First, the good news. Don’t expect any 3 Guys 1 Hammer here, or similar kinds of videos. These videos aren’t chosen to shock people with outright gore and on-video death, but to disturb them by leaving so much more to their own imaginations.
And now, the bad news: that doesn’t make any of these 8 videos any less creepy. These videos may be (sorta) Safe For Work, but they’re certainly Not Safe For Sanity. We’re talking about videos of the “I Feel Fantastic” category here.
If this warning is enough for you to click away, let me offer you a cute video of little Chloe saying goodbye to everybody at a mall escalator instead, so you at least get something from this list.
Still here? Okay, strap yourself in. Let’s start you brave souls with something easy…
What It Is (If You’re Too Afraid To Watch): It’s Hulk Hogan shilling for his latest endeavor, a webhosting service. What are the odds that this business will be every bit as successful as Ric Flair Finance, a business spearheaded by a pro wrestler who owes more money to the IRS than Daniel Padilla owes to bad taste in music for his singing career?
The Defining Moment: Around 0:42, when you get to see Hogan, in all his 60-year-old glory, wearing a thong, repeatedly slapping his wrinkled buns, as he channels his inner Miley Cyrus, wrecking ball and all. This is the guy who used to tell us to say our prayers and eat our vitamins, and now, we’re saying our prayers in hopes that we could unsee this video. Please.
[two_thirds buffer=0]What It Is (If You’re Too Afraid To Watch): Meet Fergie Oliver. Unlike the Fergie we all know and love, this one seems to come from the school of R. Kelly and Freddie Aguilar, as the creepiest game show host ever. He spends most of this clip trying to score kisses with little girls who couldn’t be older than nine. It’s unnerving how he got away with this throughout the entire clip.
The Defining Moment: The slow-motion kiss around 0:43. Technically, the kiss never actually happens, but where the heck is Chris Hansen when you need him?
[two_thirds buffer=0]What It Is (If You’re Too Afraid To Watch): It’s a commercial for a curiously named brand, called Little Baby’s Ice Cream. It’s supposedly really delicious, but the commercial doesn’t do a very good job of conveying this, as a guy coated in what is supposedly ice cream stares unblinkingly at you while eating the very ice cream he is coated in.
This ice cream will devour you in your sleep. And your little babies.
The Defining Moment: You either go with the part where the voice over says, “I eat Little Baby’s Ice Cream”, and stop before he can say the last two words of that sentence. It makes so much more sense that way. The weird Psycho-ish sound effect at the end doesn’t help ease your unrest, either.
[two_thirds buffer=0]What It Is (If You’re Too Afraid To Watch): Damned if I know. In 2009, some workers stumbled upon this strange, amorphous blob under the sewers in Cameron Village. Nobody knows what it is exactly, or anything else about it; except that it’s clearly alive, and it will probably murder you in your sleep once it figures a way to travel from Raleigh to inside your bathroom. Heyyyy, it lives in a sewer though, right? Sweet dreams!
The Defining Moment: When it beats like a heart in the middle of the video. Whatever that thing is, it clearly doesn’t like being observed. Leave it alone, before it decides to introduce itself to you. Up close, and personal.
[two_thirds buffer=0]What It Is (If You’re Too Afraid To Watch): A performance by one Olivier de Sagazan in 2008, although it looks more like a demo reel meant to make Takashi Miike go “dude, not cool.” It’s over nine minutes of insanity, as a guy just looks at a camera, applies wet clay all over his face, and does random things while at it, including a fart. For art. Y’know, artsy fartsy? I realize that the intention of this performance art is to disturb and upset people, but that’s also why I wish I didn’t see it.
The Defining Moment: It has to be this one. There’s something so visceral about that moment where he first slashes at his “face” that makes you feel that it’s only going to get worse from there.
[two_thirds buffer=0]What It Is (If You’re Too Afraid To Watch): What initially looks like a children’s show song about being creative takes a disturbing turn for the worse at the last part in what might ironically be the only video here that sort of contains gore, although in a most unexpected way. The credits don’t get any less terrifying, by the way.
The Defining Moment: Hints of the terror to come start early on enough. Despite that, the minute the scene drastically changes in look less than a minute later, that’s when the disturbing sh*t really starts happening in rapid-fire. It’s like what you would get if you put Sesame Street together with Charles Manson and forced them to collaborate in a song written by Lito Camo, which is arguably an even more disturbing idea than the video itself.
[two_thirds buffer=0]What It Is (If You’re Too Afraid To Watch): No props. No production values. No nothing. Just one guy telling his “baby girl” how much he loves her in a video entitled “For Briona.” Of course, he does this with a wildly swinging camera he’s clearly holding with only one hand. I worry about what the other hand is doing, and if he isn’t about to wear Briona’s skin as a coat immediately after the video.
The Defining Moment: The moment at the end where he says, “I love you more than anything else in the world,” laughs ever-so-sinisterly, then says, “bye, baby girl. Stay perfect—for me.” I don’t even want to imagine how he intends to ensure that “baby girl” stays perfect for him.
[two_thirds buffer=0]What It Is (If You’re Too Afraid To Watch): It’s a CCTV video of a woman in an elevator. For unknown reasons, the elevator refused to close until she was no longer inside. As the video plays, her erratic behaviour grows increasingly bizarre and disconcerting, but we never understand what was really going on, nor find out if anyone else was there with her. This woman was Elisa Lam, a Canadian tourist who was staying in Los Angeles’ infamous Cecil Hotel, home to two serial killers for a time: Richard Ramirez in 1985 and Jack Unterwegger in 1991. This was also the last time Lam was seen alive, as she turned up dead inside the hotel’s water tank days later.
The Defining Moment: The entire video, seriously. Was she possessed? On drugs? Trying to escape from someone? Nobody knows. And to make matters worse, if it took them two weeks to find Elisa Lam in the water tank, that means the hotel’s guests were drinking and bathing with her decomposing body in their water supply. Given how long it took them to complain about it, Elisa probably wasn’t the only Canadian staying there.
I don’t even know how I’m going to sleep alone tonight after going through all those videos. Can I leave you guys with an adorable puppy trying to roll over to help wash away the stench of terror? And let’s never speak of this whole thing ever again, mmkay?
Is your hair standing on end? Do you know of other videos (real or fiction) that just make your skin crawl? Post it on the Comments Section.
