A Lukewarm Defense of an Analogue Horror Series I Don't Like

By Patrick Totally
November 14th, 2023

CW: This article contains discussions of fictional CSA, extreme violence, and scary analogue horror faces.



The Painter is an ongoing analogue horror series that started in November 2022 by UrbanSPOOK. Its loose narrative trails a serial killer who tortures and disfigures their victims in painful, creative ways. The centerpieces of each upload in the series are paintings made by the mass murdurer of each of its victims. This serves as a light piece of social commentary. The real scenes of the murder are censored, apparently too gruesome to be shown on screen. However, since the paintings are allegedly more fictitious than the crime scene photos, we are allowed to be shown them. Our perception of the reality of the crimes skews in the favor of the criminal, with the police reports serving as museum wall blurbs for the paintings shown on screen.


It's not an original premise. Dozens of other twenty-somethings discovered this shortcut to complicating the relationship between subject and object as soon as the price of camcorders dipped into the $100 range. It's August Underground with a new coat of varnish, and that's fine! I genuinely don't mean for that to read as being to The Painter's detriment. Horror is the most self referential genre of film. If anything, it signifies that The Painter may be uniquely positioned in the web horror space to engage with this rich lineage of hyperviolent antihero leads.


The typical analogue horror protagonist is a victim. They are either endangered directly within the events of the uploads or serve as a useful pawn to some nefarious entity that has an interest in having the media the protaginist is digitizing be uploaded online. In The Painter, there is technically a narrator separate from the serial killer, but if the narrator isn't the killer themself, they're definitely working in the killer's best interest. The videos are formatted like police reports. They give a normal amount of context about the lives of the victims leading up to their murders before going into comical detail about the ways in which each victim was raped, hacked up, etc., much more akin to a statement from a prosecution in a jury trial. Despite this, each video ends with an assurance that the killer is still on the loose. These videos could only be made and released for the killer's benefit. That on its own is an interesting twist on the format! The identity of the person uploading a respective analogue horror channel's videos is usually a late game reveal.





Unfortunately, The Painter fails to stick the landing. Its framing device only works if the art the killer produces is genuinely affecting. The series is a means of framing these works before anything else. When I first saw the series, I assumed the art featured in the series was AI, and now having scrolled through the artist's backlog, I'm still convinced that they're using AI for reference. The range of styles is so wide while the subject matter and staging are so static between pieces. The scary face is in the middle of the screen. There's some scary stuff in the background. I feel shockingly little of the hand of the artistic mastermind behind these works. They evoke so little, and the series suffers as a result. It doesn't help that all of the photographs in the series that are meant to be photographs are processed and framed in the same way as all of the artworks, which makes them pop even less.


So The Painter's bad, which is a shame, but it had some potential. If that was it, I probably wouldn't be writing about it, but the conversation surrounding the series right now is worrying to me.


The catalyst for much of the criticism surrounding the series seems to be its graphic content. The third upload in the series, IN THE WALLS, infamously revolves around the rape and murder of several young children. Their deaths aren't shown onscreen, but true to the series' format, we're presented with a roster of missing children's portraits, followed by a series of paintings of nasty looking dead bodies that correspond to each of them.


People generally don't seem to like The Painter, and people especially don't seem to like IN THE WALLS. UrbanSPOOK has had several prolonged meltdowns on Reddit and Twitter over people calling the series' graphic content excessive and that series like The Painter drag down the genre as a whole. Several creators, including the leads of The Walten Files and ChezzKids, have taken pot shots at UrbanSPOOK as well. There's a bunch of videos called some shit like "the death of analogue horror" that have images from The Painter in the thumbnail. Professional book summarizer Wendigoon recently uploaded a two hour long video video titled "The Best & Worst of Analog Horror: GREYLOCK vs UrbanSPOOK - Scary vs Disturbing". GREYLOCK is an analogue horror series that he likes.





And I do want to reiterate that The Painter is bad, and UrbanSPOOK does seem generally terrible at managing their social media presence. But like, people are really coming down hard on this guy! And I don't entirely get it. I get the impression that UrbanSPOOK thinks they're doing more than they actually are. They've talked several times about their series being part of a tradition of extreme art. This is cemented in the sixth upload in the series, PIGS, which is soundtracked by a straight up harsh noise track. UrbanSPOOK has no ambitions of being a lore dense series. It's meant to be a dark ride! You go in, you look at some weird stuff, and you're left with feelings you don't normally feel. Not only is there value in that, there's precedent for it. It's Whitehouse. It's August Underground. Horror is the same story told again and again. It's one all about the body and the way it reacts to looking at pictures of itself.


