Response Essay: The Man In The VHS Tape

The Man in The VHS Tape

During my first year of university, a rumor began circulating about a VHS tape that was causing students to go insane. Nobody knew who had first found the tape, or where they had found it, but the stories started in October, when a female student allegedly stopped talking altogether after watching it. Her roommate claims that she came into the dorm room one evening to find her sitting on her bed pointing at the VHS player, her eyes wide and her lips stretched into an unnatural smile. When the girl did not respond to her even after half an hour, the roommate was perturbed and called the police. The student had apparently suffered intense mental trauma, and had lost her ability to speak.

Following this incident, the tape

The tape contained a video that was about an hour long. The footage would begin inside a dimly-lit room, almost like a cellar. It showed a man sitting on a wooden chair in the center of the room, facing away from the camera so that you could only see his back and the back of his head, which was covered by a hood. He appeared to be wearing dark robes, like a priest, and looked thin and frail. A mirror was placed against the wall he was facing, and angled so that his face could be seen in the video. It was an old man’s face, perhaps around seventy years old, and it wore a coldly serious expression. Quite a few people turned it off at this point. They claimed it already made them feel uneasy. The recording was monochromatic, grainy, and appeared to be old, judging by the style of the mirror and chair, the dark stone walls of the room, and the fact that the lighting was flickering, as if the room were lit by candles. Shortly after the beginning of the video, the old man would begin to speak. The strange thing was that nobody was sure what language he spoke in. The audio was distorted, but occasionally you could hear his croaky voice with an unusual accent. Some thought he was speaking a dialect of English, or an archaic form of English, because they could make out some