In many ways, the recording was just another video, one of millions uploaded during an era in which cameras had multiplied at an accelerating rate. By the early years of the 21st century, phone-based filmmaking had already begun to produce genres of sorts, the most viral examples tending towards comedy, cuteness, or horror. It’s the latter we’ll be dealing with here. If the internet is a New World that unfolds only as we imagine it, these films are like emissaries from the Old World, the one that predates any recording, the one filled with ancient and inarticulable fears.
The decade 2000-2010 is hard to define in terms of media but it’s perhaps best understood as the point at which the 20th-century understanding of cinema began its descent into the uncontainable, porn-inflected gonzo miscellany of “content.” The sequence that came to be known as Dark House Girl straddled both sides of this divide. On the surface, it didn’t have much in common with the more mainstream horrors of its time, films like Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others, or Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko. And yet, it was undeniably disturbing. It evoked a powerful sense of melancholy. It wasn’t shocking so much as it was disquieting. It provoked the unease of a half-remembered nightmare, or of the fading laugh track over an old and no longer funny sitcom.
Emerging in an era saturated with ultra-violence, the video came out in 2007, three years after ISIS released their first execution video and two years before 3 Guys 1 Hammer (the film by the Dnepropetrovsk maniacs who recorded themselves using household tools to murder a terrified man). Dark House Girl, by contrast, had an almost otherworldly feel. It stood apart from the all-out snuff more commonly found on Bestgore.com, the shock website on which it was first uploaded. When it came online, it was just another note in the chorus of moments emanating from the small screen during those years; the screen that was cradled in your hand, half-watched while the TV streamed in the background.
The footage first appeared without a title, under the file name: _296.mp4. The original sequence is composed of a single shot. The camera appears close to a bed, its crumpled duvet pushed to one side. As the lens begins to pan, we see that we are in a cluttered bedroom, the floor littered with odds and ends: a TV remote, an empty mug, a round, shiny lamp. We can hear breathing in the background. The room is lit only by the phone. At around the 27 second mark, the operator leaves the bed and moves towards the door. For the first time we hear her voice. She is speaking quietly, off-screen. It’s not clear who she is addressing. I woke up here, she says. It’s almost 3am. I’m at Sam’s house but I can’t find him. He isn’t here. I can’t get out. Her hand appears briefly on-screen to pull the door ajar, then she passes into a landing where she points the lens at the floor. There is a strip of carpet that leads down a flight of stairs, which she descends slowly, appearing in another cramped corridor. To her right is a small lounge, cushions piled haphazardly on an L-shaped sofa. The walls are bare as she progresses to a kitchen. Unwashed plates are piled in the sink, empty takeaway cartons on the counter. She opens a cupboard to reveal packets of food, some tins, a split bag of rice. There are no windows in this kitchen, all three walls are lined with units. She turns and walks back to the bottom of the stairs where she makes an unintelligible sound, then ascends, faster this time, and makes a circuit of the landing, showing us a white-tiled bathroom and the original bedroom door. She flips a switch to demonstrate the lights aren’t working, then she walks back down the stairs, this time her nails clawing at the paintwork as if feeling for an opening. It’s around this point that even the most casual viewer notices something: the house is composed only of interior doors. There are no windows and doors leading outside. The recording continues unbroken for a total of 3 hours and 29 seconds at which point the camera cuts off abruptly as if it has run out of power.
So far so innocuous. The film is strange but not to the point that it attracted much attention in the beginning. There were no clues about who or where the woman was. Most people wrote the whole thing off as some kind of weird hoax or, more likely, the efforts of a wannabe director trying to get attention in the hopes of landing a film deal. Nevertheless, there were unanswered questions. If the house was real, how had its exterior doors been erased? A cottage industry of amateur forensic video investigators failed to answer this question. There were no edits and no after effects. In fact, the more the file came under scrutiny, the more questions it provoked. There was a theory that the woman was in an underground bunker of some sort but this seemed unlikely as she’d apparently gone inside of her own volition. There was also the incongruous fact that a steel extractor fan is seen in the kitchen at around the 4 minute mark, the slight movement of the air shifting the dust in the torchlight. Others theorized that the building was a set, but if this was the case, it was an unusually good one as the protagonist’s attempts to escape become increasingly violent over the film’s duration. If it was a hoax, it was a pretty flawless one, although not flawless enough to sustain the sort of attention attracted by, for example, the footage of Elisa Lam at the Cecil Hotel in 2013, or the Down The Hill recording of the Delphi murders in 2017—both sequences with verifiable elements. The most uncomfortable thing about Dark House Girl was its seeming realism in the face of a complete lack of evidence. Those of us who’d stumbled on it watched it over and over for the authentication we wanted from it but couldn’t find.
