Ale Wats Up

Skepta wants to watch – when rap and porn collide

There are many elements of a rap video. Expensive cars, someone standing beside an expensive car and a multi-step handshake all have proven themselves to be quintessential parts of a music video. However, the oxygen that forms the foundation of life for these music videos is scantily clad women. Women in rap videos, aka Video Vixens if you’re a boomer, are the key element in getting views. By displaying so much ass that your video could double as an endorsement for BBL surgery your rap video will gain immediate attention. Back in the heyday of music channels, raunchy music videos were especially in vogue as they were a great way to capture the key TV demographic, horny men.

Some videos were so explicit that they even had to be censored. This spawned the phenomenon of uncut music videos. These rawer videos led to TV channels creating time slots devoted to them. The most infamous is BET Uncut, which gained its viewership from people who prefer listening to music with their trousers down. The magnum condom Opus of these uncut videos was Nelly’s “Tip Drill Remix” (2003). It’s a seven-minute-long montage of asses interspersed with Nelly and the St Lunatics pointing at said asses which infamously ends with Nelly swiping a credit card through a woman’s cheeks. As a result, “Tip Drill Remix” remains one of the most infamous rap videos of all time and shows the power of pushing sexual boundaries in music videos.

However, there are always artists who look further than the rest. Standing on the shoulders of giants like Murphy Lee they have reached the natural conclusion. If the audience is watching these music videos to beat off, why not combine them with what people beat off to the most? Hardcore pornography. Some artists have flirted with the art form, Kanye West reportedly filmed unreleased porn videos during the creation of The Life of Pablo (2016). Snoop Dogg famously had a brief spell as a pornography director in the early 2000s (more on that later). Even 2Pac had an X-rated version of the music video for “How Do U Want It”. The video featured several pornstars famous during the 1990s and was directed by a former porn director. Of course, one of the limiting factors of a music video like “How Do U Want It” was television censors, which even on uncut channels still had limits. The technology that killed music TV channels, the internet, truly allows an uncensored way to make music videos. One way this has been shown is with 6ix9ine. During his pre-fame HIV GANG era, the world’s most famous snitch included flashes of hentai in his music videos. However, while hentai is reserved for near nonces such as Drake and actual nonces like 6ix9ine, it doesn’t involve the rapper themselves.

But even among these absolute perverts, two rappers have reached the near endpoint of rap music videos. These musicians have answered the eternal question. What if I rap beside people fucking? As a result, I am proud to announce that I am the first person to categorise this genre of music video. Rapping beside people having sex or for brevity’s sake cuck rap. The genre currently has only seen two artists brave enough to attempt it.

Skepta – All Over the House

Skepta’s “All Over the House” (2011) is an introspective track that sees the Grime legend reminisce about when ‘we had sex all over the house’. Places include the kitchen, shower, couch and bed. He illustrates having ‘sex all over the house’ in the music video by standing around and sitting in a corner while two pornstars engage in interracial sex. As a result, Skepta comes off as the threesome equivalent of the little brother who got told there isn’t another controller to play Halo. At multiple points, he literally sits in a corner like he’s the victim in an anti-pulling PSA. The video cuts between him sitting in this corner, to the couple having sex in various places. The most infamous shots, however, involve Skepta standing in the bedroom doorway whilst the two pornstars perform standing doggystyle behind him. He looks over his shoulder at the couple his face nonchalant as if to say ‘oh yeah people having sex in my bedroom, oh guess that’s weird for you not for me though’. It’s the type of shot that you can’t believe got conceptualised, filmed and edited without someone convincing Skepta to delete it or to at least look less smug.

Member of Skepta’s rap collective BBK (Boy Better Know/Boy Been Kucked) Shorty is featured on the track. Shorty raps while sitting on the edge of a bed in a dark room presumably away from the sex. He ends up looking like he’s waiting for his housemate and her boyfriend to quiet down before venturing to the kitchen for a late-night snack. Despite this Shorty’s verse is also about having ‘sex all over the house’, with him saying that he and his missus ‘bodies’ were ‘exchanging flavours’, which Skepta presumably got a big whiff of. Aside from making it seem like he and his partner are part of a marinade, Shorty manages to drop one of the least erotic sexual metaphors in history. Shorty describes sex as ‘In and out like CD changes’ meaning that his dick is sharp, thin and brittle while his girl has a cold mechanical vagina that you shouldn’t stick your finger into.

The production of the video is far closer to that of a low-budget UK porno than a rap video, mainly because it is a low-budget UK porno. Which as a nation produces the lowest budget porn videos, not counting those Turkish man fucks wife videos shot on 8mm. Even the house that Skepta uses isn’t particularly impressive, being a far cry from the mansions of typical rap videos. The kitchen uses plastic bar stools, a disgusting furniture choice made exclusively in first-year university accommodations and Sims homes. So aside from looking like a cuckold Skepta also looks middle class, a far greater shame. Comments on the video often refer to the physical similarities between Skepta and the pornstar, due to them both being shorthaired black men. Which I will repeat I did not say, the comments did. People are saying this. Not me. This creates another interpretation of the music video. Instead of Skepta simply watching a couple go at it in his own home, the video is a piece of science fiction in which Skepta is viewing his previous self having sex. Judging by his reaction Skepta is not impressed by his own performance.

“All Over The House” like many other works of surreal horror leaves the viewer with one question, why? Skepta is famously embarrassed by the video and would stop talking about it after an interview with Annie Mac on Radio 1 soon after its release. Skepta revealed several important pieces of information. Firstly, he admits that he was responsible for the idea for the video. This makes sense when you consider Skepta’s other decisions include wearing a head-to-toe Michelin man-style coat and making the song “All Over The House”. He also states that he wanted a video for the song so the listener can ‘understand what kinda I was thinking when I was writing it’. Certain musicians seemingly have the same imagination as Brazzers screenwriters. Skepta was also clearly annoyed by the reception the video received, arguing that as he didn’t upload the video to Youtube and because he put an age warning at the start of the video, the criticism was unwarranted. A defense that hopefully also extends to WordPress articles. Skepta is also proud that he ‘made sure there was protection in the video’ and the reaction made him ‘realise there are a lot of hypocrites and sheep in this world’. An obvious misrepresentation of the criticism the video received as the issue wasn’t from a moral panic around children potentially seeing it, but more about Skepta standing around a porno set. Though to be fair, the usage of protection did get some flack. The most important info from the interview, however, was that Skepta had originally wanted to have sex in the video himself but had been talked out of it by his girlfriend. As a result, Skepta had intended to be the cucker but ended up looking like a cuckold. True classical tragedy.

While the video might seem like the biggest issue with “All Over The House”, the song itself represented the far larger problem for Skepta at the time. Releasing from his 2011 album Doin’ It Again which was widely panned as a poor attempt to make his sound more mainstream, with a particularly cutting review from NME referring to it as ‘the sound of Grime destroying itself’. Following the release of five singles that had performed disappointingly “All Over the House” was seemingly an attempt to gain attention through controversy. In this regard, it did make some noise eventually gaining one million views on a now unavailable upload on WorldStar. Of course, this is the same type of attention you’d get from loudly shitting yourself on a train. Plenty of stares sure, but no one sitting beside you. As a result, the music video was the cherry on top of a bad album that made Skepta not only look like he was ditching his old sound but doing so in the most embarrassing way possible. This continued with him being forced to scrap his intended follow-up album The Honeymoon after its two singles were poorly received for continuing with the commercialised sound. Skepta instead released Blacklisted (2012) a mixtape that saw him trying to rebuild his image as a Grime artist with him commenting on the reaction to “All Over the House” on the track “Ace Hood Flow“. ‘They thought the All Over the House video would crush me/Last week I did five shows in five different countries’. Hopefully, these show bookers gave the BBK members separate hotel rooms.

