Jacob I just want you to know "The Voice" affected me equally as much, it is the only story from those books that I can still remember every single word of, and I think of it often
I'm really suprised you didn't mention Little Inferno, it seems very up your alley and fits the themes very well, a kid presumably isolated and alone burning personal items in the fireplace, sort of a horror game in the unsettling sense with broader themes. An indie game as well, Tommorrow Corporation the same as World of Goo. Might want to check it out!
@@pieceofmind1900 he probably just doesn't know about it, I'm sure he would have mentioned it if he did or maybe he just didn't want the video to be too long? 🤔
I have panic attacks about this often. Fear that I can’t control time passing, and that I will experience the feeling of and most likely be mostly conscious in my mental deterioration and it’s completely out of my hands
Completely? You have the ability to recognize times gravity, but unlike celestial gravity you have conscious power to overpower the thought. Rebel against it by not giving it the time of day to haunt you. @@sotiredlol
Honestly, I never used to fear time, until I started to work at a school 3h away (by bus, or 1h away by car, but I have no car) from me. I had to follow a routine of sleeping by 8pm or 9pm to wake up at 5, nobody awake, few people I would meet would be at the bus stop. The bus was normally full to the brim, so I'd have to stand for an hour, stand in line for another hour, sit for another hour and sit or stand (depending on the day) for another hour. Coming back was the same deal. I'd get up at 5am, leave work at 5pm, get home by 8pm, eat, sleep. Any free time was bound to work or seeing my ex, so I didn't have much actual rest. Days would repeat endlessly, sometimes routines would be broken up by constant changes in schedule, or workers falling sick, or a protest, or a strike. Deadlines for activities, deadlines for tests, planning for what to teach to 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 9th graders. I would frequently become physically ill thanks to the bus drives, or the ACs that were on during all the shifts, or because people had come sick (students or staff). And I started to feel like it became a cycle that would repeat every week, every day, every month, every second, every minute, every hour. No time to enjoy things, no time to think about anything else, anxiety crept up on me as the week would start. Then disagreements with Staff and finally I surmised that I was stuck in a cycle of hell that I couldn't control, that I couldn't escape, because even if I cried at night for it to stop... Time would move, and I had to persist.
Yes yes yes!! They’re my absolute favorites of his. I had a huge phase around 2022 where I listened to Jacob’s essays ~constantly~ and I still often fall asleep to them
I’m not a gamer, so I discovered Jacob through these ‘fear of’ videos and they’re the only part of his work that I’m able to understand. They are a fantastically precious rarity. I had a physical reaction of joy when I saw there was a new one.
It's a relief to know that I'm not the only one who's got a fear of looking out windows at night. Sometimes my brain tells me "hey wouldn't it be totally cool if I vividly imagined a man standing outside your window right now? No? Watch this"
My old house had a large kitchen window view down a long block and a stopsign at the end. The window was also high enough someone could feasibly hide beneath it and pop up. Needless to say I share the fear as well.
We have a blind on my kitchen window but no one ever used it. I once told my dad I sometimes didn't like going into the kitchen at night, because of that exact fear, I found it really unsettling to look out into the dark garden, not knowing what could be there, and the reflection of myself looking back that just obscured the view more. I only mentioned it in passing, and since then my dad has always shut the kitchen blind when the sun goes down. That has always meant a lot for some reason
After checking out the Bortle scale I can confirm that I have been in a Class 1 area before. When I was 16 I went on a canoe trip with my youth group to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in northern Minnesota. On the first night we were there, the leader was talking to the group and I was barely paying attention. Then I looked up and my brain broke. I saw all of the stars. All of them. There was no light pollution, no clouds, no moon. I will never forget the awe and wonder of the sky that night. In 2020 the Boundary Waters was designated a Dark Sky Sanctuary, one of 13 in the world. Thank you for reminding me of one of the greatest experiences of my life.
Oh yeah! I dont think ive been anywhere that dark but up in the rocky mountains you can see the milky way so clear. It definitely makes you feel something.
As a child, I once stumbled across a "Japanese urban legend". I've long since forgotten where I heard it, it may not even be Japanese at all. It was titled "The girl in the gap". As a child it was the ultimate culmination of the base question darkness poses. It kept me awake for hours and even now as an adult makes me second guess myself. The legend goes that there is a creature, a girl, who appears in the tiniest sliver of darkness. Between furniture and walls, under beds, in the smallest crack of a closet door. If you ever lock eyes with her, she asks to play a game. It doesn't matter what you say, or do, the game starts from that moment. From that moment on, if you once more encounter the girl, she drags you into the darkness, never to be seen again. This story for me, is the purest incarnation of the question of darkness. Either she isn't there... or she is... An additional sickening turn to this, is that there IS a way out. Going blind. The only way to escape being consumed by the darkness... is to willingly plunge yourself into it. That story creeps into the corners of my mind even more than ten years later
I always found it curious how in the west ghosts are portrayed as sad creatures who are unnerving but not really dangerous and you're supposed to try to help them, while in Asia they're these unstoppable supernatural serial killers who impose blatantly unfair rules on you and then murders the shit out of you for inadvertently breaking them. Though, here in Sweden we do have a folklore creature that is sorta both: The myling, which is the ghost of a murdered unbaptized infant. You could still help those pass on, and fairly easily too if you knew what to do, but they could also kill you or other people if you did it wrong.
“There’s either something or there is nothing” is exactly the reason I would sometimes sleep in my closet as a kid! Sure it was darker than my room and there was no outlet to plug in a nightlight, but it was small enough that I knew for a Fact that nothing could be in there with me, because if there was, I would immediately know.
@@nitelyf.374 Damn, was about to post that, also if it's ethereal and lives within you during the day, you wouldn't know when it comes out... I sleep pretty well lol
@@8darktraveler8 I got inspired last night to write a bit before bed, figure I could share it here. This was just a weird 1am sorta nagging inspiration; I open my eyes. The darkness is absolute, swallowing the entirety of everything I see. The heat of my breath a palpable substance, every shift a tangible caress across my face. The covers cling to me, sticky with sweat. The blankets and heavy air, like weights pinning me to the mattress. The tiny closet, a safe room from the abyss outside, suddenly felt claustrophobic, as if there was less space than there was before. My eyes scan around, static and flashes of light speckle my vision as I try to see anything within the void. Suddenly, I see it, or rather, perceive it. A shadow, a darkness within the darkness, directly above me. My heartbeat quickens, and my breath catches in my throat. I stare, breath becoming shallow as I try to not make a sound. Seconds. Minutes. An hour. Time becomes nothing as fear continues to grip me to my core. A seed within my mind begins to sprout, slowly coming to fruition - it can see me. The heat drains from me, goosebumps raise across my body in a wave of cold static as my stomach sinks within me. My breath stops entirely and I feel so cold I almost begin to shiver. It is as if I had already become a corpse. I close my eyes, but I can still see it, malicious, tangible darkness eating the void. My eyes turn away but I can still feel it's presence, its gaze. I contemplate crying out, for someone, anyone, but I know should a single sound escape me it would already be too late. The heavy air presses down on me, threatening to crush me with it's weight, as if every piece of space the presence dominated were pushed away and compressed back onto me. The weight grows and the room becomes a coffin. I can feel it. Dread turns to complete panic as I feel the difference. My eyes dart frantically behind their lids searching for anything other than the darkness which has completely enveloped them. I open them and it's directly in front of me. I scream as it stares directly at me. My eyes open.
As a child I had sleep rituals almost worrying in their intricacy. I assigned ghosts to various zones of my room and arranged myself so none of them could see me. When I was 12 a drunk man broke into my room and fell asleep next to me in my tiny twin bed. When I woke up I was so sure this was a hallucination that I crept out of the room and fell asleep in my parents’ bed as if it had been a normal nightmare. He wasn’t detected until late the next morning, when we got close enough to my room to hear him snoring. Funnily this more or less fixed my sleep anxiety. It felt like the worst thing that could happen already had. I chilled out substantially after that.
When I was 19 I slept in some strangers home because I was drunk as fuck. Thank god I live in Spain and the family didnt kill me and didnt denounced me because I went out of the house as soon as I woke up. Wildest history I will tell to my sons for sure
I suffer from pretty significant psychosis, and my biggest paranoia was that there was a man in my room and i couldn't go to sleep or he'd hurt me. I couldn't see him, but I was convinced, CONVINCED he was there. I'm on effective meds now but I totally related to this video.
i have auditory hallucinations semi-frequently and one of the worst ones was just fabric shifting. just in the way that lets you know someone was there. I understand the paranoia about the man standing there, and that if somehow you stay up he wont move. I am also on effective meds now lol.
I was an addict as a teen/young adult, and was very ill during and for a decent period afterwards. In/after rehab, every couple of months, I would have an experience of seeing a man in my room. I was sometimes entirely lucid in the dark - not tired, not sleeping, but alone with my thoughts without technology. There was a sort of spiritual experience associated with it. At first, it was just terror, and wrestling with my thoughts and paranoia to make him go away (something I was quite used to). But eventually, I got used to him - not comfortable, but there was nothing I could do. I just had to endure his intrusion. I believe now that it was just a raw manifestation of powerlessness and my total lack of agency and control - the experience of being observed and of breaking myself down in groups/therapy sessions given a body. There is a sense of catharsis there. Almost like my brain was validating my experience externally, and saying “you are not in a good place.” It’s given a beauty in health, when you have a benchmark to compare it to.
I suffered a very similiar when I was a kid due to the stress of being bullied and being punished by my household. But the difference is that whatever is that figure I keeps on creeping to me even if I stay awake. There were times where I swear I could feel it on my skin, sometimes sharp sometimes rough. Specially a dark room in my house will be the source of such triggers. All I could probably do was was scream for help at the top of my lungs. Which resulted in angry parents :D
Psychosis isn't something I've ever suffered from but it's existence terrifies me. I really hope I never ever have to deal with what you've dealt with.
I'm bipolar 1 and have experienced this feeling vividly when manic. I once was convinced someone was watching me from my ceiling corner, no matter how many times I checked with flashlight or camera or having my pets look. I even thought it was haunted, salted and saged that corner.
My dad bought a new house in the middle of nowhere because it was cheaper and he's frugal whenever he can be. He has a big property and the house is modern, with huge windows in the main room looking out onto the backyard. The backyard is literally just a huge empty field because my dad didn't plant anything or put any furniture or even fencing lol. I stayed over to look after his dog one weekend when he was away. I was watching tv and the sun had set and I looked around once my episode finished and literally saw NOTHING but pitch black darkness through these huge windows. No backyard lighting, no neighbours, no treeline to breakup any moonlight. Just literally nothing. And my stomach dropped when I realized my dad was TOO CHEAP TO BUY ANY CURTAINS!!!!!! HE HAD JUST BEEN LIVING LIKE THIS. Watching movies, cooking dinner, eating meals with this vast expanse of darkness just outside his house. anyways I had to cut open some black garbage bags and tape them to the windows because I just couldn't take it.
Small side note: It's really interesting that at 6:00 you mention his sense of time had compressed by a factor of two in complete darkness. Michael Stevens of Vsauce did a similar experiment where he spent 72 hours in complete brightness. A very well lit room that never turned off and had no clock. After what he had assumed had been 72 hours he was waiting by the door for the examiners to let him out, yet he was only like 50 hours into the experiment. In the dark your perception of time doubles but in the light your perception of time halves. I just thought that contrast was really interesting.
