Previously: From ‘Paranormal Paranoids’ To ‘Shelby Oaks’
The first video in the eerie, creepy web series DOORS [Analog Horror] starts innocuously enough: With white text appearing on a black screen, which flickers as if you’re watching an old, slightly worn VHS tape, asking you how many doors there are in your home. You’re told to count them. You’re shown a sequence of doors — doors which, just like the video itself so far, are innocuous, unremarkable, the kinds of interior room doors you’re used to seeing in homes of all kinds.
But then, you’re told something chilling. You’re told — by that same white text appearing on that same flickering, black screen — that there is now an additional door in your home. You’re not told where it is. You’re not told how it got there. You’re just told that it was put there by… whoever is speaking to you through the text displaying on the screen in front of you.
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What do you do now?
Do you try to find it?
No. No, you do not. You are told expressly not to look for the door.
Why? You’re told that, too — and the implications are…disturbing.
But you’re also told that the door will find you.
There’s no way out.
What now?
***
Created and produced by the High Strange TV YouTube channel, DOORS debuted at the very end of 2022. There are only two main videos in the series so far, the second having been released in the spring of 2023; but when I stumbled upon them in late 2023, I found both of them to be genuinely unsettling — especially the first video. And that? That was exciting to me. It honestly takes a lot for something like this to stick with me these days — probably because I’ve just seen so many found footage and analog horror web series at this point that I’ve been largely desensitized to their effects — and, well… I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
As such, I’ve been trying to wrap my brain for some time around why the DOORS analog horror series seems to have such staying power for me. What the heck is it about this one that makes it so dang scary?
Yes, there’s something House Of Leaves-esque about the whole thing — in the idea of a space changing in ways it shouldn’t be able to — as well as an aesthetic that’s quite reminiscent of 2022’s surprise experimental horror hit Skinamarink. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the similarities here, although whether those similarities are there by design or by coincidence remains to be seen. However, I think there’s more going on in DOORS than just callbacks, whether intentional or not, to other pieces of horror storytelling that have impressive track records when it comes to freaking people out.
Part of it, I think, has to do with the way it handles its audience. Although it’s true that, by the second installment, DOORS starts to follow a familiar found footage/analog horror web series formula — someone has gone missing under mysterious circumstances, and the person from whose point of view the footage we’re presented with shows us is looking for their missing friend/family member/loved one — but the first installment puts us in a slightly different position. It’s presented as something happening to us, the viewers — not something that’s happening to someone else that we’re viewing from afar.
But even after it starts down a more well-trodden path, the concept behind the whole thing continues to give it an unsettling edge.
Here’s ultimately where I landed:
DOORS is, in essence, not just a supernatural tale, or a missing person mystery, or a run-of-the-mill analog horror series. DOORS is a very specific type of tale — a very specific subgenre of horror: It’s a home invasion story.
And home invasion stories have a tendency of sticking with you long after you’ve finished viewing them.
“Because You Were Home”: Towards A Wider View Of Home Invasion As A Subgenre
I’ve been thinking a lot about home invasion lately.
My preoccupation is almost certainly due to the time I’ve spent with the 2023 season of the Evolution Of Horror podcast; over the course of 36 episodes — that is, for most of the year — this season broke down and analyzed the history of the home invasion subgenre, film by film, from the 1930s up through the present. It’s been fascinating, as Evolution Of Horror always is, and full of smart and sharp discussion of a huge array of extremely effective films.
There’s no getting around it: Home invasion films can be extremely difficult to watch. There’s quite often a level of brutality to them that isn’t always present in, say, ghost stories or folk horror; they’re frequently mean, and nasty, and packed with chillingly mundane reasoning that explains — or, depending on your perspective, doesn’t explain — why their antagonists have undertaken their reigns of terror. “Because you were home,” the titular Strangers say in the 2008 sleeper hit. “They wouldn’t play with us,” the shockingly young intruders say in 2006’s Ils, or Them. “Why not?,” say the two young men who call themselves Peter and Paul in both the 1997 and 2007 versions of Funny Games; the implication is that it’s just, well, a funny game to them.
This isn’t to say that other subgenres aren’t or can’t be brutal; of course any kind of story in any genre or subgenre can have that quality, horror or not. But in my not-inconsiderable viewing experience, home invasion horror films tend to hit that brutality button with an unusually high frequency, and often in ways that are seen less often in other subgenres.
Perhaps most frightening of all is the fact that, often — not always, but often — home invasion antagonists are typically human, and these kinds of stories not only can, but do actually happen sometimes in reality.