Skepta would completely reject his mainstream image with the 2014 release of his classic track “That’s Not Me“. A throwback to Skepta’s old school Grime roots he rebukes the sound and image he tried to cultivate around the release of Doin It Again stating ‘Yeah, I used to wear Gucci/I put it all in the bin ‘cause that’s not me’. The video reflects this by deliberately looking low budget, which it was costing only £86 to create. Skepta stands beside a DJ (who is not naked) and raps into his headphones, a nod to pirate radio production instrumental in Grime’s origins. Skepta and the DJ are superimposed over a VHS recording of Skepta rapping. Despite this, the video still looks higher budget than “All Over the House” and would even be awarded Best Video at the 2014 MOBO Awards. Showing that staying authentic to your roots works out better than making a porno.

“All Over the House” plays a highly important role in displaying the state of Skepta’s career in the early 2010s. A misguided and embarrassing attempt at gaining wider fame that only turned away his core fan base. Ultimately, the video also shows that if you embarrass yourself by starring in a porno, if you work hard enough you can eventually get a song with ASAP Rocky.

Ski Mask the Slump God – Psycho Freestyle

Ski Mask the Slump God is a Floridan rapper best known for his hit “Catch Me Outside” (2017) as well as collaborations with the late XXXTentacion. While being one of the biggest artists from the SoundCloud rap boom is a respectable achievement, his true legacy will be pioneering the freestyle beside people having sex genre. You may think it’s bending the rules to include a freestyle, but Ski Mask is actually rapping the song, “Psycho” (2016). As it never got an official music video, this makes it essentially the video for the song. The first upload has been taken down but from my deep research I’ve discovered the video was originally titled “Ski Mask The Slumpgod Rips Freestyle While Homie Rips Slut” (2016). A debatable title on both ends.

The video is seemingly set in a mansion from a PS1 horror game, it’s pitch black, there are large support pillars and the wall paint is cracked. There is also an L-shaped settee in the middle of this dark void seemingly for no reason. The video begins with Ski Mask rapping from his song “Psycho” whilst in the background on the settee a woman is loudly having sex. She is sitting up facing the camera with her back towards the man having sex with her. From my much-needed research into the topic, this is called reverse cowgirl, a position particularly popular with pornstars and women who would rather stare at the wall than into their partner’s dull eyes. Ski Mask’s performance is energetic doing his trademark cartoonish rapping and dancing. Cartoonish is a literal description as Ski Mask raps like a cut Cow and Chicken character, with him even devolving into chicken noises near the end of his freestyle. Which when combined with the sounds of sex is especially annoying and not even unique as 95% of amateur porn videos have Family Guy playing in the background. At around 20 seconds into the video, a figure emerges out of the darkness from behind one of the support pillars. What originally seems to be some form of vengeful apparition ready to punish you for beating off to a SoundCloud rapper turns out to be just some guy. He proceeds to dance beside Ski Mask for the remainder of the time. The video continues this way with Ski Mask occasionally blocking the camera’s view of the sex, presumably in a subconscious effort to not be in a video beside two pornstars fucking. It all ends rather awkwardly with the couple running out of steam at just under 2 minutes while Ski Mask just stops rapping in response.

The backstory of the video is deep for a 2-minute-long video uploaded to Pornhub. The male pornstar was Ski Mask’s manager Bruno Dickemz, a weirdly important figure in the 2010’s SoundCloud and Florida rap scene. He managed the Members Only collective which alongside Ski Mask also included XXXTentacion and this was not the only group managed by Dickemz. He first managed Raider Klan, a highly influential rap collective from the start of the 2010s, with the group being most famous for spawning Denzel Curry and the female Azalea Banks, SpaceGhostPurp. Dickemz pulled these rappers into his orbit thanks to him having women, (allegedly) drugs and a mansion for the rappers to use. Yes, the mansion which had attracted so many rappers to him is the Jigsaw torture chamber where the video is set. It’s surprising MTV Cribs never did an episode on Hill House if this is how they’re willing to live. Giving rappers a house and thinking up horrible video ideas is seemingly all the management he did, as rappers were quick to stop associating with him the minute their careers started to succeed. Making Dickemz the rap equivalent of the cheese-scented child you have sleepovers with because their single father, who is slowly dying from a combination of painkiller addiction and depression over his inability to reconnect with his ex-wife, a recovering painkiller addict, keeps his Hustler’s magazine collection in the living room on a dusty glass table beside his copy of Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power and an overfilled ashtray. RCA Records signs you and you stop hanging out together.

Bruno Dickemz is also responsible for the inverse of using sex to sell rap with his porn series Groupie Lust, easily the worst combination of genres since pop punk. The series used rappers in their thumbnails, titles and even in the intro of the videos themselves in an attempt to gain views. However, the rappers would disappear long before the actual scenes began. Ski Mask appears in one of these videos. It opens with the “Psycho” freestyle and he is featured in the intro where he makes some awkward small talk with a male pornstar 10 years his senior. This uninteresting appearance does cause one of the more depressing realisations to emerge from this saga. A likely possibility is that Ski Mask didn’t make the video for him to gain fame, but instead for his smooth-brained pornstar manager to gain it. The series is defunct and it’s easy to see why with it being the type of business idea Jerry Lundegaard would envision. Literally, nobody watches porn video intros and people definitely do not watch them because a low to mid-tier rapper will be in them. So, the only idea worse than putting pornstars in your music video is mixing rappers with your porn.

Clearly, the video was created simply to gain attention. It being uploaded in 2016 is important because this was the start of a brief period where upcoming rappers acted ridiculously for attention. These rappers were obsessed with clout, a term that entered the public lexicon around this era and was even partly popularised by Ski Mask’s friend XXXTentacion. Clout is essentially the amount of online reaction a rapper can get. A mentality of wanting to get clout led to the rise of rappers in the late 2010s gaining popularity by posting shocking videos. One example of this can be seen with 6ix9ine. Often being seen as the poster boy of this era of rap, 6ix9ine would originally gain his clout from posting “skits” such as pedigreeing a naked woman. His skill at these videos is so strong that with the death of his rap career he is currently pivoting to starring in clickbaity Youtube videos with the likes of the NELK Boys. A fate significantly worse than the currently incarcerated gang members he ratted on. However, the figure that best displays gaining clout this way is Boonk Gang. Popular on Vine due to sketches of him stealing various things such as silicon breasts before running away. Boonk Gang would find himself constantly reposted on huge rap-centred social media pages, like WorldStar or Akademiks, despite his actual music never gaining any real audience. As a result, filming yourself beside two pornstars definitely seems like the type of clip that would get some attention. However, the question remains did it in fact get Ski Mask any clout?

In terms of if the video gave Ski Mask any significant attention the answer is no. The video was and is not widely referenced when talking about Ski Mask, unlike other viral videos from different rappers of the era. Comments on the uploads of the actual song see little reference to the explicit video. This is also from around the time of the upload as no one is commenting on a Ski Mask video now. The obvious reason for this lack of attention is that the video could not be reposted on Instagram pages like Akademiks. Videos like this are also hard to get trending on sites like Twitter because users are not willing to repost them on their own accounts as they don’t want to look like sick perverts. However to be fair to the concept of freestyling beside pornstars, Ski Mask while enjoying a sizeable fanbase never had the same level of fame as other contemporaries. So perhaps if someone like Lil Yatchy had performed beside his manager having sex he might be better remembered for it.

Today whilst Ski Mask has without a doubt fallen off, like so many other rappers of his brief era, he can still be proud of making freestyle history.

