a pile of stuff

I think the thing that the thing that this work does best, is create a setting that is steeped in unacknowledged horror. Let me unpack that a bit. In horror media, if a thing or situation is horrifying, the characters in that media will have various horrified/situation-appropriate reactions to it, and the audience has emotional reactions sympathetic/mirroring the reactions of the characters. However, sometimes, a piece of media will normalize the horrific: the characters of the media will be largely un-reactive or blazé towards the horror, which often heightens feelings of disconcertment for the audience because the dissonance between the feelings of horror invoked in the viewer and the reaction of the characters are so discordant. I feel this technique is best used when using it on a large scale - creating a world that not right and very fucked up, and giving it the extra oomph by having everyone who lives in the world treat it as mundane. This type of setting lends itself to lots of Fridge Horror (see TV tropes for more info on this).

Anyways, getting back to TCBP here, I think it does a phenomenal job of unacknowledged horror execution given the very short length it has to work with. I have most certainly seen media that does unacknowledged horror on a grander scale, but judging it on a length-to-unacknowledged horror ratio, TCBP is one of, if the most concentrated work(s) I have come across. Many of the comments talk about how the engineer being interviewed just says things that are crazy and upsetting, and then just blazes right past them, with a smile on his face.

The quality of the CGI adds to this as well. I, like many of those in the comments of the video, went into it completely blind, and the effect was not dissimilar to getting beamed by a 2x4 out of the blue. The video presented itself to me in 2020 (before AI), and I watched it on a device with a smaller screen, so with the CGI being pretty good and the documentary-esque tone that was used, it took me an embarrassing amount of time to realize that it was not real - only when the physics became too implausible to ignore.

The experience left me dazed, with a feeling of unnamable dread and persistent discomfort. In my attempts to find more videos that could evoke this feeling in me, I came across a playlist with both TCBP and Little Runmo in it, and that is how I discovered Gooseworx.

The world of Little Runmo is fucked, and Little Runmo himself is fucked, and Little Runmo's struggles to live despite it all is what gives flavor to the whole thing. Little Runmo exists in a subcategory of unacknowledged horror media in which only one (1) person/being is able to see the horror for what it is. The audience now gets to sympathetically feel horror with the main character again, not just at the thing that is horrifying, but also about how everyone else is OK with this.

I am getting side-tracked again. One last thing I'll note here: the scene in TADC ep 1, where Pomni is looking for Caine, and is opening a bunch of doors, and there is this behind one of them: