Tall humanoid with raw crimson skin takes over television stations with a dark prophecy. Then viewers wake up trapped in their own bodies

A scary video posted on YouTube in March 2024 has gotten a lot of attention for showing a frightening creature that breaks into TV broadcasts. The short horror film is called The Boiled One Phenomenon and was made by a content creator named Doctor Nowhere, whose real name is Silas Orion. The video has been watched more than 4 million times since it came out.

The film tells a made-up story about something that supposedly happened on August 13, 2003, in Pennsylvania. In the story, an old children’s show about nature called Tree of Heaven started playing on TV even though it had been cancelled years earlier. While the show was on, a scary being called PHEN-228 or “The Boiled One” showed up on the screen and gave viewers a frightening message.

The creature in the video is shown as a tall humanoid with raw crimson skin that looks melted and damaged. In the story, this being hijacks television stations with a dark prophecy and tells people watching that remembering its face will make it appear to them later, as per Fandom. The story says that people who saw the broadcast later woke up trapped in their own bodies and could not move, which is similar to a real illness called locked-in syndrome where people stay awake but cannot move their muscles.

People liked this scary video so much

The video became popular because it mixes real facts with the fake story to make it feel more believable. Doctor Nowhere used actual history in the film, like mentioning the Ephrata Cloister, which was a real religious group that lived in Pennsylvania back in the 1700s. The video also uses verses from the Bible, especially one from Psalms 91:10, which shows up several times in the safety warnings at the start.

The movie shows its story through different types of footage, like warning messages, interview clips, and messed-up TV recordings. One main character is Job Zamperini, who is supposed to be a veteran from World War II and becomes a victim of the creature. His name seems to be based on Louis Zamperini, a real person who survived being a prisoner of war and endured torture at the hands of Japanese war criminal Mutsuhiro Watanabe, who people called “The Bird.”

Doctor Nowhere wrote on his social media that he made The Boiled One partly to represent Watanabe and turn the war criminal into just a “warped red face” that people see online. This gives the horror video a deeper meaning beyond just trying to scare people, since it also talks about real trauma and pain from history.

The film uses a style called analog horror, which is a type of scary content that looks like it was made with old technology like VHS tapes. In the story, about 530 people in Pennsylvania watched the broadcast, and 509 of them ended up with symptoms like locked-in syndrome where they could not move. A fake organization called the Ephrata Branch tries to stop more people from seeing the broadcast by shutting off electricity, leading to a nightmarish situation for viewers who had already watched it.

After the video came out, fans started making their own art, theories, and content based on it. There is even an official toy plushie of the creature that people can buy. The creator has said he plans to make more videos in this series later on.