Analysis

From examining both works a clear and unsurprising conclusion is found. It’s a bad idea to film yourself rapping beside pornstars fucking. If like Skepta you have any amount of respectability the video will dent your image. For an up-and-coming rapper, you’re not going to get any form of attention. A video that cannot be reposted anywhere or found without having your safe search off is unlikely to gain any real popularity. Perhaps the greatest issue with cuck rap is on a fundamental level. Rap out of all other genres places the greatest importance on an artist being perceived as cool. Rapping beside women dancing is cool and gives off the image of the rapper being desirable. On the other hand, rapping beside people having sex makes the rapper look like a fan at a porn convention.

Despite the clear stupidity of creating these videos, they honestly do reflect a certain aspect of rap culture. The genre has popularised terms such as ‘running a train’ and countless songs refer to ideas of sharing a woman between a group as to quote Snoop ‘It ain’t no fun if the homies can’t have none’. These lines are used to display their super-Lothario status, distrust of women and loyalty to their strictly male friends, which are all tenants of the generic rap persona and Catholicism. These bars are so common that they’re normally used as throw-away lines that pass through the mind of the average listener. It’s when these lyrics are depicted visually that one realises the weirdness and frankly homoerotic nature of these situations. So perhaps these videos deserve credit for actually showing the true reality of you and your friend hanging out while they have sex. It’s weird.

This article up until now has deliberately not mentioned the true origin of rapping beside people fucking, Snoop Dogg’s Doggystyle (2001). Doggystyle (1993) is one of the greatest rap albums of all time with tracks like “Gin and Juice” being among the most recognisable in the genre’s history. Snoop Dogg’s Doggystyle on the other hand, is a mixture of both pornography and music video directed by the rapper which features his own songs and was released as a porno DVD in 2001. The video sees Snoop and a large entourage rapping while pornstars engage in lesbian sex in front of them on the concrete surrounding a pool. One can only hope the actors were paid well as scissoring on concrete leads to a lot of sore hands. In the only moment of Snoop’s career after 1993 that sees him being ahead of his time, a male pornstar performs analingus on one of his female costars as Snoop and his friends dance around the couple.

Why this video hasn’t been included with the list is firstly down to the entourage. Having a large group of people beside you as you rap near pornstars just doesn’t leave the same level of embarrassment felt by just there standing alone. Obviously, for the music video genre this article has named to work, one must look like a cuck. Secondly, there is no intrigue in why the video was created as it involves Snoop Dogg and therefore its origins are clearly for money. Snoop Dogg’s willingness to degrade himself for a paycheck extends far beyond the limits of any pornstar. From cooking with Martha Stewart to recording theme songs for food delivery services to making Death Row’s catalogue only available as NFTs, Snoop’s existence is a Randian quest for the continual acquiring of funds. Snoop was not damaged by the DVD as a porno tape is significantly harder to get than just watching a video online. This inherent obscurity meant that it largely exists as a simple tidbit of his career. The other reason why there was no impact is the image Snoop cultivated for himself. The early 2000s was a transitional period of his career, with Snoop slowly shifting from a gangster image to that of a cartoonish pimp. As a result, directing a porno if anything adds to his persona, even if it only had a negligible impact. So to get away with pornstars fucking beside you, for starters you need a group of at least eight people also not having sex and it helps if you already have no dignity.

The future?

Cuck music videos are the near-end point of the genre. But the true ending, of course, would be a rapper actually having sex in their music video. Numerous rappers have had simulated sex in their music videos, for example, Kodak Black has depicted himself getting head nearly as often as he’s appeared in court. Which is a lot. A rapper being the cucker is somewhat shown in the video for “Broke Boi” by Playboi Carti. He is filmed by his friend through a car window as a woman simulates performing oral sex on him. Not quite a cucking in the Dictionary sense but pretty close to looking like it, which as this article argues is much more important. Of course, this is all the type of sex you could see in a PG-13 movie, a rapper engaging in hardcore sex mid-music video has yet to occur.

But will the day come? The potential has both increased and decreased in two different ways. Firstly, rappers do not commonly perform acts of ‘clout chasing’ through shocking videos as they have declined heavily since the days of Ski Mask’s freestyle. Artists now mostly blow up from snippets on TikTok or from disrespecting deceased rivals on TikTok. Therefore, a rapper deciding to make a video like this for attention is significantly less likely. However, it’s also now increasingly popular for rappers to have OnlyFans. Of course, most rappers with OnlyFans are on a downswing. But the Norma Desmond-style energy that a desperate bid for attention like this would require wouldn’t be dissimilar to the energy that Skepta had when he filmed “All Over The House”.

It’s also not like raunchy rap videos have stopped being successful as seen with Cardi B’s “WAP“. Essentially a Hype Williams video if he developed an obsession with tigers and butt cheeks, the video was a massive success sitting currently at around half a billion views on YouTube. The video and lyrics were able to exploit the inescapable cultural war which has engulfed the world since Donald Trump released his LP Presidential Run (2015). As the culture war around rap and sexuality in rap hasn’t slowed down at all, a rapper going the extra step in their music video could exploit the same conversations to make it successful.

Just like how cuck videos show a greater part of rap culture, a rapper engaging in a hardcore porn music video would too. Aside from almost every rapper boasting about fucking at some point, they could be seen as similar to a cancer previously common to rap albums, the sex skit. These ‘comedy’ interludes involved the rapper, as the name implies, pretending to have sex and were most prominent in the 1990s to 2000s. Their similarity to the hypothetical endpoint of rap videos are the urban legends attached to them on old rap forums which said these skits are the rapper really having sex. People responsible for the creation of these skits have confirmed these theories in some cases. One example can be found in The Notorious B.I.G.’s Ready To Die (1994). According to Diddy, whose involvement in the album included production and performing ASMR on the tracks, the sex skit at the end of “Respect” was in fact a recording of his cash cow getting head. A difference one could argue is that the skit is intended to be humorous whilst a porn music video would just be sad. But nobody in history ever thought these skits were funny, the only criticism of Ready To Die receives is about how infuriating the skits are. Clearly, these skits were made to show that the rapper managed to have sex, an act similar to the boy who sprays his mother’s perfume on his collar to prove he really did kiss fifty girls just before school.

Overall, this article has taken up far more of my time than I intended it to and has forced me to set my page to mature, presumably pushing this page deeper into the pit of the algorithm. I’ve never really understood what that word means. It’s one of those terms, like matrix, that was intended to be used by mathematicians and programmers but has now been co-opted by the dumbest people on Earth. Terms and conditions prevent me from linking to the videos or showing screenshots or even recreating the images in MS Paint, so you’ll have to look up the videos themselves. I’ve also been forced to watch the same pornographic videos numerous times to accurately write the descriptions. As I’m no longer thirteen years old, this has been a self-induced version of the Ludovico technique.

On a deeper level, this article has caused me permanent spiritual pain. I’ll forever be associated with these videos. Of course, not by other people as this site gets as much traffic as desert oases only found by survivors of airplane crashes do. But I’ll forever know I spent hours looking up searches like ‘Skepta porn’ and ‘Biggie really getting blowjob?’. When I die, just as my eyes shut and the last specks of air leave my lungs with a labored breath, a voice will whisper ‘you read XHamster comments’ and my face will turn and express a silent scream as I’ll know no heaven awaits me.

Basically, the article was intended to poke fun at an incredibly stupid decision that some very talented people have made. And yet I, an untalented person have made the same mistake. So at least I’m just like Skepta.

