my age had lost their grandparents already, I had already lost three, but I was the only one who was losing one to that.
So that album comes out and gets popular online years later and it's bringing up trauma I didn't even realize I had and...my peers are laughing at it. At best they're scared in theory but they don't actually know.
And I hope they never have to.
I'm so sorry... I lost my dad to dementia earlier this year, and this song has haunted me similarly, popping up in video after video for laughs or for spooky ambience... Each time it reminds me of the pain and dread I felt when I realized the true horrors he was going through in day to day life as the disease progressed... He's no longer suffering now, but I never want to be reminded of that time again.
Horror has always been the home of haunting nostalgia. That's why horror films age so gracefully compared to other genres. When the Universal monster films came out, Frankenstein made his monster in a medieval castle. The Count emerged as an obsolete and vanished type of aristocrat existing in a cobwebbed stone keep. In the 1960s The Haunting of Hill House and Psycho solidified the 1920s era Second Empire home, so many of which fell into decay with the Depression, as "the haunted house." In the eighties Kubrick memorably played "Midnight, the Stars and You" in the echoing, vacant halls of the Overlook Hotel. Even science fiction in horror dates better. Lucas foolishly tried to update his Star Wars (itself a ghost of '50s Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon serials) with CGI that aged worse than the footage it replaced. But Alien ages more gracefully, provoking the makers of Alien: Isolation to copy chunky '70s tech and static-filled NTSC screens.
The headlines of the day will always produce new horror. The First World War gave us the shattered visages of the Phantom and Frankenstein. The atomic bomb gave us Gojira. The Manson family gave us Michael Myers and all the rest of the slashers. The "greed is good" eighties gave us Dr. Lecktor. The Northridge Earthquake of '94 affected many Hollywood creators and its imagery ended up in many films, like the crashing of the Enterprise in Star Trek: Generations. Do I need to even discuss how 9/11 imagery found its way into films like The Dark Knight or The War of the Worlds? The Trump era and COVID has already spawned a new generation of nightmares. Horror will always lag by about a decade as we process our traumas.
Perhaps the horror aesthetic is just being cemented into our collective psyche as being set in the 1980's-90's. Much like medieval high fantasy or a spaghetti Western, it's easy to staunch some stories in a certain setting. So perhaps it's not always so much of a callback of nostalgia, but is instead just making something that fits in with that aesthetic, so it just feels right?
It is possible
I wouldn't be so sure. Think about how much we're now seeing based on body cam/found footage styles, which is distinctly more 90s/2000s in origin.
@@VeritabIlIti Surely there can be more than one era / style in horror. found footage has its roots in blair witch. some have roots in freddy kruger or other cheesy 80's horror. Some go back to hammer studios. or even the original 1930's frankenstein cheesiness.
@@tsm688 that's exactly my point. I was countering OP's statement about horror being rooted in 80s/90s aesthetics. You are absolutely right, horror exists in lots of periods and styles.
In my opinion why I think nostalgia is so fitting with horror is that looking back at some of the fond memories from when you was a kid but with a more knowledgeable filter you realize the little horrors hidden under your childish inacence
11:10 weird thing to mention but the movie “wrong cops” visually takes place in every time period between 1970 and 2010 and this reminds me of that
I think on some level we LIKE the distortion, fuzziness, etc of nostalgia. The clean look and sound of modern tech triggers the uncanny valley in us.
I always said there was a lot of horror to be recovered from abstract images, low resolution models and jittery graphics. As our brains often have to fill in the gaps of what our eyes can't fully make out, and whatever our mind is able to create tends to be way more horrifying and personal than anything a dev could model.
@@elisehalflight Like the first Jurassic Park the dinosaurs were barely visible half the time, obscured by lighting and rain. This made it very effective visually.
@@tsm688 Word, I really loved how they kept the visual of the velociraptors hidden for a good chunk of the movie, sold them as intelligent stalker killers like no other film on the franchise.
