Web Video / The Painter

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With a narration framed in the form of police video tapes, the series centers on the discovery of disturbing paintings depicting the victims of a string of increasingly bizarre murders carried out by an elusive Serial Killer in Louisiana. An investigation commences in hopes of finding the person or people behind these paintings and the carnage left behind, but those involved may end up getting more than they bargained for.

The series consists of ten episodes (colloquially referred to as "tapes" by UrbanSPOOK himself):

1. "Faces" (November 3, 2022)
2. "The Lighthouse" (December 26, 2022)
3. "In the Walls" (January 9, 2023)
4. "The Clue" (January 27, 2023)
5. "Witness" (February 24, 2023)
6. "Pigs" (April 28, 2023)
7. "Family" (June 30, 2023)
8. "Meat" (September 29, 2023)
9. "Hell" (October 31, 2024)
10. "The Painter" (December 31, 2025)

The series is available to watch on UrbanSPOOK's YouTube channel, with a full playlist of the episodes in order. In addition to the episodes, UrbanSPOOK has posted a variety of supplementary material for the series on his Instagram account, such as Q&As and an action figure sculpture video montage.

UrbanSPOOK has an official Reddit community dedicated to The Painter and his other works, which can be visited here.

Provides examples of:

• Ambiguous Gender: The Painter, initially — her appearance is rather androgynous, being a pale, thin person in concealing clothing and with long dark hair. She was assumed to be male up until the finale, which reveals that she's a woman.
• Ambiguously Human: It's subtly implied that the Painter may not be human - or at least not entirely human. For starters, she's shockingly strong and agile for her frail, sickly appearance. She looks different every time we see her (although that may be the other painter), and her face is extremely pale with uncanny eyes. Also, her pupils seem to reflect light, which would indicate the presence of tapetum lucidum.
• Ambiguous Time Period: It's implied that the series takes place during the early 2000s, but it features footage from police body cameras for some crucial plot events. Such type of camera was invented in 2005, and it wasn't until the early 2010s when they started being widely implemented by police forces in both Louisiana and the US as a whole.
• Anachronic Order: According to UrbanSPOOK on a Q&A in Instagram, the episodes aren't necessarily arranged in an completely chronological order, even if they give a clear sense of linear order and plot progress. While he has left the exact chronological order of the episodes to the viewers' guesses (aside from later adding that "Witness" is the first episode in the chronological timeline), this is evidenced, for instance, by the wording of "an alarming number of victims" used to describe the paintings found at the Ford family farm in "Pigs", implying that "Pigs" chronologically takes place after "Family" and "Meat" (the episodes featuring all of the "Pigs" paintings' corresponding victims aside from the Fords).
• An Arm and a Leg: Happens on a couple of occasions:
  • Tom Harris' arms were mutilated, along with his eyelids, before he was buried in a pile of wax and left to suffocate inside it.
  • The Perpetrator apparently got his left arm mutilated at some point. Said left arm is implied to be the third arm found inside the pile of wax alongside Tom's corpse.
  • Tina Rosenberg's feet and arms were cut off, but she survived to the killers not only once, but twice.
  • Both of Mae Ford's hands were ripped from the handcuffs she was restrained with, likely a result of the brutalized rape she was forced to suffer with the Ford family's horse.
  • The bunch of hacked limbs found inside the workshop of the Painter's lair in "Hell" implies that this has also happened to many other unaddressed victims of the Painter.
• Arc Words: "This is the painting."
• Art Evolution: "Hell" sees some of the most sweeping changes to the series yet, most of which appear to be the result of intentional improvements to the series formula. These include the use of full-motion video footage in addition to the titular paintings, the continued use of voice acting, and an ending where the police are finally shown to be competent at their job and bring the Painter's killing spree to a close.
• Back for the Finale: A multitude of previously mentioned and seen characters return in "Hell". Some of them alive even.
