Welcome back to Scare Me! a weekly horror newsletter. Today, I’m coping with how much Michael Wehunt’s latest novel, Nightjars, is getting under my skin.

In the year of our lord 2026, we all know we can’t trust the media we see. From Photoshop to Facetune to deepfakes, most of us automatically look for the seams in mediated reality.

There’s usually an uncanny tell—a warped curve, an extra finger, a glitch or an unnatural smoothness. It’s unnerving to think about how normal (and necessary) this kind of scrutiny has become.

But for me, there’s something even more dreadful when analog media is warped. Analog is supposed to be grounded in something real. It’s the grooves in a vinyl record, the delicate tape spooled within a cassette, the way chemical reactions bloom into film photography. It’s magnetic, electric, chemical. I want to believe it’s less corruptible. But of course, in horror and sometimes real life, that isn’t true.

I’m currently in the midst of reading Michael Wehunt’s latest novel, Nightjars, which came out on Tuesday. It’s an eerie, unsettling story about a father and son, lost memories, and impossible photographs that may or may not have captured a series of crimes.

It’s got me thinking about other examples of analog techno-horror and why it all bothers me so much.

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Nightjars begins with a Polaroid. Our main character, Luke, is a divorced dad and ex-alcoholic. He’s fifteen minutes into a date that seems to be going well enough—until she slips away from their table and never returns. After impulsively downing the dregs of his date’s Old Fashioned, Luke notices the edge of a photo peeking out from beneath her napkin. The image it contains is fucking horrifying: It’s Luke, as a child, next to a woman who appears to be dead.

Luke doesn’t remember the incident, but he’s long suspected there are truths hidden in the recesses of his mind. His father was a long haul trucker who reminds me of Keith Hunter Jesperson, the so-called Happy Face Killer. (For more on Jesperson’s crimes, I recommend his daughter Melissa G. Moore’s podcast, Happy Face, though I found it devastating.) Luke has spent hours in hypnotherapy attempting to retrieve memories that might connect his father to a string of serial killings in the ‘90s.

From this opening scene, the story only gets weirder. Wehunt collages clues in a variety of analog and digital formats, from pixelated security footage to microfiche reels to digital photos. Luke sees himself committing unholy acts of violence, while also confronting his memory gaps in therapy. This pairing—a search for truth in memory and a careful study of physical records—seems like it should be solidly complimentary. We remember things we’ve experienced, and artifacts document things as they occurred.

Except—that isn’t quite true. Hypnosis makes people susceptible to false memories, and present-day Luke may be encountering doppelgängers or mimics captured in the photographs. I’m not deep enough in the story to fully understand what’s happening, but the sense of betrayal is what really stings. If we can’t trust what we see and what we remember, how can we ever feel confident in our understanding of the world?

It’s a question Savageland also asks viewers to confront. The 2015 found footage movie is a forensic analysis of a (fictional) massacre that obliterated nearly every resident in a small border town.

The only survivor is an amateur photographer who’s accused of the violent killings—but his undeveloped film tells a different story. As he attempted to flee the town, he snapped a series of photographs that seem to show a sudden invasion of…something. Did the cartel destroy the town? Or was it something otherworldly? The answer changes depending on who the documentarians ask, and their political stance on immigration.

I’m pretty certain I learned about this movie from an interview with Trevor Henderson, an OG analog horror artist with a wildly impressive track record for dreaming up horrific images that might just seem real at a glance.

Any tour of analog horror couldn’t be complete without paying homage to Koji Suzuki’s 1991 novel Ring. Even if you’ve seen the movies a dozen times, I still always recommend the books. (Just be warned there’s some problematic stuff about gender, to put it mildly.)

As a writer, Suzuki values scientific plausibility. Ring sometimes reads like a science fiction procedural, if there is such a thing; Suzuki’s characters hypothesize and debate, gather evidence and deduce and conclude. There’s a chilling brilliance to the way the novel’s logic feels just real enough to make you wonder.

It’s also a novel that feels very specifically rooted in the ‘90s. VCRs and VHS tapes—analog media that have almost vanished now—play a vital role in the story. At the time, I’m sure it felt modern, but now it feels incredibly nostalgic and contained. The fifth novel wonders what would happen if the video made its way onto YouTube…

Suzuki got me thinking once again about Catriona Ward. (When am I not?) The creepy photographs in Nightjars have me thinking fondly of the photos in Looking Glass Sound, a twisty metafictional magic trick of a novel that goes in directions I didn’t see coming. The first portion of the novel is one of the best crime stories I’ve read, featuring an elusive intruder who breaks into people’s houses and leaves voyeuristic Polaroids behind. It’s also reminded me that The Last House on Needless Street has a disturbing cache of cassette tapes. Analog again!

And finally, an analog-obsessed movie that’s unmatched for vibes: Sinister. Ethan Hawke stars as a struggling true crime writer / desperate sicko who moves his family into a home where a terrible series of crimes occurred nine months earlier. He discovers a cache of film reels that seem to capture the brutal (and creative) slayings…and a demonic entity that can enter our world through images…

Man, do I love those horrible little film reels.

No, not the Tim Burton adaptation—the OG soap that ran from 1966 through 1971, releasing a staggering 1,225 episodes. It’s a masterpiece of Gothic melodrama, featuring vampires, seances, and ghosts, with a fair amount of camp for good measure. There’s just something soothing about turning on an episode (or half a dozen episodes) around this time of year. I’ve written a little bit about my modest Dark Shadows collection but not the show itself. Strike a match, light your candelabra, and meet me back here next week!

We’ll be back in Interview Land soon—in addition to our upcoming conversation with Macabre Daily editor-in-chief Matt Orozco, we’ll also be joined by debut author Deena Helm! There’s a lot to love in Our Cut of Salt, her deeply moving story about the diaspora, inheritance, and grief experienced by a trio of Palestinian women. I wrote about it here, and am looking forward to our conversation once her book tour settles down.

Scare Me! is a free weekly horror newsletter published every Thursday morning. It’s written by Michelle Delgado, featuring original illustrations by Sam Pugh. You can find the archive of past issues here. If you were sent this by a friend, subscribe to receive more spooky interviews, essays—and maybe even a ghost story or two.