Today the Algorithm(TM) blessed me with this video about creepy old CGI:

And I thought, this old mixture of liminality, along with an uncanny valley effect, has almost became an entire niche genre of horror. I've known about the creepy aspect of liminal spaces for awhile. There are some good subreddits dedicated to liminal spaces. If you take a look at a variety of liminal spaces, you'll notice that a good amount of them do not actually take place in the real world, but in the digital. These sets of spaces evoke not just a feeling of the uncanny valley, but of nostalgia as well.

Early technology has been creating these uncanny and liminal spaces in the virtual world for long time; at first because of the technology available, or lack thereof, but eventually to purposefully evoke this feeling of being lost in a space which you don't fully understand. I've seen a bit of this horror on Newgrounds, in Randy Learns Science.

Without spoiling anything, the game puts you in an early internet space, in which you're playing what looks to be a children's game, but it becomes quickly apparent that something isn't what it seems.

As was mentioned in the video embedded above, early CGI animation evoked this sense of the uncanny valley. Some animators probably weren't going for that feeling. However, some of the early animations are so creepy and ominous, you have to wonder if the animators used the lack of technology at the time to their advantage, purposefully leaning into the inhuman and threatening worlds they could create, such as in The Little Death:

You can look not only at the sum of the product, but of specific aspects of it as well that could lead you to believe the animators played into the horror aspect on purpose. I mean, look at the title.

There are larger games which play in this retro-internet horror setting as well. Hypnospace Outlaw takes place in an early internet space, where you play as a type of "internet police", tasked with surfing an early internet that feels threatening and mysterious.

I feel like part of what makes the horror work, is the sense of nostalgic anxiety it invokes. It reminds me of when I was a child and was given access to the internet. My parents probably didn't know what an unwise that was. The first OS I remember was either Windows 95 or 98, and surfing an early internet without the full comprehension of what I was doing did create a sense of unease. Hell, I mean, even Newgrounds played a part in it. Stumbling across Newgrounds at an early age on an early OS, and accidentally clicking on a horror point-and-click like Exmortis:

To a young me at the age of <10, this made the internet an uncertain place where I couldn't be sure if where I was going was going to be a safe space for someone my age. I'm probably not the only one with this experience, and that's probably why those old CGI films and early internet spaces evoke that feeling of horror.

So tell me your thoughts and experiences with this kind of horror. Does anyone else here share the early childhood experience with me? Share any media you might have that evokes this sense of unease. What would you call it? Anything related to the topic belongs here!