Surreal, Must-See YouTube Film Is Equal Parts Comfort Food And Nightmare Fuel

By Robert Scucci
| Published 56 minutes ago

If you grew up with cable in your house during the 90s or early aughts, you may remember a very specific, but hard-to-describe feeling. You fall asleep on the couch watching one of your programs (for me it was always Golden Era Simpsons), only to wake up hours later. Both of your arms are asleep from dozing off in an awkward position, and your show is no longer broadcasting.

Instead, you find yourself watching late-night paid programming that probably plays pretty normal when you’re more lucid, but comes off as straight from the uncanny valley because you’re stuck in that strange mental state that can only be experienced when you’re on the verge of sleep paralysis.

The short film Indistinct Chatter – Have You Ever Seen a Cow?, created by YouTuber KrainagrzybowTV, captures this hyperspecific mental state through its stop-motion visuals. The whole thing plays out like a TV left on overnight, as the sleeping subject (you, the viewer) absorbs whatever images show up on screen, creating a sort of alternate reality that makes sense in the moment but becomes increasingly disturbing the more you think about it.

Oddly Soothing, But Also Frightening

Indistinct Chatter is one of those shorts you have to see to believe. It clocks in at just over 30 minutes, and there are a handful of follow-up videos that range anywhere from one to two minutes. The content is all the same in the sense that it’s surreal, occupying that strange liminal space between consciousness and twilight that’s hard to put into words, but something we’ve all experienced before.

The main video in the series follows the life and consciousness of a little boy named Rajinder. He’s seen listening to his radio and watching television before bed, and then he’s whisked into a world full of windows and empty rooms, not unlike what’s seen in The Backrooms. From there, the whole thing becomes a stop-motion fever dream where in-universe advertisements (for products like Good Windows and a canned meat known as Bramble Bor) and television characters overlap not only with each other, but with Rajinder’s thoughts as he drifts in and out of sleep.

A Proper Visual Representation Of The Strangest Feeling

Like I said, if you’ve ever fallen asleep while watching late-night cable during your formative years, Indistinct Chatter feels all too familiar. I could be guessing on the inspiration for its title, but it reads like the kind of closed-caption display used when people are murmuring in the background, letting the viewer know something is happening just beyond the spectrum of what they’re supposed to hear. It’s like watching an episode of Home Improvement, falling asleep, and then imagining you’re in the episode too, but everybody is slightly off while acting like it’s just another wacky adventure filmed in front of a live studio audience.

As the film progresses, Rajinder’s imagination becomes increasingly unhinged as he befriends a sentient cabbage creature named Fungela, who is also featured in advertisements and becomes increasingly aggressive as he continues to play with her. By the time the whole thing wraps up, you will feel like a changed person. Not because it’s terrifying at face value, but because you’ll feel seen, as if somebody finally found a way to visually represent that weird, fleeting state of consciousness we all experience at one point or another, but struggle to put into words.

If you like surreal dreamscapes and sitcom allusions, and miss those weird blocks of late-night infomercials, Indistinct Chatter is well worth a watch and can be viewed on YouTube.