The human mind strives for change or novelty of any kind, hence the hallucinations induced when you've looked at the same thing for any amount of time. If you stare expressionlessly at your own face in the mirror, it will eventually distort (this happens faster in the dark), and I imagine that dreams are the same kind of experiential phenomena that exist to prevent us from experiencing sameness for too long, even if it's just lying with our eyes closed. To geek out for a second, this part of the human condition is why I love meditating so much. Meditation is a direct challenge to this strive for novelty by way of integrating mindful observation and bodily stillness without striving for dreams or hallucinations, chasing specific thoughts or emotions, or even engaging in self-talk. Philosophically, there's a strange sense of comfort in recognizing that there's always *something* there, even in the most solitary of darkness - consciousness. The fear of the dark comes from the fear that an unknown, unknowable "other" presence could be concealed within it. With Michael's experience, he knew that no other presence was in the room with him because he could see, but in the dark, there's no frame of reference to denote that anything else is there. Here's a thought experiment: Would you rather consciously stay in prolonged light or darkness? I think I'd actually prefer prolonged darkness - my only stipulation is that it not be cold. Calling back to 'Fear of Cold,' this is a more impactful fear that affects me. Dark without cold? Totally fine. Dark *and* cold? That's something I'm not fond of thinking about, lol.
I find it absolutely genius how Jacob played with our eyes in the first part of this essay. Everytime we stare at him, speaking, clothes dark but with a bright, white background - and then he cuts to a dark scene, a forest, a room, and you see a siluette. You see his siluette plastered all over the image. You know there's nothing there, but... there is. For example, 15:58. With an extra detail that, as he talks about the "man in the corner", you can see his shadow being reflected to our right (his left, behind). This is crazy to me. There are so many layers and intricacies in Geller's works. Only suitable that I find him to be the best essayist I've ever encountered.
He also has background lights in frame after about 26:46 when he's talking about light pollution, and if that's intentional, I think it's meant to evoke UFO sighting descriptions of lights hovering in the sky. (Or it could just be random boats in the background, since those would be slow-moving green, red, and white lights - which, to be fair, would probably account for a lot of sightings that weren't [human-made] aircraft.)
I remember trying to fall asleep in a basement on the couch one night when I was around... 21. There where zero light sources whatsoever. No windows in this room. Not even led lights from any electronics. And then suddenly I saw it. In front of a white door the silhouette of a tall man standing blacker than anything else in the room. And it didn't disappear as I stared closer for what felt like minutes. I just stared at it. This black void shaped so clearly like a man. I honestly can't remember when or how it disappeared. But I can remember the shadow perfectly.
I always liked the interpretation of dark that Ray Bradbury presented in “Switch on the Night” a kids story book about a boy who is afraid of the dark until a little girl named Dark teaches him about the wonders of the dark that can’t exist with the lights on. I loved it for my son as a little kid because instead of saying ‘don’t be scared of the dark cause nothing’s there’ it says you should want to see what’s out there.
Sounds like another kids' book I read (well, listened to in audiobook form), The Owl who was Afraid of the Dark. It sounds like a similar premise, and despite being told that "dark is exciting", "dark is kind", "dark is fun", "dark is necessary", and "dark is fascinating" by various characters throughout the book, the main character doesn't get over his fear until he is shown that "dark is beautiful".
As someone who went in a cave one time to be in the dark, true darkness is a really profound experience. It's hard to explain just how uncanny it feels to not even be able to see your own limbs in front of you, to be able to reach and place your hand over your face and not even see your own hand. It's really weird.
I went deep into a cave once and turned off my lights. I couldn't mentally place my own body within the space I occupied. After awhile, I felt as if I was floating in nothingness. Like my body was slowly turning left, right, down and up all at once - yet, all in the same place.
One of the scariest experiences I've had was during a closing shift at a local Cafe I used to work at. That evening it was storming and thus everything was much darker than normal. A man (who was clearly unwell and had a record of stalking baristas) kept coming and going, his behavior was upseting the other customers but he knew the owner so even though I wanted to kick him out. eventually closing time rolls around and he's gone so me and my coworker get on with the cleaning. She takes the till into the basement to count the money, I finish washing the dishes. I turn around and there he is, standing still inches from the front door. I had to call out to my coworker to make sure she locked the door. I quit that job a few months later, for many reasons this being one of them
holy shit, there's a game titled closing shift very similar to your story that I thought you were talking about game story, check it out asap, you're in for a surprise!
@@Ronam0451 I'm not sure if that's in knowing irony or jest, or actual contempt of the association, but I'd like to point out that it'd very strange for it to be the latter, given that so much of this channel's content is designed around exploring deep concepts by tying in people's experiences and real sentiments to video games, in approaching them as an art form and storytelling medium - and done so exclusively in many videos, and to point, featuring in some prominence in even this video of particular...
@Ronam0451 What a weird thing to make fun of... This channel makes videos about video games and real world things they relate to all the time, he literally did it in this video. I just don't... -how old are you dude?
I had such a visceral reaction to just hearing the title "The Voice" once more after so long. You were NOT alone with that one Jacob. It messed. Me. Up. as a kid and really made me try to understand genuine fear. The fear built from anxiety based on a nagging feeling from deep within you. Not the fear of something grabbing you. But the fear that something *will*. A fear that's deep and primal that you somehow can give to only yourself.
I've never heard of it before, but something about the speed of it is terrifying. 1, 2, 3 They take their attention away. They call for help. In that moment of distraction, the thing outside her door closed the distance.
As a child i remember most vividly falling asleep with my bedside lamp still on, only to wake up to the most terrifying shadows projected on the walls. It was nothing more than a spider who had find her way above the lamp projecting her form upon the walls, but the views of those simingly gigantic black arms closing in from the darkness of my room never escaped me.
That’s an amazing visual. We’ve evolved to fear things like spiders and snakes, and for good reason! It’s as if your brain was still able to process the changing light pattern in your room as you slept, even with your eyes being closed, and decided to wake you to make sure the dancing shadows were not from what it feared it might be.
When I was younger, I used to feel conflicted as to whether or not I wanted to leave my bathroom light on at night - the light was comforting, but, at the same time, what if I looked between the backlit gap in my door and the floor and saw a pair of feet blocking the light? I never knew how to balance my fear of the dark and my fear of what the light could reveal. "Darkness" by Byron is among my favourite poems; "Skinamarink" is among my favourite horror films; the fear I experience when looking out a window at night is the same as yours: "what if it stops being empty?" This video felt handcrafted for me; at its conclusion, during the song you played, I felt nearly moved to tears for reasons I can't quite explain. This is truly among the best videos I've ever seen on this website. I am grateful to be alive to experience this series as it is created. Thank you.
I go overnight fishing about 20-40 miles off the coast of Maine at least once per summer, and I've never experienced night or void more intense than the open Atlantic. Looking around and seeing no land in any direction and being hardly able to tell where the sky ends and the sea begins is the most surreal, grounding experience that I don't think I'll ever top in my lifetime. Like, I stand there on the deck and stare up into the stars and think about how solid ground is 500ft below me and miles farther away on all sides and I'm just there in a tin can in the middle of the ocean and I'm so imperceptibly small in the middle of everything. And when I describe this to people they often tell me it sounds scary, but there's so much beauty in that void which I'll never be able to adequately put into words. It forever haunts my art and everything I do, it's just so amazing.
I don't know a damn thing about fishing but I would love to be out there and take in that feeling. I imagine it's what out ancestors ancestors felt all the millenia ago
I never thought I would hear someone else speak about the darkness at sea. I sailed across the Atlantic once as crew on a very small ship. On a moonless night with no clouds and extremely calm water, the stars reflecting in the ocean were genuinely indistinguishable from their counterparts and you could not see where the water ended at the horizon. It was like being in a snowglobe surrounded completely, and honestly I thought I imagined it for many years. Huh
You just reminded me of hearing that story (the voice) at summer camp when some other campers decided to scare the ever loving life out of me by replacing Ellen’s name with mine and sing-songing the “I’m on the first step, I’m on the second step” part which somehow made it more frightening. In years later at camp I saw other campers get the same treatment except sometimes they’d have an accomplice sneaking up behind the victim of the story and grabbing their shoulders at the climax so the person would scream and jump. I’m happy the story lives, because it was one of my first experiences with deliberate horror and as much as I HATED it at the time (big scaredy cat) it has stuck with me for the sensation of night-shivers down my spine in the middle of a sunny day.
Some years ago, I came across a quote from somewhere I can't recall. "We are afraid of the dark because our instinct knows that there could be be things in the darkness that want to kill and eat us. Like a tiger. Tigers are not afraid of the dark, because they know the most dangerous thing that could be in the darkness is a tiger." I am reminding myself that in my home, I am the tiger.
@@Yora21What if there’s a tiger in your house that you can’t see when you turn off the light? Do you know who wouldn’t have a tiger? A lighthouse keeper.
@@Yora21 Yeah but tigers have a retroreflector behind their eye (the tapetum lucidum), pupils which at their widest can cover most of the surface of their eye, and a higher proportion of rod cells in their eyes. The tiger isn't scared because it doesn't think it's dark at all. Or to put it another way, whatever is skulking in the dark is able to see just fine.
Stunning. The first video of yours I saw was Fear of Depths, which immediately captivated me, and this really captures that feeling again. Very well made.
@ But I think its either that channel members get the videos early, or its kind of like a premier of the video or something, I'm not sure. But yeah, I've seen videos that come out where there's already more likes than views on it, so it seems to be common
Seeing everyone share their experiences with the fear of dark is really reassuring me because i thought the way i could instantly become paranoid of SOMETHING there in the dark just from one thought was childish. I can still barely forgive the magnus archives for ep 111. On the other hand, the reassurance of "we're scared of this too" is immediately outweighed by how much new nightmare material this video ended up giving me, LOL
I'm so glad you talked about skinnamarink in this video, I left the theatre after watching it shaken, and I had to go round to my partner's house to stay the night because the thought of being alone in the dark was terrifying
I was watching it in my living room and had to pause to turn the lights on at some point…. I’m sure it would have been a more visceral experience if I hadn’t had that option but it was already really getting to me 😅
Jacob is one of the few RUclipsrs who actually knows how to make a real video essay as opposed to a superficial plot summary with stolen analysis tacked on.
“When you say ‘he has seen the light’ you sound as if you mean ‘corrupted,’” he said. “Something like that, yes. Different worlds, Commander. Down here, it would be unwise to trust your metaphors. To see the light is to be blinded. Do you not know that in the darkness, the eyes open wider?” - Terry Pratchett, Thud!
I'm reading through that book right now. The way it uses darkness and light is very evocative, an extremely sensual book, in that it uses all senses to their fullest potential.
Thank you, I was thinking about this book the whole time! I haven't read it recently enough to properly compare it to this video, but damn, what an amazingly evocative narrative. I'm also reminded of The Tombs of Atuan, the best Earthsea book.
I spent over two decades of my life thinking that my greatest fear was the dark. Turns out my greatest fear is being alone, and being alone in the dark just reinforces that fear like nothing else. The unknown is nowhere near as scary if we face it together
Yes! I'm like this too and I found this out when my brother went on a night out in my new apartment (first time I was alone in my living quarters since I was born) and I started hallucinating sounds and people. But when I have people around me, I can go out in the dark no problems
I don't know if you have a connection to her at all, but can you see if you can get Ashley Young to release the song at the end on her spotify account? Or ask Jacob to?
