Image Source: “The Oldest View - The Rolling Giant”
“The Oldest View” is a short subliminal horror series created on YouTube by Kane Parsons, known online as Kane Pixels, and is the same creator of “The Backrooms” series. “The Oldest View” isn’t as subliminal as “The Backrooms” but instead feeds off of nostalgia and the mundane, creating horrors from what once could have been cheerful memories. The series features five episodes and two different endings, one occurring in an alternate dimension.
The series takes the perspective of the content creator Wyatt and follows his journey into an abandoned mall buried deep underground. The mall is reminiscent of 1980 - 1990s era malls but is eerily empty and quiet until music starts playing from somewhere in the mall and Wyatt encounters a mysterious giant figure, named “The Rolling Giant”. This entity appears to be a large cardboard puppet of Julien Reverchon, a French botanist.
The most unsettling part of this series is that the Mall and Giant were both real things. The mall was called “The Valley View Mall” in Dallas, Texas and the giant was part of an art festival to honor respected figures in Dallas’ history. The Giant was stored in the mall for 11 years until the mall was demolished in 2023 with the Giant still sealed inside.
Kane Parsons surprised viewers familiar with the location and festival with the quality of the replication of the Mall and Giant, as they were created with CGI. Despite the mall being CGI it looks and feels real, a testament to the talent and skill Parsons has in creating digital, yet believable locations.
Subliminal horror has always been an odd genre as it pulls from the mundane, places and things that we might see in our everyday lives become eerie and oddly surreal. “The Oldest View” reflects this as a normal-looking abandoned mall quickly becomes sinister with the lack of familiarity and people usually present in such areas.
Overall “The Oldest View” lives up to Kane Parsons’ prestige and displays a complex use of CGI, world-building, and mystery. Using real-world places and events increases immersion as the mysterious horrors contained in these places feel a little bit more real and uncanny because they once existed and were visited frequently by real people. Utilizing all of Parsons’ skills and talents, “The Oldest View” twists cheerful memories of old and reduces them to empty and eerie husks of what they once were.
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