• Bad People Abuse Animals:
  • In "The Clue", the Perpetrator broke the legs of Sean Kane's dog, and rather than kill her outright like her owner, left her to suffer and die in his apartment. She was allegedly barking in agony for nine hours before someone finally called the police, after which she was rescued.^note Information from later episodes, however, make it unclear if the barking noises really came from the dog, as it's implied that the Perpetrator himself makes the noises due to their presence in several other known murder scenes involving the Perpetrator but no dogs at all.
  • At the Ford family farm in "Pigs", the killers injected a stallion with sildenafil^note For those wondering, that's the chemical name for viagra and forced him to brutalize Mae Ford's body via mating until he died of a heart attack, and gutted a pig to hide Ian Ford's corpse inside it and replace its eyes with those of Fiona Ford's.
  • In "Meat", it's implied that something really bad happened to Fred Baker's missing cat, if the painting "Pocket Pussy" is any indication.
• Bestiality Is Depraved:
  • It's all but flat-out stated that Mae Ford, the victim of the painting "Breeding Mount Mae", was forced by the killer(s) to mate with a horse drugged with viagra until her body was thoroughly brutalized and she died from bleeding out.
  • The "Pocket Pussy" painting implies that this fate happened to Fred Baker's missing cat.
• Big Bad: The Painter is a Mad Artist Serial Killer, and the police's investigation into their brutal and bizarre murders are what the tapes center about.
• Big Damn Heroes: Officer Nathan Cole in "Hell", who upon conducting a welfare check at Tina Rosenberg's house, immediately storms the building when he hears Tina screaming in agony and saves her from being killed by shooting Collins dead and holding Lanius at gunpoint.
• Big Fish in a Bigger Ocean: The two killers, Ambiguously Human traits aside, have been able to kill over one hundred people since many of their victims were either ordinary people or helpless police officers, but in "Hell", as soon as someone else with a means of defense confronts them (in this case, an armed police officer), one is shot on the spot and the other just yields.
• A Birthday, Not a Break: The Painter's attack on Tina Rosenberg, Jack Stryker and Flora Rosenberg at a forest in "Witness" took place on the day of Tina's 20th birthday, which Jack wanted to celebrate by taking Tina and Flora on a trip to said forest.
• Bittersweet Ending:
  • The episode "Hell" ends on a very bitter note: Mona turns herself in after Bill is killed, but she's left countless lives dead in her wake, and Tina, although surviving the rampage, has lost her entire family and boyfriend, plus her limbs, ears and eyes to the killers, leaving her in complete agony.
  • Taken further in the final episode, "The Painter". On one hand, Mona is put on death row for her crimes, though another inmate kills her before she can be executed. On the other hand, The Red Man's influence has led to copycat murders appearing across the United States, ensuring that the cycle of violence is nowhere near over.
• Body Horror: The victims in the paintings usually have nightmarish alterations done to their bodies.
• Bowdlerize: The nude humanoid representing Ian Ford from the "Ian the Pig" painting was originally painted with visible genitalia^note This version can be seen on UrbanSLUG's Instagram and the Soundcloud single cover of the "Pigs" soundtrack; said genitals were edited out of the painting for the "Pigs" episode itself, due to YouTube's policy regarding depictions of nudity in videos.
• Call-Back:
  • A good number of the paintings only have their context elaborated in an episode after the one the paintings themselves appear in.
    • The victims corresponding to "Daniel After the Fire", "Jennifer's Last Stare", and "Lisa's Secret Face" from "Faces", named Daniel Williams, Jennifer White, and Lisa White, have their corpses found in "The Lighthouse" (though only Daniel's death is explained).
    • "Fucktoy Cory" and "Scream Maggy Scream" from "Faces" have a whole episode ("In the Walls") dedicated to contextualizing them. While the corpse for "Scream Maggy Scream" is discovered in the episode, the one for "Fucktoy Cory" isn't actually found until "Hell".
