Entertainment
Disturbing YouTube Series Will Force You To Document Your Dreams
By Robert Scucci
| Published
Some of my favorite horror entries live on YouTube and are created by up-and-coming filmmakers who have not yet seen their big break. Series like Alex Kister’s The Mandela Catalogue, Steven Chamberlain’s No Through Road, and channels like Bitesized Nightmares and Kepther e, in my opinion, are leading the charge when it comes to the new wave of found footage and analog horror. I am drawn to this corner of the genre because of how visceral it feels, largely because these videos are framed as legitimate uploads that you are not necessarily supposed to be watching.
Given my fondness for this brand of horror, the almighty algorithm eventually led me to a relatively new series known as VCR Willie, which started making its rounds on YouTube this past November. Updated sporadically by YouTube creator Alexanderthetitan, with videos ranging from eight to 20 minutes, VCR Willie plays like a found footage experiment but has far more going on beneath the surface. The key distinction is that the footage we are seeing was not voluntarily recorded, but instead documented by Alex, the owner of the channel.
A Chronicle Of Nightmares
VCR Willie keeps you in the dark until its fourth entry, “NAK,” where Alex finally addresses his audience and explains what is happening to him. Alex, if we take everything he says at face value and suspend our disbelief for a moment, claims he was living a normal life until he woke up from a lucid dream where he discovered a Sony Handycam sitting in his closet. When he wakes up, he realizes the camera is physically there in his house, despite being a make and model he has never owned.
Things get even stranger when Alex finds a tape already inside the camera but has no way to play it, which leads him to send it out to be digitized. Once he receives the file and watches it, he realizes the footage is exactly what he has been seeing in his recent dreams. Every time he wakes up, the process repeats. A new tape appears in the camera, he sends it off to be digitized, and then reviews what was captured. It is heavily implied that Alex himself is behind the camera in the footage, as the people he interacts with refer to him by name.
Mimics, Shadow People, And Apartment 40
The footage itself, which is not presented in a clean chronological order, begins to paint a picture of what is happening in Alex’s alleged dream world. He is paid by a woman named Scarlet to document her boyfriend Jared’s increasingly strange behavior. Scarlet insists that while the person looks exactly like her boyfriend, it is not actually him, but rather an entity mimicking his appearance to deceive her. The real Jared is hiding inside her apartment, cowering in fear, while another version of him stands outside, trying to get in while pretending to be the real thing.
Most of the videos in VCR Willie follow this same basic structure in different variations. They are almost always set in what appears to be the same apartment during different time periods and with different occupants. Someone hires Alex to document unsettling events involving a real person and their mimic, and the line between who is real and who is not grows more difficult to define as the series progresses.
The mimics themselves vary depending on how far along they are in replacing their subject. Some appear nearly complete, while others still feel unfinished, as if they are learning how to pass. One recurring detail, at least so far, is that they all offer Alex water at some point. They prefer to drink straight from the tap, but they always direct him toward the water cooler in the far corner of the kitchen, often referring to it as “the good water.”
The most recent uploads in the series, with “VHS NIGHT” being the latest entry as of January 18, 2026, push the story into increasingly violent territory. It feels as though the mimics are tightening their grip on the narrative itself, subtly pressuring Alex to join them.
A Visceral Thrill Like Nothing You’ve Ever Seen Before
What keeps me coming back to VCR Willie is how it sidesteps many of the genre’s most familiar beats. There is shaky camera work, the occasional jump scare, and all the expected trappings of found footage, but there is an added layer of unease that is difficult to explain. The people Alex interacts with feel dangerous and welcoming at the same time. They will casually chat with a smile, then suddenly shift into something hostile, storm off into another room, and peek back around the corner as if they believe they are hidden, despite standing in plain sight.
For the first time in a long while, I found myself watching through my fingers because I genuinely have no idea what kind of horrors Alex is walking into inside this apartment. Throughout every video, there is a persistent feeling that I am being watched as well. The idea that these tapes originate from an alternate dream world that does not intersect with Alex’s waking life only makes it more unsettling. In my mind, the mimics have not crossed over yet, but it feels inevitable, and that possibility adds another layer of dread to the experience.
