I’ve had to rethink a lot of the scariest things I’ve ever seen in a video after .gif and .webm were brought into the same realm as .mp4, .mov and 35mm. The horror that really stuck with me over the years from VHS into RuTube was Stefan Avalos and Lance Weiler's The Last Broadcast (1997). It was a photo finish release with The Blair Witch Project, which beat Last Broadcast into theaters while it took the home video market first. It lead to a race between two formats—Blair Witch with its grassroots marketing-fiction-as-reality and Broadcast gaining steam through word-of-mouth and “you have to see the ending.”

This would be turned upside years later as Weiler would experiment more with world-building digital narratives, like the transmedia project “Pandemic,” and its companion short Pandemic 41.410806, -75.654259--both of which premiered at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival for curious festival-goers.

Subscribe! ► http://bit.ly/SubscribeCSSO Written & Edited by: Kris Straub (http://studios.chainsawsuit.com) VHS glitch footage via Christopher Huppertz ► https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qELSSAspRDI Other visuals captured via "VHS Camcorder" ► http://rarevision.com/vhscam/ Local 58 lives at ► http://local58.info

So it goes without saying that the scariest video I ever saw is one I come back to on October 1st: “Local 58-Weather Service.”

Created by and posted in 2015 by Chainsawsuit Original, the "Local 58" videos are a twisted look into the public access channels that became warped with age and the advent of digital decomposition. I started thinking about it more and more over the year as "Weather Service" plays up to the fear of a pre-recorded message made for the worst-case scenario. The absolute worst version of an obituary being uploaded by accident or the recent job posting for a photo editor with the fear the editor may quit.

Though one of the final lines sticks with me and is apt for the start of a spooky month:

"This message will repeat until there are none to read it"

“Is Alex Murphy a cop dreaming that he is a robot, or is he a robot that only dreamed it was a cop? The question isn’t answered in either iteration of RoboCop — not in Paul Verhoeven’s gonzo original, and not in this remake by Brazilian director José Padilha.”

— "All Man, All Machine, All Cop: The Enhanced Personhood of ‘RoboCop’," Claire L. Evans, Grantland

Being inundated with science fiction of all types makes me unusually bristle at the idea brought up in this edition of Grantland's The Futurist. I'm not a fan at all of Diet Robocop but it has a scene as haunting to me now as when I saw disassembled and writhing cyborg in Robocop 2.

Nü-Alex Murphy demands to be shown how much of his new body is a suit and how much of him is physically left. Without hesitation, Diet Robocop's creator shows him:

“This scene has an existential color that is muted, and eventually bled out, by the rest of the movie. Without his mechanical body, RoboCop is little more than a brain in a jar. With it, he’s a neurological passenger perched on top of a big machine; as such, he can’t objectively know if the external world — the lab, his family, Detroit’s criminal element — is real. ”

— "All Man, All Machine, All Cop: The Enhanced Personhood of ‘RoboCop’," Evans, Grantland

A.D. Police Files, a 1990s cyberpunk anime about a police force that fought rogue robots and leveled the city doing so, had their own take on this in "The Man Who Bites His Tongue." An officer is critically injured and his last functioning organs--his tongue and brain--are put into a robot. A newly minted tank that can go one-on-one with other unstoppable machines that reminds himself of his humanity by biting his tongue.

Naturally, His evil creator has plans to scrap him after he performs poorly by acting more mechanical than human after the public reject the idea of a man inside a machine. This is the same public that deals with literal miles of property damage and explosions on a daily basis from machines so the future has a low tolerance for failure.

So, our cyborg overdoses on a drug that inhibits his emotions, goes into a delusion he's with his girlfriend while he actually slaughters his fellow officers. He recovers enough to beg his girlfriend to shoot him with (conveniently) an anti-tank rifle in the tongue so he can feel enough pain to die.

Both the mouth and gun are a reference to the original Robocop when one of the criminals suggests they "aim for the mouth" with their own anti-armor ordinance as they hunt an injured Robocop and Lewis in an abandoned factory. The joke being they think its face is human, but an earlier remark from an OCP official that the only organic components to Robocop are parts of Alex Murphy's brain and his face stretched across a metal skull.

Maybe because we've had 27 years to digest it in pop culture, but the overwhelming feeling of Robocop is it is not Alex Murphy. It learns to call itself Murphy, it learns to respond to Murphy and it learns to process emotions like revenge and anger but Robocop isn't Alex Murphy.

Throughout the original trilogy Robocop became morecomfortable performing how it assumes Alex Murphy would do. Why refer to Robocop as it when I refer to the character from A.D. Police Files as him? Robocop has never "felt" pain in any of the versions shown. The ongoing joke is Robocop may call itself Murphy, but it doesn't hesitate to strap on a jet pack and a machine gun in place of an arm. It also looks awesome to kids that want to play with action figures.

Diet Robocop makes a second leap with its ending where Robocop overrides programming due to "humanity." Previously the best it could do was wait to have a Prime Directive switched off or the cyborg equivalent of deleting system 32, which is shoving a spike into an electrical socket. Diet Robocop wants you to know deep down that Robocop has flesh and is Alex Murphy. The original had to force you to accept maybe the man in the man-machine was just as artificial and just as adept at evolving its software to appease the masses.

Spike Jonze's Her takes this to the emotional level. Diet Robocop goes out of its way to assure you the Murphies will stay together and be a nuclear family model for the Singularity. But before that, it was the Noid with an automatic weapon.

Robocop is aware it is Alex Murphy 2.0. As an operating system and a being, which was something the original Diet Robocop script got into, the stages of death are essentially the same as becoming a futuristic hybrid. The original Murphy's dying moments turned to fear and acceptance before being reborn. This acceptance, along with a random mention in Robocop 2 that Murphy's "faith" kept him from committing suicide as Robocop, breeds a better operating system. It's a gradual transformation as Robocop accepts it is no longer Murphy, brushing off steel girders or instantly accessing data and Clarence Boddicker's throat with the same spike. Taking this further, Robocop is both OCP's crowning achievement and an ever-lasting fluke like a sentient Slinky.