THE video is called Blank Room Soup and recently it’s been an internet sensation of sorts, believed by some to be some kinda perverted home movie.
While it is genuinely unsettling, the video is fake. Disturbing but fake.
Let me backtrack a little. Three months ago I’d never heard of the Deep Web and now it’s ALL I hear about. This is the buzz term to describe the dark underbelly making up 90% of the internet that the vast majority of users never see – a vast labyrinth of encrypted, secret sites featuring everything from drug-dealing hangouts, snuff porn messageboards, conspiracy theory nuts and just plain craziness.
I wouldn’t check out the Deep Web myself, because it’s too scary for my liking. But I’ve watched a few YouTube videos where folk regularly update viewers on what they’ve found there.
One such explorer is SomeOrdinaryGamers (aka Mutahar) and it was on the August 30 episode of his Deep Web Exploration series that I first saw a short film he’d uploaded from the Deep Web.
It was a video that could actually be found quite easily on YouTube, which isn’t particularly deep. There, it’s known as Blank Room Soup.
In the film, which runs for little over a minute, a man (with his identity obscured by a black bar superimposed over his eyes) is dressed in a singlet and sits at a table in front of a video camera. He looks haggard as he gorges himself on a bowl of what appears to be ramen noodles. He eats with a wooden ladle.
Behind the man is an open door. After a few seconds, a person wearing an oversized human head appears and walks towards him. He looks like a mascot.
As the mascot touches him, the man starts to cry. Laughter can be heard in the background.
The man continues to eat and cry while the mascot comforts him, stroking his back. After a few seconds, a second mascot appears from stage right and also comforts the man who now sounds hysterical. Both mascots are nodding as the video ends.
Now, I think Mutahar tends to over-react to a lot of stuff he unearths in his Deep Web series, even when it’s fairly benign shit.
So him dry-retching and acting all freaked out over this film, which he assumed was some weird torture fetish tape, seemed a bit OTT to me.
That said, it IS fucking creepy and I soon became obsessed in learning more about Blank Room Soup and the people who made it.
It didn’t take me long at all – in fact, the links were in the comments below Mutahar’s episode.
Turns out this film could be found on a Daily Motion channel belonging to RayRayTV.
The freaky mascots appear in several videos where they dance in a studio, wander around Hawaii and even go clubbing. They’re odd but mostly harmless – the videos reminded me of a weird cross between the 2014 cult movie Frankand the surreal skits that appeared on 1990s British comedy The Smell Of Reeves And Mortimer. Y’know, the kinda comedy that’s more dada than haha.
The duo even appear in a 2006 music video, Push Button, for a punk cabaret band called Stolen Babies.
Yet the site also contains Blank Room Soup and a follow-up video known as Soup Torture, both uploaded in 2008.
Soup Torture is also a minute long and shows the two mascots standing silently in the background, watching the soup-eating man as he shovels ramen noodles into his mouth till he’s nearly retching. After 30 agonising seconds, one of the mascots runs full speed towards the man before the video cuts out and we hear brief audio of the man screaming.
Both videos have a completely different vibe to the other RayRayTV fare in both content and tone. Maybe RayRayTV was exploring darker comedy material – if so, the comedy is lost on me (and many others).
Curiously, comments had been added by RayRayTV beneath both films. Next to Blank Room Soup is written, “A clip of people who look like us doing something to someone that we would never do. We promise.”
And with Soup Torture: “What’s happening in this clip and why do these people look like us!”
Clearly, something was not right here. But I could glean little more from RayRayTV’s Daily Motion page, which didn’t seem to have been updated for seven years. There was just a name attached to one of the “safe” videos, a director called Raymond Persi.
I did more research...
...AND THE MYSTERY WAS SOLVED.
Persi is a Californian artist, animator and voice actor, who’s directed episodes of The Simpsons and now works for Disney. His storyboard credits include Wreck-It Ralph and Frozen.
He has a Tumblr page (raymondpersi.tumblr.com) featuring animated videos and illos of his mascot character RayRay.
If you check his page on Wikipedia you learn that Persi’s younger sister is Dominique Persi, the lead singer of Stolen Babies. Which explains that connection.
So there you have it – the creator of Blank Room Soup and Soup Torture is NOT a snuff torture film sicko.
It still doesn’t explain his motivations for making these short, disturbing films. But hey! It’s art innit. Probably as good a reason as any.