VCR Willie feels like a breath of fresh air in a genre that often leans on familiar frameworks. We receive the creator’s explanation early on, and everything that follows is left to our imagination as we wait for the next update. It is a genuinely exciting time to be a horror fan when creators like Alexanderthetitan have the freedom to push boundaries without studio interference, resulting in some of the most unsettling horror being produced right now.
Entertainment
Hurdle hints and answers for April 19, 2026
If you like playing daily word games like Wordle, then Hurdle is a great game to add to your routine.
There are five rounds to the game. The first round sees you trying to guess the word, with correct, misplaced, and incorrect letters shown in each guess. If you guess the correct answer, it’ll take you to the next hurdle, providing the answer to the last hurdle as your first guess. This can give you several clues or none, depending on the words. For the final hurdle, every correct answer from previous hurdles is shown, with correct and misplaced letters clearly shown.
An important note is that the number of times a letter is highlighted from previous guesses does necessarily indicate the number of times that letter appears in the final hurdle.
Mashable 101 Fan Fave: Nominate your favorite creators today
If you find yourself stuck at any step of today’s Hurdle, don’t worry! We have you covered.
Hurdle Word 1 hint
The edge.
Hurdle Word 1 answer
BRINK
Mashable Top Stories
Hurdle Word 2 hint
Moody.
Hurdle Word 2 Answer
POUTY
Mashable 101 Fan Fave: Nominate your favorite creators today
Hurdle Word 3 hint
America’s bird.
Hurdle Word 3 answer
EAGLE
Hurdle Word 4 hint
A platform.
Hurdle Word 4 answer
FORUM
Final Hurdle hint
Cheapskate.
Hurdle Word 5 answer
MISER
If you’re looking for more puzzles, Mashable’s got games now! Check out our games hub for Mahjong, Sudoku, free crossword, and more.
Entertainment
Star Trek’s Most Ambitious Villain Helped Create The Franchise’s Most Complex Hero
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
When Star Trek: Voyager first came out, the most fascinating character was the Doctor. While Robert Picardo’s performance was superb, it’s fair to say this character was mostly fascinating on a conceptual level. We had seen things like hypercompetent Starfleet captains and exotic aliens before, but what we hadn’t seen was a fully holographic chief medical officer. Voyager’s Emergency Medical Hologram seemed like the perfect embodiment of the Star Trek ethos. He’s a technological strange new world and new life, all rolled into one.
However, what casual audiences didn’t realize is that the Doctor wasn’t completely unique. Long before Picardo’s character ever sawed bones in the Delta Quadrant, Captain Picard dealt with another extraordinary hologram: Moriarty, the brilliant foe of the famous investigator Sherlock Holmes. Over on The Next Generation, Geordi LaForge accidentally created this villain as a sentient hologram when he asked the holodeck to create a challenge worthy of the android Data. Later, Star Trek: Voyager executive producer Jeri Taylor revealed that, in-universe, the holographic Doctor was created because Starfleet took advantage of the same accidental breakthrough that created Moriarty!
It all started in “Elementary, My Dear Data,” the Next Generation episode in which the titular android and Geordi LaForge recreated Sherlock Holmes’ adventures on the holodeck. Thanks to his positronic brain and his encyclopedic knowledge of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Holmes novels, Data is able to easily solve every mystery that is thrown at him. That’s when Geordi makes a seemingly simple request. He asks the Enterprise computer to develop a holodeck foe that could actually defeat Data, one of the smartest beings in the entire galaxy.
The computer obliges and creates a sentient version of Moriarty, Sherlock Holmes’ greatest foe. Following Geordi’s instructions, the Enterprise computer included much of Data’s vast programming, which resulted in the holographic character becoming self-aware. Moriarty ended up threatening the Enterprise on two different occasions, and Picard eventually got rid of him by trapping the unknowing villain in a simulation where he thought he had left the holodeck and could explore the stars. This was meant to be a happy ending for Moriarty, but in the show’s typically bleak fashion, Star Trek: Picard later showed us a different, more hostile version of this character created by a malevolent Section 31 AI.
