Sodium streetlights. That's where it starts for me. Not the event or the era but the colour — that flat, amber wash that turned every pavement into something theatrical and slightly wrong. Modern LEDs render the world in full spectrum. Sodium vapour didn't. It collapsed everything into two tones and left your brain to fill in the rest. The brain, filling in, often chose unease.

Something about the 1970s and 1980s registers as faintly sinister when viewed from here, and the reaction is common enough to suggest it isn't just personal. The textures of that period — film grain, tape hiss, CRT scanlines, the particular softness of analogue video — carry an ambiguity that digital media has largely eliminated. Modern footage is sharp, bright, and hyper-legible. Older material contains noise and shadow. The brain interprets visual ambiguity as uncertainty, and uncertainty triggers a low-grade vigilance that can settle in the body as discomfort. You're not scared, exactly. You're watchful.

Pacing compounds this. Television idents, public information films, educational broadcasts — they moved slowly and left gaps. Long pauses. Static framing. Sparse dialogue. Minimal scoring or none at all. Contemporary media fills nearly every second with motion or sound because dead air is considered a failure. Confronted with silence, the viewer projects meaning into the space, and what gets projected is rarely cheerful. The Protect and Survive films weren't trying to be frightening. Their flat, institutional delivery made them more disturbing than any horror film could manage.

That institutional tone is part of it too. Public messaging in Britain during this period was formal, impersonal, authoritative. It lacked the conversational warmth that modern branding considers mandatory. Government broadcasts addressed you like a patient being told to stay calm — which, if you weren't already anxious, was a reliable way to make you start. The emotional distance reads as cold now. Cold enough to feel ominous.

The broader atmosphere didn't help. Cold War nuclear anxiety sat underneath everything like a bass frequency you couldn't quite identify but could feel in your teeth. Industrial decline, unemployment, urban decay, terrorism coverage, moral panics — even if none of this was consciously processed at the time, it shaped the cultural mood. And cinema absorbed it. Halloween, The Exorcist, Videodrome, Threads — these films used suburban quiet, analogue distortion, and institutional spaces to generate dread. Their visual language has become fused with how we perceive the entire era. I can't look at a 1970s kitchen without half-expecting something terrible to happen in it.

There's also the matter of memory without metadata. Pre-internet life left fewer searchable records. Fewer photographs, no social media archives, no instant documentation. Memories from that period feel less indexed and more dreamlike as a result. Dreamlike states carry an uncanny quality almost by default — the sense that something is present but not quite accountable. Mark Fisher called this hauntology: the persistence of lost futures, visions imagined in the past that never materialised. Media from the period can feel like a signal from an abandoned timeline. That dislocation sits somewhere between nostalgia and dread, and I'm not convinced the two are as different as we'd like them to be.

I keep a folder of screenshots from 1970s Open University broadcasts. I'm not sure why. The lecturers stand in front of beige walls explaining thermodynamics in voices that sound like they're narrating the end of the world. Nothing about the content is threatening. Everything about the atmosphere is.

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