    • The victim of "Wax Doll Tom" from "Faces", Tom Harris, has his corpse discovered in "The Clue".
    • The victim of "Hanging Jimmy" from "Faces", Jim Lee, has his corpse found in "Hell".
    • The victim of "The Man in the Pipes" from "The Clue" is already established to be Sean Kane in said episode, but his corpse isn't found until "The Painter".
    • Most of the paintings found in "Pigs" are explained in the next two episodes. "The Jigsaw Baby", "Breathless Janice", "Observing Paul", "Hide and Zeke" and "Blowhole Isabelle" are contextualized in "Family", while "Meat" addresses the murder cases corresponding to "Flesh Head Fred" and "Wet Skin George".
    • The victim of "Emma's Last Smile" from "Hell", Emma Riley, has her corpse discovered in "The Painter".
  • "Tina the Witness" from "Pigs" inverts the tendency by nodding back to Tina Rosenberg's case from the previous episode, "Witness". The killers' second attempt at killing Tina in "Hell", in which they left her with her eyes and ears pierced by needles, in turn nods to the injuries implied in "Tina the Witness".
  • Sarah and Michael Stone were either murdered or at least kidnapped in the camera footage of their house shown at the end of "Meat". Their sewn corpses and painting (titled "Stone Loop") are then found in the next episode, "Hell".
  • The Collins family, whose corpses, photos and a painting for Angel were seen in "The Lighthouse", are a target for multiple call-backs.
    • The faces of Bill and Mia Collins (near-identical to their photos before death) can be seen among the photos of skinned faces in "Pigs". Additionally, one of the two morse code sentences that the Perpetrator speaks in the video tape from the end of the episode translates to "I am Bill Collins".
    • The Paint Room from "Hell" features a painting depicting the Collins family's remains inside the lighthouse's barrel. Then at the end of the episode, not only is the Perpetrator is identified as Bill Collins, it's also found that he was the one responsible for killing the rest of his family in the first place.
  • Many paintings in the final montage have a similar naming convention and theme as other previous paintings.
• Cannibal Larder: The main basement of the Painter's hideout in "Hell" was used as a storage of victim corpses from which at least one of the killers had eaten flesh from.
• Cold-Blooded Torture: The Painter and the Perpetrator love to prolong their victims' suffering and torment as much as possible before they die, whether it be through burnings, skinnings, stabbings, mutilation or even sexual abuse.
• Content Warning: All episodes except "In The Walls" begin with a warning that the video tape contains violent and disturbing content. "Pigs" has an additional warning right before the paintings discovered at the Ford farm's tack room are shown, cautioning that they could be very distressing to some.
• Cop Killer: The Painter has targeted both former and current police officers. She seems to have an active hatred of the police (or maybe just a very sick sense of humour) based on the fact Ian Ford's painting is titled Ian the Pig, referring both to how his body was found inside a pig carcass and the derogatory slang for a police officer.
• Cosmic Horror Reveal: In the final episode, it is revealed that from early childhood, Mona Lanius was driven to kill by a mind-controlling Eldritch Abomination that's heavily implied to be the concept of violence given form. This entity does not take setbacks lightly, as following Mona's death, a massive wave of deaths and disappearances sweeps the nation.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: The Painter and her accomplice have no concept of a quick and painless death, as shown by the murder methods they use for many of their victims.
  • Carla Grey (from "Carla's Teeth") was stabbed 36 times in the face and had all of her teeth ripped out.
  • Jackie Gramm (from "Floating Jackie") was stabbed 27 times in the perineum and then drowned in water as her blood flowed into it.
  • James Miller (from "James' Secret Face") had his face ripped away from his skull and his wrists slashed open, leaving him to suffer in agony until he eventually died days later.
  • Daniel Williams (from "Daniel After the Fire") was burned alive until his body was completely charred.
  • Whatever the killers did to the Collins family in order to reduce them into shredded flesh and bones, it wasn't pretty.
