I have been a longtime fan of horror, from slasher movies to analog horror Youtube series to even eldritch video games. During this search for new media to disturb and scare me, I have come to realize that Gen Z's idea of horror has begun wearing a face — and unconvincingly at that.

Horror media is a reflection of societal fears of the time of its creation. Slasher movies of the 70’s and 80’s, for example, reflect the American phenomenon of high-profile serial killers and pushback against the sexual liberation of younger generations. Modern horror titles, such as “Midsommar” or “The Babadook,” focus on trauma, family and mental health instead.

Amid this trend, there is a subgenre of horror that is widely known to Gen Z and has been incubating online for years, but is only now beginning to gain mainstream attention. It exists primarily in short-form horror skits on social media and indie Youtube channels, silently gaining millions of views from zoomers such as myself.

For lack of a better term, I will call it “mimic horror.”

The concept of mimics is one that has been bubbling under the subconscious for a good part of the last decade, from modern retellings of skinwalkers from Navajo folklore to internet horror pieces such as “When Day Breaks,” all having enjoyed widespread popularity online.

The staple tropes of contemporary mimic horror were established in the analog horror Youtube series “Mandela Catalogue,” first uploaded June 2021 by Alex Kister, featuring “alternates” – creatures that imitate people, albeit imperfectly. The series, which has since garnered over 72 million views on Youtube, inspired a cascade of new mimic horror pieces, from internet originals such as “The Glendale Archives” or “Weird Birds” to video games such as “No, I’m not a human” or “That’s not my neighbor” and countless short-form skits on TikTok or Instagram featuring dark rooms and uncanny makeup.

Many mimic horror pieces are minimalistic, often involving a government emergency alert message warning of creatures impersonating loved ones and a silent reveal that one such creature has already infiltrated the protagonist’s home.

In one, a figure stands in the dark shadows of a dimly lit hallway, its features largely obscured, save for the eyes, which are too big, and its mouth, which is too wide. The protagonist, wide-eyed, rushes into their room and locks the door as the thing scuttles about outside, then knocks politely.

“I love you!” It howls.

Mimic horror to me, is fundamentally about the breakdown of truth itself. It is no surprise, I think, that the storytelling medium of emergency government alerts and themes of isolation in an ambiently hostile world exploded into popularity in 2021, the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In many different works, a government broadcast would carry with it an expectation of authority and hope. Mimic horror’s broadcasts deliver outdated information, become corrupted by the mimics’ influence, or otherwise obscure darker truths about the world. That is to say nothing of the mimics themselves, a creature defined by its effort and failure to perform normalcy with barely disguised malice.

A generation grew up with classrooms full of flags and globes and cutouts of various ethnic groups holding hands around the Earth. Then, as they began tentatively venturing into adulthood, they were told about the severity of climate change, saw a virus sweep across the globe, trailing behind a dozen conspiracy theories and senseless wars break out over the whims of a handful of politicians.

That is to say nothing of corporate social media campaigns, in which novelty quickly curdled into exhaustion as a generation witnessed corporations destroy environments and profit from war and genocide, all the while wearing a polite smile and an endless stream of meaningless platitudes – the inhuman, wearing a mask.

Led by algorithmic whirlpools, people found themselves increasingly radicalized — less willing to compromise, more willing to dehumanize the other side. It became commonplace to hear your family member regurgitate conspiracy drivel they’d heard on the internet, from vaccines to 5G. The unbridgeable gap you feel when you realize when your loved one has accepted these claims to be facts, have they not become mimics in their own right?

With the rise of large language model technology, mimic horror began to seep into reality as reports of users uncovering massive bot networks became widespread on social media — bot accounts with bot faces, posting artificial intelligence content, tagging and talking to each other as if they were people. “Dead internet theory,” a concept that the internet has been largely taken over by bot networks, has all but become a presumption for younger generations accessing the web.

This unique social condition, surely felt on some subconscious level by most Gen Z individuals, is what continues to sustain mimic horror. Mimic horror’s medium of Youtube channels and 15-second skits are right where it belongs, wedged in between an endless sea of pixels that try to convince me they are human.

Gen Z’s fear is an unknowable, hostile “other” wearing the face of a human. One day, I fear it will wear mine.

Kim Young-moo is a Korea Times intern.