AGAIN, The Painter is pretty bad at evoking any sort of heightened awareness of my own body, but my issues with the series has very little to do with its content and everything to do with its execution. It feels especially weird to be up in arms about depicting harm towards children in an analogue horror series when at least two of the scene's defining texts are literally Five Nights at Freddy's fanfic, a video game series that is mostly about children experiencing incomprehensible suffering.


Does The Painter need more lore? Fuck no!!! Anybody who says they want anything to have as much lore as Five Nights at Freddy's is dumb or lying through their teeth.


That leads into a much more serious issue. UrbanSPOOK has, up to this point, revealed very little personal information about themself. While I was catching up on the discourse surrounding their work, I saw a sentiment echoed multiple times that UrbanSPOOK is disrespectful to actual survivors of CSA, which is a crazy thing to say about somebody you don't know anything about. Several have accused the artist of being a pedophile, which, from what I can tell, is a judgement being made entirely on the merit of the videos they produce.






I can't confirm whether or not UrbanSPOOK is a sexual assault survivor. This is because they're a private person who doesn't post about their personal life on the internet.


I've seen similar sentiments echoed elsewhere in the internet horror space. I can't sleep is a horror creator who started gaining notoriety online at roughly the same time as UrbanSPOOK. They are also anonymous. Their work is personable. Most of their videos are a small horror vignettes focusing on small terrors bubbling out of the malaise of modern life. Several of their videos, such as Punishment and Sins of the Flesh, deal pretty explicitly with sexual assault. It's a good project!





The comments sections of these videos are frightening to me, though. The general sentiment seems to be that it has passed an arbitrary threshold of quality to speak to an authentic experience. Furthermore, many commentors go as far as to diagnose I can't sleep as a survivor of sexual assault themself, which is weird, because nobody knows who they are.





This is not me saying anything about I can't sleep as a person. That's the point. When a work deals with sensitive subject matter, especially one that is deliberately released under an alias, it doesn't make any sense to assume anything about the character of that artist based on the work's quality. The reception of these works fits into a dangerous trend in the way people consume art, in which each aspect of a work can only express an aspect of a creator's biography. A work of art is an object that is removed from the logic of real things. It can draw on biography, it can focus on the materials or sociopolitical circumstances of its construction, but these are only ways that art can be made. To write a narrative about the construction of a piece of art is not a means of changing the original object. The narrative may change the way an object is looked at, but never the object itself.








To diagnose a person based on their work and only on their work is to attack their character. If I was UrbanSPOOK, I'd also be grossly offended that people who don't know who I am have taken the liberty of deciding whether or not I've been raped. If at some point after I write this, UrbanSPOOK comes out at some point and says that they're not a CSA victim, it's not going to change the fact that the feedback they're recieving is unhelpful and offensive. If everyone only made art about things that happened to them, the world would be very boring. Vice versa for I can't sleep. If there is to be room online for people to upload work anonymously (and I think there should be), these works need to be necessarily approached in good faith.


What's this about a genre collapsing under the weight of too many works? If a genre fall apart when some of its tertiary works flounder under scrutiny, its pulse is probably much weaker than its gatekeepers would insist. Analogue horror is exciting exactly because of its negligable barrier to entry. Its strongest innovators may not be making work at all if they were born in a time where they weren't able to pirate editing software.


Alex Kister famously made the first parts of his Mandela Catalog series on his iPad. Furthermore, when The Mandela Catalog first started, it was uninteresting and derivative! Its principal antagonists were first introduced as spooky jpegs Kister ripped off /x/. Ever since Kister gained access to his community's resources, though, he's been able to make spectacular visual and narrative advances in his work. He's identified the unique aspects of his visual palette and expanded them into a unique, opressive art style.


Good faith scrutiny towards individual works is the lifeblood of an artistic community. Without it, its genre's perameters could never be accurately determined, and its participants would never be able to develop an internal vocabulary. That being said, what's with this sacrificial lamb routine? Why is this randomass edgy mid series getting kicked out of the edgy mid club? Genres don't die when someone makes a bad work in that genre. Genres die when their qualities can only be defined through negation. It means nothing to say that analogue horror isn't some sort of way. I don't care if UrbanSPOOK is annoying on twitter or whatever. It's dangerous to be this precious about the thing you're making.


Let's let The Painter be bad because its visuals let down its challenging premise. Let's let The Painter be bad because it's too edgy for casual viewing but not edgy enough to be a farce. Let's let so many interchangable power electroncis tapes be bad because they've been recycling the same stale pool of aesthetics since the early 80's. If we lose the ability to acknowledge an art object on its own terms, we run the risk of each starting a different branch of the same quack psychiatric institution.



Give The Painter a watch yourself if you're interested

And make sure to check out I can't sleep, which I can more comfortably recommend

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