For what it’s worth, the odds of a home invasion occurring in the United States are fairly slim—and, moreover, they’ve actually been on the decline in recent years. According to the 2022 Criminal Victimization survey from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the victimization rate for burglary and trespassing combined was 14.6 per 1,000 in 2022; that’s down quite a bit from 21.1 per 1,000 in 2020. For burglary specifically, the rate was 10.2 per 1,000 in 2022, down from 15 in 2018, while for just trespassing, the 2022 rate was 4.5 per 1,000, down from 6.2 per 1,000 in 2018. Percentage-wise, burglary and trespassing rates for 2022 were 1.46 percent; just burglary was just over one percent; and just trespassing was under 0.5 percent.
Then again, in a country where you can be shot for accidentally knocking on the wrong door, or killed in your own home by someone — a cop, no less — who got their own address wrong… well, it’s worth noting that statistics that come directly from law enforcement can only tell you so much, and only from one highly specific angle.
Anecdotally, though, home invasions do happen, and even when they’re not violent, they’re still pretty traumatizing. Indeed, each episode of Evolution Of Horror’s home invasion season included what experiences, if any, each guest who appeared on the show to talk about specific films had with home invasions in their own lives — and a not-insignificant number recounted break-ins they’d experienced, and how they affected them as they tried to (often literally) pick up the pieces and put things back together.
All of which is to say: Even for folks who have seen so many horror films and are so familiar with so many subgenres that they’re not usually “scared” by much anymore — the home invasion subgenre is often the one that makes people go, “I love horror, but nah, I’m not watching that.” For myself, I will and do watch home invasion films — indeed, some of what I consider to be the most effective horror films I’ve seen fall under the subgenre — but there are some that, while I’m happy to listen to people talk about and analyze them, I still have no desire to see myself.
In any event, the thing that Evolution Of Horror’s series did that I found the most interesting was broadening out the definition of “home invasion.” Of course it addressed the heavy-hitters — the ones I’d consider home invasion films in the “traditional” sense, like the aforementioned The Strangers, Ils/Them, and Funny Games — but it also included films that you might not initially consider home invasion at a first glance. Think:
- Stories that subvert the set-up — that is, rather than an intruder coming into the protagonist’s home, the protagonists go to the antagonist’s home, putting them in unfamiliar territory as they navigate their increasingly dangerous situation, as in 2015’s The Invitation (a personal favorite of mine) and 2022’s Speak No Evil.
- Or, stories that start out looking like a different subgenre — a haunted house film, for instance — but then turn out to be home invasion stories, after all, as in 2014’s Housebound (which is also a terrific horror-comedy, if that’s your jam).
- Or, stories that have a subtler take on home invasion — that is, instead of a violent intruder forcing their way in through physical brutality, the invasion happens more slowly and more quietly, so that the occupants of the home being invaded don’t notice what’s really going on until it’s almost too late. (The breadth of films here is wide — The Hand That Rocks The Cradle and Single White Female, both from 1992, and 2014’s The Guest are among the picks I’d put in this category.)
- Even films that aren’t technically horror films can have home invasion elements, like the rollicking 1990 holiday classic Home Alone. (There’s a reason footage from Home Alone lends itself so well to the ol’ “Family Film But Make It Horror” fan trailer treatment.)
All of which got me thinking:
A door appearing in your home that should not be there, placed by someone who does not live there.
Isn’t that a home invasion of sorts?
“We Have Added A Door”: DOORS, Part One
When the first DOORS video debuted, it didn’t actually identify itself as part of a series; uploaded to YouTube on the High Strange TV channel on Dec. 23, 2022, it was called simply “DOORS [Analog Horror].”
From the beginning, it addresses us, the viewer, directly, instructing us via text on the screen first to turn off the lights, then to put on headphones, and lastly, to count the number of doors in our home.
Then, we are told something chilling: “We have added a door,” the text reads. (Whenever the door is mentioned, both in this instance and in every instance moving forward, it is always stylized in red lettering — not too dissimilar from the way House Of Leaves always renders the word “house” in blue. There is no mistaking this door for any other door.)
These five simple words tell us much more than just what they say on the surface: One, they tell us that our home is now different than it was — there is something else there now, something that we did not put there ourselves. And two, they tell us that there is an outside force — a collective someone, or perhaps a collective something — that is encroaching upon our home and changing it.
Both of these things occur without our knowledge or permission:
Something has been put in our home without our knowledge or permission.
And something — or someone — else put it there, in our home, without our knowledge or permission.
This home invasion doesn’t comprise just a single invader. Here, it’s twofold.
