Why VHS still looks frightening
Analogue video has a texture a modern phone camera never produces by accident: soft edges, colour that spills past the lines, bands of tracking noise rolling up the frame. Found-footage films borrowed that look because it reads as evidence rather than as a photograph, as if someone simply pressed record and something happened.
This generator rebuilds those artefacts on a canvas in your browser. Grain is random per pixel, scanlines darken alternate rows, distortion shifts slices of the picture sideways the way a worn tape does, and colour separation pulls the red and blue channels apart. The timestamp uses a blocky on-screen-display style so it sits on the image like a real camcorder overlay.
Tips for a convincing tape
Night-time and indoor photos work best, because darkness hides the clean detail of a digital sensor. Keep distortion low for a believable result and push it high only when you want the frame to look as if the tape is failing.