This is exactly what made Hereditary on the scariest movies for me. The scenes where someone is in the corner, looming barely visible in a dark room were extremely unsettling.
when you started talking about more scary stories to tell in the dark I immediately knew which story you would talk about, that one terrified me as a kid
Charles Bonnet syndrome is the name for when these hallucinations happen after physical vision loss - it's similar to phantom limb, where the brain regions responsible for receiving sensory input start firing disorganizedly when that input is fully lost (normally there's a baseline "nothing's happening" signal that keeps things organized in the conventional absence of sensory data). Oliver Sacks wrote a fair bit about these types of hallucinations, how these regions of the brain eventually get 'bored' and start firing without specific structure, and then later brain areas interpret that signalling the same way as any other sensory signal that would be passed to them. Phantom limb is this kind of hallucination for proprioceptive and tactile information - charles bonnet syndrome is the same, for partial or complete vision loss, and can involve highly complex and detailed imagery without even dream logic to cohere it together.
Charles Bonnet Syndrome is likely very similar to how Tinnitus can often work. Tinnitus (unless caused by hearing damage i think) is caused by a lack of auditory stimulus.
It's also interesting to note that, for people who've undergone temporary blindness, they experience Charles Bonnet syndrome for quite a while, becoming increasingly vivid and clear, until their visual processors completely shut off. Instead of darkness, they experience ... a complete lack of visual data. Even visual memory gets jettisoned. Then, later, when they regain sight, it comes right back. I don't remember the exact source, but I remember learning this from a story of somebody who hit their head hard enough they went completely blind, and later hit their head and regained sight. Would love a cross-ref, or somebody who remembers more details than I.
@@God_Yeeter I had no idea it could happen without hearing damage, when I noticed ringing in my ears i just assumed I listened to too much loud music. I mean I mightve, hard to tell when you only notice the ringing when it's silent anyways
@MarzaButTube what op describes is how i would describe my experience with tinnitus too! there was a period in time, right before lockdown, where I began to pay attention to the silence. there was no logic to it, it wasn't conscious either and I have no hearing damage or impairment of any kind. it's all occuring mentally. one moment I am myself, and the next, I suddenly begin to perceive this 'absence' as its own presence. I 'hear silence', a mental, intangible and low strident ringing that no physical item can change. I've been hearing silence ever since that period. it's very odd to spell it out that way, but I never found any other better descriptor to it. it used to terrify me, and I need ambience to cover it up in order to sleep nowadays. it used to be a major obstacle to it, I was always particularly sensitive of sound. hearing silence is a paradoxical concept, but if what op says about the functions of tinnitus is true, then it'd finally provide a solid, grounded explanation to the experience. in the same way that you conjure mental shapes in the dark, tinnitus would be the brain providing artificial, mental sound in the absence of any actual, real sound!
This really does feel like a true magnum opus for this channel. The culmination of the Fear series, filled with small nods to other past videos, on a topic that may well lurk in every single video on the channel. It feels like a celebration, of the channel, of the genre, of the 6 years we’ve spent here, growing and learning together. Watching it made me more emotional than I think a video has ever made me feel. Congratulations and thank you for everything, Jacob. Here’s to many more.
i hope this doesn't seem like excessive praise because i mean it sincerely: the way you turned "there's nothing there, or there's something there" on its head with the silhouetted hand against a night sky is perhaps one of the most beautiful descriptions of human mortality i've ever heard.
34:00 I had wondered about the odd lighting in the hallway scene with the level of white balance shifting constantly through the video, the kind of poor camera quality you would see in a lesser essayist. But I had faith in Gellar that it was part of a bit to prove a point, and lo and behold. Excellently done as always.
my favorite book when i was a child was Jean DuPrau's book "City of Ember." it was a post-apocalyptic story about two kids trying to escape their underground city, because the city was starting to lose power. i think the thing that captivated me about it was the idea that the horror of Why the city had been built underground (being that it was a last refuge for humanity after a nuclear war) wasnt really talked about directly. Instead, the horror was the fact that the blackouts that plagued the city were getting longer and more frequent. there was this creeping dread all the characters felt that any one of these blackouts could be the one where the lights never came back on. I thought about that book quite a few times while watching this video lol, i have no idea if the writing is what im making it out to be since i read it 14+ years ago, but metaphorically i think it feels right at home with everything you talked about here. amazing video as always!!
@@nvrndingsmmr I remember my 6th grade English class read this book, and we watched the movie together too when it came out in like 2008! I remember thinking it wasn’t half bad, it’s got a surprisingly high budget cast with a young Saoirse Ronan and Bill Murray. I remember that in the movie they decided to add giant creatures that were the result of nuclear radiation to the story, for more fear factor. I don’t think there were any in the books, but in the movie it’s shown that there are horse-sized beetles that lurk in the darkness outside the city limits that pose a threat to the humans who try to escape Ember, and elephant-sized moles that live in the sewers. It was mostly the same as the book, I guess little me liked it. Spoiler alert, Bill Murray gets eaten.
I feel like the "the year the sun disappeared" or properly known as the volcanic winter of 536 could've been in this video. The entirety of Europe and Asia had absolutely none/no proper sunlight. I know it's not 'true darkness', but it feels like it would fit The quotes from people in the Roman empire during this period on this, are downright apocalyptic. "At noon, no shadows from people were visible on the ground" "A winter without storms, a spring without mildness, and a summer without heat" -Cassiodorus Temps dropped, crops universally failed, frosts during harvest season. Mediterranean was besieged by a plague. I think that people back then thought the world was at its end, Ragnarök come.
The dark is basically like schrodingers cat where horrors can only exist in the dark and only cease to exist upon trying to observe them or switching on a light.
I'm so glad you mentioned the windows. I've always had a fear of uncovered windows at night, and it has persisted into my adulthood. Honestly, I think it's worse than it used to be. I've always been afraid of seeing glowing eyes outside more than anything. That specific possibility has always scared me more than anything else, and I can't even explain why. Loved this video so much, every "fear of" video you've made is so incredible
I’m surprised someone else has the same exact fear of glowing eyes illuminating the dark. I believe it’s scarier since, as Jacob said, you know “something is there” but you can’t make out exactly what, thus letting your imagination take over. Thanks for sharing.
The Descent is one of my favorite movies and it really is stunning how dark the entire thing is. I tried to show it to a friend of mine in the middle of the day once and we had to shut all the blinds and adjust on the couch so the glare didn’t obscure it
It’s so good! The darkness and claustrophobia of being trapped in the cave is so terrifying (along with the fact that anyone looking for them would be looking in the wrong cave system) that the horror of the monsters feels so minor in comparison. (Your best friend has betrayed you in every worst way possible…also there are monsters.) It’s brilliant writing
I'm impressed with the contrast between being terrified of the shadows at the bottom of the stairs and being comforted by the darkness of the pure night sky in the same thirty minutes of this video. Also, changing the "there's nothing there; there's something there" idea to be a comfort rather than a fear is a quintessential Jacob Gellar move.
17:20 This is it! This is me! I'm a fully grown man, and I still cannot go near an uncovered window at night. Even if I have no choice, I keep my head turned away
I love Jacob’s “Fear Series”. RUclips randomly recommending his Fear of Cold video to me is how I discovered this channel, and I’m so thankful that it did.
The worst thing my friend ever told me was that, while getting an eye procedure done, they flipped her lens and she said she saw nothing Not blackness Not dark Simply nothing
I once heard a description not seeing by a completely blind person who said it's like looking at the back of your own head and thinking about it that way blew my mind.
You can get an idea for what that's like by closing one eye, your brain will stop using its inputs because of the good eye and you see nothing out of the closed eye
We imagine nothing as inky black, because our minds cannot grasp the idea of absence of something. We won't understand, not even when we return to nothing.
It is fascinating how dependent on vision we are. Darkness only makes us lose one sense, but it is so much more terrifying than losing any other sensation.
i just- like, literally an hour ago- broke up with a friend. the one who was the first to show me compassion. ever. outside of family friends. to watch her get radicalized so fast hurt so, so bad. this video couldn't have dropped at a better time. thank you.
I work as an overnight chemist at a manufacturing plant. We have one window in our lab. The window is part of the fire exit door. One night I heard a bang in the parking lot that the window looks out to. I peered out the window to find man’s face looking right at me in the window. I yelled and my fight or flight reflexes jumped. Turns out it was just a delivery driver bringing pizza and just couldn’t find the right door. However I any time I look at the dark beyond the window I get chills from that moment still.
As someone with psychosis, the dark has always worsen my delusions and caused me to develop an irrational, intense fear of the dark. This video perfectly explains the type of shit my mind goes through whenever I'm in the rare instance of being submerged in complete darkness, the irrational thoughts of "I'm going to be attacked at any moment and I am not safe" dig into my brain whenever I have to gaze into the blinding darkness.
i am petrified of the dark, to a point where it's almost certainly a diagnosable phobia. i can barely focus in windowless rooms, elevators feel like traps, the lights went out in a public bathroom two years ago and i genuinely have some lasting trauma from it. my room is never dark enough to completely obscure everything, and the rest of my apartment is always partially lit. my apartment building is an assisted living facility and uses light as easy security, so my windows are always lit and the hallway lights stay on even in a power outage. but i know that darkness still isn't far away. your explanation for this fear will stick with me, because i've always struggled to define it coherently. thank you for this.
I intentionally chose to work nights in a warehouse as one of my first adult jobs specifically because it meant I would spend the dark hours in a well-lit building full of life and movement. The sun was always up when I awoke in the afternoon; nightmares vanished as soon as I opened my eyes in the middle of the “night.” As someone who is often terrified of the dark, it was lovely.
in the shots which alternate between a dark shot of a bedroom, and you talking in a well lit room, because of the phosphene effect, a human silloutte is imprinted upon the dark room. the first time this happens, its when you read the end of the short story saying "No one was there." absolutely brilliant
17:20 It's kinda comforting to know that I'm not the only person with a fear of looking out of windows at night. I can reliably cope with the darkness of the indoors, with the potential of the unknown within a space that I know well, but... I have no control over the other side of that glass, and the multitude of things that go bump on the porch do not help matters. The fact that it's literally always raccoons does nothing to ease the anxiety.
This is likely going to be lost to the void of comments, but I just lost my most cherished friend and pet. She's a ferret, or well, was a ferret, but I loved Cookie with every part of my soul and losing her felt kind of like being dunked into the dark. Your video helped me immensely. Thank you.
I was about fifteen seconds into this video when I turned off all the lights and went into my windowless bathroom, I used RUclips premium and turned off my screen and experienced the video that way. It was magic. All my perception has been changed for a brief time by the void. I am sorry if you made aesthetic decisions for this video for I did not experience them. I give this video a 10/10
I've been afraid of the dark all my life, even into adulthood. I usually jokingly refer to it as "what if there was a guy there," but I've never heard it put in such an eloquent way that gets to the core of why it's terrifying. Thank you for another banger Jacob. I'm watching this in the daytime, but looking forward to when night falls and I lay in bed, heart racing thinking of this video.