How A Villain Created A Hero
What does all of this have to do with Robert Picardo’s holographic Doctor on Star Trek: Voyager? Elementary, my dear reader! Very early in Voyager’s development (the show didn’t even have a name yet), executive producer Jeri Taylor was inspired by Moriarty to create a new character. As reported in A Vision of the Future-Star Trek: Voyager, Taylor wrote down notes for a holographic doctor “who, like Moriarty, has ‘awareness’ of himself as a holodeck fiction. He longs for the time when he can walk free of the Holodeck.”
A few days later, she wrote down additional notes that contain a startling bit of Star Trek lore. “The Holo-Doctor represents a new, state-of-the-art technology which has capitalized on the serendipitous incident which created Moriarty, and has programmed a holographic character which has self-awareness of his situation and limitations.” While Moriarty is name-dropped on Voyager a couple of times, the show never mentioned what Taylor’s notes seem to confirm: that Lewis Zimmerman could never have created the Emergency Medical Hologram program if not for Geordi LaForge accidentally creating Moriarty on the holodeck.
From Villain To Leading Man?
If that’s not strange enough, there was a period of time when Voyager’s producers were considering making Moriarty a mainstay character on the show. As reported in Star Trek–Where No One Has Gone Before, Taylor’s notes mentioned that “everyone agreed that was a little too broad, and we couldn’t figure out why anyone would take him along.” After dismissing the idea, they decided “that having a holographic doctor with the full consciousness of being a hologram might be fun, and we’d never done anything like that before, except for Moriarty.”
There you have it, gentle reader. Without the character of Moriarty on Star Trek: The Next Generation, we’d never have the Doctor on Voyager. In this way, Trek’s most ambitious villain helped create the franchise’s most complex hero. Thanks to Jeri Taylor’s notes, we also know that, in-universe, Lewis Zimmerman would never have been able to create the Doctor if not for Geordi accidentally creating a sentient Moriarty so Data could have fun. In retrospect, this does make Zimmerman’s arrogance that much weirder. After all, he has a lot of attitude for someone who owes his entire career to the two biggest book nerds in the galaxy!
Entertainment
Moon phase today: What the Moon will look like on April 19
After days of almost (and complete) darkness, the Moon is finally starting to reappear. We’re currently in the Waxing Crescent phase of the lunar cycle, which means each night until the Full Moon we’ll see it get more illuminated from the right side.
What is today’s Moon phase?
As of Sunday, April 19, the Moon phase is Waxing Crescent. Tonight, 5% of the moon will be lit up, according to NASA’s Daily Moon Guide.
Despite more of it now being illuminated, the percentage of surface is still too little to be able to spot any surface details. Check again tomorrow.
When is the next Full Moon?
The next Full Moon is predicted to take place on May 1, the first of two in May.
What are Moon phases?
NASA states that the Moon takes about 29.5 days to orbit Earth, during which it passes through eight distinct phases. We always see the same side of the Moon, but the amount of sunlight reflecting off it changes as it moves along its orbit, creating the familiar pattern of full, partial, and crescent shapes. We call these the lunar phases, and there are eight in total:
New Moon – The Moon is between Earth and the sun, so the side we see is dark (in other words, it’s invisible to the eye).
Mashable Light Speed
Waxing Crescent – A small sliver of light appears on the right side (Northern Hemisphere).
First Quarter – Half of the Moon is lit on the right side. It looks like a half-Moon.
Waxing Gibbous – More than half is lit up, but it’s not quite full yet.
Full Moon – The whole face of the Moon is illuminated and fully visible.
Waning Gibbous – The Moon starts losing light on the right side. (Northern Hemisphere)
Third Quarter (or Last Quarter) – Another half-Moon, but now the left side is lit.
Waning Crescent – A thin sliver of light remains on the left side before going dark again.
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