Nostalgia won't ever go away - because it's mostly people wanting to be reminded as an adult, of something they perceived as children. If a person in 2050 is given 1980s cartoons to watch, then yes they will be nostalgic for that as an adult. They'll be nostalgic for whatever they took in, and which helped form their child worldviews. I guess my view is that nostalgia is a personal thing to each individual, that we can analyze writ large as a cultural thing - but it isn't primarily a cultural thing. If the vast majority of adults watched the same cartoons as kids, they will have a similar nostalgia - but only because they by happenstance watched the same thing. I think analyzing nostalgia as a cultural phenomenon primarily, loses some of the point though - and might make a person make assumptions that aren't true.
As for the album thing, I think that was scary not due to nostalgia, but because it captured what it might feel like to lose your mind, your faculties. That's scary independent of nostalgia. It'd be like someone intentionally blurring, slowly, their photographs, to simulate what a person with a degenerative eye disease experiences.
I think you're missing a significant part of the argument here. Nostalgia has taken on a cultural significance specifically because of what you're talking about: if the majority of kids watch similar things, they will then have nostalgia for it as adults - that IS pop culture in a nutshell. What you're describing as individual adults having nostalgia ceases to be individuals because it is so widespread. Talebot isn't talking about a conscious nostalgia in the classic sense, but a cultural nostalgia, where creators and consumers are both shaping media around older aesthetics that they likely grew up with - a retrospective zeitgeist, if you will.
That certainly went in a direction I wasn't expecting.
I agree
I think we can all agree with that
This is one aspect of why I love The Amazing Digital Circus. It's got some nostalgic types of gaming features (that's as well as I can describe it) like with the second episode where Pomni glitches around, the abstractions being similar to MissingNo in that they're distortions of what they were supposed to be, even Ragatha's face becoming Pong when Caufmo's abstraction makes her begin to glitch around. But it deals with more than just that. There's problems being looked at that are very old, but coming around now as something new (body dysmorphia and gender dysphoria), dealing with loss of loved ones and memories, fear and panic of the unknown, sociopaths, and more. It's universal feelings that have a certain timelessness to them perceived in an old gaming light. It's neat.
Unfortunately, Gooseworx doesn’t treated her 3D animated show as semi-horror, despite using couple to pretty close few existential horror elements with its main cast, except Caine, and one episode is fully exploring horror itself in two subgenres, Kid and Survival Horrors in the form of game difficulty modes???
@@Chadjr2009 They never claimed it was a kid's show, and you can very clearly tell that from episode one with the existential crisis of "Where tf are we and what is this vast void". It's up to parents to review things first. Even the pacing in the first few moments tells you it's not for kids. Besides, lots of us grew up with The Secret of NIMH, Land Before Time, Watership Down, Plague Dogs, The Simpsons, Family Guy, Futurama, South Park, Jurassic Park, Jaws, and many other things that may have "traumatized" us at first, but we quickly recovered if we had loving and attentive parents or understood that all that was just fake. Videos/movies/shows are a great medium to scare kids because it explores new topics for them in a safe way that they can pause at any time and ask questions to trustworthy adults. Or pause and just explore on their own later when they feel ready.
@@nykole1963 Oh no. I was referencing to third episode of TADC, where Caine make two sub genres of horror as game difficulty modes for haunted mansion-theme challenge, with easy mode representing Kid Horror.
"In fact, none of it is older than 2020." I recognized the first one shown as Five Nights at Freddy's 3, which was released in 2015.
Ummm what about literally Castlevania and ocarina of time? Both made pre 2000
@@Gigitheeternal That's not Castlevania, that's Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon 2. which came out in 2020. That's not Ocarina of Time. I don't know what it is, but the HUD is different.
@@Rhomega oh dang, I got totally played, I forgot bloodstained was so recent since it was hyped up for so long, and I'll be honest I couldn't see the other clip well enough either, I just saw the mini map and the hearts in the top left and felt smart......smort
Was looking for a comment like this. First thing I noticed
@TaleFoundry the bottom clip that's all the way to the left is from fnaf 3 and fnaf 3 was released in 2015, so 5 years before 2020
At 2:18 , the moment that backing track plays all I could hear was the soothing southern drawl of Wendigoon reading a bedtime story to PapaMeat lmao. "Who up creepin they cast?"
Erm... He's right behind me, isn't he?