One of my scariest experiences, is from recent years, when I used to go cycling alone on the road. At the time I would leave the house at around 4am, so I could be on my usual track as the sun would be rising. Thing is, that measuring the exact time of sunrise is trick, since it changes throughout the year. That said, I left home way too early, the sun wouldn't come out for at least another hour, and I was out alone in the dark on the road. There was still some lights around, but my track goes to the neighboring town and then back, there's no lighting on the outside road. I reassure myself and start cycling on the dark road, the further away I get from my town the darker it gets, there's nothing but the road and rough nature on both sides. I then start to hallucinate, I see shapes from tree stumps, unlit reflective street signs in the distance, large rocks. I become hyper aware of someone running from the dark and pushing me off the bike. I speed up. Eventually I get to the other town, and then the sun rises. I thought I'd been riding for at least an hour, but it took short of 30 minutes, I've never done that track that fast before, nor since.
Watched on Nebula a couple days ago and just had to comment that this might be my favorite video of yours. Using the "there's nothing there or there's something there" framework to slowly build tension and reveal more terrifying secrets about the dark, only to completely subvert expectations by using that motif to end the video with a tinge of optimism was seriously one of the most moving moments I've ever experienced from your videos. I spent most of the video dreading the next thing you'd talk about, just to end the video with a complete smile on my face. Wonderful work, Jacob.
Mentioned what I was watching to the wife & she mentioned how our 3 yr old is waking at night in her room and crying for us. I hadn't put the 2 together but makes sense. Loved the Scary Stories so much as a kid I tracked them down for my library. Great video, sir.
I had the same thought. I also have aphantasia and I've never been particularly bothered by darkness. If anything, I prefer it to bright light. I've never tried to go without light for days so I'm curious how I'd react.
@@Yora21 I have aphantasia and I can have visual halluzinations during meditation! Blew my mind the first time it happened. I can imagine that people with aphantasia have a harder time reaching that point but it surely isn't impossible. Let me know if you find any research!
AFAIK aphantasia only makes you unable to *consciously* imagine sights, so if you can see your dreams then I imagine you'll react to the room the same as us.
"I have watched all his other Fear of Videos" I said to myself "I will surely love this one as well and only get chilla a couple of times" The DREAD I felt throughout this video, I knew I shouldn't have listened to the reading of The Voice and I might have trouble sleeping tonight lol I think you truly outside yourself this time, the editing, the script, the pacing, the sfxs, your narration, you truly accomplished so much
It's amazing how strongly our brain rebels against darkness. I remember in my photography class having to develop photos in the darkroom. There was a small cupboard with two curtains to make sure no light got in while you opened up your film canister, unwound it, and rewound it into the container containing the solution necessary to make the chemical reaction happen. We had to practice for days bwforehand with empty tester film winding and unwinding, screwing and unscrewing, mastering a precise process we'd have to perform in total darkness. And I always found it odd that every time, I found it easier to do if I kept my eyes wide open, even if I couldn't see anything. Because if I looked down at where I knew my hands would be, looked down at where I knew the canister was, it was easier than keeping them closed. Because my brain would create phantom images of the movements I was making, vague shapes and forms to help guide me. I'd forgotten about that until your video. I always found it a very strange experience: how closing my eyes was worse than keeping them open, just so my brain could try its hardest to make sense out of the nothing.
23:40 I live in Moore County. When the power went out that night, my family just assumed a tree fell somewhere (we live in a very rural area). We only figured out what happened the next morning. My dad got up around 4 to go running; went into town to discover all street and traffic lights down. His running buddies told him about the shooting. They did their run by the snatches of Christmas lights outside the houses that had generators, which was every half-mile or so. My friend’s grandpa had a heart attack during the blackout. They lived about 45 mins away; their power didn’t even go out. But the only suitable hospital was in our county, and the roads were so unsafe that by the time they got there it was too late.
Hey Jacob! I just wanted to say. Ive been learning how to sew for the first time lately. And ive been working on making this set of jacket and pants covered in patches. And your videos have been my preferred thing to listen to pass the time while I work for hours and hours making it happen. Its really been such a joy. I really apreciate your art!
WOW, I was expecting a Jacob Gellar video soon, but I was not expecting the culmination of all your fear videos, AND the first of your videos I watched "Control, Anatomy, and the legacy of the Haunted House". this was incredible, my mind is reeling, thank you, thank you so much.
In an odd kind of symmetry to losing sense of time in the dark - Years ago while working at a bar, I struck up conversation with a dude who had literally just flown back from working in Antarctica where he was an mechanic. He was coming back because he didn't like doing the winter shifts. One of the things he said was that it was hard enough when it was daylight all the time. He told me about how during his first shift there, he was doing maintenance on one of the vehicles, when one of his colleagues came up and asked what he was doing. He said he'd just been doing his job, and the guy said "You realise its 3am, right?" The dude said he hadn't noticed at all. Everything took a bit longer to do in the cold anyway, but he assumed it was the early afternoon. He just went back inside to sleep, but said it was wild how easy it was to lose track of time in the absence of it getting dark.
I was HOPING House of Leaves would make it in here!! That book has captured my mind for so many reasons, including the way it discusses battling the dark.
11:10 no but my 3rd grade teacher read this to us an hearing “I am coming up the stairs” straight up triggered just how terrified and enthralled I was. I had completely forgotten about this until now. Now that I think about it, it was probably my first brush with horror.
I love these serious dives into horror and fear, Jacob. Really I do. But with this one, I just CANNOT stop thinking about "Man hand hook hand car door"
17:25 when i was a kid, i slept in the living room, because our house had too few bedrooms. i had and still have a lot of trouble with insomnia, and spent a lot of time lying awake on the couch, in the quiet darkness of that room. it had many windows, and only a couple of them had curtains. my greatest fears were constantly in tension with each other, one, that something could see me through those windows, and two, that i might see it. my heart would pound as i tried to tear my eyes away from the window across from the couch, trying to bury myself in my blankets and lie perfectly still. sometimes i didnt sleep until the sun came up. thank you jacob, great work.
i think "can you see the dark" and "is water wet" are very similar arguments ! just like the semantic argument is that water in itself is not wet , but other objects that come into contact with it are , i think that if you saw a room down the hall without light that you'd be 'seeing the dark' , but if you're in it and unable to see , you are in the dark , seeing an absence of light
fun fact: The word "window" originates from the Old Norse word "vindauga", which is a combination of "vindr" (wind) and "auga" (eye), meaning "wind eye." so Windows basically means eye
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Jacob I just want you to know "The Voice" affected me equally as much, it is the only story from those books that I can still remember every single word of, and I think of it often
I'm really suprised you didn't mention Little Inferno, it seems very up your alley and fits the themes very well, a kid presumably isolated and alone burning personal items in the fireplace, sort of a horror game in the unsettling sense with broader themes. An indie game as well, Tommorrow Corporation the same as World of Goo. Might want to check it out!
@@pieceofmind1900 he probably just doesn't know about it, I'm sure he would have mentioned it if he did
or maybe he just didn't want the video to be too long? 🤔
@@pieceofmind1900I've played and beat the game! There are just too many pieces of media about the dark to include all of them.
you are by far my favourite creator
I’d kill for a Fear of Time video, I think it would likely be a total masterpiece.
I have panic attacks about this often. Fear that I can’t control time passing, and that I will experience the feeling of and most likely be mostly conscious in my mental deterioration and it’s completely out of my hands
I know that Fear of Time manifests itself in different forms, but I liked Daryl Talks Games' video named "Stories that Use Time to Hurt You."
Completely? You have the ability to recognize times gravity, but unlike celestial gravity you have conscious power to overpower the thought. Rebel against it by not giving it the time of day to haunt you. @@sotiredlol
Honestly, I never used to fear time, until I started to work at a school 3h away (by bus, or 1h away by car, but I have no car) from me. I had to follow a routine of sleeping by 8pm or 9pm to wake up at 5, nobody awake, few people I would meet would be at the bus stop.
The bus was normally full to the brim, so I'd have to stand for an hour, stand in line for another hour, sit for another hour and sit or stand (depending on the day) for another hour. Coming back was the same deal.
I'd get up at 5am, leave work at 5pm, get home by 8pm, eat, sleep. Any free time was bound to work or seeing my ex, so I didn't have much actual rest.
Days would repeat endlessly, sometimes routines would be broken up by constant changes in schedule, or workers falling sick, or a protest, or a strike. Deadlines for activities, deadlines for tests, planning for what to teach to 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 9th graders.
I would frequently become physically ill thanks to the bus drives, or the ACs that were on during all the shifts, or because people had come sick (students or staff). And I started to feel like it became a cycle that would repeat every week, every day, every month, every second, every minute, every hour. No time to enjoy things, no time to think about anything else, anxiety crept up on me as the week would start. Then disagreements with Staff and finally I surmised that I was stuck in a cycle of hell that I couldn't control, that I couldn't escape, because even if I cried at night for it to stop... Time would move, and I had to persist.
ZA WARUDO!
Every single "Fear Of" video you've done has been moving in a deep, emotional way that I can't quite describe, thank you for continuing to make these.
Yes yes yes!! They’re my absolute favorites of his. I had a huge phase around 2022 where I listened to Jacob’s essays ~constantly~ and I still often fall asleep to them
yes
I’m not a gamer, so I discovered Jacob through these ‘fear of’ videos and they’re the only part of his work that I’m able to understand. They are a fantastically precious rarity. I had a physical reaction of joy when I saw there was a new one.
honestly, i feel this way about all of his videos 😅 his one about “art for no one” is so incredible
This is the first video I've seen of his and the community has ruined it
It's a relief to know that I'm not the only one who's got a fear of looking out windows at night. Sometimes my brain tells me "hey wouldn't it be totally cool if I vividly imagined a man standing outside your window right now? No? Watch this"
My old house had a large kitchen window view down a long block and a stopsign at the end. The window was also high enough someone could feasibly hide beneath it and pop up. Needless to say I share the fear as well.
My brain would punish me imagining picture of my pale doppelganger in a window of my room. I mean, when i'm outside and looking at my window.
We have a blind on my kitchen window but no one ever used it. I once told my dad I sometimes didn't like going into the kitchen at night, because of that exact fear, I found it really unsettling to look out into the dark garden, not knowing what could be there, and the reflection of myself looking back that just obscured the view more. I only mentioned it in passing, and since then my dad has always shut the kitchen blind when the sun goes down. That has always meant a lot for some reason
@mimipaige8 W for your dad. When I was a little kid I had all kinds of fears but I was just ridiculed lol
I legit came to the comments to say exactly this
After checking out the Bortle scale I can confirm that I have been in a Class 1 area before. When I was 16 I went on a canoe trip with my youth group to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in northern Minnesota. On the first night we were there, the leader was talking to the group and I was barely paying attention. Then I looked up and my brain broke. I saw all of the stars. All of them. There was no light pollution, no clouds, no moon. I will never forget the awe and wonder of the sky that night. In 2020 the Boundary Waters was designated a Dark Sky Sanctuary, one of 13 in the world. Thank you for reminding me of one of the greatest experiences of my life.
Oh yeah! I dont think ive been anywhere that dark but up in the rocky mountains you can see the milky way so clear. It definitely makes you feel something.
As a child, I once stumbled across a "Japanese urban legend". I've long since forgotten where I heard it, it may not even be Japanese at all. It was titled "The girl in the gap". As a child it was the ultimate culmination of the base question darkness poses. It kept me awake for hours and even now as an adult makes me second guess myself. The legend goes that there is a creature, a girl, who appears in the tiniest sliver of darkness. Between furniture and walls, under beds, in the smallest crack of a closet door. If you ever lock eyes with her, she asks to play a game. It doesn't matter what you say, or do, the game starts from that moment. From that moment on, if you once more encounter the girl, she drags you into the darkness, never to be seen again.
