Mission Statement

On January 15th, 1975, a young girl in Milwaukee discovered a deck of cards hidden inside an antique chest of drawers her parents brought home. Included with this deck was a set of instructions for playing a game known as Calliope. She invited four of her friends to play the game, thinking it was simply a variation on Poker. By the morning of January 20th, the girl was the only survivor.

In May of 1943, a Japanese artist was commissioned to paint scenes from across the island of Kyūshū. One night, the artist awoke to find himself having painted a landscape depicting a city in flames, with bizarre shadows that resemble people covering the walls. He recognizes it as Nagasaki, and vows to never visit the city again.

In October of 1998, an NBC affiliate in Maine had their signal interrupted during a broadcast of Days of Our Lives. This new broadcast depicted an empty street in an unknown metropolitan area. Morse code is played over this transmission, which has since been translated as “Y2K38 NOACH CANNOT SAVE YOU”. The camera shook before the broadcast ended as a gargantuan shadowy form descended onto the street.

In 1603, the first and only known performance of The Rapturous Revival of the Crosse occurred in Southern London. Written by a Catholic playwright, the performance was interrupted by a Protestant mob storming the playhouse. The mob attempted to murder the entire theater company, but found their assaults-- everything from throwing tomatoes and boots to firing pistols to running onto the stage and stabbing the actors-- were completely ignored by the performers. When the play concluded, every member of the theater company simply vanished, leaving bloody, ragged costumes behind.

These are just a few examples of what we have dedicated our lives to studying. For every claim of a haunted Nintendo cartridge, or an alleged snuff film disguised as a kid’s show, or a mundane Youtube video created by a malefactor trying to game the ever-elusive algorithm, there are a dozen pieces of media like this-- lost to history, locked away, hidden from public view purposefully, until we uncover and study them.

The Institute for the Study of Forbidden Media catalogs these items and phenomena because, quite simply, nobody else is willing to take them seriously. These works are aberrant to reality as we know it, and we believe that educating ourselves and others about them, no matter the risk, is the best way to defend humanity against whoever, or whatever, is responsible for these items.

This blog will collect essays, recountings, summaries, and personal testimonies regarding pieces of media studied by members of the Institute from 2021 onward. Some entries have previously been posted on certain internet forums in an attempt to boost awareness of the forbidden media phenomenon, and have been re-edited for the sake of better readability and flow. 

For legal reasons, certain names and details regarding the persons and corporate entities involved in the creation of forbidden media, as well as the names of the individuals writing these summaries, have been altered or expunged.

 

Money for Nothing (1999)