Horror in general is largely about boundaries and the violation there-of. The boundary between what isĀ ārealityā and what isĀ āfiction,ā or what isĀ ātrueā and what isĀ ādreamā 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 rightĀ 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 Ā vision mightĀ āfailā replicated almost perfectly organic hallucinations.
If you combine this with the way that things like The MatrixĀ and theĀ āBrain in a Jarā thought experiment have worked their way into popular consciousness, itās easy to see how a sort ofĀ ādigital realmā 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.
But I think itās important to remember that in a lot of ways, our brain and our eyes are just as prone to signal decay as any computer or camera, and our old folk tales about fairies and stories about witches that sound suspiciously like stories about ufos that sound suspiciously like hypnopompic and hypnogogic hallucinations with sleep paralysis can attest to that.Ā
(side note - comedy is also largely about boundary crossing. The more you think about how close comedy and horror are, as genres, the weirder it gets)
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