This story for me, is the purest incarnation of the question of darkness. Either she isn't there... or she is... An additional sickening turn to this, is that there IS a way out.
Going blind. The only way to escape being consumed by the darkness... is to willingly plunge yourself into it.
That story creeps into the corners of my mind even more than ten years later
I always found it curious how in the west ghosts are portrayed as sad creatures who are unnerving but not really dangerous and you're supposed to try to help them, while in Asia they're these unstoppable supernatural serial killers who impose blatantly unfair rules on you and then murders the shit out of you for inadvertently breaking them.
Though, here in Sweden we do have a folklore creature that is sorta both: The myling, which is the ghost of a murdered unbaptized infant. You could still help those pass on, and fairly easily too if you knew what to do, but they could also kill you or other people if you did it wrong.
@RelativelyBest as an american, trust me we have plenty of ghost tales that are not about benign entities
@@scaredoclock3881 Don't those usually turn out to be demons, though? I dunno, that's just the impression I get.
and then ZUN turned the woman in the gap into Yakumo Yukari
@@tranquoccuong890-its-orgeCRAP YOU'RE TOTALLY RIGHT
“There’s either something or there is nothing” is exactly the reason I would sometimes sleep in my closet as a kid! Sure it was darker than my room and there was no outlet to plug in a nightlight, but it was small enough that I knew for a Fact that nothing could be in there with me, because if there was, I would immediately know.
You wouldn't know if it was clinging to the ceiling, silently watching. It could just seep in through the cracks in the doors.
You should not have said that
This is brilliant
@@nitelyf.374 Damn, was about to post that, also if it's ethereal and lives within you during the day, you wouldn't know when it comes out...
I sleep pretty well lol
@@8darktraveler8 I got inspired last night to write a bit before bed, figure I could share it here. This was just a weird 1am sorta nagging inspiration;
I open my eyes. The darkness is absolute, swallowing the entirety of everything I see. The heat of my breath a palpable substance, every shift a tangible caress across my face. The covers cling to me, sticky with sweat. The blankets and heavy air, like weights pinning me to the mattress. The tiny closet, a safe room from the abyss outside, suddenly felt claustrophobic, as if there was less space than there was before. My eyes scan around, static and flashes of light speckle my vision as I try to see anything within the void. Suddenly, I see it, or rather, perceive it. A shadow, a darkness within the darkness, directly above me. My heartbeat quickens, and my breath catches in my throat. I stare, breath becoming shallow as I try to not make a sound. Seconds. Minutes. An hour. Time becomes nothing as fear continues to grip me to my core. A seed within my mind begins to sprout, slowly coming to fruition - it can see me. The heat drains from me, goosebumps raise across my body in a wave of cold static as my stomach sinks within me. My breath stops entirely and I feel so cold I almost begin to shiver. It is as if I had already become a corpse. I close my eyes, but I can still see it, malicious, tangible darkness eating the void. My eyes turn away but I can still feel it's presence, its gaze. I contemplate crying out, for someone, anyone, but I know should a single sound escape me it would already be too late. The heavy air presses down on me, threatening to crush me with it's weight, as if every piece of space the presence dominated were pushed away and compressed back onto me. The weight grows and the room becomes a coffin. I can feel it. Dread turns to complete panic as I feel the difference. My eyes dart frantically behind their lids searching for anything other than the darkness which has completely enveloped them. I open them and it's directly in front of me. I scream as it stares directly at me. My eyes open.
Poor young jacob has room with bad Feng Shui
JoJo ref
Lol
"So, now you know" :D
@@piggy743 no, Feng Shui is an independent thing. Too bad cant follow it myself
Dude's going for a liminal vibe. It's unsettlicious.
As a child I had sleep rituals almost worrying in their intricacy. I assigned ghosts to various zones of my room and arranged myself so none of them could see me.
When I was 12 a drunk man broke into my room and fell asleep next to me in my tiny twin bed. When I woke up I was so sure this was a hallucination that I crept out of the room and fell asleep in my parents’ bed as if it had been a normal nightmare. He wasn’t detected until late the next morning, when we got close enough to my room to hear him snoring.
Funnily this more or less fixed my sleep anxiety. It felt like the worst thing that could happen already had. I chilled out substantially after that.
Holy shit 😅 I'm glad it helped you mellow out rather than exacerbating things!
what a horrific story 😭😭 I’m so sorry you had to go through that
nah id barricade my room after that 😭
When I was 19 I slept in some strangers home because I was drunk as fuck. Thank god I live in Spain and the family didnt kill me and didnt denounced me because I went out of the house as soon as I woke up. Wildest history I will tell to my sons for sure
Sorry dude, my bad.
I suffer from pretty significant psychosis, and my biggest paranoia was that there was a man in my room and i couldn't go to sleep or he'd hurt me. I couldn't see him, but I was convinced, CONVINCED he was there. I'm on effective meds now but I totally related to this video.
i have auditory hallucinations semi-frequently and one of the worst ones was just fabric shifting. just in the way that lets you know someone was there. I understand the paranoia about the man standing there, and that if somehow you stay up he wont move. I am also on effective meds now lol.
I was an addict as a teen/young adult, and was very ill during and for a decent period afterwards. In/after rehab, every couple of months, I would have an experience of seeing a man in my room. I was sometimes entirely lucid in the dark - not tired, not sleeping, but alone with my thoughts without technology.
There was a sort of spiritual experience associated with it. At first, it was just terror, and wrestling with my thoughts and paranoia to make him go away (something I was quite used to). But eventually, I got used to him - not comfortable, but there was nothing I could do. I just had to endure his intrusion.
I believe now that it was just a raw manifestation of powerlessness and my total lack of agency and control - the experience of being observed and of breaking myself down in groups/therapy sessions given a body.
There is a sense of catharsis there. Almost like my brain was validating my experience externally, and saying “you are not in a good place.” It’s given a beauty in health, when you have a benchmark to compare it to.
I suffered a very similiar when I was a kid due to the stress of being bullied and being punished by my household. But the difference is that whatever is that figure I keeps on creeping to me even if I stay awake. There were times where I swear I could feel it on my skin, sometimes sharp sometimes rough. Specially a dark room in my house will be the source of such triggers. All I could probably do was was scream for help at the top of my lungs. Which resulted in angry parents :D
Psychosis isn't something I've ever suffered from but it's existence terrifies me. I really hope I never ever have to deal with what you've dealt with.
I'm bipolar 1 and have experienced this feeling vividly when manic. I once was convinced someone was watching me from my ceiling corner, no matter how many times I checked with flashlight or camera or having my pets look. I even thought it was haunted, salted and saged that corner.
My dad bought a new house in the middle of nowhere because it was cheaper and he's frugal whenever he can be. He has a big property and the house is modern, with huge windows in the main room looking out onto the backyard. The backyard is literally just a huge empty field because my dad didn't plant anything or put any furniture or even fencing lol. I stayed over to look after his dog one weekend when he was away. I was watching tv and the sun had set and I looked around once my episode finished and literally saw NOTHING but pitch black darkness through these huge windows. No backyard lighting, no neighbours, no treeline to breakup any moonlight. Just literally nothing. And my stomach dropped when I realized my dad was TOO CHEAP TO BUY ANY CURTAINS!!!!!! HE HAD JUST BEEN LIVING LIKE THIS. Watching movies, cooking dinner, eating meals with this vast expanse of darkness just outside his house.
anyways I had to cut open some black garbage bags and tape them to the windows because I just couldn't take it.
that is insane levels of fearlessness, imo at least lol. I wonder if he liked your thrifty curtains tho, he should definitely keep them
Small side note: It's really interesting that at 6:00 you mention his sense of time had compressed by a factor of two in complete darkness. Michael Stevens of Vsauce did a similar experiment where he spent 72 hours in complete brightness. A very well lit room that never turned off and had no clock. After what he had assumed had been 72 hours he was waiting by the door for the examiners to let him out, yet he was only like 50 hours into the experiment. In the dark your perception of time doubles but in the light your perception of time halves.
I just thought that contrast was really interesting.
Vsauce, Michael here LET ME OUT
The human mind strives for change or novelty of any kind, hence the hallucinations induced when you've looked at the same thing for any amount of time. If you stare expressionlessly at your own face in the mirror, it will eventually distort (this happens faster in the dark), and I imagine that dreams are the same kind of experiential phenomena that exist to prevent us from experiencing sameness for too long, even if it's just lying with our eyes closed.
To geek out for a second, this part of the human condition is why I love meditating so much. Meditation is a direct challenge to this strive for novelty by way of integrating mindful observation and bodily stillness without striving for dreams or hallucinations, chasing specific thoughts or emotions, or even engaging in self-talk. Philosophically, there's a strange sense of comfort in recognizing that there's always *something* there, even in the most solitary of darkness - consciousness.
The fear of the dark comes from the fear that an unknown, unknowable "other" presence could be concealed within it. With Michael's experience, he knew that no other presence was in the room with him because he could see, but in the dark, there's no frame of reference to denote that anything else is there.
Here's a thought experiment: Would you rather consciously stay in prolonged light or darkness? I think I'd actually prefer prolonged darkness - my only stipulation is that it not be cold. Calling back to 'Fear of Cold,' this is a more impactful fear that affects me. Dark without cold? Totally fine. Dark *and* cold? That's something I'm not fond of thinking about, lol.
Makes sense while making no sense at all. Maybe our daytime perception is shorter than our night-time
In the human mind, time is slowed by darkness and hastened by light. Thanks for bringing up VSauce, Solaire!
A very interesting literal contrast, between dark and light. Thanks for the insight =)
I find it absolutely genius how Jacob played with our eyes in the first part of this essay. Everytime we stare at him, speaking, clothes dark but with a bright, white background - and then he cuts to a dark scene, a forest, a room, and you see a siluette. You see his siluette plastered all over the image. You know there's nothing there, but... there is.
For example, 15:58. With an extra detail that, as he talks about the "man in the corner", you can see his shadow being reflected to our right (his left, behind). This is crazy to me. There are so many layers and intricacies in Geller's works. Only suitable that I find him to be the best essayist I've ever encountered.
THATS TERRIFYING I DID NOT NOTICE UNTIL THIS
you're so observant
Am glad someone else noticed ❤
He also has background lights in frame after about 26:46 when he's talking about light pollution, and if that's intentional, I think it's meant to evoke UFO sighting descriptions of lights hovering in the sky.
(Or it could just be random boats in the background, since those would be slow-moving green, red, and white lights - which, to be fair, would probably account for a lot of sightings that weren't [human-made] aircraft.)
I remember trying to fall asleep in a basement on the couch one night when I was around... 21. There where zero light sources whatsoever. No windows in this room. Not even led lights from any electronics.
And then suddenly I saw it. In front of a white door the silhouette of a tall man standing blacker than anything else in the room. And it didn't disappear as I stared closer for what felt like minutes. I just stared at it. This black void shaped so clearly like a man. I honestly can't remember when or how it disappeared. But I can remember the shadow perfectly.
I always liked the interpretation of dark that Ray Bradbury presented in “Switch on the Night” a kids story book about a boy who is afraid of the dark until a little girl named Dark teaches him about the wonders of the dark that can’t exist with the lights on. I loved it for my son as a little kid because instead of saying ‘don’t be scared of the dark cause nothing’s there’ it says you should want to see what’s out there.
