I'm Watching Fake Documentary Q

Fake Documentary Q is a Japanese online web horror series, and it does a lot to keep me invested in what's happening where some other online web horror series lose me. Honestly I never have wanted to click on anything with "backrooms" in the title, a lot of analog horror just fails to interest me enough to click and some don't get me coming back. I kind of care less about lore than I do themes, I never have been into ARGs, and tendencies to expand the scope of things can whiff for me. Vita Carnis really had me with "weird things that drop off these meat strands" and less so with "gotta watch out for the mimics" and even less so with "oh and there's some big conspiracy."

Also I'd like to state here that I'm not calling any series that seems called out by this bad or saying that you can't find any enjoyment in them. I'm just talking about my personal preferences because they're going to inform what I enjoy so much about Fake Documentary Q.

It's a comparatively low-key series, each episode focusing on a strange, haunted, cursed, or otherwise supernatural piece of media.

Also because internet horror relies a lot on hyperreality and these often have a documentary formatting I just want to be clear about something: Fake Documentary Q is a work of fiction. Everyone in it is an actor. Please do not go "there's no way this can be real" because they aren't saying it is. It's called FAKE DOCUMENTARY for a reason.

The first episode, CURSED VIDEO, informs us that what we're seeing is footage from a fake documentary that a TV production company was working on. The director and a cameraman go to a video rental store that's closing to ask the manager about a haunted video that will kill the viewer. The manager shows them, something that looks like a normal tape until it cuts to grainy portraits of deceased people. The owner shows them the tape... and then confesses that it's not real. The tape does have the strange interlude, but the manager watched it and he's still alive. He just wrote "THIS TAPE WILL KILL YOU" on the box to get some teenagers to rent it as a dare and drive up business for the store.

And then the narration informs us that the reason that this production was shelved was because the director and cameraman both died unexpectedly not long after filming this. At the end they replay the cursed segment, but now the portraits are different.

This lays out one of the first overarching themes of the series: Things and people becoming haunted by intent. The attempts to create something "cursed" or "haunted" lead to things happening to their creators.

Maybe it's due to the language barrier (I don't speak Japanese, but they do provide english translations using youtube subtitles) but the actors deliver very understated and toned down performances. Maybe there are too few "um"s but they're nailing a sense of real people talking better than some found fiction does.

And that things are so low-key helps the verisimilitude a lot. No stereotypical monsters chasing you, no holes in reality, just strange happenings. In CURSED VIDEO, the deaths could've just been natural. And if you were treating each episode as a real documentary segment about a piece of cursed or haunted media, you could still approach them as skeptically as you do something like the Sudbrink calls.

One thing that's subtly high-key is the effort. As much as I enjoyed the story and acting in CURSED VIDEO, you know what stuck with me the most?

The store manager plays them the video on an old CRT TV that the store's security cameras were on. And they found an actual CRT with the lines from the multiple camera burned into it. Or if not, they went to a lot of effort to simulate the glare on the glass and the burned-in graphics. Either way the effort stuck out to me a lot.

Descent is another overarching theme. Most obviously in BASEMENT, where a woman is stuck in an elevator that keeps descending past any possible basement levels while we see darkness through the glass panel in the door. The video glitches out, we see fragments of people getting on and off as normal while she's still descending, until the elevator finally stops in pitch darkness and closes behind her after she steps out.

And tied to the intention making things real, repetition also reoccurs in the series. Or maybe it's the same theme. Doing things repeatedly to create a magic effect. In THE VISIT we see people repeatedly praying over a deceased person to ask for the spirits to act on their behalf. In TAKE100 an unedited reel of 100 takes of the same scene start to produce strange effects by the end.

And yes, there is a meta-horror aspect to it. If people can create media that is haunted through their intent, then would Fake Documentary Q the actual Youtube channel also create a real haunting?

And while there can be connections between episodes, they feel more like callbacks or details than a checklist of things you need to know to "get it." A similar but not identical bouquet of flowers appears in WHAT THE DEAD LEFT BEHIND and FLOWER OFFERING, but in very different contexts. They feel more like recurring elements to go with the recurring themes than trying to fill out a wiki of random things people need to learn. Each episode stands on its own and doesn't require knowledge of the others. I'm confident you could hit shuffle on the playlist and these themes would still emerge.

If you would like to check the series out the one content warning I'd give is that PLAN C contains audio of a suicide attempt. No visuals or anything graphic about it but the subject matter can be difficult to deal with for some.