"your wife looks mad funny in that box"
Everywhere At The End Of Time broke my heart in ways I didn't think possible. Losing people you love to dementia/Alzheimer's is a slow-burning kind of hell, with deaths and grief both internal and external scattered like breadcrumbs on the path.
Nostalgia can indeed be damaging if one allows themselves to be consumed by it.
I feel like there’s some good potential for a horror film based around this concept, like a monster that victimizes others by trapping them within an illusion representing the era about which they feel the most nostalgic, and if they can’t break free then they die and have all trace of their existence erased from everyone’s memories.
0:01
Heartaches, heartaches....
My loving you, they're only heartaches....
Your kiss was such a sacred thing to me....
I can't believe it's just a burning memory.......
Heartaches, heartaches,
What does it matter how my heart breaks?
I should be happy with someone new,
But my heart aches for you!
It makes sense than in an increasingly connected world that has us constantly plugged into present issues and an increasingly bleak future that people would look to nostalgia as an escape, but that kinda feels like a trap. Get lost in the haze of an idealised past so you don't have to deal with the present or even think about the future.
one of the songs from the metal band "Lamb of God" has a line that says "nostalgia is grinding the life from today" and that applies perfectly here I think
We can't always be mourning the past. We have to celebrate the present too. It's like that Queen song, "Those days are all gone now/But one thing's still true/When I look and I find I still love you."
I think the existential horror here is that our media seems to be aimed towards emulating/reanimating the past, instead of creating something that can be emblematic of the present. Just look at the success of X-Men '97.
@@VeritabIlIti I mean that’s an adaptation, which we’ve always had.
Still stuck in an old chair. Never loving the new house. Never watching the start of a new day. Never seeing today
I have a precious memory. I know that I will never experience anything like it again and as I am still quite young I can feel this one precious memory fading while my other memories are still functioning quite well.
Candle cove is a good example of nostalgia horror. People reminiscing a kids show from when they were kids, slowly remembering the weird things that occured, then finally finding out that it was watchable only for them.
It was made by Kris Straub who also made Local 58 which really kicked off analog horror.
The nostalgia is being here and now that's why the 90s 80s 70s and 60s work with aesthetic so well and it is getting to be redundant and repacking to the point of cringe oblivion. Just live in your future, just live in your moment.
It feels less like looking backwards and more like we've hit a plateau with art.
Yup. That’s it. It’s also because IP laws are coming into prominence on a bigger scale than before.
Can it also be said how the present seems to poison artists' motivations? Some wild stuff just changed in Twitter's TOS about AI training and I sense another migration out of that site. As for myself I don't even want to share my art digitally anymore.
The steady background noise in this really lends to the atmosphere of this vid.
Great job once again. Thanks for the existential crisis!
Idk about running out of nostalgia, I mean my generation is now starting to become nostalgic for things like the Wii, ps3, 2010 music, etc. People will always be nostalgic about things from their childhood (I'm 20). Whereas for media like games and video/film I believe the main draw of copying retro media is the limitations they give, these limitations make room for creativity to shine. I don't think these retro styles are only popular due to nostalgia, I never grew up with most of it and I also love it. They simply make a good platform for creativity.
Agreed. There's all sorts of inspirations being pulled from the last 40 years of media, and as time marches on people will get nostalgic for the unique stuff made now.
Tolkein's works could be described as farming nostalgia, describing a world of fantastical monsters and roughly medieval tech levels.
I don't think culture will get "stuck" in a nostalgia loop. Things will echo and repeat, but change every time by the nature of how creativity works. It seems misled to say that nostalgia is harmful to culture based on the misconstrued conclusion that it will cause a spiral.
I haven't seen a new tale foundry video in ages
Me too
I feel like this is an accurate definition of modern day culture and really society as a whole. Even politics can't help but use nostalgia and past events as arguing points for their campaigns. It's like the present day is a blank canvas in comparison to the fully illustrated canvases of past decades. Our world is very much in a lack-luster, mundane state. We all want something to look forward to but have been met with mere nonsensical technological advancements, politics that make absolutely no sense, and so many crises that we've almost become desensitized to everything the world has to offer.
I do, however, think there is something special about the modern day being a blank canvas. It has endless possibilities. Endless ways to enjoy and appreciate life. Endless ways to inspire and create positive change in our communities.
