u/EmmaWatsonButDumber

8/10
I loved the vibe of this movie. The fact that we discovered this sinister, eerie world level by level and it felt engaging and tense, while giving me a hint of Irish folklore and horror. First, the hotel, then the suite, then the basement, step by step we discovered this secret and it really was a haunted classic imo. The protagonist was human and flawed but not naive, and I liked that he came up with ways to escape and he wasn’t (too) stupid.
My criticism was that the ending was a bit too happy for me, but I get why it had to be like that. I’m also not a big fan of the “internal trauma doubles the external horror and the protagonist actually did something really bad in the past but comes to accept it right in the middle of the climax so he can overcome both the physical monster and his mental struggles”. It feels a bit overdone and an attempt to add a layer of depth.
There are some very memorable moments throughout the film and I’m always gonna be a sucker for witch movies and folk horror. It really shows that sometimes you can shape out a good scare by looking back at the whispers of the generations that came before you, and I like that. I like that a lot.
Overall, my DM top is:

1. Oddity
2. Hokum
3. Caveat
   Looking forward for his next projects!!!

First of all, this movie was a solid 8/10 for me. It felt fresh and really intriguing. The imagery was memorable and some of the jumpscares were really effective, such as the tent one. I also really loved the ending shot. I do, however, have some questions, and I was hoping someone could answer them in case I missed their explanation in the movie.

- how did Darcy find Olin to be able to break in and kill him? Why did Ted give her the eye, when she could have taken it herself? I assume she used the wooden golem to kill Olin, but it's still weird that no one noticed anything and Ted also said to her that Olin died of a heart attack.

- was Dani trying to connect with a ghost? What was up with that? In the beginning, she set up the camera for that.

- if Dani left her phone in the car, why didn't she ask Olin to bring it to her through the window so she could call the police?

- how did Olin find Dani's home? Had he overheard the address and exact date of the planned murder?

These things don't really make sense to me.

I've done a lot of moderating gigs in my life, and I usually like the powerful feeling they give me. I like to be the one that keeps shit under control.

There are some things that are not mine to control, though.

I work for a popular streaming platform and I would just pick up lives and get paid by the hour. Usually, I'd have to keep the chat decent and remove slurs or hate speech, things inciting self harm or suicide, racist / homophobic stuff and all that. I also gave warnings and flagged streams where things started to get weird.

Gore, nudity... you know. That didn't happen too often, though.

I also had to deal with really fucked up scenarios. Things I couldn't quite explain, uncomfortable things, messy, unsettling stuff. I quit now, but I came across some streams that really fucked me up.

Here's one of them.

It was two months before the last stream I moderated, which I talked about earlier. I hopped online and picked it up. It was created by this channel... um, for anonymity, I'll change all of the names to similar (ish) sounding ones. The channel was called Nightshade Thief, around 3K subscribers. Very poetic, I know.

The first few minutes showed this guy walking through the woods, late at night. He was looking around a lot and laughing somewhat nervously. Half his face was covered by a Covid mask. It raised some suspicions, but a lot of guys cover their faces on lives. He had around 50 viewers at first.

"'Sup, guys. It's your boy Nightshade. Leave some thoughts below on what tonight's stream will bring."

he's gonna dig up some weirdo lol

Meh, nothing unusual with a comment like that. I thought it was a joke.

you gonna steal from old people again?

show us the body this time

Lots of likes being sent. I felt a tingle up my spine. I had an idea of where the livestream was gonna go, but I tried to ignore it. I wouldn't accept it.

"All right, chill, y'all. So this is what we're dealing with tonight. I've landed something huge, this family's like, super rich, man. Super rich." he would constantly look around. "And I'm on their property right now, they have this graveyard around and had a huge funeral for some grandpa. I'm talking filthy rich, loaded, fucking shit..."

The camera was constantly shaking as he was walking through the dark woods.

"But here's the thing: they're modest when it comes to burying their dead. The old man's six feet under and there's no security around. I guess they're just too fucking loaded and blinded to think someone would trespass into their woods."

fym their woods man

dude these people own a forest?

