Marcus’s depression

The disc was tucked inside a generic black case, found in the back of a bin at a liquidation sale. No label, no studio branding, just the words “MARCUS – FINAL EDIT – DO NOT RELEASE” scrawled in what looked like dried, brown ink.

When I started the file, there was no Netflix logo. There was only an abrupt cut to Marcus’s bedroom. The quality was wrong—not standard digital crispness, but a sickly, sepia-toned hue that made the room look like it was filled with stagnant water.

The audio was the most disturbing part. There was no dialogue, just a low-frequency hum that vibrated in my chest, accompanied by the wet, rhythmic sound of something heavy dragging across floorboards.

Marcus was lying on his bed, but his posture was all wrong. His limbs were splayed at unnatural, disjointed angles, like a marionette with severed strings. He wasn’t on his phone. He wasn’t staring at the ceiling. He was staring directly into the camera lens, his eyes wide and bloodshot, fixed in a stare that felt like it was piercing through the screen and into my own living room.

Then, Ginny entered. She didn’t walk through the door; she seemed to slide into the frame, her body blurred at the edges like a corrupted video file. She stopped at the foot of the bed. Her face was expressionless—a terrifying, blank mask.

“Marcus,” she whispered. The sound wasn’t coming from the speakers; it felt like it was coming from inside my own ears. “The color is leaving everything.”

Marcus didn’t blink. “It never had any, Ginny. We just imagined it.”

As they spoke, the room began to decay. The posters on the walls peeled away, revealing not paint or drywall, but layers of raw, pulsing muscle and bone. The lighting shifted from the yellow gloom to a stark, blinding white, exposing the room for what it truly was: a cage made of rotting organic matter.

The dragging sound intensified. I realized with a jolt of horror that it was coming from behind Marcus’s bed. Something was trying to climb up from the shadows beneath the frame.

Marcus began to laugh, but it was a wet, choking sound. He started to pick at his own skin, digging his fingernails into his forearms. He wasn’t just scratching; he was peeling away strips of himself, and beneath the skin, there was no blood—only shifting, black static that coiled like vipers.

“You like this, don’t you?” Marcus asked, shifting his gaze to me. His voice was no longer his own; it was a layered, distorted chorus of a dozen different voices, all whispering in agonizing synchronicity. “You sit there, feeding on our pain, watching us shatter for your entertainment. You’re the reason I can’t stop breaking.”

The camera began to jerk violently, the perspective shifting as if someone were carrying it through the room. It panned to the mirror on the wall. In the reflection, the room was empty. There was no Marcus. There was no Ginny. Just a dark, cavernous void where the furniture should have been.

Suddenly, the screen went black, save for a single, flickering prompt in the center: “WILL YOU JOIN HIM?”

I tried to turn the TV off, but the remote was unresponsive. I tried to unplug it, but the cord felt cold—unnaturally, freezing cold—and when I tugged, it didn’t come out of the wall. It felt fused to the outlet, as if it had grown into the architecture of my home.

I sat there, paralyzed, watching the black screen. Slowly, a reflection began to form on the surface of the TV. It wasn’t the room behind me. It was the room from the video. And Marcus was there, standing just behind where my reflection should be, his long, jagged fingers hovering inches from my shoulders.

I haven’t turned the lights on in hours. I don’t dare. I can hear the dragging sound again—not from the television anymore, but from the hallway outside my living room door. It’s getting closer, and every time the floorboards creak, I hear that same layered, distorted voice whisper:

“I’m done waiting, watcher.”

Do you think that by consuming content that focuses on the deep trauma of fictional characters, we are inadvertently inviting a darker, more obsessive energy into our own lives?