Witch House didn’t ask permission to exist.
Sometime around 2009, a handful of bedroom producers—mostly in the US and Europe—started uploading tracks to MySpace and Bandcamp that sounded like chopped-and-screwed hip-hop had been dragged through a haunted house, then fed into corrupted video game files. The sound was slow, bass-heavy, drenched in reverb, with samples pulled from horror films and forgotten R&B vocals pitched down until they felt like transmissions from some other dimension. But here’s the thing: the music was only half of it. What made Witch House feel like an actual movement, even if it lasted maybe three years before collapsing into a dozen micro-genres, was the visual language that came with it—occult symbols, inverted crosses, distorted VHS static, and digital glitches that looked like your computer was dying in real time.
I used to think the aesthetic was just edgy window dressing. Turns out, it was doing something more deliberate than that. The glitch wasn’t decoration—it was the point.
When the Interface Becomes the Ritual Space and Nothing Feels Stable Anymore
Witch House artists didn’t just use occult imagery because it looked cool, though it definately did. They were pulling from a specific visual vocabulary: pentagrams, sigils, Satanic panic-era symbolism, early internet goth culture, and—critically—the aesthetics of digital failure. Datamoshing, pixel sorting, compression artifacts, corrupted JPEGs. The same tools that glitch artists like Rosa Menkman and Phillip Stearns were using to critique digital media, Witch House producers were using to build atmosphere. Acts like †‡† (Ritualz), oOoOO, and Salem layered their album covers and music videos with distorted, barely-readable text, often using Unicode symbols that broke standard fonts. Their track titles were intentionally unreadable. It wasn’t about clarity—it was about making you feel like you’d stumbled into something unstable, something that might not load correctly.
The glitch aesthetic wasn’t new, obviously. Artists had been breaking digital tools since the 90s. But Witch House took that vocabulary and fused it with something older: the visual language of the occult, which has always been about hidden knowledge, symbols that only the initiated can read, rituals performed in dim light. In a way, a datamoshed image and a sigil are doing the same thing—they’re both signs that something beneath the surface is being manipulated, that the normal rules don’t apply here.
I guess it makes sense that this happened when it did.
The Internet Was Still Weird Enough to Let Subcultures Form in the Cracks Without Algorithms Smoothing Them Out
By 2010, platforms like Tumblr and early YouTube were hosting entire visual ecosystems built around Witch House. Fan-made videos layered occult iconography over scenes from obscure horror films, VHS tracking errors, and looping glitch effects. The aesthetic became inseparable from the music. You couldn’t listen to a Salem track without picturing grainy, washed-out footage of empty suburbs at night, or inverted crosses flickering over static. The visuals weren’t illustrating the music—they were completing it, creating a total sensory experience that felt like you were accessing something you weren’t supposed to. Something corrupted. Maybe something cursed, if you wanted to get dramatic about it, which honestly a lot of people did.
What’s interesting is how quickly it all fell apart. By 2012, Witch House was already being declared dead, mostly by the same blogs that had hyped it two years earlier. Some artists moved into vaporwave, others into industrial techno or dark ambient. The aesthetic splintered into a hundred different directions—occultwave, ghost drone, haunted trap. But the core idea—that digital glitches and occult symbols could work together to create a sense of instability, of being between worlds—that stuck around. You see it now in everything from hyperpop visuals to the way horror games use UI corruption to build dread.
It wasn’t a long-lived genre, but it left a mark. And maybe that’s the most Witch House thing about it—it appeared, distorted everything around it for a minute, then vanished like a broken file you can’t quite recieve back.