But it's scary out there 😢
Sounds like another kids' book I read (well, listened to in audiobook form), The Owl who was Afraid of the Dark. It sounds like a similar premise, and despite being told that "dark is exciting", "dark is kind", "dark is fun", "dark is necessary", and "dark is fascinating" by various characters throughout the book, the main character doesn't get over his fear until he is shown that "dark is beautiful".
As someone who went in a cave one time to be in the dark, true darkness is a really profound experience. It's hard to explain just how uncanny it feels to not even be able to see your own limbs in front of you, to be able to reach and place your hand over your face and not even see your own hand. It's really weird.
I went deep into a cave once and turned off my lights. I couldn't mentally place my own body within the space I occupied. After awhile, I felt as if I was floating in nothingness. Like my body was slowly turning left, right, down and up all at once - yet, all in the same place.
Your prose is fantastic. Some of my favourite videos on RUclips.
One of the scariest experiences I've had was during a closing shift at a local Cafe I used to work at. That evening it was storming and thus everything was much darker than normal. A man (who was clearly unwell and had a record of stalking baristas) kept coming and going, his behavior was upseting the other customers but he knew the owner so even though I wanted to kick him out. eventually closing time rolls around and he's gone so me and my coworker get on with the cleaning. She takes the till into the basement to count the money, I finish washing the dishes. I turn around and there he is, standing still inches from the front door. I had to call out to my coworker to make sure she locked the door. I quit that job a few months later, for many reasons this being one of them
holy shit, there's a game titled closing shift very similar to your story that I thought you were talking about game story, check it out asap, you're in for a surprise!
@@line4169 it's just like mah vidya game 🤓
@@Ronam0451 I'm not sure if that's in knowing irony or jest, or actual contempt of the association, but I'd like to point out that it'd very strange for it to be the latter, given that so much of this channel's content is designed around exploring deep concepts by tying in people's experiences and real sentiments to video games, in approaching them as an art form and storytelling medium - and done so exclusively in many videos, and to point, featuring in some prominence in even this video of particular...
FUCK. THAT.
Fuck ALL of that. Jesus. I'm glad you're okay. And screw the owner for letting some man make their employees feel unsafe.
@Ronam0451 What a weird thing to make fun of... This channel makes videos about video games and real world things they relate to all the time, he literally did it in this video. I just don't... -how old are you dude?
I had such a visceral reaction to just hearing the title "The Voice" once more after so long.
You were NOT alone with that one Jacob. It messed. Me. Up. as a kid and really made me try to understand genuine fear. The fear built from anxiety based on a nagging feeling from deep within you.
Not the fear of something grabbing you.
But the fear that something *will*.
A fear that's deep and primal that you somehow can give to only yourself.
Yeah no this one destroyed me.
I'm 33 years old, and my eyes started tearing up when he read it. I can only imagine if I had been exposed to it as a child 😬
I get that feeling when I'm around the police
I thought he was going to read the one about the woman who heard a ghost in the darkness of their room ask her husband if he ate her liver
I've never heard of it before, but something about the speed of it is terrifying.
1, 2, 3
They take their attention away.
They call for help.
In that moment of distraction, the thing outside her door closed the distance.
As a child i remember most vividly falling asleep with my bedside lamp still on, only to wake up to the most terrifying shadows projected on the walls. It was nothing more than a spider who had find her way above the lamp projecting her form upon the walls, but the views of those simingly gigantic black arms closing in from the darkness of my room never escaped me.
oh i would shit myself jesus lmao
That’s an amazing visual. We’ve evolved to fear things like spiders and snakes, and for good reason! It’s as if your brain was still able to process the changing light pattern in your room as you slept, even with your eyes being closed, and decided to wake you to make sure the dancing shadows were not from what it feared it might be.
When I was younger, I used to feel conflicted as to whether or not I wanted to leave my bathroom light on at night - the light was comforting, but, at the same time, what if I looked between the backlit gap in my door and the floor and saw a pair of feet blocking the light? I never knew how to balance my fear of the dark and my fear of what the light could reveal.
"Darkness" by Byron is among my favourite poems; "Skinamarink" is among my favourite horror films; the fear I experience when looking out a window at night is the same as yours: "what if it stops being empty?"
This video felt handcrafted for me; at its conclusion, during the song you played, I felt nearly moved to tears for reasons I can't quite explain. This is truly among the best videos I've ever seen on this website. I am grateful to be alive to experience this series as it is created. Thank you.
Well. New fear unlocked.
My power went out right in the middle of watching. It's canadian cold, dark winter, I nearly shat myself.
10/10
I read the title as "Fear of Drake"
The most perplexing idea for me in that moment was that Jacob Geller made a drama video about hip hop
Or god forbid, the peenar.
A quick glance + thumbnail and i thought it was Fear of Bark
No you didn't stop looking for likes
I'd be terrified, too
FD Signifier did (well, less dramatic more informative) and he nailed it, so you’re not completely crazy!
I go overnight fishing about 20-40 miles off the coast of Maine at least once per summer, and I've never experienced night or void more intense than the open Atlantic. Looking around and seeing no land in any direction and being hardly able to tell where the sky ends and the sea begins is the most surreal, grounding experience that I don't think I'll ever top in my lifetime.
Like, I stand there on the deck and stare up into the stars and think about how solid ground is 500ft below me and miles farther away on all sides and I'm just there in a tin can in the middle of the ocean and I'm so imperceptibly small in the middle of everything.
And when I describe this to people they often tell me it sounds scary, but there's so much beauty in that void which I'll never be able to adequately put into words. It forever haunts my art and everything I do, it's just so amazing.
That sounds like a breathe-taking experience.
I don't know a damn thing about fishing but I would love to be out there and take in that feeling. I imagine it's what out ancestors ancestors felt all the millenia ago
I love just standing in the forest at night I have never even thought of what it must be like out in the ocean. I want to do this someday.
Would you recommend others try it? Sounds remarkable
@ YES the forest at night is so spectacular. The feeling is definitely of the same flavor, just a little to the left.
I never thought I would hear someone else speak about the darkness at sea. I sailed across the Atlantic once as crew on a very small ship. On a moonless night with no clouds and extremely calm water, the stars reflecting in the ocean were genuinely indistinguishable from their counterparts and you could not see where the water ended at the horizon.
It was like being in a snowglobe surrounded completely, and honestly I thought I imagined it for many years. Huh
have you read earthsea? if not, you would like it
Love this comment
My absolute favorite series on youtube. Some of the best writen videos on here. I'm scared
You just reminded me of hearing that story (the voice) at summer camp when some other campers decided to scare the ever loving life out of me by replacing Ellen’s name with mine and sing-songing the “I’m on the first step, I’m on the second step” part which somehow made it more frightening. In years later at camp I saw other campers get the same treatment except sometimes they’d have an accomplice sneaking up behind the victim of the story and grabbing their shoulders at the climax so the person would scream and jump. I’m happy the story lives, because it was one of my first experiences with deliberate horror and as much as I HATED it at the time (big scaredy cat) it has stuck with me for the sensation of night-shivers down my spine in the middle of a sunny day.
FEAR OF THE DARK
FEAR OF THE DARK
I HAVE A CONSTANT FEAR THAT SOMETHING'S ALWAYS NEAR
That played through my head the moment I saw the title of the video. (Specifically, the crowd at Rock in Rio.)
Titles you can hear
It's behind you
I'm an adult and even now when I turn the downstairs light off, I quicken my steps up the stairs so the monsters in the dark don't grab me.
Some years ago, I came across a quote from somewhere I can't recall.
"We are afraid of the dark because our instinct knows that there could be be things in the darkness that want to kill and eat us. Like a tiger.
Tigers are not afraid of the dark, because they know the most dangerous thing that could be in the darkness is a tiger."
I am reminding myself that in my home, I am the tiger.
@@Yora21 I mean, another human being in your house, unknown and uninvited, seems like a _very_ dangerous thing.
@@Yora21What if there’s a tiger in your house that you can’t see when you turn off the light? Do you know who wouldn’t have a tiger? A lighthouse keeper.
@@Yora21 Yeah but tigers have a retroreflector behind their eye (the tapetum lucidum), pupils which at their widest can cover most of the surface of their eye, and a higher proportion of rod cells in their eyes. The tiger isn't scared because it doesn't think it's dark at all.
Or to put it another way, whatever is skulking in the dark is able to see just fine.
Basically you can’t see something in the dark,
But it can probably see you
Stunning. The first video of yours I saw was Fear of Depths, which immediately captivated me, and this really captures that feeling again. Very well made.
SAME that one and the fear of cold one are literally my favorite video essays I've ever seen
I'm sure I am missing something but how the hell is your comment a day old when the video was only published an hour ago?
@ No, I was wondering the same thing
@ But I think its either that channel members get the videos early, or its kind of like a premier of the video or something, I'm not sure. But yeah, I've seen videos that come out where there's already more likes than views on it, so it seems to be common
@@mildcoco I'm a Patreon member
Seeing everyone share their experiences with the fear of dark is really reassuring me because i thought the way i could instantly become paranoid of SOMETHING there in the dark just from one thought was childish. I can still barely forgive the magnus archives for ep 111. On the other hand, the reassurance of "we're scared of this too" is immediately outweighed by how much new nightmare material this video ended up giving me, LOL
34:32 Great video but, as a physics student, the phrase "Light emitting photons" causes me intense emotional distress.
Lmao
You’ve been misled. Photons are tiiiiny little lamps
I'm so glad you talked about skinnamarink in this video, I left the theatre after watching it shaken, and I had to go round to my partner's house to stay the night because the thought of being alone in the dark was terrifying
I was watching it in my living room and had to pause to turn the lights on at some point…. I’m sure it would have been a more visceral experience if I hadn’t had that option but it was already really getting to me 😅
When I started watching this video essay Skinamarink was the first thing that came to my mind that embodies concept of 'fear of the dark'.
man no movie scared me like that one, it was a primordial fear i had buried years ago
I'm too scared to watch, what was under the bed???
Jacob is one of the few RUclipsrs who actually knows how to make a real video essay as opposed to a superficial plot summary with stolen analysis tacked on.
he's the goat of youtube nobody can convince me otherwise
@@callmetired2294 I really do think he's one of the best content creators in RUclips quality wise
shoutout to that one hack that just does double digit hour slop videos where he just badly explains plots of RPGs
@@richardvlasek2445which one?
@@Needforsit I think he means Pyrocynical.
“When you say ‘he has seen the light’ you sound as if you mean ‘corrupted,’” he said.
“Something like that, yes. Different worlds, Commander. Down here, it would be unwise to trust your metaphors. To see the light is to be blinded. Do you not know that in the darkness, the eyes open wider?”
- Terry Pratchett, Thud!
I'm reading through that book right now. The way it uses darkness and light is very evocative, an extremely sensual book, in that it uses all senses to their fullest potential.
GNU Terry Pratchett
Thud! is so good. The guarding dark!
@@victorialampe3135
A man's not dead while his name's still spoken.
Thank you, I was thinking about this book the whole time! I haven't read it recently enough to properly compare it to this video, but damn, what an amazingly evocative narrative. I'm also reminded of The Tombs of Atuan, the best Earthsea book.
"Every soul have it's dark" - John DarkSouls
he should change his name to Jacob Banger because these are always the best video essays on the platform.