The world has never been perfect, but that doesn't mean we can't make it better.
"Carpe diem" is a phrase that I think summarizes my point.
We should all live our lives to the fullest and appreciate every moment we're given because we never know what we have until it's gone.
Hope this bring at least some comfort to anyone who reads this. Much love to you all. ❤️❤️❤️
Looking through history, this is what has been going on for a long time, we're just only nor realizing it.
The past is a country we can never return to, so we treat it like a fantasy playground: a safe space where we dress up as whatever emotion is tickling our soul , be it fear, hope, sadness or whatever. The fact is, we already know how things play out, so we can forget uncertainty while we romp around in grandpa's suit.
these videos consistently get me so hyped that I start jamming to the intro music even though it's not a bouncy intro at all lol
This is one video where I think you've got it wrong. We're mining the past for the gems that didn't resonate when they were created, not pining for the lost past.
This is an interesting point
The nostalgic attachment is how Object Yokai are made. Once forgotten they will take a life of their own and wreak havoc at being abandoned, haunting either their former owners or anyone they come across. Haven't I served you well?
On the off chance anyone reads this, this video reminded me of Kane Pixels' series "The Oldest View." One of the main themes of that series is how quickly the past is forgotten. Even someone who had done so much, like Julien Reverchon (who was a French Botanist), is unknown to most of the modern world. And when we try to dig old memories back up, what have we turned them into? Admittedly, "The Oldest View" is fairly cryptic, but that's what I've taken away from it.
When I heard the song, my first thought was of Allan Sherman's parody "Headaches". The original is "Heartaches" by Al Bowlly.
I thought it was part of the Omega Flowey boss fight in 'Undertale'. At least, the part before the battle.
new tale foundry video??? hell yeah!
Nostalgia is a hell of a drug
True
As someone who came from the later years of the Analog Era (90s-early 2000s), I can always tell when something is actually from a later time.
It’s hard to put into words, but most media meant to emulate earlier times often lacks keys details that sets it apart.
One needs an actual living knowledge, though. Because I am from the era, I can easily say things like “Oh, they *never* would have made something like this,” or “The colors are a bit off fro something from the era,” in other words, it lacks the feeling of being genuine.
I have a distinct feeling that as the years go on, the 70s-90s are just going to be remembered as a monstrous amalgamation, much like how we remember the distinct eras that make up “the Middle Ages”. If I had a penny for everything from a “Renaissance” Fair that was actually from a much earlier or later time, I could buy Disney. But such is the ravages of the monstrous abomination that is warped memory.
I never knew of this as "nostalgia" horror, I always thought these games and videos were just a subgenre of horror made in a retro style. Although I do see how horror can take advantage of nostalgia; taking some old beloved things, highlighting and overemphasizing the unsettling bits that were mostly overlooked, or outright twisting even the happy bits into something terrifying.
The early Pixar baby looks so unsettling now, or we finally realized how unsettling it actually was all along, both because of how much CGI has progressed and the degree of separation from when stuff like this was commonplace. There's also the fact that adults, who knew this stuff as kids, can come back to it a decade later and often pick up on things they didn't before. Or even the simple phenomena of having the mental energy to scan for other things you might've miss after you've already experienced the first run and know basically what to expect.
Another scary part, too, is how quickly these processes are happening now compared to then. The Pixar baby, while undeniably uncanny, still represented a major leap forward in computer generation, and the majority of people were willing to overlook the creepiness to appreciate the advancement. It inspired awe. Now we get people fighting over CGI that would have blown those 2000s animators minds, saying it looks sub-par. The closest analogue I think we have now is the advancement of visual generation, but instead of feeling excited or impressed we mostly just feel disturbed.
Tales Foundry is so nostalgic
I remember watching Skinamarink and that perfectly encapsulated the idea of how it felt to be young and afraid.
Now I’m older but still afraid
Video games from the 90s were more inovative because of the limitations they had to work around.
8:38 I was lucky enough to be born about 10 years before the internet was easily accessible for everyone and I don’t think I could ever put into words what a game changer it was, like sure I was 10 but I could tell how world changing it was, I spent the rest of my childhood absolutely glued to the family computer, with our terrible 2kb/s internet, 8kb/s if we were really lucky.