"Y'all act stupid. Of course they own acres of land. I had a friend who used to work for them and his ma did, too. Cleaned up their shit, and that's how I came to know where their cemetery is. I hope I don't get lost. It should be near the lake, I've been walking for fucking ages. Anyway, my sources tell me this'll be a big catch. They don't have wired fences around this summer house, ain't nobody got cameras in the forest."

He hit around 200 viewers.

"There it is, man." He flipped the camera to show a small clearing cut into the trees.

It didn't look like a proper cemetery. Just a handful of graves scattered unevenly, like someone planted them there and didn’t care how they grew. Fresh soil on one of them. A simple headstone. No flowers.

"Jackpot."

The chat spiked.

that’s it??

that’s the rich ppl grave??

dig it up bro

He set the phone against a rock, angled just enough to keep himself and the grave in frame, and he started digging.

At first, it was just annoying to watch, I'm not gonna lie. The repetitive motion, the dull thud of the shovel, the way he kept stopping to listen like he expected someone to tap him on the shoulder. Dirt piling up around the hole, darker the deeper he went.

Nobody in chat was really reacting to anything unusual yet. Just egging him on.

faster bro i'm almost there

hurry up

digmaxxing

why do i feel like i shouldn't be seeing this

what if it gets taken down lmao

He laughed, breath getting heavier, stopping at some point to read the comments. It was clear that he wasn't taking it too seriously.

"Y’all relax, this ain’t gonna get taken down, I've done it before." Yeah, sure, buddy. On one hand, I should have ended it quickly. On the other hand, we have a protocol when illegal shit starts happening and I had to wait enough to have proof to report it.

It took him maybe twenty minutes to hit something solid. The sound changed to wood, hollow.

The chat blew up.

there it is

open it daddy

OPEN IT

why am i scared lol

this feels like a prank

He wiped his hands on his pants and crouched down, brushing dirt away from the top.

"Old-school coffin," he said. "Cheap, too. Told you... modest."

That wasn’t true. Even I could tell that. The wood looked thick. Heavy. Not cheap at all.

He wedged the shovel under the lid and pried.

It took a few tries. Then it gave with a crack that echoed too loudly in the trees.

He froze.

Listened.

Nothing.

Then he lifted it.

I’ve seen dead bodies before on streams. Accidents, once a suicide that didn’t get taken down fast enough. You build a tolerance to a certain point. I moderated one once where some people found one in a suitcase... maybe I'll also talk about that later.

This wasn’t that.

The body was there. Old man, like he said. Suit, hands folded.

He lifted the camera to show him better. I winced. I couldn't be seeing this. It felt extremely wrong and intrusive. I suddenly wanted to cry, even if I'm not emotional.

That was my first reaction. After that, it turned into What the fuck?

The old man's mouth was open.

And it was packed with dirt. Packed. Compressed as if someone had forced it in there until there was no space left, with the lips stretched around it...

The chat slowed down. Viewers dropped to 70.

wtf

yo what

why his mouth like that

Nightshade leaned in, squinting.

"What kind of fucked up tradition is this? Jesus. You seeing this shit?"

He stopped and straightened his back. I strained to hear anything in the static. His eyes widened, mask moving rapidly under his breath. He slowly patted the corpse, the pockets, looked for rings. He'd gone quiet and pale in the moonlight.

"There's nothing here," he whispered. "Did you hear that?"

He lifted the camera up and pointed it to the woods. The quality wasn't that good, and the mic kept picking up his ragged breathing and friction from his hands.

I hovered over the controls, ready to flag the stream. This was already crossing into something I should’ve shut down. Grave desecration, visible corpse, it ticked enough boxes.

But I hesitated.

I don’t know why.

I was so tensed up that his whisper came as a jumpscare. "I had a hand on his chest, guys, and it feels like it's moving. It's probably a rat or something, but it fucking grosses me out."

Another round of uncomfortable silence as we stared at Nightshade's face, covering the entirety of the screen.

At first I thought he'd heard something again, but his expression didn’t match that. It wasn’t fear. It wasn’t even tension. To be honest, it looked like he'd lost track of why he was there in the first place.

He stayed like that for a few seconds, staring into the dark, unmoving, as if something had caught his attention and held it there.

Then his posture shifted and relaxed. The tension in his face smoothed out. Even his breathing seemed to slow.

