Have you ever noticed how much we use signal degradation as a shorthand for existential “wrongness”?
Like, in horror movies, an otherworldly voice may hiss like radio static, while a creepy monster may jerk and stutter from position to position like a video that’s dropping frames. The influence of a hostile, alien presence may be indicated by visual “tearing”, like the film is being played back from damaged media, or by deliberate audio/video desynchronisation.
Video games get in on the act, too. The use of simulated glitches to represent reality-warping effects in horror gaming is well documented, of course, but it goes beyond that. In the language of gaming, a portal to an alien realm may bleed stylised pixels and crackle like a PC speaker with the volume cranked too high, while the sound effects associated with “unnatural” magic might introduce digital distortion to an otherwise naturalistic soundscape.
I sometimes wonder what it says about our anxieties as a culture that the easiest way for media to freak us out is to confront us with manifestations of the artificiality of the medium.
Horror in general is largely about boundaries and the violation there-of. The boundary between what is “reality” and what is “fiction,” or what is “true” and what is “dream” are pretty much fundamental boundaries.
The fact that human beings dream and have incredibly vivid imaginations gives us an inherent ability to doubt our own reality. This allows us to either question our own experiences or question our own knowledge of the laws of our world. And this, in turn gives birth to much of what drives horror, in general.
The idea that somehow, a fundamental boundary is being violated is basically at the root of all horror, whether explicitly - such as a gateway to hell opening, or subtly, in that something not right seems to have made its way into our realm of the mundane. Horror largely relies on this sense that a line that should not have been crossed has been.
The idea that ones perceptions of reality starts to change as one approaches a border between realms is a pretty old one. It goes all the way back to stories about the fairy realm where time and color are distorted, and fairy dust can alter your perceptions of just about anything. Or portals to the underworld where the flow of time and the rules of realty change.
And I think that signal distortion, interestingly enough, largely comes from attempts to replicate the effects on perception of much older sorts of boundary crossings - altered states of consciousness - be they dreaming, drug included, or stress related. Things like an altered flow of movement or time, colors and shapes bleeding into one another or leaving trails, things seeming to oscillate or strobe, pop in and out of existence. Things like flashing lights, white noise, and even pixilation are all pretty well documented occurrences, even before the advent of photography.
Looking into migraine aura and hallucinogens is particularly interesting because some of the depictions of what people experience look very much like signal decay - and some of them predate the actual medias.
I recall when google first released Deep Dream that a lot of people commented how eerie it was that a system built entirely on one interesting way computer vision might “fail” replicated almost perfectly organic hallucinations.
If you combine this with the way that things like The Matrix and the “Brain in a Jar” thought experiment have worked their way into popular consciousness, it’s easy to see how a sort of “digital realm” and distortions associated with that have also become pretty standard indicators of boundaries, especially ones that are meant to indicate that something about the world is false.