Which Slasher movie villain has the highest (cool) body count? – An overly long analysis of the sex lives of the silent and deadly

Slasher movie villains are often ranked by their body count. You can find numerous AI-generated articles that rank Slasher villains by their number of kills. Popular Youtube channels such as Dead Meat are devoted to counting up how many kills are in horror movies. Basically, an audience exists for these types of listicles which may include you, nerd.

However, this meaning of body count is the same type that school shooters and other full-time virgins acquire. The real body count that matters is how many people they’ve smashed. Sex has often been seen as playing an integral part in Slasher movies. They’re famous for involving topless women (who die) people having sex (who die) and virginal women (who don’t die). This trope of the virgin girl in Slasher movies has been much discussed but they’re not the only virgins involved in Slasher movies, not counting the audience. The iconic killers of the genre are also commonly virgins and this article’s ground-breaking research will show their precise body counts.

Michael Myers – Halloween

Despite arguably being the father of Slasher villains, Michael Myers himself is a virgin. Being trapped in an asylum since you were six years old does limit dating options, as does your therapist telling anyone who interacts with you that you’re evil incarnate. A cockblock that would make even the kindest soul want to murder an entire town. The creator of the Halloween franchise, John Carpenter would illuminate upon Michael Myers’ sex life after some hard-hitting answers from R.A. The Rugged Man, occasional interviewer, full-time white rapper.

R.A. – Is Michael Myers a virgin?

Carpenter – Is he a virgin?

R.A. – I mean, all he does is kill. Did he ever get laid?

Carpenter – I don’t think he was able to. He was fucked up, I think he got confused between fucking and killing.

R.A. – What if he’s really just a repressed homosexual on a rampage?

Carpenter – I never thought about that. I just think he’s crazy. But what do I know, maybe he is.

While Carpenter has seemingly never thought if his killer was a virgin (or gay), to the series’ creator Myers shouldn’t be able to even consider having sex, or at least how normal people understand sex. An idea regarding the usage of knives in horror movies that has been discussed by critics like Carol J. Clover is that the knife is essentially a penis. As many murders in horror movies involve the killing of nude or almost nude women the murders can be viewed as the following. The knife represents a subconscious sexual desire for the woman victim that the Slasher is unable to express through his actual penis. This idea fits in with Carpenter saying that Michael ‘gets confused between fucking and killing’. The first scene in the franchise represents this best out of the franchise. Michael as a 6-year-old views his sister making out with her boyfriend and stabs her to death as she is naked. Which does make you see Carpenter’s idea that he was getting sex and murder confused. It also makes you see that Michael maybe has a little bit of incest in him.

Of course, a franchise that is based around a man chasing a woman does bring up the question, is he trying to smash? As the first murder shows, Laurie being his sister in the original continuity might not be a deterrent to Michael. Maybe Michael does deep down inside want to get some of his sister’s cheeks. However, while this incestuous interest is all subtextual in most films in the franchise, at the midpoint of the series it was intended for Michael to commit Brazzers.com level incest. Michael was meant to have fathered a child with his kidnapped niece. This plot point was in an early version of the script for the sixth film in the franchise Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers. Which as the incest baby plot implies manages to be the worst movie in a franchise filled with horrible films. It’s also the only one starring Paul Rudd. In the released film, his niece inexplicitly has a child though the father is never actually mentioned. As this plot point was not properly included in the actual film and because niece touching doesn’t count, Michael is still a virgin.

Michael is essentially the textbook Slasher villain, a blank silent slate that only exists to murder teenagers. As a result, his love life is the same as a typical horror movie villain, non-existent.

Ranking

Horniness – 3/10

Body Count – 0

Leatherface – The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

Leatherface stands out as one of Slasher cinema’s few horny villains. A character trait you might’ve been able to guess from him having the same build and outfit choices as a Redditor. Of course, as Slasher movie franchises are constructed with the same care as his masks, Leatherface’s horniness has changed from film to film. In the first film and most others in the franchise, Leatherface is essentially asexual. His interests only are food and his family, like a typical Texan. He and his family even laugh off the final girl Sally’s pleas that she’ll do anything to live in the original film, unlike a typical Texan. However, this is very different in the sequel, where Leatherface develops a crush on the film’s protagonist Stretch. He goes so far as to switch up his trademark chainsaw dancing by putting his chainsaw over his groin and humping with it like he’s daggering. He even saves her life from the rest of his family by pretending he has murdered her. Despite this Leatherface ultimately sides with his family over Stretch when his brother explains that no one in his family even knows what sex is. As a result, thanks to sticking to a Money Over Bitches mentality Leatherface remains a virgin.

The reason for Leatherface’s horniness is because the Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 switches from the raw, gritty tone of the original to the vibe of a Saturday morning cartoon. As a result, Leatherface is transformed into having the personality of a pubescent boy in a six foot seven three hundred pound body. Which to be fair is the average weight of a Texan teenager. His horniness continues into the third instalment of the franchise, though much more disgustingly. In the film, Leatherface has his own (implied) child thanks to what is (implied) to be either incest or you know something even less chill than incest. The child member of the family is never explicitly said to be Leatherface’s kid and considering the circumstances in which the child would be conceived, this cannot be counted as a W for him. After the third movie, no other films in the franchise have bought up Leatherface’s sexuality. This is despite the second movie being made by the film’s original creators and therefore essentially being the word of God. As every reboot and remake of the franchise strives for the tone of the original, Leatherface returns to his normal murderous self. However, all these films absolutely suck so maybe one day a director will be desperate enough to let Leatherface return to humping his chainsaw.

Overall, Leatherface shows that ambition may not lead to results. While he is a rare horny Slasher villain Leatherface remains a virgin like his counterparts.

Ranking

Horniness – 0 or 100

Body Count – 0

Jason Voorhees – Friday the 13th

Even though Jason has a staggering twelve (not thirteen) movies, he has barely shown any form of sexuality. This is of course thanks to Jason being an undead child, who then actually wasn’t undead but was an alive man who still had the brain of a child, before being killed, only to be accidentally resurrected as a zombie. As a result, women are not high on his list of interests. The only things Jason is known to like are murder, his mother and hanging out around the lake. Jason’s lack of interest in sex is especially ironic considering his origin. He was a victim of other people having sex as he died (but actually didn’t) as a child due to camp consolers being too busy fucking to save him from drowning. Dying (but not really) from other people having sex is particularly embarrassing for a person who has literally never even talked to a woman.

As a result of dying from other people fucking, somewhat of a fan-created lore is that Jason deliberately targets those who have sex. Which would make him horny as we all know being anti-sex is the biggest sign of someone being a pervert. However, Jason has killed numerous people who have clearly never had sex, with his trademark Hockey mask coming from a fat virgin. Of course, the real reason why Jason kills so many victims who have sex is due to producers trying to draw in those interested in murder AND tits. Two key demographics to have for any successful franchise.

There is, however, one film in the franchise where Jason displays what can be read as noncery. In Friday the 13^th Part 3 main character Chris, a rare woman Chris, reveals that years ago she was attacked by Jason with her passing out so she can’t remember the exact details of what happened. As the flashbacks just shows Jason grabbing Chris and dragging her away like a caveman combined with how Chris somehow isn’t dead maybe Jason’s MO was a little different than normal. Chris was originally meant to be flat-out molested by Jason before the screenwriters decided that it was too far for a film that includes someone’s head being crushed by Jason’s bare hands. Of course, this doesn’t count towards Jason’s body count and not towards his overall horniness rating. His horniness rating is not affected because Friday the 13^th is even by horror movie franchise standards a particularly slap-dash series, especially in the first films in the franchise. Jason just a film before had been changed from a dead child to a serial killer and his trademark hockey mask would only be introduced halfway through the third film. Jason’s character had barely been thought out, although let’s be honest not a lot of thinking was needed, with the series switching from screenwriters and directors film to film at its start. The Jason popular with audiences is the undead and most importantly for this article, asexual version from the 6^th movie on.