Without looking back at the chat, without saying a word, he reached up and pulled the mask down from his face.

face reveal rn? read the room man

He looked down at the grave. Then, very calmly, he crouched lower and reached into the loose soil beside the coffin.

He scooped up a handful of dirt, and for a moment, I thought he was going to throw it back into the hole or brush something off the body.

Instead, he brought it to his mouth and pushed it in.

He opened his mouth wide and shoved the dirt inside, using his fingers to press it past his teeth.

The chat exploded immediately. Views spiked up to 1k.

what the fuck

yo stop

is he serious

the bills can't be this high

He didn’t react.

He scooped another handful. And another.

Each time, forcing it into his mouth with the same slow, deliberate motion, packing it in like it was something he needed to do correctly, and there was no panic in him. No hesitation. His eyes were unfocused, half-lidded, like he wasn’t really there anymore, something I'll never forget.

I reached for the controls, ready to shut it down, but something held me there. The same stupid instinct that makes you watch even when you know you shouldn't.

Then he stopped.

His hand hovered in front of his face, fingers coated in dirt.

He blinked.

Once.

Then again.

The calm drained out of him all at once.

His eyes snapped back into focus, and he gagged violently over the corpse. He looked at us as if it had been our fault.

He dropped the dirt, clawing at his mouth, spitting, coughing. Clumps of wet soil hit the edge of the coffin, smeared across the wood, fell back into the hole.

He choked hard, trying to clear his throat, panic flooding his voice now.

"Fuck, fuck, what did I..."

He spat again, harsher this time, gasping for air between retches.

The chat was going insane.

bro what are you doing

get out of there

GET OUT

ewww what the fuck

"I didn’t..." he tried to say, but it broke into another cough. "I didn’t... why did I..."

He didn’t finish.

He looked back at the coffin.

At the body.

At the mouth still packed with dirt.

Something in his expression changed again, but this time it was fear. Real fear.

"Fuck this," he said, hoarse, backing up. "Nope. Nope, I’m done. I’m done, I’m getting the fuck out of here."

His hands were shaking, and as he moved, the angle shifted wildly before slipping.

The phone fell.

It hit the edge of the coffin and slid inside, landing against the old man’s chest, tilted upward just enough to capture the interior.

The lid was still open. The night sky a thin strip above.

BRO

DON'T LEAVE US HERE TF

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

come back for us omg

tf just happened

how didn't this get taken down already

jesus christ that was a ride

i don't claim any negative energy from this

COME BACK???????????? HELLO????????

"Fuck this, fuck this..." his voice came from somewhere above, scrambling, dirt shifting as he climbed out. "I’m gone, I’m actually gone, I’m not doing this..."

The camera stayed where it was.

Inside the coffin.

Looking up.

We could hear him now, not see him: his footsteps crashing through the underbrush, branches snapping as he ran blindly into the woods.

The chat flooded with messages, overlapping, frantic.

For a few seconds, it was just that, him running, breath ragged, the sound of him getting farther away.

Then it stopped.

Abruptly.

Mid-step.

There was a brief, empty silence.

And then...

... a sound that I still don’t know how to describe properly.

It started like a scream and turned to something that I assume left terrible scars. It stretched, warped, broke into something deeper, something wrong, something that didn’t belong to a human throat. A long, drawn-out wail that seemed to tear itself apart as it went, rising and collapsing at the same time. The thing that scares me the most as I'm replaying it in my mind is that it escalated, as if whatever he was seeing out there turned worse and worse.

It echoed through the trees, distant but unmistakable.

Then it cut off.

Clean.

The forest went silent.

The stream kept running.

WHAT THE FUCK

???????????????

bro s dead

omg this feels illegal to watch

?????!!!!!!!!!!!

Minutes passed.

The camera didn’t move. Still inside the coffin, angled upward, the dead man’s face partially in frame. My heart was pounding in my chest so much that it made me lightheaded.

We all waited, unsure of what to think. Expecting to see someone pop into frame and tell us we'd been pranked. Nothing happened for minutes.

Then, a whisper cut through the audio.

"Hello."

But it didn't come from my headphones. It sounded exactly like the dry, breathless rasp you'd expect from the dead old man, but it came from right behind my left ear, inside my locked apartment.