On this topic I always pointed to the pragmatic reason rather than the essentialist one.
Like in the modern era, you need a lot of workaround to overcome the fact everyone has in their pocket a device for comunication, with access to ton of info and other features. we are surrounded by infrastructure to offer us services... And it's hard to remove those from you. So you either use a supernatural element to remove it or you set your story where those stuff arent present (either in time or space)
I suppose one thing going for nostalgia horror is that it refers to a place and time long past for those who never experienced it first hand or lived along side it but didn't know the goings ons. A time full of mysteries, wonders, and limitations that risk fading away into the depths of time. Personally, I was born after the 80s and I was too young to soak in the culture of the 90s, yet there are things from those eras that I grew fond of through the recollections of those who did.
Honestly glad someone mentioned how sickeningly boring this nostalgia obsession era is.
There was a big throwback in the 80's to late 50's and early 60's music.
This very much relates to how one of the defining horror works of the 80's, Stephen King's IT, had half its story set in the 1950's.
Nostalgia is always with us, and it's always potentially terrifying.
kadda the 80s was when it began kadda
I wish I could remember the good times 😔
I'm glad I can't
Nostalgia consumed everything when media became available everywhere, all the time. No free time for boredom = no new content for future nostalgia.
The way you narrate is just fabulous!
Nostalgia horror? Sounds more like Analog Horror to me!
Distant 56k noises
Oh yeah Lacy's Games is 100% Analog, definitely not based around flash games.
@@KatieAngelWitch i loved playing Lacy's Games on my VHS tape!
Somewhat, but its fits more so as a sub-subgenre of Nostalgia Horror itself.
Plus, it seems you didn’t watch the entire or previous videos these TH-camr makes.
I'm sketching a drawing while I listen to this video. In my sketch, in a digital medium, I'm using a brush that purposefully mimics the sketchy style of a regular pencil. With that, I avoid using any shape tools. When using a medium made to clean up art, somehow, I and many others still find ourselves drawn to those imperfections that make it seem real. I think a part of this "nostalgia frenzy" is a desire for those intrinsically human traits that we've lost by making everything neat and tidy. Everything is so organized that we now fantasize of chaos and messiness. It's why Into the Spiderverse was so revolutionary for animation; it embraced stylization over realism. It's just expressive without trying to be perfect, and I think we yearn for times when things couldn't be perfect.
TBF, I am nostalgic for the 2000's and even early 2010's. Maybe in 20 years we can look back at the 2020's be nostalgic for something missing in 2040's, something we took for granted but only miss it when it is gone.
I very specifically miss like 2014. Cell phones were for convenience and you weren’t expected to be tethered to them 24/7, wifi was pretty good, the internet felt like an interesting place to explore and was full of resources, socials existed but they also weren’t all consuming or nearly as highly curated as they are now, sigh, I could go on but it does feel a little like I’m dwelling too much.
2020’s could definitely end up being nostalgic in the future but from here that prospect feels dystopian and depressing but only time will tell.
I personally don't miss anything from the past (born in 1996) i don't miss the mean spirited humor that dominated that era, nor the teen dramas and reality shows that populated the TV at the time, even less I miss the people i had to go to middle school with, nor living in a culture where being gay or trans made you a phenomenon.
The videogames were great, but now we live in an era where you can play anything from the past with just a few clicks, and more indie games are made than ever, opening the doors for countless experiences full of creativity and innovation. I love how far we've come. I don't have any nostalgia to cling to.
For me the best horror is the stuff that lurks in the dark and never gets seen. It stays hidden but makes you aware of it's present.
And really really good horror makes you feel stuck. In some way simply stuck and takes away the possibility to get out. That is the best horror for me.
I remember vividly the stories about doki doki literature club where the game at some point "takes over" your pc and makes you feel like your stuck with that really unnerving and unsafe characters.
