It follows a POV shot, travelling down a hallway towards what appears to be a naked woman. As the camera travels towards the end of the corridor to reach her, the walls seem to flicker and fluctuate - the audience, along with the camera operator, are repeatedly shot back to the beginning, endlessly reaching for the only human in frame that is agonisingly unobtainable.
The dizzying frustration met with dread culminates in something that is akin to horror. You could see this replicated in a traditional horror movie with ease, in a dream sequence or when a character is hallucinating. Without a doubt, a looping, ungovernable environment has featured across genres and mediums with the intent of unnerving an audience who doesn't want to be made aware of their own mundane loops - wake up, breakfast, travel to work, shuffle papers around for 8 hours, travel home, eat, clean up, watch TV, go to bed. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
Expressing the wordless, the unconscious mind, is what film is for. Surreality works best when it can be visualised, its distinctiveness ironically making it more universal through the affirmation that the audience watching is not crazy for inferring that life makes no sense, which is why it has to make sense. This balance of supression is integral so that our minds don't implode under the weight of a very strange world. It is deferred to art to prevent the unspoken violence and perversion of our hearts from hurting those around us. Artists are merely the conduits for this process, though anyone is welcome to throw their hats into the 'everything-is-not-okay-and-we-should-be-periodically-screaming-out-loud-more' ring.
I've written previously about the democratising of art and production, and have seen how the worst of us have come to intepret this, plugging other people's work into AI generators and then bragging about how they have 'made' something. If researching and writing this piece has done anything for me, it's affirm that the internet has been an avenue for genuinely transgressive art, made by people who simply wanted to make it and have other people see it, and that it's something that we are still capable of doing if we realise that the process of creation is what's special, not the end result.
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| Crooked Rot |
Internet horror has continuously evolved as the average user's sense of fear has morphed with the exposure to graphic real-world horrors. Most multimedia horror - whether short stories, ARGs or strange blurred images - exists to be memefied, with a parallel sense of irony and naïveté, and an awareness that the sincerity of these works only really enhances them. As with the horror genre in general, an unwillingness to buy into the premise and atmosphere only really reflects badly on you, not the work itself.
Take creepypasta, an often maligned form of internet horror. It's derived from the word 'copypasta' a generic term for any short piece of writing, image or video clip that is widely copied and pasted across different sites, and is an attempt to solidify a kind of lore around specific scary stories through the repeated sharing to different people. Many of these stories revolve around encountering a corrupted video game or computer with hidden horrors inside of it; others centre on lost episodes of beloved TV shows where the characters are strange, uncanny and uncharacterisitically violent. They evoke an inevitable fear of disintegrating childhoods, where what was once innocent has been ruined by knowledge of a cruel world buzzing around you, where you used to be hidden from its malice and how you can't ever return to that feeling of ignorance again.
At the same time, many of these stories, images and videos don't resemble the quality of seasoned storytellers, often resorting to predictable plot escalations and shock horror existing to stick with you for that moment before moving on, though not before sharing it with a friend before closing the window. Horror like this, with its fingerprints evident in the clay and its grammatical errors peppered throughout, does not necessarily exist to be canonised, rather it works within a larger system of horror that could be around the corner and more importantly, that you could contribute to.
There has always been a certain lexicon of the internet which has no doubt contributed to the formal techniques of this kind of horror. For example, much has been written about how strange and practically avant-garde internet humour of the 2000s was, often defaulting to randomness and nihilism, blended together, where its illegibility to those who didn't understand it, was the point. You either got on board and embraced it or were shut out for not being 'with the times'. There was a sense that this generation of young people creating a landscape in the digital world were not trying to imbue this world with meaning, but point gleefully at its absence. As Elizabeth Bruenig put it in The Washington Post, it was 'a digital update to the surreal and absurd genres of art and literature that characterized the tumultuous early 20th century.'
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| doll |
PiroPito, also known as nana825763, has been making and uploading videos to YouTube for 18 years, with oldest video on his channel, doll, pre-empting his future work whilst also remaining in line with what this version of the internet was hungry for - short, deep-fried creepy videos that exposed the unsteady hand of amateur filmmaking. To a website dedicated to the casual watching and sharing of what would be the new media dominating culture in the decades to come, the fact that he was not formally educated in art can only have accencuated the disparate but ever-viral upload schedule of one mysterious man.