I jumped, ripping my headset off, and slammed the button to end the broadcast. The channel was gone within minutes. Deleted, wiped out. I couldn't calm down an hour afterwards. I had to go out and drink it away, and eventually, to cope I guess, I played it off as some prank.

I keep thinking of that wail. That man-turned-into-animal wail.

I tried to convince myself it was an elaborate trick, some sort of spatial audio mixing the streamer used to mess with his viewers. The next day, I went to the bathroom to splash cold water on my face and calm down. But as I leaned over the sink, a sudden, violent gag reflex hit me. I coughed hard, and a wet, heavy clump of dark black soil splattered against the white porcelain.

I froze, staring at the dirt. Then, the bathroom light flickered, and the temperature in the room plummeted.

In the reflection of the mirror, I saw him. The old man from the coffin. He was standing directly behind me in his ruined suit, his eyes clouded and dead, his jaw hanging open.

Before I could scream, I started coughing again and spitting dirt everywhere. I don't think you've ever choked on dirt to know how it feels like... it's dusty and it lingers in your throat, making it feel like it has entered every single corner of your being. Nausea built up and erupted through me into the sink, again and again. I blacked out.

The thing is, when you puke so much you become dehydrated and faint, and it took a while to regain my consciousness. Eventually, when I build up the strength to get up and look in the mirror, I saw that my lips were so bruised, they were almost black, and the skin around my mouth had been smashed, blood had erupted under it, making it seem like I had smudged dark lipstick on my face...

My whole apartment had been trashed. My front door, however, had remained locked from the inside.

I knew I got the curse the same way you know you got the flu from someone. I spent the next weeks in shambles, desperately looking through every corner of the internet to find a way to get rid of it. I would wake up in the middle of the night craving dirt, craving the feeling of it pressing on my chest, the feeling of being buried alive...

My body would ache and nothing could satisfy this hunger, this insatiable hunger for mud. For soil.

Eventually, I came across a forum. Some girl claimed to know about this. "Rich people," she began, "do all kinds of weird shit for fortune. This is a religious thing, some ritual that had to end with to dust you shall return. That poor guy ruined it and it backfired. I think"

"Right. So how do I get rid of his spirit that makes me want to suffocate with him?"

"Uh, you have to remind your body that it's not made of dirt. Or dust. You're made of flesh."

"Hm."

"To stop the craving for dirt, consume flesh."

I thought she was fucking around, so I disconnected.

Over the next week, I came through with a terrible fever that pulled my limbs down to the center of the Earth and made me curse the day I was born. I'd see the old man in the corners of my vision, and I cried and apologized for having seen his dead body without his permission. I would keep puking dirt and I knew that I was getting closer to seeing what Nightshade had seen that night, what pulled that wail out of his lungs. Eventually, desperation kicked in.

I grabbed a kitchen knife and you can imagine the rest. Consume flesh. Who needs all of their fingers, anyway?

It took me hours to stop shaking, and even longer to scrub the taste of blood and skin off my tongue. But the scratching in my throat was completely gone. I'm ashamed of what I did, but it seemed to work.

Sometimes, the internet connects us to things that shouldn't have a digital footprint. Things that can use an open server port like an open door.

Like I said at the beginning, I’ve seen a lot of fucked up streams in my time. This wasn't the only one that left a mark on me. I've got a lot more stories to tell you guys about what happens on the dark side of live moderation.

I'll be posting them soon. I have to. Sharing is caring, right?

I am a moderator on a well-known streaming platform. I tend to take the jobs that pay the most, and I've gotten used to seeing some pretty fucked-up stuff that I had to keep under control. Most of the time, there's just people flashing the camera or doing self-harm or being racist, homophobic, misogynistic and so on. I also delete harmful things from the chats and make sure stuff isn't escalating. You know the drill.

However, I have had some gigs in the past that made me want to quit moderating. I'll probably tell you all about that, but for now I'll focus on this one, since it felt weirdly personal.

I had almost decided to quit due to a previous incident I don't feel like getting into right now, but I figured that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, and it doesn't hurt to do one more job like that.

So that's what I did.

The listing said something like:

Pre-broadcast moderation for internal livestream content. No audience interaction required.

That last part mattered. No viewers, that meant I wouldn't have to deal with any trolls or doxxers. I was just going to monitor a stream that wasn't public yet. It was part of a delayed broadcast system. My job was to watch the live feed and flag or remove anything that would violate guidelines before it ever reached an audience.

