Samantha loses everything

The Deleted File: “Samantha_Loses_Everything.mkv”

It wasn’t supposed to be on the server. I found it while doing routine maintenance on the backend of the official site—a file sitting in a hidden directory, unlinked, labeled simply: Samantha_Loses_Everything.mkv.

Thinking it was some kind of test footage or a failed promotional clip, I opened it. It was exactly one hour long.

The video didn’t start with the usual Netflix logo or the Ginny & Georgia title card. It started with static—the kind that makes your teeth ache, a high-pitched, oscillating frequency that seemed to vibrate the glass of my monitor.

The image faded in. It was a shot of Samantha’s bedroom, but it looked… wrong. The lighting was sickly, a bruised yellow hue that made the wallpaper look like rotting skin. Samantha was sitting on her bed, staring into the camera. She wasn’t acting. She wasn’t reading lines. She was shivering, her face stripped of all makeup, eyes hollowed out as if she hadn’t slept in weeks.

“They took it all,” she whispered. Her voice was flat, devoid of the bubbly, obsessive tone Samantha is known for. “They took the social media. They took the popularity. They took my face.”

The scene cut abruptly to a montage that lasted for twenty minutes. It wasn’t a narrative; it was a series of quick, jarring cuts. Samantha was walking through the halls of Wellsbury High, but every other student was a mannequin. The camera panned over them—plastic faces with crude, Sharpie-drawn eyes. As the camera passed, the mannequins would slowly turn their heads to follow her, the sound of grinding plastic filling the audio track.

At the thirty-minute mark, the video shifted again. Samantha was back in her room, but the room was empty. No furniture, no posters, no clothes. Just bare, grey concrete. She was sitting in the center of the floor, holding a pair of shears.

She started cutting her own hair, but she wasn’t just trimming it. She was hacking away, pulling clumps from her scalp, her fingers turning black and necrotic as they touched the strands. She didn’t scream. She just kept whispering, “I’m losing it. I’m losing everything.”

I tried to close the window. The program was frozen. My keyboard was unresponsive. The high-pitched frequency grew louder, pulsating in time with her ragged breathing.

The final fifteen minutes were the worst. The camera zoomed into her face until her eye filled the entire screen. It wasn’t a digital eye anymore; the pupil began to melt, streaming down her cheek like black ink. As it fell, it burned holes into the concrete floor. She leaned closer to the lens, her skin tearing away at the corners of her mouth as she forced a smile.

“Do you have everything you want?” she asked through the screen.

The screen went black.

I sat there in the silence of my office for a long time. When I finally forced my computer to restart, the file was gone. My browser history showed no record of the file ever existing. But when I checked the reflection in my darkened monitor, I realized with a sudden, freezing jolt that my own face looked slightly different—like a mask that was beginning to slip.

I haven’t been able to watch the show since. Every time I see Samantha in a regular episode, I don’t see the character. I see the empty, grey room, and I hear the sound of plastic grinding against plastic.