  • Cory and Margaret Beck (from "Fucktoy Cory" and "Scream Maggy Scream", respectively) had their bodies split in half, with the upper halves being mixed with each other's lower halves via stitching. And that was only after Margaret had her neck and jaw broken from getting a brick shoved into her throat, and Cory had his genitals ripped off.
  • Tom Harris (from "Wax Doll Tom") had both his arms and eyelids cut off before being buried in candle wax and left to suffocate to death.
  • Mae Ford (from "Breeding Mount Mae") and the Fords' stallion were forced to mate after Mae was handcuffed to a pole and the stallion was drugged with viagra. This resulted in Mae's body being completely mangled (with her hands being ripped off from the handcuffs) until she died from internal bleeding, and the stallion quickly dying of a heart attack due to its viagra overdose.
  • Paul (from "Observing Paul") had his unborn daughter's dismembered head shoved down his throat and his mouth sewn shut. He was then left to slowly asphyxiate as the killers forced him to watch his wife and son being murdered in his eyes.
  • Isabelle Jackson (from "Blowhole Isabelle") had her head drilled downwards from the top until a hole was made on the upper jaw of her oral cavity.
  • Dr. Fred Baker (from "Flesh Head Fred") bled to death from the killers slowly peeling his head's skin off with a bunch of sandpaper sheets.
  • Fred's missing pet cat is implied to have been Flayed Alive and raped to death, going by the "Pocket Pussy" painting found under Fred's bed (on which Fred's corpse was found).
  • George White (subject of "Wet Skin George") was stabbed roughly 487 times all over his body, and that was only after his face was cut off. To add insult to injury, many of the stab wounds were tightly clustered around his crotch.
  • Police dispatcher Sarah Stone and her husband Michael (the victims of "Stone Loop") were force-fed rocks before having their mouths forcibly stitched to each other's rectal openings.
  • Emma Riley (subject of "Emma's Last Smile") had 80 of her bones broken, then was disemboweled and strangled with her own intestines.
• Double Meaning:
  • Ian Ford's portrait from "Pigs" is titled Ian the Pig. His body was found stuffed inside a dead pig, but Ian was also a police officer, which "pig" is a derogatory term for.
  • The Riddle in the note tucked into Isabelle Jackson's corpse in "Family" ("I live where I can't breath and I eat without teeth. What am I?") has two answers; aside from the most obvious answer of a whale, based on how the murder method the Painter used to kill Isabelle was intended to mockingly evoke a whale, the riddle can also be attributed to a human fetus, in reference to the unborn daughter of the murdered family seen prior in the episode and whose home adress Isabelle mentioned in the her 911 phone call. Even the episode's soundtrack, "Whale", appears to get involved in the symbolism, as its prominent whale-like moaning sound becomes similar to a baby's cry when sped up.
• Downer Ending: In the series finale "The Painter", Mona is stabbed to death while on death row, but not before casually telling the interviewer that things will get worse. She is correct. Shortly after, it's revealed that many new paintings are being discovered across the United States, and the people whose names correspond to said paintings are currently missing. And it's implied this is only the beginning.
• The Dragon: The masked Perpetrator is this for the Painter. For a time, it was speculated that the Painter had an accomplice in their killing spree as the photos taken of the Painter are quite different than the masked individual seen in the photo from "The Clue" and the video tape from "Pigs." "Family" confirms the existence of a second killer and they're caught on camera together in "Meat." The Painter is still framed as the killer who calls the shots and makes the paintings, with the masked man serving as her violent muscle for the murders that require a good amount of strength to carry them out. In his autopsy at the end of "Hell", his identity is revealed as former police officer Bill Collins (who was first mentioned in "The Lighthouse").
• Eerie Pale-Skinned Brunette: The Painter is a woman with long black hair and very pale skin, almost looking like a Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl.