And I think having kinda low poly stuff with all that simmering and distortions makes you feel stuck in the past. It makes you uncomfortable cause you are stuck in another time. I really like "world of horror", but I also need quite a lot of time passing between my playing sessions of that game. My boyfriend actually wanted it and bought it to play after asking me if he could sometimes use my switch... To this day HE didn't play the game and I kinda believe he actually bought it more for me than himself. Cause I can't stand gore and splatter, but I love some psychological, supernatural horror, even if it will trouble my sleep scedule a lot. I also freaking love the little nightmare games cause they are only a tiny bit with real boss fights and a lot of tension while trying to sneak away from the grotesk looking... Things... But it also shows you some glimpses of what's happening and it doesn't tell you the gruesome truth directly. You really need to puzzle it together and I am still not sure what the ending of the two games really were. They ARE simply nightmares. Theres just no real solution or resolution in the end. And that's horror I love.
Making you feel stuck, having a lot of "I can hear you/about you but I never REALLY see the truth behind all"
Though world of horror is leans more into the fighting monsters than the pure psychological disturbances, it's good. It makes you feel trapped in the stories I've played and I think the low poly makes the monsters only better, cause it's up to you to imagine how they were intended ro actually look like and your imagination is always more horrifying than the truth.
And I still vividly remember a mouse that found it's way into our house literally haunting my sleeping time. I had to go sleep on the couch in the living room to get some sleep, cause I heard their little paws running on the wooden floor of my room, scratching on the wooden boxes where toys lied under my bed cause they weren't used most times. But every time I stood up, would make light and look under my bed, that mouse was gone. I would hear it running away through my room, but never catched a glimpse of it...
And now that I think about it... It may have been inside the floor... That would explain the really loud noises near my head. The noise traveled through the walls and when I stood up the mouse would get scared of the noise and run...
It was TERRIFYING. And I am absolutely no way scared of mice. I would pick one up and pet it, when it's a domesticated mouse and I have not to fear bites and infections. But that mouse really haunted me at nights... Till my mom put out poison... We never found it, we cought glimpses of it still alive in the living room and even attempted to catch it through any means... It was simply a ninja mouse haunting me in my bedroom as a somewhere between 10 and 14 I think child.
So yeah, I get why the asthetic and I think it's way better than having it look like a tripple A title. Cause that way it makes you feel way more stuck than good graphics.
I'm haunted by my own past writing;
From the ages of 12-17, a friend of mine and I used to create stories together, so many plotlines and arcs over time, and the story grew up with us
I broke off that friendship with them due to them not being able to see me as just a friend,
And to this day, our world still plagues my mind, i keep coming up with new arcs and scenes, and sometimes I am tempted to write the story down, re-writing it to make it into a cohesive novel series
But rewriting it would cause a loss of much of what made it great to me, and it could never be the same story
Especially when the co-writer wouldn't be there for it
Yet the world and its characters won't leave. They haunt my daydreams and my imagination, offering me an escape from daily life
I’m so sorry that happened to you D:
Nostalgia is a different type of ghost than shades or poltergeists for sure. At least in my experience, it's a whole different vibe.
As an outsider looking in, when I see the kind of art that thrives on nostalgia gives me ambiguous feelings. To me is another way of mass control, one that subliminally tells people that the good old days were best. Isn't that even a political slogan nowadays? The point is, it takes people out of the present moment and what possibilities there are and move them into circumstantial victimhood. That is the truly horrific part. So what would future generations be nostalgic about this times? The chaos of discovering how much dirt under the carpet everything significant in current society is hiding and how it helped create something new.
As soon as I read the title I knew hauntology would be brought up at some point in the video
This robot dude is nostalgic for nostalgia. That's meta. I need to eat chicken noodle soup right now.
“Imagination and memory are but one thing, which for diverse consideration has diverse names.”
I'm here for any sort of conversation about Yames where people aren't calling him "schizo" or "disturbed", gg Talebot
It’s funny, by this sort of thought process, I collect ghosts. I take care of them. I put them in a shelf. That’s my entire hobby. It makes it seem off thinking about my obsession with retro technologies in this way. Especially when most of them were created before I was even born. I grew up with a 3ds and I went out of my way last year to find a GameCube in the wild. I’m intrigued in times long past, but I never actually experienced these technologies first hand.