The conversation around the film picked up again around 2018, when a user named @Japanfest86 re-posted the tape to Reddit r/TrueCrime and claimed the woman was Ekaterina Yarusov, a nursery school teacher who had met a man on a dating app in 2006, dated him for a few weeks, gone back to his place after a meal, and disappeared. There was no real reason to connect her to the footage—and this was only one of many theories—but it was tantalizing enough for Websleuths.com to pick the story up and as a result, the video began circulating again. It was now one of not millions but of perhaps only a few thousand historic amateur .MP4s floating around online that were capable of maintaining a sustained audience over several decades. Much of this content had long ago been debunked but at this level of interest, it kept reappearing zombie-like on new channels, long-dead recordings resurrected for an audience that replenished itself ad infinitum, for the millions of fresh eyes that constituted a different generation, or just a different tribe, rendering and re-rendering the meaning of the footage until, through sheer dint of repetition, it took on a haunted existence of its own, dying only to be re-born, forever undead, forever charged with the power to touch someone new. A canonical text, if you will. The sort of piece in which I specialize.
The thing was, most of these films were hoaxes and it was amazing how quickly people came clean when there was money on the table. And of the others, the more sensitive pieces, some of them were connected to unsolved crimes. These were also often negotiable but required a more delicate approach. Dark House Girl, by contrast, seemed to fall into neither of these categories. There was a complete absence of signs around it, which was impossible because the internet was made of signs.
People go online because they want something. The average browsing history will throw up a wildly catholic miscellany even in the course of a few hours: new sneakers, a high protein recipe, a way to pass the next half hour as painlessly as possible, love, attention, wild sex, an affordable funeral package for Uncle Johnny. But there are some things you can’t find on Google, or even on Tor. The original recording of Dark House Girl was one of these things.
We must all find our niche in this world and mine is cinephiles. I used to work in a second-hand bookshop sourcing first editions for collectors and it was through this job that I came across my first film archivist. He wanted an original reel of George Méliès’s The Impossible Voyage from 1904. Film collecting in those days was dominated by old white men, men who had been around long enough to remember going to the cinema alone as children, when the price of a ticket was counted in pennies and you could still spend whole days in the dark. Most of these men were dead now but they’d taken me far enough into their world to set me on this path.
There are two types of people who collect digital assets: flippers, the types who jump on emerging markets—this is the crowd that bought heavily into NFTs, they tend to work with art collectors in an effort to give their activities the veneer of high culture but in fact, they are closer to second-hand car dealers or estate agents. Then you have the real aficionados, the types who spend their lives online. Some of these people have access to money and they want to build serious collections, not only for their own satisfaction but to preserve the history of their own era through a lens that only the deepest, most plugged-in players would understand. They usually find me through word of mouth, on esoteric message boards. They want first editions and ideally they want them on the original device.
I’ve had more than one request for Dark House Girl in my career, mostly from anonymous clients who understand that I sometimes have to resort to nefarious methods to get the material. The most recent order had arrived on Monday. I hadn’t recognized the username and the client had written in broken English, which initially made me think it was a scam, but then he or she had also gone on to namecheck a handful of others in our rather obscure circles, which reassured me that, at least on the surface, they understood my operation. I’d tried and failed before to source this piece but the money on the table was several times my usual fee and anyway, I’d felt my breath pick up at the mention of this particular film.
These memories reeled through my mind in the frantic manner of someone who hasn’t slept for days. The thing about my sort of work is that its boundaries are ill-defined. The world I work in seeps into you, there are no borders or markers of time, it enters through the senses like everything else but it isn’t like anything else. It expands faster and with greater complexity than our capacity. We are none of us capable of adapting to this virtual universe but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t change us. It’s not unusual for me to work through the night, but I do it not so much willingly as because prolonged immersion leads to a certain level of compulsion. The process takes on a life of its own, like a cell reproducing abnormally, detached from its original purpose. I couldn’t stop looking for Dark House Girl and the more the file eluded me, the more I redoubled my efforts.
It was around this time that I noticed a new username at one of my usual haunts. I received a message almost immediately. No text but an audio file. A recording of a camouflaged voice that said:
If you follow me I will follow back.