• Evil Has a Bad Sense of Humor: Played for Horror. The Painter has a deeply sick sense of humour, with several painting titles being puns referencing how their victims died or other circumstances of their deaths/disappearances, such as "Flower Face Flora" (a clear play on words between Flora Rosenberg's name and the resulting appearance of her face after it was smashed in with a hammer) and "Hide and Zeke" (referencing how Zeke was nowhere to be found in his family home despite the corpses of the rest of his family being found there, with the police declaring him missing rather than dead). They also murdered Isabelle Jackson, a heavy-set woman, by drilling a hole into her forehead, and then stuck a whale-related riddle into the resulting hole and titled her painting "Blowhole Isabelle" to make her corpse seem like a whale parody.
• Eye Scream: In "Pigs", a pig's eyes are gouged out and replaced with those of Fiona Ford.
• Facial Horror:
  • A staple of this series, as the Painter appears to mainly go after the faces of their victims. Victims have had them cut off, smashed with hammers or skinned with sandpaper.
  • Plenty of the Painter's portraits depict their victims with this, even some who weren't killed via facial injuries.
• Failed a Spot Check: Seemingly, everyone in the world. Even when the killings are performed in urban neighborhoods, nobody spots the killers climb up a drain pipe (while carrying enough wax to fully encase a man in, no less) and no one hears their neighbors being brutalized. When Sean Kane's home is invaded and he's attacked, bloodied and taken away, all the neighbors hear is his dog barking. Even then, they don't start thinking anything's amiss until after the dog has barked incessantly for a full nine hours.
• Family Extermination: The Painters' numerous victims include several whole families, such as the Collins family from "The Lighthouse", the Ford family from "Pigs", the family without surname of Janice, Paul and Zeke from "Family", and the Jones family from "Hell".
• Fate Worse than Death: What the Painter is heavily implied to have intended to invoke on Tina Rosenberg. After being forced to hear her boyfriend and sister get tortured to death, the Painter planned to chop her hands and feet off, and gouge out her eyes and eardrums (pretty much putting her in a Johnny Got His Gun situation) before presumably leaving her like that until she either bleeds to death or is found by another person. While the Painter does go with the whole scheme by the time of "Hell" (to disturbing results regarding Tina's mental well-being, and following an interruption of the killers' first attempt at mutilating Tina in "Witness"), this coincided with the killers' apprehension and Tina's rescue and hospitalization (with the open possibility of Tina receiving ear reconstruction surgery and the implication that she'll get better in the future), so whether the Painter successfully managed to leave Tina in such a state of almost eternal agony is currently left up in the air.
• Finale Title Drop: The final episode has the same title as the series itself: "The Painter".
• Forced to Watch: In "Family," Paul (whose painting, Observing Paul, was previously seen in "Pigs", alongside those for the rest of his family), had his unborn daughter's head stuffed down his throat and his mouth sewn shut, and was forced to watch his wife and son get brutally murdered before choking to death.
• Genuine Human Hide:
  • The Perpetrator wears a mask of flayed human skin to cover his skinless head.
  • It's strongly implied that the Painter had attempted to make a lot more clothing made of human skin, going by the flayed faces nailed to walls at the Ford farm in "Pigs", and the tailoring material seen at the abandoned factory's workshop in "Hell" (which is described as an apparent attempt at making clothes from human skin).
• Giallo: The series takes heavy inspiration from the genre, combining mystery and suspense with graphic violence and a persistent atmosphere of tension.
• Gorn: A lot of the horror of the series lies in the detailed and graphic descriptions of how The Painter murders their victims.
• Groin Attack: Played for Horror instead of for comedy, and on three occasions to boot:
  • Jackie Gramm suffered 27 stab wounds to the perineum before being drowned.
  • Cory Beck's genitalia were ripped off before his body was split in half and had its halves swapped around with the respective opposite ones of his twin sister Margaret via sewing.
  • Among the 487 stab wounds that George White took, a good portion of them are concentrated on his crotch.