Basically, I was cleaning it in real time so when it aired later, it would already be "safe."

They were simple, but weirdly specific:

1. Do not pause, rewind, or refresh the stream
2. Do not take screenshots or record the screen
3. Do not open the “Chat History” tab
4. Remove any message that appears to reference future events

That last one really stood out.

When I asked about it, the guy running the onboarding just said that sometimes test data gets injected into the chat, and just to remove anything predictive.

I thought he meant spoilers. Like if the stream was scripted or something. I figured it might be one of those fake haunted house or magic trick livestreams, so I didn't really give it a second thought.

I was wrong. The stream was… boring.

Just a fixed camera pointed at a room. Looked like an apartment living room. Couch, coffee table, a door in the back, one lamp on.

No movement, and no sound except a faint hum, which I assumed was the fan.

The chat panel was empty.

I sat there for maybe twenty minutes before anything happened.

A message popped up.

door opens soon

I hovered over it. It didn’t look like a normal user message and it had no username, just grey text. I assumed this was the "test data" they mentioned, so I removed it. About ten seconds later, the door in the stream opened, then closed again. That reminded me of some scene in a found footage movie, where the bad filmmakers are trying to scare us.

The empty room was making me uncomfortable as shit. I'd seen a lot of obscure videos on the internet that start with an empty, grainy room.

Messages would appear, I’d remove them, and then something in the stream would happen shortly after.

lamp turns off (delete) Lamp went out.

something moves behind couch (delete) A shuffle behind the couch.

At around the one hour mark, I got distracted and didn’t delete a message right away. I'm sorry, but when you're staring at an empty room for hours, you tend to go insane.

door opens

I let it sit for a few seconds and nothing happened when, about half a minute later, the door opened.

I stopped deleting messages immediately and started timing them.

Every single one happened, but always after a delay.

I opened a notepad and wrote a few down: the timing wasn’t perfectly consistent, but it hovered around the same range, which was like 20 seconds. It kind of dawned upon me that the chat hadn't been reacting to the scripted stream, but it was actually ahead of it.

This was supposed to be pre-broadcast, so where the fuck were the messages coming from? And how the fuck were they predicting what was gonna happen?

I wanted to get mad, but I didn't have anything to get mad at. The instructions had been clear, and nothing weird actually happened. They did tell me the chat was gonna be predictive. There wasn't any catch in the listing. I thought it was freaky, and I just wanted to take a picture, so I opened chat history for two seconds to do just that.

Yeah, I know. It was one of the rules.

When I opened it, I expected logs, it was just a long list of messages, all of them describing events. I scrolled... most were about the room, which was stupid, since there wasn't anything in the fucking room to begin with-

moderator closes chat history

I froze.

I hadn’t done that yet.

... Should I?

moderator feels happy they closed chat history

I closed it immediately, then went back to the main view and kept watching.

Hands kind of shaking at that point, but I told myself there had to be a technical explanation. Preloaded logs or simulation or something. I didn't rule it out as a prank, because my webcam was always covered so my reaction to it was hidden.

Then a new message appeared in the live chat.

moderator checks behind him

I stared at it. Didn’t move or delete it.

Nothing happened in the stream, the room stayed empty. Ten seconds passed. Twenty. Thirty. Then another message appeared.

too late

I turned so fast I almost broke my neck. Nothing was there, of course. Jesus Christ, that’s the worst part, right? When nothing’s there. I laughed, actually laughed, closed the chat and went back to the stream.

The door was open now. And beyond it, there was a hallway. I hadn’t seen a hallway before.

it looks at the moderator too

it leaves the room

Slowly, something passed the doorway.

Nothing else happened in the stream, no more messages appeared.

Everything went still again, and at exactly four hours, the system logged me out automatically.

I stood up and turned on all the lights, then walked around the house for a bit to shake off the stiffness that was caused obviously by sitting down for so long, and not by anything else.

The next night, I checked the notepad file, where I'd written the delays.

There’s a line at the bottom that wasn't mine and read moderator rereads notes.

And under it:

turns around again

I turned around to see my window, wide open.

Yeah, I don't fuck with moderating anymore.