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.

In the first of the 'No Through Road' series we see footage claiming to be from a camera belonging to one of four boys found dead in their car at an abandoned farm near Stevenage, England. In the footage the four friends are driving around at night having fun but keep returning to the same junction no matter what direction they take. Eventually they find themselves stranded on a farm road next to a 'No Through Road' sign. A masked figure emerges and attacks the boys before the footage cuts, followed by a plea for any information relating to the incident.

The description for the YouTube video reads: 'On 17 December 2008, four seventeen-year-old boys are said to have been found dead in their car at an abandoned farm, 10 miles from their hometown. One month later, a video containing unedited footage from a camera belonging to one of the boys, also found in the car, stolen from the British secret service, is uploaded to YouTube.'