• Grand Finale: "Hell" concludes the hunt for the Painter, ending in her arrest.
• Grew a Spine: The police in "Hell". After 8 episodes of being completly incapable of stopping the two killers, despite the amount of evidence found, Officer Nathan Cole manages to catch them just before they can kill someone else. In a moment of sheer badassery, he arrives at what he thought would be a simple welfare check, hears Tina screaming in pain and terror and immediately charges in, kicking down the door and catching the killers in the act. When the Perpetrator tries to lunge at him, he simply shoots him dead, then holds the Painter at gunpoint, preventing her from escaping. Whether the cops got their act together or Nathan is the sole competent officer in the force is up for debate.
• Hell Is That Noise: Of course, Tina's screeching at the end of "Hell".
• Half the Man He Used to Be: The Painter kidnapped twins Cory and Margaret Beck and sawed them in half after giving them some other injuries, then stitched Margaret's upper half onto Cory's lower half, and Cory's upper half onto Margaret's lower half. Why the body with Cory's upper half was kept in the Painter's lair until its discovery in "Hell" while the one with Margaret's upper half was left in another abandoned building is unknown, but judging by the name of Cory's portrait ("Fucktoy Cory"), it wasn't anything pleasant.
• Hanging Around:
  • As implied by the name of his portrait ("Hanging Jimmy") and clarified by the discovery of his corpse in "Hell", the Painter killed Jim Lee by hanging him.
  • The police find the youngest member of the Collins family, 2-month baby Angel, hanging by a noose in the attic, with her painting referencing the lengthening of a person's neck that usually happens when they're asphyxiated by hanging.
  • At least one unidentified victim whose corpse had been found alongside Jim's in "Hell" had also been hanged by the Painter.
• I Love the Dead: At least one of the killers (most likely the Perpetrator, who's established as being far more unhinged than the Painter) has engaged in necrophilia with a few of their victims' corpses, such as Cory Beck's corpse with his lower half replaced with that of his twin sister Margaret's (which was kept inside a cage at the killers' lair, and the painting of which is titled "Fucktoy Cory"), Fred Baker's cat (who has a dedicated painting titled "Pocket Pussy") and George White's corpse (which had four stab wounds filled with semen).
• I'm a Humanitarian: The abandoned textile and paint factory's basement from "Hell" having had the function of a Cannibal Larder indicates that at least one of the two killers had eaten pieces of flesh from their victims' corpses to sustain themselves.
• Implacable Man: The Painter will go to seemingly impossible lengths to find and kill their victims. Once, they shimmied up an apartment building's drain pipe just to bury a man in candle wax after they chopped his arms and eyelids off.
• Inconsistent Episode Lengths: The episodes get increasingly longer as the series progresses. "Faces" and "The Lighthouse" have runtimes of just above 2 minutes and 40 seconds; "In the Walls", "The Clue" and "Witness" are over 3 minutes long; "Pigs" is the first episode to surpass the five-minute mark; "Family" and "Meat" are over 6 minutes long; and "Hell" and "The Painter" are the longest episodes by a drastic margin, having runtimes of more than 10 and 15 minutes, respectively.
• I Want My Mommy!: While recalling the night they were attacked in "Witness", Tina says the last thing her younger sister Flora did before the killers bashed her face in with a hammer was scream for their mom.
• Karma Houdini Warranty: After getting away constantly for their crimes, The Painters are cornered and taken down by a police officer, with Bill Collins shot dead and Mona Lainus being arrested and awaiting trial for her crimes in “Hell”
• Kill It with Fire: Daniel Williams (from "Daniel After the Fire") was burned alive until his entire body was charred.
• Mad Artist: The Painter makes grotesque pictures of their victims, and seems to have a grim and bloody creativity in their killings.
• Nightmare Face:
  • Many of the Painter's portraits invoke this trope.