Overall, Jason is the least sexual of any Slasher movie villains, displaying no interest aside from murder. This is a reason for Jason’s popularity being a ‘wholesome’ killer whose films you can pop on and see nice gorey murder without any of the gross molesty stuff.

Ranking

Horniness – 0/10

Body Count – 0

Various Ghostfaces – Scream

Scream as a franchise famously flips Slasher tropes. One of them is not having the invulnerable constantly masked-up killers of other Slasher franchises. The killers are shown as normal people before the reveal of them being serial killers, as the stories function as very violent whodunnits. As a result, not only have there been various Ghostfaces, nearly all of them have had sex. Interestingly the person they have sex with is commonly the protagonist of the film. This is the case in the original Scream, the recent 2022 movie (oops spoilers) and in the forgotten TV series. The common in movie reason for this is some form of scheme that involves the current Ghostface trying to get close to the lead character. For example in the first film, Billy Loomis has sex with series lead protagonist Sidney Prescott as part of his greater scheme to get revenge against her. As Scream is meta in referring to horror cliches, the second reason is to subvert the trope that only virgin women survive Slasher movies. This inadvertently creates a new trope, that Slashers who have sex don’t survive movies.

Ghostfaces stand out as an outlier on the overall results, and this is because they’re not true Slasher villains. A key part of the Slasher genre that differentiates it from others like Giallos is having a distinctive killer. But true Slasher killers are not just unique because of their look, it’s because there is no mystery to who they are. They are also far more cartoonish than the Ghostfaces of Scream. A character like Jason or Michael Myers is unable to attend high school and have a girlfriend like the Ghostfaces. Essentially, as the Ghostfaces have had sex before their identity as the killer is even known to the audience they don’t really count.

Ranking

Horniness – Plotting

Body Count – Normally at least 1

Chucky – Child’s Play

While being a doll might make you think Chucky’s love life is limited, he’s actually the only Slasher villain to be married and have a sex scene. Before the fourth film in the franchise Bride of Chucky, the tiny murderer showed no real signs of horniness. Well aside from his catchphrase ‘I’m Chucky wanna play’ which is a guy named Charles specific pickup line. Voice actor Brad Dourif also gives Chucky the same voice as your uncle who flirts with bartenders. However, Bride of Chucky sees him reunited with his former girlfriend Tiffany, who Chucky went out with before his voodoo transformation into a doll. This confirms Chucky as having been with a woman during his time as a human, a rare act for a Slasher villain. Chucky kills Tiffany to turn her into a doll too, and they continue their healthy relationship together. After being inspired by watching two victims have sex, the two dolls make cinematic history by engaging in the first Slasher villain on Slasher villain sex scene and the first doll on doll sex scene. This horrible attempt at comedy, just slightly less embarrassing than this article’s attempts, leads to Chucky having a child in the follow-up film Seed of Chucky. Having two movies devoted to his family life makes Chucky the only Slasher villain whose sex life plays an important role.

It’s necessary to note that Chucky’s love life taking centre stage in his films happened when the series turned to pure deliberate farce. Bride of Chucky was released in 1998 in the boom of self-aware horror movies that arrived in the aftermath of Scream. While Chucky was never the most serious of characters with him being a wise-cracking doll, he still only had sex when his series started to include things like killing Britney Spears impersonators. Or when rapper Redman of How High fame appeared as himself in Seed Of Chucky. Or when part of the marketing campaign for Bride Of Chucky included having Chucky appear in wrestling organisation WCW to begin a feud with wrestler Rick Steiner. Who isn’t even the famous Steiner brother. Nothing shows appealing to the lowest common denominator more than trying to market your film to wrestling fans. This is best shown by WCW going out of business a few years later thanks to advertisers literally refusing to have their products associated with wrestling. Overall, this shows that if a horror villain is gonna have sex in their film, that movie will be stupid as hell.

Overall, despite being a doll with the soul of a serial killer, Chucky has the most traditional love life of any Slasher villain. Being married with a child and having this become an integral part of the character’s identity makes Chucky the character any horror fan should aspire to be. As he also fucks dolls which horror fans also do.

Ranking

Horniness – Married

Body Count – 2 (Tiffany in human and doll form)

Freddy Krueger – A Nightmare on Elm Street

Freddy Krueger is one of Slasher cinema’s most talkative villains and as a result, it would make you think he had enough time to say some freaky shit. Throughout the franchise, Freddy does several horny actions, which are best shown in the first film. Krueger repeatedly harrases a group of teenagers throughout the film with him attacking the lead character Nancy on several occasions. Freddy gives Nancy the most uncomfortable phone call of her life, an impressive feat considering her boyfriend was played by Johnny Depp, when Freddy tells her that he is ‘her boyfriend now’ and licks her through the phone. Aside from this Souja Boy inspired harassment in another scene, when Nancy falls asleep in the bath Freddy’s trademark razor blade-covered hand rises out of the water directly in-between her legs. On the bright side, this would be a quick way to get rid of that classic 80s muff.

Freddy out of all other iconic Slasher movie villains has had the most, let’s call it ‘implication’, of doing more than just murdering his victim. Aside from Freddy’s aforementioned horny actions, the murders in the film can be seen as being reminiscent of sexual violence. The first murder in the franchise sees a young woman attacked in her bed by an invisible assailant while screaming for help. Freddy kills her by cutting her open directly in between her breasts ripping through both her shirt and skin. The sexual nature of Freddy’s crimes was originally meant to be overt. Series creator Wes Craven, the originator of sex crimes in horror movies envisioned Freddy as being a child molester, not a child killer. This was changed as killing children was believed to be more acceptable to audiences than abusing them. The belief that having a child molester in your horror movie would leave a bad taste in the audience’s mouth was proven correct with the horrible 2010 remake, where Freddy is a full-on toucher. Of course, these do not count towards his body count and sadly puts Freddy’s horniness in the same section as BBC Radio DJs. Criminal.

Freddy however, can have sex that isn’t highly illegal. At least he was before being burned into a prune. It’s revealed in the sixth film in the franchise Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare that he had been married. He even had a child proving that he is capable of having regular sex, giving him one confirmed body at least. It also makes Freddy one of the few Slasher villains to have had a wife or kid. Though the achievement is a bit less impressive as he killed his wife and tried to kill his kid.

Overall, Freddy is one of the few Slasher icons whose horror is sexual in nature. He performs some actions which would get him sent to HR for sexual harassment. He also is rare as his backstory involves him being married and having a child.

Ranking

Horniness – Nonce

Body Count – 1

Pinhead – Hellraiser

Despite Hellraiser not truly being a Slasher franchise, it would be wrong not to include horror’s most horny monster, Pinhead. The head of a group of extra-dimensional BDSM enthusiasts called the Cenobites, who Pinhead describes as ‘explorers in the further regions of experience. Demons to some. Angels to others’. A statement you’ll also find in a poly couple’s Tinder bio. As a result, the Cenobites’ intentions are sexual, well the type of sexuality that 40-year-old divorced women have. Pinhead and his Cenobites tight black leather get-ups are clearly based on S&M fetish gear and their bodies show signs of self-mutilation for sexual pleasure. Pinhead’s trademark look was originally envisioned to include pins going down his entire torso, which was meant to imply he had a Prince Albert.