This is not to say PiroPito is in the habit of unconscious creation, citing avant-garde and surreal influences such as Max Ernst, The Quay Brothers and Shūji Terayama, with the latter being a key figure in the Japanese New Wave movement of the 60s and 70s, which was borne out of the massive cultural change instigated in response to post-WWII nationalism and a frustration with the Japanese studio system not representing the current moment. Like Ernst's multimedia approach to the representation of personal memory and collective myth, or Terayama's rejection of traditional narrative in favour of invading the frame, sometimes by literally hammering into it (as seen in Smallpox Tale), PiroPito has repeatedly exploited the confines of shareable internet videos to create dynamic works of art that speak to a simultaneous fear and embrace of the grotesque and inhuman, that which lurks in the corners of the screen we simply do not want to veer our eyes towards.
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| wakagoke seppun sou |
wakagoke seppun sou is a video that incorporates fusuma sliding doors as a way of slowly revealing the more disturbing elements of domestic life. Deriving its title from André Breton's novel, The Immaculate Conception, and inspired by the conceptual artist, Tabaimo's Japanese Kitchen, it's a video that immediatele places itself within a traditional artistic context, wearing its influences on its sleave and remaining deliberately obtuse to simple intepretation. At the same time, its short and frenetic structure as well as the penchant for quickly dissolving into disturbing imagery, places the video firmly within the formal criteria of internet horror.
This film specifically evokes the objectification of women, with the chanting sounds in the background eventually devolving into moans, and even crying, paired with the literal segmentation of women's bodies for the audience's pleasure. As the video becomes more distorted towards the end, we're drawn into the looping, monotonous sounds, sexuality being so devoid of humanity, it has trapped us in a cycle we can't escape from.
PiroPito's work will often incorporate deliberate digital artifacting, a term used to describe the unintended corruption of files during their digitising, manifesting in glitches and distortion. Vidoes like Mr East Loves Mom and Username 666 make conscious use of glitches, and thereby play upon our fear of footage being so degraded that it becomes incomprehensible, that this technological space, with its promise of eliminating the flaws human hands create with their inability to stay steady when we need them to, is also fallible to decay, that we can't actually be protected by the promise of perfection and forever. Furthermore, this deliberate tampering with the digital image seeks to reposition said image as no longer a singular representation of true reality but rather an individualistic distillation of a reality that has become fractured and is collapsing under the weight of trying to signify the present moment without its grisly flaws and intimate details.
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| My house walk-through |
One of his most ambitious videos is one that went viral in the late 2010s. My house walk-through popped up in many reaction videos, with those who watched responding with awe and bafflement, trying to work out if it was animated, if it was real and how on earth one person could have made it. The film consists of a very simple premise: an unnamed, silent camera operator is guiding the viewer through their house. We're told early on that there has been a typhoon in Japan and that this person is in their grandparents' house.
And yet, there is very clearly something off. The camera swings around unnaturally, a stark torchlight only really lighting what's directly in our eyeline, leaving the dark spaces around it eerily emphasised. As this person makes their way through the house, we quickly learn that they are stuck in a loop, repeatedly sliding back the door, applying the same subtitles to the bottom of the screen, going over the same memory again and again.
As is asserted in the description, this is not a horror movie. PiroPito is using a real house to create atmosphere. It doesn't resemble a traditional horror video on the internet, as it requires a significant amount of patience to enjoy it. The reveal at the end in fact only really speaks to the real life death that occured in the house, that of the filmmaker's grandfather whose body wasn't found until three weeks after his death. The house, becoming less distinct and more like an infectious mass of wet, red paper, resembling a tomb, traps its owner and viewer alike in a cycle of revisiting the same paths of pain and grief forever.
Internet horror as body-less, where the characters are faceless and the authors become lost through their guerilla distribution on forums and email threads, creates a feeling of dread distinct to the kind of technology that seems to have no end, with no creators to be held accountable for their irreversible actions on the modern world. There is a residual feeling that the alienation a digital space often creates is not singular to its creator. There will always be an audience of ravenous, lonely onlookers seeking to feel seen by that which can't be easily explained away, whose very fears come from the fact that the unknown is all around us and we almost never get to touch it. On occasion, however, the horror does get to touch us. In one way or another.