The Algae is Always Greener

My older brother died three years ago and I still miss him everyday. I want you to know this before I tell you anything else. You need to acknowledge that I'm not nearly as disturbed or confused as I was when I first found what he was hiding. Two years later, I had learned information that made me feel so ashamed that I didn't help him in time. My brother wanted to be a filmmaker. He was inspired by every shot that belonged to every world renowned classic. However, he had never made anything over an hour. That gave him severe anxiety and depression. He always was telling me "A real movie has to be at least an hour and thirty minutes long. That's a film, man." I felt bad for him. He just could not find the right story for him to make a 'film'.

Whenever he was working on his computer, writing a script that he knew he was just gonna delete later, he always had the soundtrack of Spongebob Squarepants playing. He said it gave him energy. He said the feeling of nostalgia from the show made him try harder to be creative. He had always loved Spongebob anyway.

So, when I stopped by his house to collect trophies of his to help honor his memory, I wasn't surprised when looking through his cluttered as usual, but somehow empty as hell room, to find a book of four DVD envelopes that each seemed to contain one season or special from Spongebob Squarepants. I was intrigued by the back of each DVD. Each had a different label. I realized that these labels were titles of scripts my brother had told me he was working on. Not only that, but below each label was what seemed to be a running time. Each was an hour and thirty minutes long.

The first DVD I popped into his DVD player had the title of my favorite idea for one of his movies: Revenge. 'Revenge' was supposed to be a retelling of Hamlet but told through an early Western environment. Cowboys and all of my favorite tropes of Eastwood's films.

Now, I am going to summarize each "film", of course starting with this one, with as much detail as possible without (somehow) boring you; because you have to get the point that despite my love for my brother, he was disturbed and damaaged. Deeply.

I was baffled when the title card read "One Coarse Meal" with ukulele music. After the title came opening credits. I realized that this was ripped from the Spongebob episode of the same name. I was disappointed. Until the bubbles rose, the bubbles that always rise at the end of the credits to each Spongebob episode. When the bubbles rose, it revealed a scene that was filmed with a camera.

A dark night. The camera focuses on a street light's orb. The camera lowers to reveal a still object. This object is a garbage bag. It seems to contain a body. I was hooked and gripped to the end of my brother's bed.

Out of the darkness, my brother wearing a fedora came. The camera zooms in on his face, revealing a wide smile that I found menacing even when I wasn't terrified just yet. His eyes quickly glanced into the camera. It cut to a scene from Spongebob where Plankton is running from Pearl the whale for five seconds. Static. For ten fucking minutes. It came with the usual static sound as well. I couldn't find the remote to fast forward and I thought pressing the skip button on the DVD player would just skip the whole thing. I sat there. Waiting. After awhile, I got tense. In fact, a song slowly faded over the sound at the eighth minute that got to me. I was getting nervous.

Then abruptly, the DVD stopped. It was over. It wasn't even an hour. Somehow, after only watching one DVD, I knew what my brother was doing. He said these videos were over an hour so he could just be proud of his work. Whether each work was a sign of him being mentally unhealthy wasn't the point. Although I knew that I had found something that would change my overwhelmingly positive view of him. For that reason, I was anxious to insert another DVD.

'Center' was a project my brother had kept to himself. All he said was, "it's hard to write". And literally nothing else. I was anxious. However, I also felt obligated. Part of me wishes I wasn't so I would never watch that fucking video.

'Center' is still the most frightening thing I have ever seen. Whenever I take my teenage daughter to see a new horror film (not some shitty Unfriended-like movie or found-footage film but a SCARY movie), I don't feel any tension. I cannot escape the memory of the fear I felt watching my brother do whatever the fuck he was doing.

Most of the video was the episode of Spongebob, "Someone's In The Kitchen With Sandy". I already felt the tension during the episode. It was a creepy concept (Plankton wearing Sandy's fur which looked like an empty husk). The name was ominous enough.

As soon as Sandy was arrested, the video cut to a dark room. The sound was dead and there was a wide window with blue curtains. I was on edge. I knew this was all wrong. After three minutes, I realized something. There were three objects in the darkness. They were glittering from the window's light. I tried to look closer, but still I did not yet comprehend what I was looking at. Not yet.

Soon, I heard something. A breath. I was chilled. I had no idea what was breathing or why. Until I realized what I was looking at. The objects were from a face. My brother's wide, nightmarish, and piercing eyes floated above his demonic, wide grin of closed teeth. The dead sound of the camera had gone silent. For three minutes, I dealt with a pulse that could've taken my arm from my body with how hard it throbbed and how fast it ran.

After three minutes, the video seemed still. I had been frozen to the bed with the overwhelming sense of fear inside of me. After five minutes, I was sure it was done. I stood up and walked to the DVD player to stop the video. I pressed the button. That is when he jumped at the camera.

It has taken me three years to see my brother as my brother instead of an evil and mysterious nightmare. That's all I saw when the DVD popped out. I was pale, sweating, and I felt numb at my legs lying on the floor after screaming. I screamed from fear. I screamed from pain. I had no idea what my brother was anymore. I wanted to leave. It felt like I couldn't. Something was closing in. It was such a frightening paranoia. I did not put the DVD back in to watch anymore of it. In fact, I broke the fucking thing as soon as I left the house. However, I didn't stop at 'Center' and leave. I knew I had to learn who my brother was.

