The Painter

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.

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 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.

I'm gonna make a lot of comparisons to most of this series' genre, but trust me, it's warranted.

In a sea of low-effort analog horror, The Painter is the most graphic series in the genre by far and its reception shows. Most analog horror often relies on retro visuals, walls of distorted sound, and cryptic dialogue in an attempt to overwhelm the viewer with as much stimulation and confusion in hopes the viewer will be scared. Many series have used these techniques to great success, but the wave of analog horror has lead to results that often seem like amateur tribute works by inexperienced creators whose work is propped up by some preexisting IP and/or derivative of said IP inserted into the analog horror style. The Painter does the exact opposite, letting the content itself do most of the work as opposed to its arrangement. Unlike its competition, the meat of The Painter is not found in any lengthy dread-inducing scenes nor is it anything too flashy. It's not Invasion of the Body Snatchers or Five Nights at Freddy told in the analog horror format for the hundredth time, it's a serial killer who kills their victims in ways that are as shocking as they are artistic. It's simple, yet unique. Despite its minimal presentation, it evokes more urgency than it may appear upon first glance, due in part to the music. The music, again in contrast to most analog horror series, was originally composed by UrbanSpook himself, and ranges from unsettling drones to harrowing Post-Industrial. UrbanSpook's music amplifies whatever mood is meant to be set by the scenarios described and the paintings shown. The paintings are the main attraction of the series and also its most standout quality. Some of the depictions of murder victims would be the most disturbing frames in any other series, but in the painter, these pieces are often showed back-to-back-to-back, staying up for an amount of time that barrages the viewer, but stays up for long enough to let the viewer absorb what they're seeing. It's incredibly apparent from how many paintings there are and how much detail they have that UrbanSpook is someone who understands what can make a still image scary, almost to the point where one would question the sanity of UrbanSpook (as many viewers have). Couple that with the brutally matter-of-fact descriptions of the murder victims that correspond with the paintings alongside the disgusting creativity used by the painter character and you've got a series of disturbing events that could rival that of Se7en. However, with this left-of-left-field approach to story telling, it does leave a small amount to be desired. As many skeptics of The Painter have pointed out, the police briefing style of these videos leaves the world-building lacking. Obviously, for what The Painter is going for, that's not entirely necessary, but a sense of place could help the series a tad. A sense of time, however, could ruin the fear factor of this series. Despite the VHS format in mind, grounding The Painter in any decade could compromise the suspense. The scenarios described alone are just vague enough that they could apply to any time period, whether that be 1983 or the present day.

Overall, The Painter is by far the most horrifying analog horror series to date. It may not have the most effort put into it or the most stimulating visuals, but it's definitely one of the more creative, innovative, and hair-raising series on the internet as of today.