I spent over two decades of my life thinking that my greatest fear was the dark. Turns out my greatest fear is being alone, and being alone in the dark just reinforces that fear like nothing else. The unknown is nowhere near as scary if we face it together
Yes! I'm like this too and I found this out when my brother went on a night out in my new apartment (first time I was alone in my living quarters since I was born) and I started hallucinating sounds and people. But when I have people around me, I can go out in the dark no problems
fear of loneliness,,, the most primal fear right next to the darkness.
I'm not scared of being alone, I'm scared of the possibility that I'm not
@ another primal feeling, that’s the same fear that kept our ancestors safe from tigers that were possibly stalking us!!
I see a Jacob Geller “Fear of-“ video, I click
Truly we are among the absolutely goated
I see a Jacob Geller or Wendigoon release, I know it's gonna be a great time.
I even come back to watch them after some time. They're so well put together that it feels like the first time every time.
wild wendigoon spotted
Y'all have been some of the most influential horror centric RUclipsrs for me personally, thank you so much
I don't know if you have a connection to her at all, but can you see if you can get Ashley Young to release the song at the end on her spotify account? Or ask Jacob to?
This is exactly what made Hereditary on the scariest movies for me. The scenes where someone is in the corner, looming barely visible in a dark room were extremely unsettling.
when you started talking about more scary stories to tell in the dark I immediately knew which story you would talk about, that one terrified me as a kid
Bro I don't know why but your last line in this video hit me so hard man, my heart hurts and I'm weeping, this was beautiful.
Charles Bonnet syndrome is the name for when these hallucinations happen after physical vision loss - it's similar to phantom limb, where the brain regions responsible for receiving sensory input start firing disorganizedly when that input is fully lost (normally there's a baseline "nothing's happening" signal that keeps things organized in the conventional absence of sensory data). Oliver Sacks wrote a fair bit about these types of hallucinations, how these regions of the brain eventually get 'bored' and start firing without specific structure, and then later brain areas interpret that signalling the same way as any other sensory signal that would be passed to them. Phantom limb is this kind of hallucination for proprioceptive and tactile information - charles bonnet syndrome is the same, for partial or complete vision loss, and can involve highly complex and detailed imagery without even dream logic to cohere it together.
Charles Bonnet Syndrome is likely very similar to how Tinnitus can often work. Tinnitus (unless caused by hearing damage i think) is caused by a lack of auditory stimulus.
It's also interesting to note that, for people who've undergone temporary blindness, they experience Charles Bonnet syndrome for quite a while, becoming increasingly vivid and clear, until their visual processors completely shut off. Instead of darkness, they experience ... a complete lack of visual data. Even visual memory gets jettisoned. Then, later, when they regain sight, it comes right back. I don't remember the exact source, but I remember learning this from a story of somebody who hit their head hard enough they went completely blind, and later hit their head and regained sight. Would love a cross-ref, or somebody who remembers more details than I.
@@God_Yeeter I had no idea it could happen without hearing damage, when I noticed ringing in my ears i just assumed I listened to too much loud music. I mean I mightve, hard to tell when you only notice the ringing when it's silent anyways
@MarzaButTube what op describes is how i would describe my experience with tinnitus too! there was a period in time, right before lockdown, where I began to pay attention to the silence. there was no logic to it, it wasn't conscious either and I have no hearing damage or impairment of any kind. it's all occuring mentally. one moment I am myself, and the next, I suddenly begin to perceive this 'absence' as its own presence. I 'hear silence', a mental, intangible and low strident ringing that no physical item can change. I've been hearing silence ever since that period. it's very odd to spell it out that way, but I never found any other better descriptor to it. it used to terrify me, and I need ambience to cover it up in order to sleep nowadays. it used to be a major obstacle to it, I was always particularly sensitive of sound. hearing silence is a paradoxical concept, but if what op says about the functions of tinnitus is true, then it'd finally provide a solid, grounded explanation to the experience. in the same way that you conjure mental shapes in the dark, tinnitus would be the brain providing artificial, mental sound in the absence of any actual, real sound!
im so ready for my jacob to be gellered
who up gellering they jacob
The way he just [clenches fist] Jacobs all that Geller
she Jac on my Geller till I ob
Wake up babe, a new Geller just Jacobed.
This really does feel like a true magnum opus for this channel. The culmination of the Fear series, filled with small nods to other past videos, on a topic that may well lurk in every single video on the channel. It feels like a celebration, of the channel, of the genre, of the 6 years we’ve spent here, growing and learning together. Watching it made me more emotional than I think a video has ever made me feel. Congratulations and thank you for everything, Jacob. Here’s to many more.
i hope this doesn't seem like excessive praise because i mean it sincerely: the way you turned "there's nothing there, or there's something there" on its head with the silhouetted hand against a night sky is perhaps one of the most beautiful descriptions of human mortality i've ever heard.
34:00 I had wondered about the odd lighting in the hallway scene with the level of white balance shifting constantly through the video, the kind of poor camera quality you would see in a lesser essayist. But I had faith in Gellar that it was part of a bit to prove a point, and lo and behold. Excellently done as always.
my favorite book when i was a child was Jean DuPrau's book "City of Ember." it was a post-apocalyptic story about two kids trying to escape their underground city, because the city was starting to lose power. i think the thing that captivated me about it was the idea that the horror of Why the city had been built underground (being that it was a last refuge for humanity after a nuclear war) wasnt really talked about directly. Instead, the horror was the fact that the blackouts that plagued the city were getting longer and more frequent. there was this creeping dread all the characters felt that any one of these blackouts could be the one where the lights never came back on. I thought about that book quite a few times while watching this video lol, i have no idea if the writing is what im making it out to be since i read it 14+ years ago, but metaphorically i think it feels right at home with everything you talked about here. amazing video as always!!
Nope you pretty much got it
SO THATS THE NAME OF THAT BOOK. I also read it as a kid and it filled me with so much curuiosty. Thank you
I read this too! They made a film adaptation, I wonder if it's good?
@@nvrndingsmmr I remember my 6th grade English class read this book, and we watched the movie together too when it came out in like 2008! I remember thinking it wasn’t half bad, it’s got a surprisingly high budget cast with a young Saoirse Ronan and Bill Murray. I remember that in the movie they decided to add giant creatures that were the result of nuclear radiation to the story, for more fear factor. I don’t think there were any in the books, but in the movie it’s shown that there are horse-sized beetles that lurk in the darkness outside the city limits that pose a threat to the humans who try to escape Ember, and elephant-sized moles that live in the sewers. It was mostly the same as the book, I guess little me liked it. Spoiler alert, Bill Murray gets eaten.
@@nvrndingsmmri dont remember it very well honestly, but itd be interesting to revisit 🧐
the best part of being a nebula enjoyer is watching it again on youtube
based
Literally me
Same though
i dream of the day i can finally get nebula and watch him there....
@the_beholding259 why
I feel like the "the year the sun disappeared" or properly known as the volcanic winter of 536 could've been in this video. The entirety of Europe and Asia had absolutely none/no proper sunlight. I know it's not 'true darkness', but it feels like it would fit
The quotes from people in the Roman empire during this period on this, are downright apocalyptic.
"At noon, no shadows from people were visible on the ground"
"A winter without storms, a spring without mildness, and a summer without heat"
-Cassiodorus
Temps dropped, crops universally failed, frosts during harvest season. Mediterranean was besieged by a plague. I think that people back then thought the world was at its end, Ragnarök come.
The dark is basically like schrodingers cat where horrors can only exist in the dark and only cease to exist upon trying to observe them or switching on a light.
I'm so glad you mentioned the windows. I've always had a fear of uncovered windows at night, and it has persisted into my adulthood. Honestly, I think it's worse than it used to be. I've always been afraid of seeing glowing eyes outside more than anything. That specific possibility has always scared me more than anything else, and I can't even explain why. Loved this video so much, every "fear of" video you've made is so incredible
I’m surprised someone else has the same exact fear of glowing eyes illuminating the dark. I believe it’s scarier since, as Jacob said, you know “something is there” but you can’t make out exactly what, thus letting your imagination take over. Thanks for sharing.
The Descent is one of my favorite movies and it really is stunning how dark the entire thing is. I tried to show it to a friend of mine in the middle of the day once and we had to shut all the blinds and adjust on the couch so the glare didn’t obscure it
It's one of my favorite horror films for a reason - it isn't just gore for gore's sake, it also features deep-seated psychological terror
It’s so good! The darkness and claustrophobia of being trapped in the cave is so terrifying (along with the fact that anyone looking for them would be looking in the wrong cave system) that the horror of the monsters feels so minor in comparison. (Your best friend has betrayed you in every worst way possible…also there are monsters.) It’s brilliant writing
I'm impressed with the contrast between being terrified of the shadows at the bottom of the stairs and being comforted by the darkness of the pure night sky in the same thirty minutes of this video.
Also, changing the "there's nothing there; there's something there" idea to be a comfort rather than a fear is a quintessential Jacob Gellar move.
17:20 This is it! This is me! I'm a fully grown man, and I still cannot go near an uncovered window at night. Even if I have no choice, I keep my head turned away
that's how the false hydra gets you
45:46 was such a satisfying full circle moment, I love when Jacob paints a picture so well that we can see where that final puzzle piece is gonna go!
I love Jacob’s “Fear Series”. RUclips randomly recommending his Fear of Cold video to me is how I discovered this channel, and I’m so thankful that it did.
Same, that was my first Jacob Geller video and I've watched every single one since then.
6:24 for any other fans of The Magnus Archives, im instantly thought "nope, avatar of the buried, seal her back in"
"Take her not me"
"Take her not me"
"Take her not me"
I almost thought he'd reference lost johns' cave
The worst thing my friend ever told me was that, while getting an eye procedure done, they flipped her lens and she said she saw nothing
Not blackness
Not dark
Simply nothing
I once heard a description not seeing by a completely blind person who said it's like looking at the back of your own head and thinking about it that way blew my mind.
They flipped her fuckin lens?? god surgery is fucking terrifying bro holy shit 😭
You can get an idea for what that's like by closing one eye, your brain will stop using its inputs because of the good eye and you see nothing out of the closed eye
We imagine nothing as inky black, because our minds cannot grasp the idea of absence of something.
We won't understand, not even when we return to nothing.
@@SAMURAINUTSThat's so cool!
It is fascinating how dependent on vision we are. Darkness only makes us lose one sense, but it is so much more terrifying than losing any other sensation.
Actual full body shivers. Something about your hand over the stars, I don't know. I can't name a single feeling but I felt a lot and it made me smile.
i just- like, literally an hour ago- broke up with a friend. the one who was the first to show me compassion. ever. outside of family friends.
to watch her get radicalized so fast hurt so, so bad.
this video couldn't have dropped at a better time. thank you.
Radicalized?
he's back at it with another corporate production by Big Fear
"Fear of Cold"was my intro to your videos and they are consistently so well done and fascinating. I appreciate your work
I swear every new video you get more Magnus archives coded
Okay, so NOT JUST ME thinking about the universal fears.
Omg yes
I work as an overnight chemist at a manufacturing plant. We have one window in our lab. The window is part of the fire exit door. One night I heard a bang in the parking lot that the window looks out to. I peered out the window to find man’s face looking right at me in the window. I yelled and my fight or flight reflexes jumped. Turns out it was just a delivery driver bringing pizza and just couldn’t find the right door. However I any time I look at the dark beyond the window I get chills from that moment still.
As someone with psychosis, the dark has always worsen my delusions and caused me to develop an irrational, intense fear of the dark.
