YouTube: Horror in Less Than 15 Minutes
It can take only a short time to make your blood run cold or to make you feel like something is just wrong. You start out feeling okay, but it devolves into a need to leave the light on just a little bit longer or stay under your covers because leaving your bed seems to be a risk in itself for the night. If you love a fast thrill, look no further than the wonderful world of YouTube.
From series about the macabre and strange to the outright terrifying, it can cover any creep factor you need in less than 15 minutes. It also doubles as being highly interesting since you encounter incredible talent in the little known artists found on the web or the YouTube stars that retain their freedom by staying on their own channel and maintaining control of intellectual property.
Below are some great starter channels and/or videos to warm up your adrenaline or run a chill down your spine. These are in no particular order as I can’t quantify what level of freaky or terrifying they will be to you so I have arranged them by videos or full channels.
Enjoy these, and let us know in the comments section what some of your favorites are!
We will begin with videos for those that don’t want to commit to becoming hooked on a channel with a whole library of videos. That can be as awful as Netflix, and we already have that.
I didn’t ever have an issue with clowns until the first video on my list. A James Cawley video by the title Pennywise / Stephen King’s IT Fan Film will give you a complex about clowns, pointed teeth, or any combination of the two for that matter. I can still see his face clear as day, and it has been the better part of six months since I watched that video. A violent looking clown lures a little girl away, and in her family’s desperation they manage to find her… but don’t like what they find holding her in his grasp. Watch this and hate me for introducing you to the reason you’re now super unnerved by Cirque De Soleil.
The channel (with the highly NSFW name) Fuck You Zombie features a video called Selfie from Hell. As someone who runs a style blog and, sadly, takes a shit ton of selfies, this would be a waking nightmare. With each snap the girl takes, a figure appears in the frame, only to be absent once the camera is off. The end is chilling and made me grit my teeth a little to look into my camera. Add that to my childhood shiver over mirrors thanks to legends like Bloody Mary, and I may never see myself again. On second thought we might want to consider mass circulating this video again. It might cut down on the useless selfie epidemic.
There are a ton of very short horror stories I am absolutely in love with. Lucky for us one of the best has been adapted into a short and featured on the YouTube channel 2SentenceHorror. I Heard That Too starts innocent enough and seems innocuous, but that all changes when the little girl’s mother calls from downstairs. With its massive amount of oh-hell-no factor, I can safely say I love this one for its simplicity. It plays on the fact that we fear the unknown and things that aren’t where they should be. Throw in a twist at the end, and despite it easily being one of the shortest, it’s also one of my favorites.
