User Reviews

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.

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, Amateur analog horror, The Painter is the most graphic series in the genre by far and its reception shows. Most analog horror often relies on high-sharpened visuals, walls of distorted sound, and cliché dialogue in an attempt to overwhelm the viewer with as much stimulation and confusion in hopes the viewer will be scared, often leading to results that seem like tribute works by inexperienced creators. The painter does the exact opposite, letting the content itself do most of the work as opposed to its arrangement. Unlike its competition, it's not dependent on already existing IP's as the source of its lore or compositions. It's not the Five Nights at Freddy's lore 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. Despite its minimal presentation, it conveys more urgency than it may appear at first, due in large part to the music. The music, again in contrast to most analog horror series, was originally composed by UrbanSpook themself, and ranges from unsettling drones to harrowing Post-Industrial akin to musical artists like Xiu Xiu, Uboa, Swans, and Lingua Ignota. UrbanSpook's music amplifies whatever mood is meant to be set by the scenarios described and the paintings shown. The paintings are a bulk of the series and what makes it unique. Some of these artistic depictions of murder victims would be the most disturbing frames in any other series, but in the painter, these pieces of art 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. 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 murder 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 2023.

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

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.

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.