Pinhead of course has never been shown to have actual sex in the film series. But Pinhead has in fact nutted so much that he has reached a higher point of existence. This is how Cenobites even exist. They’re the end result of humans who seek and solve a puzzle box that supposedly allows them to reach a world of unnatural pleasure. So, for Pinhead to even seek out the puzzle box in his human form he must’ve been doing some nasty shit. In the second movie Pinhead is shown to have originally been an Officer in the British Army during WW1 before his goth glow-up. As a result, many would suspect that perhaps he was a tragic figure, someone simply trying to escape the horror of war. However, those with historical knowledge know that English officers during WW1 were famous for their interest in buggery and other boarding school-inspired perversions.

This extremely sexual horror makes sense when you consider the series creator Clive Barker. Barker is a horror Renaissance man, an author, director, screenwriter and on top of that a weird pervert. Barker’s other creations include Rawhead Rex a giant penis-shaped demon who attacks an Irish town, based on a creature from Irish folklore called the English. As shown Barker is not afraid of making the horror of his stories based in sex, with the story of Hellraiser itself focusing on a woman’s affair with a pile of meat. With this shortened explanation of the film’s story being a legitimate explanation of the film’s plot. The horror of the Cenobites comes from fear of sexual deviancy. Them being from another world is a representation of how extreme sexual fetishes can be incomprehensible to those outside of the subcultures they exist in. Pinhead, therefore, is a horror villain that is sexual at his very core.

Pinhead is the ultimate gorilla pimp of horror movie villains. Whilst his counterparts are successful if they have had sex once, Pinhead has literally fucked so much that he’s supernatural.

Ranking

Horniness – Instagram model DM’er

Body Count – ∞

Conclusion

The Slasher villain with the highest body count depends on how you measure it. Pinhead due to his mere existence has to have the largest body count. However, he is never shown to actually have sex and there’s no idea what number his body count really is. In this regard, Chucky boasts the highest body count of the genre. Being the only Slasher villain to have a sex scene as well as having a wife and kid who are essential to his character, Chucky is Slasher cinema’s best lover. Even despite being the biggest cocksmith in Slasher movie history, his body count is only one or two, depending on if you count becoming a doll as making you count for two different people.

While we now know which Slasher icon has had the most sex, many more questions about Slashers have been raised. When looking at the results of the research, the majority of Slasher movie villains are virgins. In this manner, they are actually quite accurate to real mass murderers, despite them also having supernatural powers. The reason for Slasher villains being virgins on the surface is very simple. Imaging a silent masked assailant laying pipe removes a bit of the horror from its villain. As a result, Slasher movie villains with any sexual interests are nearly always in films with comedic elements, with Scream, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Child’s Play franchises all showing this trend. Of course, these comedic Slasher villains include sex because sex is about as low-brow as humour can get. The easiest way for a cheap laugh is by having some kind of sexual mishap or innuendo. Bride of Chucky and Seed of Chucky both go for that late 90s early 2000s self-aware, pop culture spoofing humour found in works like South Park or the Scary Movie franchise. Bride of Chucky even shares the same gag as Team America : World Police as both films have two dolls fuck. Of course, the big difference is Team America was funny. Texas Chain Saw Massacre 2, on the other hand, goes for a level of humour too embarrassing for a primary school panto, by having Leatherface start air-humping with his chainsaw. As a result, having your Slasher villain have sex or be horny is a big sign that the screenwriter is a hack.

Hellraiser and to a lesser extent Nightmare on Elm Street show that if a horror villain is to remain serious whilst including a sexual element, it must be an integral part of their horror. Nightmare on Elm Street being about a killer targeting victims in a helpless state does bring up a similarity to sexual abuse as does their parents covering up crimes against children. Hellraiser’s Pinhead and his Cenobites show a horror that is based on fear of sexual deviancy and excess. Sexuality is the basis of Hellraiser’s narrative, with Pinhead and the Cenobites not even the main antagonists of the film, with the story being about a violent love affair between a married woman and her zombified brother-in-law. As a result, including sex in a work of horror and for it to be taken seriously requires sexuality to be baked into the very core of the horror itself.

Another interesting development is that Slasher villains are often envisioned to be sexually violent in earlier versions of scripts, which is ultimately missing in the final product. Halloween, Friday the 13^th, Nightmare on Elm Street and Texas Chainsaw Massacre arguably the most iconic franchises in the genre’s history all have had early drafts of scripts that make their villains into flat-out rapists. All of these elements have been removed from the final product due to them being seen as going too far. Of course, this is interesting for how the genre’s is viewed by both filmmakers and audiences. The genre is defined by deliberately striving to have the violence be as over the top and gorey as possible. However, sexual violence is a step too far. This likely has to do with what these films aim for. Whilst of course they intend to be scary, Slashers do include a certain amount of light-heartedness at their core. The murders nor the murderers aren’t realistic and you can’t extend the same creativity of violence the genre is famous for with sexual violence.

In recent years Slasher movies have been seeing somewhat of a return in popularity. The success of films such as the recent Scream instalment and a new series in A24’s X, which saw two instalments being released in 2022 alone. These films often see a flip on trends regarding sex and gender in Slasher movies. For example, X is an extremely sexual Slasher film with it essentially being what if the hippies from Texas Chain Saw Massacre were pornstars. While these new Slasher movies often try to flip old cliches of the genre regarding gender, like the ideas of their being a virginal final girl or promiscuous women dying. As a result, the final girl being a virgin trope is dead. However, their opposition remain virgins. So when will the final revision of the genre take place? Will there ever be a horror movie brave enough to subvert the true gender cliché of the genre? When will an auteur come around and show a classical masked Slasher villain fucking in a completely serious manner?

PS. And yes after getting to this part of the article I remembered that Jennifer’s Body and It Follows exist. But I’m not counting demons I mean masked silent killers like the genre is known for. Also yes I wrote about X and the villain in that is horny as hell but Bad Grandpa-style old lady makeup doesn’t count as a mask Mia Goth.

Who’s that peeking in my window? – A look at gang stalking

Do you ever feel watched? Have you noticed an increase of blue cars driving past you? Are you able to hear the radio signals being implanted into your brain only after you stop taking the psych medication that your satanic doctor prescribed you?

Well, then you MIGHT be a targeted individual.

But what is a targeted individual and how do I become one? For starters, you have to notice that you are a victim of gang stalking. This is when a group of people part of some nefarious organisation (up for the targeted individual to decide) spy on a person. These methods of spying are various, ramping up from somewhat unbelievable to full-blown loony. Commonly repeated features of gang stalking are seeing people stare at you in the supermarket, the same cars seemingly passing you all day and receiving phone calls from unknown numbers. Whilst most of this is clearly paranoid and delusional the realm of reality is still attached with these examples. However, there are much more outlandish claims about being a targeted individual. It develops into claims that the gang stalkers are doing sci-fi shit such as trying to invade the targeted individual’s thoughts through technology like their TV or nearby mobile towers.

Gang stalking in itself is a textbook conspiracy theory and as a result, is often mixed in with other conspiracy theories. For example, common explanations for who is responsible for the gang stalking involve David Icke favourites such as the NWO or reptilians. These answers about what conspiracy theories are involved in gang stalking varies between targeted individuals. For example, one of the top posts on r/gangstalking is a meme mocking the idea of vaccine tracking chips. Meaning that not getting your booster is more insane than claiming George Soros is trying to enter your brain.

This meme helps to reveal an interesting aspect about the gang stalking community which is the numerous divisions within it. Targeted individuals subscribe to differing conspiracy theories making their explanations for who, what and why they are being gang stalked often divergent from one another. This leads to one of the more humorous aspects of the targeted individual community one which is so common among other more normal online groups, gatekeepers. To explain gatekeeping is when members of an online community say that someone is not a real fan unless they fit certain criteria. Gatekeepers within the gang stalking community can often be found agreeing with people who call targeted individuals who agree with greater conspiracy theories such as flat earth as being mentally ill. To them, these people are schizophrenics who are just delusional but their personal experiences with gang stalking are real.

