How Nostalgia Kills Memories

—

Why does modern horror look so much older than it should?

▬▬▬▬ Tale Foundry Community▬▬▬▬

▬▬▬▬ Tale Foundry Team ▬▬▬▬
• Talebot — The Talent
• The Taleoids — The Talent's Helpers
• Benjamin Cook — Writer, Director, & Voice Actor
• Kathryn Healy — Researcher & Writer

[MrARock]

No one can comfortably imagine the future any more, so we imagine the past instead.

[Noperare]

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

[Secret_Moon]

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.

[coldendarc]

"if dreams are like movies, then memories are films about ghosts"- counting crows

[lerneanlion]

This is the most horrifying take on "the past never truly dies" I ever seen after watching this video.

[cloverlovania]

starts off with talking about nostalgia horror, ends with an existential crisis. wouldnt expect anything less from you

[razor]

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.

[smartsmartie]

Nostalgic horror seems to be extremely existential: by repeating the past you become lost in it

[kilgor]

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?

[FirstLast-cgnk]

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?

[IanVermeers]

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.

[avivyoukerharel]

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.

[vginsprdsobepr]

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.

[AC-nigt]

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.

[orsonzedd]

The only thing people felt when the cybertruck was unveiled was secondhand embarrassment

[Hotshotk]

"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.

[hellenrose]

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...

[yokothespacewhale]

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

[commandosolo]

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.

[Nextlevelpsych]

Nostalgia consumed everything when media became available everywhere, all the time. No free time for boredom = no new content for future nostalgia.