So it’s like collecting and taking care of ghosts of people and times you never even knew properly. Only ever getting a vague description from someone who was there. Man this is oddly deep. I have a cold and it’s midnight- 😭
le hauntology kadda
16:45 culture has been stagnant and thats been pretty clear in youtube as well with og youtubers speaking out on feeling burntout and hell even recent ones like tommyinnit feeling the burn. theres really nothing new that is being made even if there is one it will be copied over and over and over until that new thing isnt popular anymore.
capitalismo le hauntology kekekekekek
I disagree with this point of view. See one thing many people forget is the fact that the 80's were inspired by the 50's and the 50's by the 20's and so on. We don't just recall stuff from the past, we transform it and morph it, even if we do so unintentionally. Let's take the example with indie video games. Although they are definitely INSPIRED by older times, they are NOT like the games of older times and they couldn't be, because we are mixing OLD styles with NEW technology. A game that started development a few years ago and that is a great example of this is ULTRAKILL - in case you haven't heard of it, it is a First Person Shooter where you play as a robot travelling through hell murdering everything in it's way. It's graphics are a direct call to the ps1 artstyle, it's gameplay to older fps titles like Quake, and even it's game concept has led many people who haven't played it to brush it off as a DOOM clone! However, despite borrowing many elements from older media, it still does many things of it's own, which make it unique to today. It expands and twists ideas from other games. It combines aesthetics and techniques both new and old in ways only today's technology allows. It reinvents the genre and the game as a whole has had a HUGE impact on the indie gaming scene.
That is to say, that when the present eventually becomes the past other people long for, the footprint left by the 2020's will look much different than that of the past. The same way that the 90's has it's own aesthetic, and the 2000's and even the 2010's. Heck, I'd argue nostalgia exists in an even stronger form today than centuries ago, the way that we look back not at past eras, but at past recent decades! There is already tons of art, which borrows from the technological artifacts of the 2000's!
I can imagine how 30 years from now, people will look back on what we create today and will be nostalgic about things we probably aren't even noticing right now!
One other reason why nostalgia might be on the rise: the baby boomers are very old now, meaning there are a lot of old wealthy consumers compared to previous times. And as we age, we tend to become nostalgic.
It's death, grief, and stagnation. The realisation that a true idilic society like we used to imagine is not possible and will never be possible. It is the fear that true progress has plateaued, and soon comes the inevitable cliff.
In other cases, it may be Our past looks back at us and tells us that we will soon join them. Momento Mori.
Some nostalgia I miss the overall experience when it's not the same anymore...like going back to visit my elementary school when I was in middle school, or playing Runescape. However, I still laugh 100% of the time whenever I watch Monty Python or Mel Brooks movies, and I still obsess over LOTR or Star Wars or Legend of Zelda as if it were the day I was introduced. Some music tends to work this way too with me.....some stuff will stick forever and I'll always find myself circling back to it, while others fall off and I grow out of.....some spiral out, some spiral deeper within, it all just depends. Either way, I try to flow with whatever resonates with me the most...although I still am subject to FOMO. I do miss the concept of Runescape, but it doesn't feel the same. If that experience were optimized to be even greater, the new experience would pull people in for sure. However, what I will never reexperience again is playing Runescape WHILE in middle school. Environmental patterns make a huge difference. Runescape was a fun pass time between homework and other things I had and wanted to do, while also it was a medium to talk about with my peers while I was at school. It's easy to obsess over what you wish you had access to but can't around people who mutually feel the same. I learned really quick though that talking too much is how to get hacked though haha for my child self I started learning basic player trading materials that weren't just pokemon cards. Runescape was a huge stepping stone that helped me get accustomed to mmos and rpgs in general that wasn't directly a linear story and combat driven experience.
0:56 well, the fnaf clip is older than 2020, it came out in 2014, but still way younger than it looks
That particular clip was FNAF 2, right?
@@VeritabIlIti No, fnaf 3, also it turns out it came out in 2015
Out of all the tale foundry videos this one is probably the scariest to me
Part of the “retreat” to “older styles” is that the endless tech race to have a smoother, less polygonal, more detailed style means that there’s a lot with those “old styles” that simply wasn’t fully explored.