One of the primary characteristics of a classic home invasion story is, I would argue, uncanniness. As I’ve discussed before, uncanniness relies on making the familiar strange (that is, taking something recognizable and comforting and making it unfamiliar and unsettling). In the case of a home invasion, the safe space that is your home becomes unsafe: Even if it looks the same, the presence and the threat of the intruder makes it strange. Your home becomes, therefore, uncanny.
It’s worth remembering here that the Freud essay from which this definition of the uncanny comes is titled “Das Unheimliche” in the original German — and that “unheimliche” translates into English quite literally as “un-home-like.”
From this point in the video onward, the first DOORS video takes great care to underline fact that our home is no longer ours. After being shown the door — a closed, white interior door with six or seven panels the width of the door stacked vertically and a silver knob on the right-hand side — we’re given instructions on how to behave in our own home: We are told, “DO NOT try to find the door.”
We are warned about what will happen to us if disobey these orders and do look for the door. We are told, “If you search for too long, your house may begin to look unfamiliar” and informed that “it is easy to become lost” in this new, unfamiliar, un-home-like space.
We’re told — and shown — two cautionary tales: One about Jonathan, who went looking for the door, did not find it, and “became lost,” swallowed by darkness; and the other about Audrey, who did find the door, and suffered… some kind of terrible fate after stepping through it.
We are warned, again, NOT to try to find the door.
We are told the door will find us.
And, as we are shown the door once more, it opens slowly towards us, with a person — possibly Audrey—framed within it. This person is smiling — an unnatural smile, a rictus grin, their face distorted and somehow wrong. We stay on this shot, with this person smiling at us, for an extremely uncomfortable amount of time.
We are told that we can try to run; the implication, however — as the person in the doorframe rushes towards us — is that we won’t make it far. There are, after all, “many doors,” as the video tells us in its parting shot.
The message from the video — from the intruders who created it — is clear: Our home is not our home anymore. It is their home — whoever or whatever they are.
“Do Not Try To Find The Door”: DOORS, Part Two
The second video in the DOORS [Analog Horror] series, which was teased on April 13, 2023 and uploaded in full on April 28, sets us in more familiar territory: Framed as a video diary, it positions us as simple viewers this time, with the creator of the video diary communicating with us through the footage. The Thing is not happening directly to us; we’re just watching it while it happens to someone else.
This particular video diary has been made by a person named Sarah, who is the twin sister of Audrey — one of the people mentioned in the previous video. Audrey, you’ll recall, is the one who found the door. She subsequently went missing, and now Sarah is trying to find her and figure out what happened.
This, too, is familiar territory: It’s quite a standard YouTube horror web series format — one we’ve seen time and time again, from Marble Hornets way back in 2009 all the way up through Paranormal Paranoids in 2021.
And although it brings a bit more focus to the series — it gives us a narrative, something to hang our story-focused hats on, so to speak — I’d argue it’s as little less inventive than the first video is.
Still, though: The idea of home invasion is rife throughout.
First, there’s Sarah herself. Logically, she begins her search for Audrey in the last place she knew her sister to be — her home — which necessitates entering Audrey’s home without her knowledge or permission. Sarah thus becomes a home invader herself, even though her intentions in doing so are good.
That’s not all, though; further aligning Sarah with the entities who claim responsibility for placing the door is what she does after she invades Audrey’s home: She performs a ritual she believes will summon a door that will aid in her search — that is, she places a door in Audrey’s home where there shouldn’t be one, just as the unidentified interlopers speaking to us in the first video of the series do.
Sarah also experiences a home invasion during her time in Audrey’s house, as well. After she performs the ritual, a number of odd occurrences happen, typically late at night, which she documents using her camera: She hears Audrey’s voice speaking to her through the bedroom door, sounding… not quite right; she has what looks at first to be a sleepwalking incident, only for it to turn out to be something else when she seemingly blinks out of existence momentarily — an incident of which she has no memory when she wakes in the morning; that kind of thing. But her second night in the house, she hears a knock on the front door — and when she goes to see who it is, she finds something odd waiting for her on the threshold.
It’s a man — or at least, it’s man-shaped, but once more, something isn’t right. In a distorted voice, he says he’s looking for “the door”; he can’t remember his name when asked, though. He asks Sarah if she knows him, but she doesn’t. He also suddenly just… blinks out of existence after the strange exchange, not unlike Sarah herself will do in another night’s time during her “sleepwalking” incident. Sarah thinks the ritual may have drawn him to us; we, meanwhile, can theorize about who it might be: Jonathan, who went looking for the door and got lost.
The scene is strongly reminiscent of the iconic introduction of The Strangers. True, Jonathan — if it is indeed him — isn’t asking after a person; he also doesn’t seem to be directing hostility towards Sarah. But a menacing figure knocking at the door, asking for something odd, and then just disappearing into the night? I can’t be the only one for whom this exchange immediately brought to mind Dollface eerily asking, “Is Tamara here?”
