Pareidolia
noun
par·​ei·​do·​lia ˌper-ˌī-ˈdō-lē-ə
-ˈdōl-yə
: the tendency to perceive a specific, often meaningful image in a random or ambiguous visual pattern

Merriam-Webster Dictionary https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pareidolia

People who follow me on Mastodon might have seen me mention my recent experiences with the YouTube series Fake Documentary Q (Japanese with English subtitles) and the sleeping trouble it has given me.

In short, FDQ is a “mockumentary” series, though more in the Blair Witch vein than the Spinal Tap one. It poses itself as a product of real research, found footage, and interviews with real people (except, not, because it is, after all, “fake”) and presents many items without editorial comment or even much context.

There may be comments along the lines of “This video was found in the archives of a local television station. We do not know why it was never broadcast.” or “A viewer sent us a request to investigate this website.” There may be narrative discussing how the footage appeared. Or, there may not. Some videos (like the terrifying SANCTUARY) start in medias res. Some are framed as actual documentary footage with a film crew and interviews. Some aren’t even videos, only audio.

Many of them, though, terrify me. They gave me real, hair-on-end chills as I watched, and some continue to do so as I recall their imagery. Not because of anything so direct as blood or ghosts or monsters. No, it is their vague hinting and intentionally raw nature that is so effective. They use the unreliable nature of video—particularly outdated video media like VHS—to add such a thick layer of confusion and distortion that the mind seeks to fill in the gaps. And the only way we can do that is to posit a world that does not work the way we believe it does.

This is a key tenet of what I might call “classic horror.” The modern genre is scattered and meandering, with splatterpunk and slashers and various in-your-face monsters with clear identities and origins. But the roots lay in tales told around campfires by people who did not know what was in the dark around them. They deal in the horror that comes when the world you see and grasp is revealed to be a thin veneer over a gaping, bottomless chasm of the unknowable. This is the horror of Machen’s The Great God Pan, for example, which has no ghosts or goblins, only a brush with the truly unknowable reality behind the world we know.

When faced with that, we at very best feel humbled. At the very worst, as Lovecraft seems dead set on insisting, we are driven mad by the knowledge of our unbearable tininess in the face of all that is beyond us.

The chill we get from a deep scare, the “frisson of horror” as King puts it in Danse Macabre, comes from the merest glimpse of this. And that is what fills Fake Documentary Q.

All the videos are different. None of them offer any overt connection to the others. But as you watch, some shared threads start to appear that seem to lead to certain conclusions about what might be going on. None of them are comforting.

NOTE: HERE THERE BE SPOILERS. If you ever plan to watch FDQ, go no further. Go in blind. Enjoy the mystery. You have been warned.

Take, for example, distorted faces. The video OBSCURE/オレンジロビンソンの奇妙なブログ reports on a strange blog left by a photo studio employee. He mentions how a certain customer keeps sending requests to overlay the photo of a woman whose face has been blurred and distorted over various family pictures. The requests continue until, finally, an email arrives that simply reads “Thank you” with a picture of the family, whose faces are now all distorted in the same way.

In the video House of Mirrors/鏡の家, a team member is asked to film all the mirrors in a person’s deceased relative’s house to allay his mother’s delusions that the relative is actually trapped in the mirrors. However, on later review, the video shows the figures of various people reflected behind him, all with faces obscured and distorted.

Another thread is the (possible) doorway to hell. In Film Inferno/フィルムインフェルノ, a young couple have disappeared. Their video camera is discovered miles away from where they had last been seen, in a filthy beach bag. The camera is broken and charred, but some of the video is restored. The recording shows the couple having a picnic at the beach, swimming and then—inexplicably—exploring a cave. They get lost. The video shows them growing increasingly panicked and disoriented, as they discover disturbing dolls and disfigured pictures (another common thread), even music coming from an unknown source. The final clip is simply a distorted, flickering red glow and the horrifying sound of screams.

This echoes Plan C/プラン C, which is possibly one of the most viscerally disturbing of the videos. It is an audio recording only, with images laid over to offer a visual aid. It records the final trip of a group of young people who seem to have made a suicide pact. They drive into the mountains, seal their car, and light a charcoal burner to suffocate themselves. The recording goes to the last minute, through their tortured breathing and coughs, until one member begins screaming in horror. The sound of screams amplifies until it becomes a chorus of the damned, then ends. The video concludes with a comment that, when the car was found, it was still sealed from the inside, but no bodies were inside.

In the video BASEMENT, we watch an elevator security video of a woman boarding on the tenth floor of a residential building. As she descends, the video begins to distort, showing other people getting on while she remains alone. The elevator shakes. It moves in odd ways. And, finally, it begins descending endlessly, far beyond the first floor or even any basement. The woman grows increasingly frantic, unable to interact with the outside world beyond a pleading look into the security camera—the eyes of the viewer—until the elevator stops. It opens onto darkness, and the woman, with no other choice apparent, steps hesitantly out into it and vanishes from sight. The elevator immediately closes its doors and returns to regular function.

Other threads touch on folk horror and curses, the terror of being alone in the mountains, the ominous power of photography, and the unease attached to video that doesn’t act like it should.

But all of these threads rely on only hints. There are things shown that seem meaningful, like countless bamboo spikes driven into the ground or crudely twisted twig figures, piles of clothing in the dark woods or a vaguely human shaped lump under a stained blanket, spreading clots of darkness that could be a face or just a shadow. And this is where pareidolia comes in. Because taken on their own, none of these things have meaning. The voice on the radio repeating “8673” in Sanctuary is simply repeating meaningless numbers, but when we see that they match the birthdate of a character in another video, we feel it must signify. We seek patterns to make sense of the senseless. Just look at the Subreddit or YouTube comments to see countless people desperate to understand more about things that are, inherently, beyond understanding.

The videos are so heavily layered with hints and ambiguity that we are desperate to attach meaning. We need to know if the woman in BASEMENT went to hell or if it was all just an elevator bug. But of course, there is no knowing. Setting aside the fact of these stories’ fictionality, they deal entirely with encounters with a realm which goes beyond mere fact. They offer awe inspiring/awful glimpses behind the curtain of knowing, and therein they find power.

The makers of FDQ seem well aware of this need for meaning and encourage viewers to keep trying. They not only engage by retweeting and liking every single explanation theory that comes at them, without comment or verification, their latest video MOTHER is built around the very idea. It is about a man whose mother disappeared from his house when he was a child. Now, as an adult, he has started receiving mysterious packages—old CDs, rocks, pictures of various places around Japan and, most powerfully, a video of a woman’s face in unclear closeup, who seems to be writhing in pain or fear in a dark, firelit space. This last, he is convinced, is his mother, and he begins to investigate all the other items for related meaning.

The piece of sedimentary rock must be connected to the pictures of Sakai city, which was once a coal port, and the city where he lived with his mother once had a coal mine. Does this mean his mother is buried, being turned into part of the earth like coal? Or does the picture of a pile of household items including a tennis racket indicate that she is living somewhere else, because she once played tennis?

What on examination is merely a random collection of items becomes, to him, a palimpsest layered with significance and depth, and he is convinced that if he continues to dig, he will find the answers he so desperately needs.

The video ends with no answers found.

The creators know very well what their viewers are digging for for, and are in no mood to give it to them. So, the search continues.