I began looking for different examples of nostalgic horror, and there are many different types of media that use nostalgic imagery and make it horror themed. A really interesting article I found, written by Aren Bergstorm says, “Nostalgic horror relies on exploiting past fears and feelings. In film and television, horror can tap into adolescent fears and portray the world as our memories of childhood composed it…Most interestingly, like all true nostalgic art, nostalgic horror encourages repeat visits, encouraging the viewer to return to a vision of the past that is terrifying, but also strangely comforting because it is outside our current experience.” I think that this explanation is really good for people who don’t know much about what the genre is about. 

 

One big tv show that uses nostalgia to cater to people is Stranger Things. I found an article by Krista Collier-Jarvis where she talks about how Stranger Things plays with that nostalgia for those who grew up in the 80s and added horror on top of it. “However, while we could simply state that Stranger Things is about 1980s nostalgia (or pseudo-nostalgia as Tom van Laer and Davide Christian Orazi call it—pointing out that many of the show’s consumers are too young to have actually experienced the ‘80s), this perspective is too reductive. Instead, nostalgia horror resurrects the fears that took root during the ‘80s—exposing how we have never truly worked through them.” A bunch of the viewers of Stranger Things are people who were not born during the 80s and have no nostalgia tied to that time, yet this show is still able to create that feeling of nostalgia for those people. Collier-Jarvis points out how one of the reasons it is able to make anyone feel nostalgic is because there are similarities in fears and anxieties during the 80s and now. 1.) Child endangerment – the Stranger Danger myth (1980s); the overturning of Roe vs. Wade (now) 2.) The Russian threat (growing more prominent in each season of Stranger Things) – the Cold War and America’s communist paranoia (1980s); the New Red Scare due to misunderstandings surrounding COVID-19 as well as the War in Ukraine (now) 3.) Satanism (season four of Stranger Things) – the American Satanic Panic (1980s); QAnon (now) 4.) Loss of small-town heteronormative, white America – suburban anxiety (1980s and now) Nostalgic Horror media does always tend to play with the current fears in society during the time it is based in, and this observation makes sense when we look at how so many teens relate to or find nostalgia within this show that plays with fears of the past that are still present today just in different ways, even if they weren’t alive during the 80s.

 

Another big source of nostalgic horror is creepypasta’s. An article written by Haley Zapal writes, “Creepypasta refers to horror stories that are kind of like internet urban legends — stories that have been read on different websites over the years that can’t be tied to a single author…The stories are often (but not always) accompanied by extremely disturbing images that help them go viral.” These stories have been around since the early 2000s and I remember how popular it was during elementary school. These stories are all very different since they are created by many different people from around the world, which means there will be a story for anyone and there are so many different sub-genres of these stories. These are tied to nostalgia for many people my age since they were all so popular when we were younger, so now looking back at these stories it reignites that feeling of reading a scary story when you are young.  

 

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