  • The killers' anomalous appearances allow them to get their own handfuls of Nightmare Faces.
  • The photos of the Collins family after being drugged by amphetamines have inhuman appearances with disturbing-looking eyes and very wide smiles.
• No Full Name Given: While most of the characters are given full names, some aren't given a surname at all, instead only being referred to by their first names. These characters include Cory's friends Chris and Zack from "In the Walls", and the titular family of Janice, Paul and Zeke from "Family" (sans the unborn daughter, whose name isn't mentioned at all).
• Off with His Head!:
  • In "Pigs," Fiona Ford was beheaded, then had her head's eyes gouged out to replace those of the pig corpse in which Ian Ford was stuffed into.
  • In "Family," Bruce Jackson was beheaded and stabbed in the chest seven times, and his head was swapped out with a painting titled Infinite Maw Bruce.
  • Implied with Zeke, whose portrait from "Pigs" ("Hide and Zeke") appears to depict the stump of a headless neck, but Zeke's corpse is nowhere to be found in the scene of his family's murder in "Family", nor in any of the following episodes.
• Police Are Useless:
  • A likely unintentional example on the creator's behalf, but the police in this series are shockingly incompetent. They're seemingly unable to follow any kinds of leads to find the killer, such as checking craft stores for any large purchase or robbery of wax (for Tom Harris' murder case in "The Clue"), and in "Witness" they don't bother to keep at least one officer by Jack Stryker's car when they go to find Tina Rosenberg, which could have helped them catch the killers when they returned to the car to plant Jack's painting.
  • Averted with Officer Nathan Cole in “Hell”, who immediately entered Tina's house after the police were notified that the killers were going after her again (though this is mainly owed to the fact that he was the only officer in the house's area at that moment), located the killers and shot Bill Collins dead before arresting Mona Lanius, thus saving Tina’s life.
  • In the final episode, if Mona is to be believed, the police were influenced by the Red Man to allow the killings to continue.
• Police Pig: Invoked by the Painter herself with Ian Ford, a retired police officer whom she kills via an unexplained means before stuffing his corpse inside one of the pig carcasses at the Ford family farm, with Ian's painting ("Ian the Pig") evoking a pun between his cop status and murder method.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: Implied in "Family". The murder method with which the Painter kills Isabelle Jackson, a fat woman, seems designed to multilate her into a parody of a whale, down to Isabelle's painting (previously seen in "Pigs") being titled "Blowhole Isabelle" and the Painter leaving a note containing a riddle (the answer of which can be either a whale or fetus^note the latter answer directly nodding to how Isabelle said the home address of the murdered family previously seen in the episode in her 911 phone call) inside the hole she drilled through the top of Isabelle's head to drive the point home.
• Riddle for the Ages: In the final episode, everything regarding the Red Man. Is he an eldritch abomination possessing his victims to commit unspeakable acts? The manifestation of a government mind-control conspiracy gone wrong? Just a common memetic thread among copycat killers? Every interpretation holds some weight.
• Sensory Abuse: The soundtrack for "Pigs" was deliberately made to be as unpleasant to listen to as possible, with distorted blaring synths that continually fade in and out while simultaneously getting louder, various screaming sounds, and incomprehensible background noises, befitting the episode that starts upping the ante of the series' horror.
• Shout-Out:
  • UrbanSPOOK has invokedstated that Cory Beck and his friends Chris and Zach were named after Cory Beck, Chris O'Neill and Zach Hadel of OneyPlays. This is strengthened by the fact that Cory's first encounter with the Painter happened at an abandoned cabin, likely an additional reference to the OneyPlays-derived channel Sleepy Cabin, which Beck, O'Neill and Hadel were all also involved in.
  • The Painter's real name, Mona Lanius, could be a reference to the Mona Lisa painting, which is fitting considering her modus operandi. In fact, the letters for "Lisa" are in "Lanius," further reinforcing the connection.