Now a rather consistent point that is bought up in gang stalking communities is real-life cases of actual gang stalking like activity. The most common example is that of the Stasi, East Germany’s secret police who would in some cases use multiple agents to legitimately stalk their people of interest. Whilst this is true why would the secret service stalk Reddit posters and meth heads? Well responses vary from targeted individuals but there are two common refrains. The first is that the people asking this are gang stalkers that are trying to once again get into the targeted individual’s head. The second is that well just because they don’t seem worthy of being put under any form of surveillance it doesn’t mean that they are not. To them, the gang stalkers might be putting them under surveillance for a reason that is unknown to all but the gang stalkers.

I think it’s clear that what’s causing gang stalking is mental illness. The specific mental illnesses at play depend on the individuals of course but fear of gang stalking is related to disorders that cause paranoia and or delusions. Therefore, CSI’s favourite mental illness paranoid schizophrenia is the disorder most associated with Targeted Individuals. It’s also noticeable that a large amount of the online community is from the USA and surprisingly Australia. I think it is no coincidence that both countries have noted issues with meth addiction, with the drug being associated with psychosis.

Also, typically of paranoid and delusional people, any attempts to explain why they are not the victim of a cabal of vampires are not received well. The targeted individual will respond to any claims that they are mentally ill with the idea that they are being gaslighted (this is the nicest option). The other response is that the person talking to them is in fact one of the gang stalkers and is actively trying to make them go nuts. This is actually an inbuilt part of how the delusion works. Any attempts to break their delusion are just the gang stalkers trying to make the targeted individual go insane.

Gang stalking has a popular online community second place only to Swifties number of mentally ill. Two of the more popular sites for them are YouTube and the subreddit R/gangstalking both of which allow for a look into the mind of the Targeted Individuals. Watching videos and reading posts by the community members really helps to show how often they repeat the same claims. As a result, I believe that the targeted individual community will continue to exist for a long while. Delusions are affected by the society and culture in which the sufferer exists in. A famous example to display this is glass delusion. Prominent among mentally ill elites during the Early Modern Period the sufferer believed they were made of glass. This disorder is nearly non-existent today whilst something like gang stalking is common. In an urban world, one filled with technology and widespread surveillance through tools like CCTV this is the perfect breeding ground for a delusion like gang stalking where the sufferer believes they are being watched.

The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes

Stan Brakhage is one of the most important experimental filmmakers of all time. His short films and writing on the medium have had a huge amount of influence on both experimental and mainstream filmmakers. Directors from Terrence Malick to Martin Scorsese have aped aspects of Brakhage’s style for sequences in their films. To those without an interest in the medium he was also the creators of South Park college Professor so that’s influence enough.

Brakhage’s short film The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes is one of his most distinct and to some by far his most disturbing. The work is numerous real autopsies shot with Brakhage’s distinctive fast-cut style with no soundtrack at all. The autopsies are at various stages so there are seemingly gentle scenes of a pathologist holding the hand of a cadaver as he drains its fluids. In contrast, there is the full removal of a person’s ribcage and to use non-medical terms all the internal stuff as their now scalped head lies over their face like a bedsheet.

The Act Of Seeing is actually part of Brakhage’s Pittsburgh trilogy with it just being the most famous due to its ugly subject matter. The Pittsburgh trilogy saw Brakhage engage with a documentary style with more of a focus on the ‘realistic’ aspects of filmmaking. As a result, these films lack the often surreal imagery of his other films. Despite the documentary essence of the short lacks any soundtrack or explanatory text completely removing the context for a layman (who is everyone except morgue workers or serial killers). This makes the viewer focus on deeper aspects than the purely technical and to me this makes the autopsy take on the appearance of a ritual. The repetition of measuring the corpse with a ruler starts to look like a form of blessing and the extraction of organs especially the brain brings up images of ritual mummifications.

Obviously due to the subject matter of the short it’s very easy to be repulsed and disturbed by Brakhage’s short. However, thanks to how it is shot, edited and the lack of soundtrack what are normally intensely disturbing and cold footage gains an intimate air. When I viewed The Act Of Seeing I thought that it stripped away much of the viscerally disgusting nature of an autopsy. Despite the sheer ugliness of the shots, it all comes together to make it seem like a deeply caring process one in which brutality is used to preserve the body for as long as possible. This makes it to me perhaps the only life-affirming work that includes a brain being extracted. As a result, I recommend The Act Of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes of course with the heavy caveat that if you feel you have a strong enough stomach. But at least in my experience, the film makes it so what would be nausea-inducing is not due to the warmth it’s able to convey.

The short is also worth it for anyone interested in the act of filmmaking. Brakhage’s style is a mish-mash of techniques and it’s interesting to see him not use certain elements such as his use of painting directly on film. Michael F. Miller has argued that the vivid colours of the brain extraction are reminiscent of his use of painting in his more abstract shorts. As a result, The Act Of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes is a particularly interesting piece of Brakhage’s filmography. Thanks to the internet what previously was a filmography reserved to areas such as Universities is now widely available with the link provided being from YouTube.

I Feel Fantastic – A Youtube classic

I Feel Fantastic is a classic piece of Youtube horror being uploaded to the account creepyblog in April 2009 which at the time of writing has reached 28 million views. A two and half minute long video of a mannequin in a feminine wig monotonous singing is sure to appear strange in any context. But every aspect of the video is creepy. The video is set in a truly drab room best described as Garry’s Mod-like. The lyrics of the synth song are without a doubt deliberately freaky repetitions of ‘I Feel Fantastic’ ‘Run run run’ ‘please leave’. But the original uploader creepyblog posted an appropriately creepy description, which explains the story of Pygmalion who in Ovid’s metamorphosis was the first Men’s Rights activist who found that the Stacey’s only liked Cypriot Chads and decided to make his own statue waifu. The description after explaining the classic tale states.

‘Perhaps what we are viewing is the work of a modern Pygmalion. To him, her toneless voice, the paleness of her skin and the comparative vibrancy of her lips may indeed be the very embodiment of a perfect woman…

Consider the mind-scape of the creator. In whose mind does this appear beautiful? In whose mind is this pure, near worshipful? Are we missing out on his perspective?

Who are we to be afraid or to judge them? He may well love her fully, perhaps more fully than any of us could ever hope to be loved. In the mind of her creator, she is a near goddess; the perfect representation, not just of femininity, but the peak of human potential. A perfectly satisfactory being.

How does that kind of unconditional love feel?

Well, how does she feel?

Fantastic.’

Due to this being the only context given to the video there was obviously very little for the viewers to go off. As a result, it’s not exactly a surprise that theories about I Feel Fantastic appeared. But these theories were not exactly grounded in reality. The most popular theory was that the video and the android were made by a serial killer. The murderer didn’t like the screams of his victims so he made the android say ‘I Feel Fantastic’ which makes sense as psycho sadists famously hate other people’s pain. Tara’s fresh drip is the victims’ clothing and this explains the costume change. The slow zoom in the garden is where the serial killer buried his victims. Now when looking at any explanation for why this makes sense the answer is? Nothing. This interpretation was just spawned from the fact that the video is creepy and that the creepiest option is always a serial murderer. Now, this interpretation is already approaching creepypasta territory but is at least remotely grounded in reality the second interpretation is pure creepypasta. Tara the Android was not only the work of a serial murderer but also Tara somehow gained sentience and eventually killed its creator.