A great example is how Ocarina of Time and other bright N64 games had a “pop-up book” style. And I’m not talking a moving pop-up book, like Paper Mario; it feels like you’re a little cardboard model in a carefully crafted diorama. There’s room to explore with this as an intentional style choice, as opposed to the direction Nintendo went - to smooth plastic toys - or where everyone else went, to endlessly more realistic plastic toys.
What's interesting to me is how these nostalgia horror pieces mostly draw in those not from that time, almost as if they want to be a part of a period they were never a part of
Great video, I think you put a lot of my own thoughts into words. I've always felt a little crazy for not wanting to revisit movies or TV I like in the past as much as other people I know. There's an indescribable sadness in mulling over what could have been and a feeling of stagnation in never wanting some things to change. And I can never tell if others feel it too, if they just don't, or if it's a sort of "comfort in the darkness" sort of thing.
I've always maintained an attitude of this: you can't stop yourself or anything else you love in this world from growing old, being replaced, not being the center of attention in popular culture, whatever. But you can control what you want to experience. I think what's important is that whatever it is, it would do you well to experience something that challenges you, that makes you feel alive.
With so many existential uncertainties, I can't say that's a winning strategy. I won't pretend I have the answer on what a life well-lived is. I can't even say that what I consume is better or worse for being nostalgic, not nostalgic, whatever. But as that one famous person once said, "Fuck it, we ball."
Videos like these really do remind me that we all live in our own echo chambers.
Like the song played/album mentioned, I'm the only person in my group of friends and people I interact with on Discord, who's heard of it. Even a friend of mine who interviews bands and is super into music never has, but I have a crap ton.
Nostalgia isn't dead, it'll always be around. It's just always going to be different for every person. Right now a lot of people between 30-40 are having that nostalgia moments where we play old games and ones with that old style feel, but there's plenty of people who don't even know about these games, and wouldn't ever play them.
There's a bunch of games that are still utilizing game engines powers and not just remaking stuff, yes there's a lot of remakes and whatnot going on, but like, who cares? That's not the only thing being produced. When you go out and look at it all, it's not even half of what's being produced. When all you do is consume nostalgia, that's all you'll ever see.
This video did make me think about it all, and it helped me realize that nostalgia isn't dead, and people are just creatures of habit.
In 10-20 years a different generation will be nostalgic for the 2010-2020s, thinking about the rise of smart phones, some dope animated shows, some really good sitcoms, and really fantastic books and games that are all original for that time.
It's all about perspective
Nostalgia is definitely a powerful force I would be lying if I said I didn't fall victim to it from time to time. I think that Nostalgia in horror and other genres can be okay if you're trying to tell a story in a certain time period where it wouldn't work in the present. I also think Nostalgia in the sense of aesthetics is fine too if you keep to the idea of what the aesthetic is about. For example, I am writing a story that takes place in the future where humans and nature live in harmony and I drew on aspects of Solar Punk and Fruitiger Aero cause those are themes of the aesthetics. In those cases, it is not just nostalgia I am trying to make something new with them. There is substance in it. All art is adapted from something else and changes over time as long as you try to add a new spin instead of recapturing the old.
lol i literally listened to everywhere at the end of time yesterday.
11:52 I made this exact argument about my Minecraft nostalgia being almost non existent. I do feel nostalgic over Minecraft, from time to time. But due to Minecraft still always getting updates and being in the public eye, the Minecraft I’m nostalgic for never truly has the chance to rest peacefully and be something I want to go back to. I’ll have the weird mix of feeling that I’m missing out, yet if I play the latest one, I’ll feel either overwhelmed or under impressed. I can never truly go back to the Minecraft I want to visit because the company in control won’t let me have it the way I want or need it. I want to love Minecraft, but it’s not where it needs to be.
As soon as I heard the song in the beginning I got chills up my spine. A while back I watched a video of another TH-camr that listened to the whole track and showed highlights and feelings and it definitely makes me feel sickly
Am i dreaming right now? Its just a burning memory on tale foundry?
Never have I been more terrified of the future than when watching this.
I’m not one to dread the direction humanity is going; I’ve always thought that we’re making more progress than regress, but man, something about this just hits different. So… job well done?