'Alonely'. A strange title but a beautiful idea for a story. A crippled man finding a deaf woman and seeing them to talk for a whole day. I was far from excited to see why my brother used this title. It took a whole hour for me to get a strong hold of myself. I drank too much water from the goddamn sink so I felt sick. Sicker than I already was from all of the fear I had felt.

After my own form of therapy, I put in the disk. What followed was basically a black and white music video for the song 'Hula Festival' from "guess-which-show". The video was just a sequence of events on repeat: my brother wearing a white shirt and black tie (who seems to be a depressed character) dices up a tomato, he puts clothes in the laundry basket and then the machine, he has coffee, he sits on the couch as the camera zooms in. No, he didn't just copy and paste the same scenes over and over. They were always filmed in different ways. Ways I'd find unconventional for a modern Hollywood film but ways that made for very impressive and creative shots. The reminder of how creative my brother was was the first thing to remind me he was still my brother. I felt less tension when it ended. I felt relaxed.

I was also surprised. It felt like nothing but a boring video. I thought, and you probably thought this too, that the video would be a disturbing exercise of how to terrify someone. I felt as if I had missed something. Maybe in the background. Some person maybe in the corner. I decided to watch the video again, and I noticed something I didn't expect but like the first viewing, wasn't frightening.

The only detail that brought a sense of negativity in the video was that my brother's face looked blanker and less filled with pleasant energy with each time the sequence repeated. There was no detail of dark intention in the background. Only a detail for honest characterization of this once living person right in the foreground.

I became immediately as glum as him from remembering that my brother was confirmed by (as well as long before) these videos to be a man with no happiness or normal behavior. Just sadness and aggression, perhaps all caused by his stupid camera.

The last video was labeled 'Gone'. My brother told me this was supposed to be a story about a son who was supposedly kidnapped. While investigating this, the father soon realizes that his son died a long time ago by his hand. He said it was a metaphor for how our father drained the life from him (Don't ask me about what happened because he doesn't deserve to be mentioned in anything anywhere).

I put in the disc. I remember whispering to myself, "Don't change. Please don't. Please don't change". I was begging him to be the brother I used to know. I put in the disc. I was met with the title card for "Gone". The only noise was the sound of the ocean. The title card lasted for a whole minute. The opening credits didn't appear. The bubbles just rose over the title card and showed a black and white scene of my brother's bedroom.

It was empty. I held the remote with anticipation. I wasn't ready for him to play his demonic bastard persona and creep up on me from the darkness. It was a dark room. And it was probably intentional. The camera lifted itself up. It amateurishly moved itself over to the door. A hand opened it and the camera now seemed to just be walking through the hallway without caring that it's a camera and it's not supposed to move in such a flawed way.

This was a first person perspective shot. The hand, the walking. It was obvious. Suddenly, yelling could be heard. It sounded like my brother. The camera shook violently as the cameraman ran. I couldn't make out where he was going to or anything from such a visually painful blur of black and white. It all soon came to a halt when with a felt aggression and force, my brother quickly grabbed and pulled the camera toward his face. The first second of a scream could be heard, but it all quickly became eerily silent.

He had a slightly scarred face that was only a small distance away from the lens. He had those horrifying features yet again. He had that wide and malicious smile, and of course his giant eyes of mostly white, but with pupils so small and irises so tight around each that it looked like my brother wasn't even human anymore.

I could see his breath. No, he wasn't breathing into the camera's lens. I could see his breath leave from both sides of his grin, heading up only to evaporate away in a second. It was like winter had come to his house.

The eyes slowly went from what I assume to be the cameraman down to the camera's lens. He seemed to be getting agitated. He was twitching in a way that was only uncanny. Soon, his jaw opened and an awful sound faded into existence. It sounded like a moan that was slowed down, and then shifted in pitch to be so unnaturally low. The sound soon shifted into a high squeal sounding like a pig. It's terrifying for me to believe, but I do think that this noise from hell was coming from my brother's open mouth.

Cut to darkness. For two seconds, a laugh so loud it could've damaged the speakers if it had gone on any longer, played over the darkness. But also from the darkness, came those two glittering and wide eyes that pierced through me. Cut to silence and text over a white background that read only "Thanks for watching". I was stunned and frozen. But then, red text began to fade into existence over the message.

'God Doesn't Deserve You'

With that, I left the room, being sure to stomp 'Gone' and 'Center' into shards for what they had done to my brother, and I swore on my whole family (members dead AND alive) I would never come back to that house. Ever again.

Now is a time for honesty. I miss my brother everyday. But the man I saw in those videos was not my brother. They were his personal demons that came together and formed a fucking phony version of him. I cry at my brother's grave because my brother deserves tears. The man from those videos deserves nothing. I feel shitty enough for bringing him to your attention.

I haven't figured everything about him out. I still don't understand why he used so much of Spongebob for his collection or who he was chasing in the last video. I don't know anything. I don't even know how or why he died. All they told me was that he was found with his bottom jaw unhinged and broken, a slime substance seemed to be wrapped around certain parts of his body, and a reef was found in his throat. Other than that, I'm clueless.

I know that a lot of people who read these believe in them. That's why I came here. Maybe someone can help. Please tell me anything you know about or something familiar or related or just anything. Please, thank you.