Whilst the idea that Tara the Android killed its creator and escaped sounds schizophrenic it does have some basis storyline-wise in another account halloweenandroid. In September 2009 this account uploaded a video called ‘piercing the android’ which stars a far more weathered Tara. In another completely innocent video, the android gets her face stabbed with a nail by the hands of someone offscreen. Tara then proceeds to bite one of his fingers which turns into a Halloween prop and falls off.

Now the name of the android’s creator would be found by those who went onto androidworld.com. On the site is a listing from 2004 about Tara the Android which was created by John Bergeron. Basically nothing is known about Bergeron aside from the fact that he created Tara and was selling DVDs of music videos starring her through androidworld to get wider attention to his skills. Interestingly this urban legend did not end with the discovery of the android’s creator John Bergeron, instead, he simply became part of the urban legend. Now innocent sex doll creator Bergeron was a known serial killer who somehow was not on the news was also was killed by his doll. Clearly, Bergeron’s anonymity outside of this listing aided the myths surrounding I Feel Fantastic. Fact-checking tends to not interact well with urban legends and as nothing exists about the creator he could be a hobbyist sex robot maker full-time serial murderer.

I think it is clear that Bergeron created the halloweenandroid page. The videos were not available off androidworld and the condition of Tara herself shows they were likely filmed later than the music videos. Now there is the question of why the halloweenandroid page began to upload in 2009 after I Feel Fantastic was uploaded. The first is that Bergeron made the creepyblog page and in a move similar to current popular horror ARGs put the videos on halloweenandroid to add to the mystery. The second is that creepyblog was created by someone else who owned a copy of the video and Bergeron attempted to take the success onto his own channel. In my opinion, either case shows that Bergeron was deliberate in the original music videos’ horror vibe.

In 2018 the whole DVD would be bought. The entire collection of videos is now uploaded to the YouTube channel Yitz. The collection continues the general vibe of I Feel Fantastic with the same threatening lyrics, terrible feng shui and Marvel Studios level special effects. These videos explain the spooky camera cut to the garden. To me, Bergeron is simply approximating what a competently shot music video would do as there are 2 other shots of outside areas including just branches. As branches aren’t associated with hiding bodies it’s clear that outside the shot in I Feel Fantastic isn’t meant to be some secret murder spot.

Interestingly the new development in the I Feel Fantastic world are comments defending Bergeron by arguing that he did not intend for the music videos to be strange or creepy. I consider this to also be quite silly. Now to be fair this does have some precedent in the world of horror YouTube videos. An example is Obey the Walrus an edited video of disabled drag queen Goddess Bunny dancing was edited to appear creepy. Goddess Bunny did not intend for her dancing to be in any way unsettling and the Obey the Walrus video made it seem creepy by its nonsensical nature telling the viewer to well Obey the Walrus. Unlike Obey the Walrus whilst the creepyblog video may not have been Bergeron himself the footage’s intention was not hijacked like Goddess Bunny’s was. I do not think that Bergeron would be unaware of the clear unsettling nature of his android music videos. Firstly, the lyrics are without a doubt on purpose unnerving. The second reason is the uncanny valley concerning androids. The uncanny valley is when as something starts to appear more human it becomes well uncanny. If an idiot like me considers this common knowledge clearly someone willing to spend $2000 on making a droid would be very aware of this. Thirdly, the halloweenandroid uploads show Bergeron was willing to display his creation in a frightening light. If he did not intend for his original music videos to be creepy I believe that he likely wouldn’t have leaned into it by inserting nails into his doll’s face. He would’ve uploaded videos trying to paint Tara as normal and not a weird living doll that eats people.

While the questions surrounding I Feel Fantastic’s it is still a Youtube classic. It is a catchy horrendously made banger of a song. Tara the Android will continue to creep kids out for years and how does that feel? Fantastic.

John Doe sketches – are images of unidentified people the new horror trend?

Images of the unidentified are unsettling for two reasons. First is their purpose. The idea of a corpse being completely separated from the person’s identity is horrifying. For police sketches, the idea of an unknown criminal stalking the streets is pure paranoia fuel. The second is just that they look so strange. This is on purpose with the sketcher overemphasising certain aspects of the person to draw attention to certain stand-out features of the person. Whilst reconstructions of unidentified bodies and police sketches are obviously different they both share the deliberate exaggeration of features. These images are now being used in online horror which can be traced to one police sketch in particular which has started to gain particular prominence. A police sketch of serial killer Derrick Todd Lee shows a bizarrely wide-eyed depiction of the murderer.

Todd Lee’s sketch has been given three notable usages. First is that in the Selene Delgado online mystery very deep rabbit hole in itself but for its importance to the sketch in short it spawned from a Mexican tv station Channel 5. This channel used to show missing people on it and one of these individuals that routinely showed up was a woman called Selene Delgado. A video on the Youtube spook channel Florecita Dreams argues that Delgado was actually a reconstructed image of a person. To argue this point it contrasted Selene Delgado’s photograph with that of reconstructions and sketches including Derrick Todd Lee’s. Likely due to just how memorable the sketch is it eventually became associated with that of Selene Delgado with it now being recognised with Delgado instead of the one that appeared on Channel 5.

The second prominent usage of the sketch is in the Youtube series The Mandela Catalogue. The series takes place in the fictional Mandela county in which imposter-style humans with faces straight from the uncanny valley take people’s identities. One of the faces used is that of Todd Lee’s sketch and once again similar to Florecita Dreams it has become the most popular scary face associated with the series. This is despite the series having numerous original distorted faces throughout showing that the uncanny nature of police sketches and reconstructions can outshine intended attempts at horror. The Mandela Catalogue itself was one of the most successful Youtube horror series of 2021 and has garnered millions of views both on its own channel and on the numerous reaction and analysis channels that YouTube horror so often spawns.

The third and perhaps most interesting usage is from a meme. In the meme format ‘Mr Incredible becomes uncanny’ the animated hero’s face slowly becomes more distorted as he learns more about a certain topic. One of these distortions is the addition of Derrick Todd Lee’s face over Mr Incredible. As this meme is from late 2021 the appearance of Todd Lee’s face is certainly inspired by the Mandela Catalogue. Appearances in memes are definitely a sign of popularity and one which tends to bleed over into other memes. As a result, I can easily see police sketches enter the online zeitgeist even more in the coming year.

Whilst police sketches and Doe pictures are of course creepy for their backstory Todd Lee’s sketch shows that the most important aspect is just their uncanny look. The popularity of his sketch in all its mentioned usages stems strictly from its Lemur like eyes. Todd Lee’s sketch whilst freaky ass hell even for police sketch standards is by no means the only strange sketch or reconstruction out there. With over 40,000 John Doe cases in the US alone is filled with reconstructions for content makers to shift through and find other unsettling pictures. With the recent interest in true crime it makes sense that drawings and reconstructions of Does have entered people’s collective fear. Doe pictures have always been freaky ass hell and in the previous ages of screamers and jumpscare reaction videos, notably, Doe pictures were not used. It is also not like the usage of recycled images new in online horror with numerous creepypastas such as many SCP’s just using photographs available online. As a result, police sketches and facial reconstructions are definitely a new trend.

The usage of sketches of unidentified people will likely only increase in popularity. Horror as a genre tends to be incredibly derivative. Mandela Catalogue itself is inspired by other works of online horror such as Local 58. The usage of already created sketches also has essentially no barrier to entry aside from some photo editing software. This ease means that anyone can hop on the trend regardless of budget, experience or talent. As a result, the featuring of police sketches and Doe reconstructions in online horror will only be heating up in the foreseeable future.