The New Sun Initiative

Retro future analog horror scifi shorts

Honored samurai, ruthless ronin, wayward vagabonds, shadowy ninja and helpless villagers... welcome.

OPENING VOLLEY
Still hard at work on Daimyo's Decoy. Not going to release it until it's finished. Still planning on releasing simultaneously as a free-to-read serial and paid ebook (and hopefully print as well). So the journey continues. Thank you for your patience.

MAIN EVENT
The New Sun Initiative

Six videos, totaling just under eight minutes of grainy, jumpy VHS "footage" complete with the corporate synth music and warbly audio.

If you are not familiar with analog horror, you're not alone. Or at least, you might not be familiar with the term.

The Signal describes the genre and its beginning:

"Beginning as a mostly audio-only, internet-only offshoot of the found footage horror subgenre, Analog Horror first began emerging and growing as a subgenre in the early 2010s. The majority of Analog Horror often consist of blurry images and fuzzy audio.

Little to no context is given to the watchers of these videos, and instead, speculation and theorizing are encouraged are the video’s comment section."

And Wikipedia further notes its characteristics:

"Analog horror is commonly characterized by low-fidelity graphics, cryptic messages, and visual styles reminiscent of late 20th-century television and analog recordings. This is done to match the setting, as analog horror works are typically set somewhere between the 1960s and 1990s. The name "analog horror" comes from the genre's aesthetic incorporation of elements related to analog electronics, such as analog television and VHS (Video Home System), the latter being an analog method of recording video and audio."

Both are dead on. Truth be told, I'm not a huge horror fan (I hate jump scares which consists of a lot of horror), so that I've managed to not to know of analog horror's existence until now is no real surprise. For those of you like myself who didn't know the term, you MAY be familiar with The Backrooms -- a series of shorts is the essence of the genre. Moreover, Wiki lists vaporwave, of which I am a fan, under See Also. They're cousins. Vaporwave got its start in the early 2010s and apparently analog horror came into being shortly before.

As a child of the 70s/80s and thus extremely familiar with VHS/Betamax, staticky televisions, corporate synth music, and jumpy videos, I cannot give enough props to the creative team. Either they are Gen X or damn familiar with media of the generation. Kudos.

Copyright Erratic State Archives

But it's NOT JUST the well-crafted use of 80s media techniques and culture that has me ga-ga over The New Sun Initiative, it's the retro-futuristic biopunk tweak. It simultaneously floored me and enamored me to it. Readers of the samuraipunk work I've done know I love incorporating biopunk, transhumanism and a bit of body horror into it. What I don't explain is how the future world of the works came to be. Some authors will go into detail, I'm not one of those. I like to explore as I'm writing, I like to explore when I'm reading. I don't like having every little detail tabulated. I want my brain to have fun with the extrapolation. Because maybe its tweaked or transformed in my head since I last flipped a page. (I read slowly; some times as little as three pages a night.) This happens when I write as well, so if I put something down, it makes it difficult to remove.

In the world of the samuraipunk in which I currently am writing, in the past, there was an unstoppable biological accident of some kind. I have no idea what, and I don't care to explore it. I just know there was an accident. It rippled across the globe killing and transforming untold billions into mutants, monsters and killers and transformed nature into a hungry entity that devoured cities... And now would be a very good time for you to watch The New Sun Initiative if you haven't already. And if you have, or when you have finished, I look forward to your comments.

UPDATE: Dive straight into the Erratic State Archives website, starting with The New Sun Initiative. All six shorts are there as well as a BEAUTIFUL curation album of the background music on Soundcloud.

WE NEVER MEET WITHOUT PARTING
Next issue... We get there when we get there.

Until then!
Made in DNA
https://campsite.bio/madeindna