The Plot Thickens: A Digital Home Invasion
But there’s an extra layer here, too — one that we haven’t talked about yet.
In the description box of the first video, we’re told this by the High Strange TV channel itself:
“This video was somehow uploaded to our channel. It seems to be some strange footage from the 90s or maybe earlier, but I don’t know where it came from or who made it. … I can’t delete it from our channel. Have you seen anything like this before? Should I be worried? I can’t find anything about this on the internet…”
And then, in the description box of the second:
“Another strange VHS tape was somehow uploaded to our channel… This seems to be a video diary made by Audrey’s sister… Where is this all going?”
Now, it’s worth pointing out that elsewhere in the description boxes, High Strange TV makes it perfectly clear that both of the DOORS videos are fiction; gone are the days of the mysterious found footage video or web series that blurred the lines between fiction and reality so much — and so well — that the big question surrounding each story was whether or not it was real. As an audience, we’re too savvy now; we know they’re not real, so the point is no longer to trick us into thinking they are.
BUT: Assuming we’re all willing to suspend our disbelief (and, let’s face it, if you’re reading this right now, you’re probably the kind of person who is willing to do so), we can still consider these two description box notes within the frame of the larger narrative. High Strange TV have effectively made themselves a character within their own work, just as they’ve made us a character by having the first video address us as it does.
There’s been a lot of academic work in recent years and decades about how we represent ourselves online and the social identities we create for ourselves as we do so. But our online lives consist of more than just avatars of ourselves; our actual profiles and pages also function as extensions of ourselves. They’re a little different than our online personas, though; more commonly, they’re likened to physical spaces both public and private.
On the public-facing end, for instance, social media has been described as a vast stage on which we perform our identities. Meanwhile on the private end — think things like Facebook profiles with security settings such that only our friends (or “friends,” as the case may be) can see them; locked Twitter profiles; etc. — our pages and profiles have been compared to bedrooms or other similar spaces.
I tend to think of publicly-available social media profiles, channels, and the like — anywhere an individual or single entity has a landing page, so to speak — as a digital home. Depending on how we choose to handle our security and privacy settings, as well as what we choose to post online and what choose to keep off the internet, we have the ability to metaphorically open our doors to visitors, to invite them to have a seat on the couch and stay for a while. However, can also choose to keep the interior doors to other, more private spaces shut — or to keep the front door shut entirely, to any or all visitors.
So, with that in mind, consider the High Strange TV YouTube channel: It, too, is a digital home. So, what happens when, within the wider reality of the DOORS story as a whole, videos just appear on a YouTube channel, put there by someone or something else, without the channel’s permission? It’s yet another home invasion — a home invasion in the digital space, wherein the YouTube channel itself is the home, and the videos the door.
The Analog Horror Of It All: Form vs. Content And Subgenre vs. Style
At this point, you’re probably thinking, “But, hang on — DOORS explicitly states that it’s analog horror. Isn’t that a subgenre? Isn’t that what this story is? Analog horror, not home invasion?”
Well… yes and no. Let’s talk about it, shall we?
Exactly what “analog horror” is remains somewhat up for debate. Attempts have been made to define it, but it’s sort of a nebulous concept. Me? I tend to think of it more as an aesthetic than a subgenre — that is, it’s a style in which a story can be shot, but not necessarily a type of story itself. Or, put another way: Analog horror is form, but it’s not necessarily content.
Analog horror is generally acknowledged to be closely related to — or perhaps descended directly from, or even a straight-up off-shoot of — found footage; like many of the most iconic pieces of found footage storytelling — 1999’s The Blair Witch Project, 2007’s REC, web series like Marble Hornets or In The Dark/Louise Is Missing, etc. — it usually consists of what I might describe as “primary source”-type material and media spliced together, rather than existing as a standard, third-person narrative.
By “primary source”-type material, I mean things like home movies or personal videos shot by the characters within the work; old commercials, advertisements, or television programs, which might be presented as either having been taped off of TV or displayed as recently-unearthed archival material; that kind of thing. Additionally, this primary source-type material has, within a wider story’s universe or canon, often been recorded or otherwise preserved with what would now be considered older, out-of-date technology — frequently the technology that was available during the 1980s and ‘90s: VHS, camcorder, cassette tapes and recorders, and so on and so forth.
That, of course, is where analog horror gets its name: The material itself is all expressly not digital. (Or at least, it’s not digital within the reality of the story being told; it still may have been produced by digital means. Because, well… that’s how most filmmaking is accomplished these days.)
