Winter of '83

I like analog horror and when it's done right it can really be something special. But when it's done poorly the cracks are really easy to spot and it just comes off as being crap. That's unfortunately how this comes off overall.

Don't get me wrong there are some good parts to it but it doesn't feel organic. Instead it literally feels like somebody's paint by numbers set. You know those things add this color here, that color there and you now have a crappy painting.

This takes place during a blizzard in 1983 in a small town in Minnesota. The town vanished after this storm and we're left to pick up the pieces. It's told through audio recordings and videos. Some good some bad.

The good make good use of the medium and that's mostly the audio recordings. The video recordings? They're less good and the biggest problem there is the camera is treated like it's a character. Now I want you to imagine a scene. You're filming yourself doing something and you hear somebody call to you off to the side. Would you A) look over to where the person was or B) look through the camera where they are?

The answer to that is of course A but in this series it's always B. And that's a big problem. It's made worse by the acting in this which is community theater acting at best. There's a couple people that give a good performance with the material they're given. The private investigator for example. But for the most part the lines are spoken by non-actors trying to act.

All in all it's not the worst I've seen but it's far from the best.

Winter of '83 is a bit of an oddity. It's analog horror which gives a certain retro charm to it. You have videos taken on VHS, or made to look like VHS, cobbled together to make a coherent whole. Or if it's released over a period of months to slowly fill in the story.

The story itself is interesting. A town in Minnesota disappears after a snowstorm. It just vanishes and we're left to pick up the pieces and figure out what led to this. There are some actual good bits in this during some of the phone calls. Some actual good voice acting and dialogue. But that's where the praise ends. It's the video segments where it starts to fall apart.

Now I'm not going to talk about the special effects or the filters used to make an HD source look like VHS. I'm not expecting this to look professional. It's a small production done on a shoestring budget. No. It's how it all fits together and, like the only other review for this states, the biggest problem is summed up in one of the scenes.

We have a guy who's locking up a store and he's videotaping himself doing it. Why? His boss demands it. He demands the employee video himself locking it up. For what reason? I don't know because it makes little sense but it's there for a reason and that's to have the plot move along.

He hears somebody asking if he can get some help and what does he do? He turns the camera towards it and responds. That's not what you'd do in that situation. You'd put the camera down and look with your eyes or keep it filming what it was originally filming and look away.

The problem is the camera is the character. It's treating this as if the camera and guy speaking are the same thing.

He follows the voice. Still filming I might add, looking through the camera the entire time until we see the eldritch horror that is responsible for this and the screen fills with static before going blue.

This is weak. It's not how you do effective analog horror. If there was somebody else there filming then maybe it would work. Maybe even have the guy locking up the store say something like, "keep filming this" or something. But no. We don't get that. There's simply no reason for that whole scene to exist other than to reveal the things responsible for this.

All in all it's not a good representation of analog horror. There's some good bits but most of it feels boring and like the other review said "paint by numbers".