In this landmark found-footage horror web series, four teenage boys descend into hell... somewhere outside Stevenage

The 2009 horror short film No Through Road claims to be made up of unedited footage recovered from the digital camcorder of four friends found dead in a car near an abandoned farm 10 miles outside of Stevenage. We are told that the video was released with the ‘consent of their families’ in the hope of finding answers to the terrifying circumstances of their deaths.

Those circumstances include a time loop, a masked figure and a dark night that never ends. The horror of No Through Road is undeniable: it’s creeping, it’s intimate, it’s convincingly real. The four boys joke coarsely and laugh loudly as young friends do, and as the circumstances change, they conceal and reveal their terror with striking authenticity, heightening the uncanny reality of what we’re witnessing.

Millions were taken in by No Through Road’s online update of the ‘found footage’ horror of The Blair Witch Project or Rec, and the short film garnered a cult following on YouTube, where one commenter claimed that it ‘fooled half of America’. While that might be a stretch, the film and its sequel web series became a foundation stone of the ‘Analogue Horror’ movement - an internet subculture dedicated to found footage and the aesthetics of late 20th-century VHS and television.