This video perfectly explains the type of shit my mind goes through whenever I'm in the rare instance of being submerged in complete darkness, the irrational thoughts of "I'm going to be attacked at any moment and I am not safe" dig into my brain whenever I have to gaze into the blinding darkness.
i am petrified of the dark, to a point where it's almost certainly a diagnosable phobia. i can barely focus in windowless rooms, elevators feel like traps, the lights went out in a public bathroom two years ago and i genuinely have some lasting trauma from it. my room is never dark enough to completely obscure everything, and the rest of my apartment is always partially lit. my apartment building is an assisted living facility and uses light as easy security, so my windows are always lit and the hallway lights stay on even in a power outage. but i know that darkness still isn't far away. your explanation for this fear will stick with me, because i've always struggled to define it coherently. thank you for this.
I intentionally chose to work nights in a warehouse as one of my first adult jobs specifically because it meant I would spend the dark hours in a well-lit building full of life and movement. The sun was always up when I awoke in the afternoon; nightmares vanished as soon as I opened my eyes in the middle of the “night.” As someone who is often terrified of the dark, it was lovely.
@@Amoechick that does sound lovely!
"I have a constant fear that somethings always near!"
Fear if the dark, fear of the dark.
I have a phobia that's someone's always there.
@andrewkomlyev4877 🤘🏽 😆 🤘🏽
Scrolled down looking for a comment like this. \m/
🤘
in the shots which alternate between a dark shot of a bedroom, and you talking in a well lit room, because of the phosphene effect, a human silloutte is imprinted upon the dark room. the first time this happens, its when you read the end of the short story saying "No one was there." absolutely brilliant
17:20 It's kinda comforting to know that I'm not the only person with a fear of looking out of windows at night. I can reliably cope with the darkness of the indoors, with the potential of the unknown within a space that I know well, but... I have no control over the other side of that glass, and the multitude of things that go bump on the porch do not help matters. The fact that it's literally always raccoons does nothing to ease the anxiety.
Why does this guys casually drop some of the best vids on the internet like it’s nothing?! 🤯
This is likely going to be lost to the void of comments, but I just lost my most cherished friend and pet. She's a ferret, or well, was a ferret, but I loved Cookie with every part of my soul and losing her felt kind of like being dunked into the dark. Your video helped me immensely. Thank you.
I'm sorry for your loss. R.I.P Cookie
RIP cookie :( all my sympathies
That sucks, my dog died last year and I miss my friend too
I'm so sorry for your loss 😔Sending you hugs and comfort across the interwebs 💕
Condolences 🫂
Babe wake up! Jacob Geller just dropped another classic!
Babe wa-
Babe?...
Babe is in the corner of the room…
bro is working his way through Smirke’s 14 and i am HERE for it
take her not me...
HELL YEAH
For real though lol all I could think about was the Dark.
We have the Vast, the Buried, the Dark...
I think I would actually die of happiness if Jacob Geller made a Spiral video.
I was about fifteen seconds into this video when I turned off all the lights and went into my windowless bathroom, I used RUclips premium and turned off my screen and experienced the video that way. It was magic. All my perception has been changed for a brief time by the void. I am sorry if you made aesthetic decisions for this video for I did not experience them.
I give this video a 10/10
Boy that final shot of the dark hand obscuring stars makes the whole video worth it for that alone
I've been afraid of the dark all my life, even into adulthood. I usually jokingly refer to it as "what if there was a guy there," but I've never heard it put in such an eloquent way that gets to the core of why it's terrifying. Thank you for another banger Jacob. I'm watching this in the daytime, but looking forward to when night falls and I lay in bed, heart racing thinking of this video.
One of my scariest experiences, is from recent years, when I used to go cycling alone on the road. At the time I would leave the house at around 4am, so I could be on my usual track as the sun would be rising. Thing is, that measuring the exact time of sunrise is trick, since it changes throughout the year. That said, I left home way too early, the sun wouldn't come out for at least another hour, and I was out alone in the dark on the road. There was still some lights around, but my track goes to the neighboring town and then back, there's no lighting on the outside road. I reassure myself and start cycling on the dark road, the further away I get from my town the darker it gets, there's nothing but the road and rough nature on both sides. I then start to hallucinate, I see shapes from tree stumps, unlit reflective street signs in the distance, large rocks. I become hyper aware of someone running from the dark and pushing me off the bike. I speed up. Eventually I get to the other town, and then the sun rises. I thought I'd been riding for at least an hour, but it took short of 30 minutes, I've never done that track that fast before, nor since.
Watched on Nebula a couple days ago and just had to comment that this might be my favorite video of yours. Using the "there's nothing there or there's something there" framework to slowly build tension and reveal more terrifying secrets about the dark, only to completely subvert expectations by using that motif to end the video with a tinge of optimism was seriously one of the most moving moments I've ever experienced from your videos. I spent most of the video dreading the next thing you'd talk about, just to end the video with a complete smile on my face. Wonderful work, Jacob.
Mentioned what I was watching to the wife & she mentioned how our 3 yr old is waking at night in her room and crying for us. I hadn't put the 2 together but makes sense. Loved the Scary Stories so much as a kid I tracked them down for my library. Great video, sir.
Watching this in my pitch dark room when I’m trying to sleep is truly a stroke of genius by myself
I’m one of those people without a visual imagination so I’d love to participate in one of those blindfold studies just to find out what I might “see”
That's actually a really cool experiment.
I have to look up if anyone ever tested if people with aphantasia can have visual hallucinations.
I had the same thought. I also have aphantasia and I've never been particularly bothered by darkness. If anything, I prefer it to bright light. I've never tried to go without light for days so I'm curious how I'd react.
@@Yora21 I have aphantasia and I can have visual halluzinations during meditation! Blew my mind the first time it happened. I can imagine that people with aphantasia have a harder time reaching that point but it surely isn't impossible. Let me know if you find any research!
All you need to find out is a blindfold
AFAIK aphantasia only makes you unable to *consciously* imagine sights, so if you can see your dreams then I imagine you'll react to the room the same as us.
You know a video finna be lit when it starts with “fear of”
"finna be lit"
This video is not very "lit". I'd say it's quite the opposite
"I have watched all his other Fear of Videos" I said to myself "I will surely love this one as well and only get chilla a couple of times"
The DREAD I felt throughout this video, I knew I shouldn't have listened to the reading of The Voice and I might have trouble sleeping tonight lol
I think you truly outside yourself this time, the editing, the script, the pacing, the sfxs, your narration, you truly accomplished so much
It's amazing how strongly our brain rebels against darkness. I remember in my photography class having to develop photos in the darkroom. There was a small cupboard with two curtains to make sure no light got in while you opened up your film canister, unwound it, and rewound it into the container containing the solution necessary to make the chemical reaction happen. We had to practice for days bwforehand with empty tester film winding and unwinding, screwing and unscrewing, mastering a precise process we'd have to perform in total darkness. And I always found it odd that every time, I found it easier to do if I kept my eyes wide open, even if I couldn't see anything. Because if I looked down at where I knew my hands would be, looked down at where I knew the canister was, it was easier than keeping them closed. Because my brain would create phantom images of the movements I was making, vague shapes and forms to help guide me. I'd forgotten about that until your video. I always found it a very strange experience: how closing my eyes was worse than keeping them open, just so my brain could try its hardest to make sense out of the nothing.
To quote Alan Wake's marketing "Don't fear the Dark. Fear what lives inside it."
This reminded me of Alan Wake too, especially pt 2. His video about it is on Nebula, if I remember correctly
@practicallyfloored I'll have to sign up for Nebula
23:40 I live in Moore County. When the power went out that night, my family just assumed a tree fell somewhere (we live in a very rural area). We only figured out what happened the next morning. My dad got up around 4 to go running; went into town to discover all street and traffic lights down. His running buddies told him about the shooting. They did their run by the snatches of Christmas lights outside the houses that had generators, which was every half-mile or so. My friend’s grandpa had a heart attack during the blackout. They lived about 45 mins away; their power didn’t even go out. But the only suitable hospital was in our county, and the roads were so unsafe that by the time they got there it was too late.
Oh hey! Funny seeing you here lol
Every “fear of” video is so awesomely crafted. Love these videos
Hey Jacob! I just wanted to say. Ive been learning how to sew for the first time lately. And ive been working on making this set of jacket and pants covered in patches. And your videos have been my preferred thing to listen to pass the time while I work for hours and hours making it happen. Its really been such a joy. I really apreciate your art!
Best video essayist on the site, hands down.
WOW, I was expecting a Jacob Gellar video soon, but I was not expecting the culmination of all your fear videos, AND the first of your videos I watched "Control, Anatomy, and the legacy of the Haunted House". this was incredible, my mind is reeling, thank you, thank you so much.
In an odd kind of symmetry to losing sense of time in the dark - Years ago while working at a bar, I struck up conversation with a dude who had literally just flown back from working in Antarctica where he was an mechanic. He was coming back because he didn't like doing the winter shifts. One of the things he said was that it was hard enough when it was daylight all the time. He told me about how during his first shift there, he was doing maintenance on one of the vehicles, when one of his colleagues came up and asked what he was doing. He said he'd just been doing his job, and the guy said "You realise its 3am, right?"
The dude said he hadn't noticed at all. Everything took a bit longer to do in the cold anyway, but he assumed it was the early afternoon. He just went back inside to sleep, but said it was wild how easy it was to lose track of time in the absence of it getting dark.
"if it's an animal it's a big animal" EXCUSE ME NO THANK YOU. I get paranoid in my *house* once the lights are off, that sounds like hell, Flamini.
That quote gave me major ted the caver vibes
@@emilyhedgehog547 That's the only thing I could think of when he said that.
I was HOPING House of Leaves would make it in here!! That book has captured my mind for so many reasons, including the way it discusses battling the dark.
11:10 no but my 3rd grade teacher read this to us an hearing “I am coming up the stairs” straight up triggered just how terrified and enthralled I was. I had completely forgotten about this until now.
Now that I think about it, it was probably my first brush with horror.
I love these serious dives into horror and fear, Jacob. Really I do.
But with this one, I just CANNOT stop thinking about "Man hand hook hand car door"
17:25 when i was a kid, i slept in the living room, because our house had too few bedrooms. i had and still have a lot of trouble with insomnia, and spent a lot of time lying awake on the couch, in the quiet darkness of that room. it had many windows, and only a couple of them had curtains. my greatest fears were constantly in tension with each other, one, that something could see me through those windows, and two, that i might see it. my heart would pound as i tried to tear my eyes away from the window across from the couch, trying to bury myself in my blankets and lie perfectly still. sometimes i didnt sleep until the sun came up. thank you jacob, great work.
i think "can you see the dark" and "is water wet" are very similar arguments ! just like the semantic argument is that water in itself is not wet , but other objects that come into contact with it are , i think that if you saw a room down the hall without light that you'd be 'seeing the dark' , but if you're in it and unable to see , you are in the dark , seeing an absence of light
Incredible as always! This is such a fantastic series of videos
bro did not watch the whole thing already
@@piggy743his comment was a day ago btw
@@piggy743it says 1 day ago because this was released early for RUclips members and Nebula subscribers
@@eshansingh1 bruh
fun fact: The word "window" originates from the Old Norse word "vindauga", which is a combination of "vindr" (wind) and "auga" (eye), meaning "wind eye."
so Windows basically means eye