• Sole Survivor: So far, Tina Rosenberg from "Witness" is the only known person who went through one of the Painter's wicked acts and lived to tell the tale, and was put under police care after they discovered her. However, she has her own painting in "Pigs", so she might well still be in the Painter's sights. Confirmed in "Hell", where the killers come back for her. However, this time, the police were waiting
• Strictly Formula:
  • The first eight episodes follow the same format: at least one person goes missing, the police find their mutilated body, followed by a graphic description of how they were murdered, and then the police find a painting corresponding to the victim before or after the murder takes place, plus some evidence regarding the Painter themselves. There are details that paint the broader picture of the narrative and occasionally shake things up, but every episode faithfully adheres to this structure.
  • The plot of the ninth episode, "Hell", initially starts off in a similar way to the other episodes, but its climax is quite different than the rest of the series, as it involves the killers finally being caught, followed by an autopsy of the Perpetrator, who was shot dead during the apprehension, and a police interrogation of the Painter before her trial in court.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: For the entire series, the police have seen shown as completely useless, with the killers effortlessly outsmarting them at every turn and killing several of their officers with impunity. So when an armed police officer finally catches the killers in the act, you'd expect him to end up brutally murdered, or at least for the killers to easily evade him, right? Nope! Mona is taken into custody with no issues and Bill is unceremoniously shot dead while resisting arrest. Turns out, between two civilians armed with sewing needles and a formally trained police officer armed with a pistol, smart money's on the police officer no matter how evil the civilians are.
• Surreal Horror: All of the Painter's portraits are heavily distorted caricatures of their victims, with malformed and grotesque faces usually related to how they killed them.
• Tear Off Your Face: James Miller (from James' Secret Face), Lisa White (from Lisa's Secret Face) and George White (from "Wet Skin George") all had their faces torn off by the Painter, with all of their respective paintings depicting skinless faces.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: The killers don't just murder their victims, in most cases they absolutely destroy them. We've seen victims with his face cut off before being stabbed 487 times, his face fully removed with sandpaper, and choked to death with his unborn child's head.
• Trauma Conga Line: Poor Tina. She loses not just her sister and boyfriend, but also her limbs. The killers then come back for her in "Hell", and while she ends up being rescued, the killers manage to murder her mother and pierce her eyes and ears before they're caught and arrested.
• This Is a Drill: Isabelle, the victim of "Blowhole Isabelle" whose death we're shown via a 911 phone call in "Family", was murdered by the Painter with a power drill, with the borehole being forced through the top of her head.
• Uncanny Valley: All of the paintings have a deeply realistic style that turns right back around into surreal, with most of the subjects/victims staring creepily at the viewer.
• Wham Episode: "Hell" is the turning point in the series. Not only does it depict live-action video footage to visually distinguish it from prior episodes, the police finally catch the killers red-handed. Mona Lanius, the Painter, is apprehended while her accomplice, Bill Collins, is shot dead by Officer Nathan Cole.
  • The last half of the final episode, "The Painter". Despite Mona's unceremonious murder in prison, the killings continue all over the United States. Forensics suggests they are all done by the same person in the exact MO as Mona. And the self-portraits of the Red Man at the end suggest that her ramblings about the entity may not be so groundless after all.
• Wham Line: In "Family":
  The presence of two sets of footprints in the blood suggests that there was more than one culprit.
  The police now firmly believes that whoever is behind these paintings and murders does not work alone.
  • In the last episode, "The Painter":
  An alarming number of paintings have appeared across the nation.
• Wham Shot: In "The Painter," a vector map of the United States which quickly fills with red circles showing murder locations, accompanied by the above Wham Line.
• Would Hurt a Child: Several of the Painter's victims are children. The youngest of their victims, Angel Collins, is a two-month old baby. On one occasion, the Painter has also mutilated an unborn fetus, whom they tore from the mother's womb and chopped up before scarring most of its remains across the house and using its umbilical cord and head to kill its parents.