The Material Sound of Magnetic Tape: Digital Horrors and Analogue Technology in The Black Tapes and The Magnus Archives

There is a strong connection identified between Gothic and hauntological preconceptions with the past returning to disturb the present, and the presence of analogue technology returning to haunt digital horror narratives. It is through analogue nostalgia, especially its interest in the noise inherent to the materiality of analogue technology, that the Gothic preconception with the past is translated into the horror podcast format; the ‘rediscovered manuscript’ becomes the re-mediated cassette tape. This paper will therefore interrogate how hauntology, analogue horror, and nostalgia interact with the Gothic, utilising a comparative methodology between two digital podcast dramas—The Black Tapes (2015–2017) and The Magnus Archives (2016–2021)—which locate the source of their horror in the materiality, spectrality, and agency of analogue technology in different ways.