Where analog horror departs from more traditional found footage — I think, at least — is that the footage in analog horror hasn’t necessarily been found. A piece of analog horror storytelling isn’t always concerned with answering the questions surrounding how and why we, the audience, are viewing the footage; the footage just… exists. We don’t need to know, necessarily, why we’re watching it, or who put it in front of us; we don’t even really need to know how the footage came to be in the first place — that is, instead of whoever shot the footage giving us a bit of exposition for why they’re recording what we’re watching, we’re just given the footage, with little or no explanation as to why it exists. There’s a bit more freedom in analog horror — it allows for more coloring outside the lines, so to speak.
Overall, there are fewer rules dictating what precisely makes something analog horror, versus what makes something, say, found footage, or even screenlife (that is, a piece of storytelling which takes place entirely within the screens of computers or other devices — think the Unfriended series; 2018’s Searching and its 2023 follow-up, Missing; The Den from 2013, and so on; screenlife is what I’d consider to be the modern equivalent of found footage, the natural extension of it in a digital, constantly plugged-in world). You may not be able to succinctly define analog horror, but you know it when you see it — which, I would argue, means that insofar as it has a definition, it’s defined by what it looks and feels like.
Hence, why I tend to think of it as an aesthetic more than anything else.
And that’s where I think the analog horror part of the equation fits in with DOORS, as well: It’s a home invasion story, told using the analog horror aesthetic as its style and visual language. Or, in terms of form vs. content: The form of DOORS is analog horror; the content is home invasion.
“The Door Will Find You”: What’s Still To Come
As I’ve previously noted, there are currently only two videos in the DOORS series; as such, I can’t say at the present whether I’ll still view the series in this way as it progresses — assuming it does, in fact, progress. A third installment was teased on July 12, 2023, but as of this writing, the full episode has not yet arrived.
But.
(There’s always a “but,” isn’t there?)
Here is what watching and spending time with DOORS has done to me in recent weeks:
It has made me look over my shoulder constantly, especially at any open doorframes that might be directly behind me, equal parts concerned about and dreadful of spotting something ducking just out of view as I do so. I should note here that my office setup is such that my back faces the door to the room, and that through the door is a hallway with several doors shooting off from it and another door right at the end of it. That’s… a lot of empty doorframes.
It has inspired in me a sense of… maybe not paranoia, exactly, but definitely something adjacent to it. I keep thinking about the phrase, “We have added a door.” Where? Why? How? I have, in my home, 12 standard interior doors to rooms, bathrooms, and closets; one front door; one sliding back door; and five accordion-style closet doors. That’s a total of 19 doors, although for what it’s worth, DOORS as a series may concern only those 12 interior doors — doors with frames and knobs and hinges, that swing open and shut in the way you generally expect from a door. What if I suddenly turn the corner and find a 13th door — a door that should not be there? What if there is, in fact, already a 13th door hiding somewhere in my home that I haven’t found yet? What if my home is no longer the way I remember it — the way I know it is?
It has made my home feel unfamiliar and un-home-like — unsafe in some nebulous, intangible sense.
I kid you not: I’ve had to work on this whole piece — nearly 5,000 words of writing — in starts and stops, because thinking about it all for too long in a single sitting made me feel too unsettled. The physical and mental sensations that made up that unsettlement were very uncomfortable to sit with in long stretches.
And I suspect a lot of that is due not just to the home invasion aspect, but due to the way this particular series answers the key question in any home invasion story — the question of, in the words of The Strangers, “Why are you doing this to us?”
That question is answered in the first video — the one that addresses us, the viewers, directly: It’s happening because we watched that video. If we hadn’t watched it, we wouldn’t know about the door. We wouldn’t know about whoever or whatever put the door in our home. We wouldn’t know to look for it — or not to look for it. We would have remained in blissful ignorance of it all, content in the knowledge that our home was as it always had been and unlikely to change unless we decided to change something about it ourselves.
The scariness is, as always, in the mundanity of the answer: All we did was watch a YouTube video, the same way we’ve watched countless others as we’ve gone about our lives in this exceedingly online world of ours.
Do not try to look for the door.
The door will find you.
And if it finds you…
…Don’t go through it.
Just don’t.
***
Follow The Ghost In My Machine on Bluesky @GhostMachine13.bsky.social, Twitter @GhostMachine13, and Facebook @TheGhostInMyMachine. And for more games, don’t forget to check out Dangerous Games To Play In The Dark, available now from Chronicle Books!
[Photos via High Strange TV (1, 2, 4-8, 11), LouisePaxton, Alex Kister/YouTube; Universal Pictures]
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