The Painter

The Painter is one of the rare analog horror webseries that's actually horrifying. Sure Mandela Catalogue is scary too along with The Walten Files, Fnaf VHS tapes and media alike. But none has scared me like the painter did. It has no jumpscares of the sort, and it relies on pure psychological terror to completely terrify us. In the first chapters I was already feeling uncomfortable, and that's already a high mark for a series as ambitious as The Painter. However, despite its remarkable achievements, it has notable flaws. My main problem with this is how the entirety of the series feels more like a gorefest than having an actual narrative. Sure the FAMILY episode disputed that claim, but had they built up a narrative beforehand, I would appreciate this even more. I wouldn't call this entertaining just for the sake of it because of its content. Despite my high rating, this is one of the only pieces of media that I would find appreciating more than enjoying. But it's still an amazing series that many people should check out at least once.

Relies too heavily on shock horror and gory kills. Just feels like the creator wanted to make the edgiest series possible. The Painter isn't a scary antagonist either, when we see their face very early on in the series. Most relating to a part which is more whole between a certain and definite article of which is a "plot" that of which is present in this time is just increasingly gory kills instead of relating to an actually meaningful story. Overall, I'd much rather recommend series that focus more on the story instead of just shock horror. Some series that come to mind are Mandela Catalogue, The Monument Mythos, Vita Carnis, Gemini Home Entertainment, Greylock, and The Walten Files, as these are all great analog horror series that do a much better job overall than UrbanSpook.

While this series started out promising with its art direction, it quickly jumped to relying on cheap scare tactics, shock value, and exploitation.

While other reviews have praised its graphic content, the series does not use the violence of its titular paintings to add to the quality of the series. After episode 2, it uses the graphic content in the paintings as shock value. It also falls on the tone-deaf and out-of-touch depictions of child sexual abuse for shock value. The depictions are graphic to the extend that it reflects poorly on the creator, and feels more gross and tasteless than scary.

Many of the scares fall into that category: tasteless. It fails to deliver any of the horror that could come with a crime series, and instead ends up as an edgy, gore-filled drag of a series.

The quality of the artwork could not save this series from its poor writing and the creator's lack of understanding of the horror genre.

The Painter is an analog horror series by Urban Spook. If you're interested in watching this, beware of violence and gore. If you're fine with that you'll find a murder mystery with several interesting characters and clues. If you're wondering what analog horror is, here is the definition. They're horror films, shorts, or videos in general done in the style of old VHS, Beta, or other pre-digital formats. Sometimes they can look like an old camcorder view of some phenomena like The Blair Witch Project. My favorite episode is family because it gives us some more clues. Overall I'd give it an 9/10. You can watch it on YouTube if you want to know.

When I first saw the series, I liked it. The art is good and the concept of human killers rather than supernatural entities is a great idea, as well as new grounds for analog horror. However, as the series goes on, it just becomes a bunch of videos full of nothing but shock value.

The series fails to provide any depth to the characters, so when they die, it's hard to feel bad for them because stuff like that keeps happening. On that note, the episodes are just Warning Sign, Text about a murder scene, and scary painting. It's the same thing for a majority of the show. And the crimes themselves are just so unnecessarily violent (there's a woman stabbed in a inappropriate part while drowning and a dog whose legs are broken for no reason by the killers, and those are the tamer ones) and this violence doesn't add much to the story aside from saying that the killers are bad.

I'm not saying this is the worst horror show I've seen, there are things such as the voice acting in "FAMILY" that I applaud, but the series itself is just a bunch of edgy stuff on top of edgy stuff that I hope is fixed in the future. If you don't mind more than 10 minutes of mindless violence that barely goes anywhere, this series is for you. As for me, I'm hoping that this series is saved soon.