As a Nightmare Fuel page, all spoilers are unmarked as per wiki policy. You Have Been Warned!
As an Analog Horror series, The Painter is quite obviously hand-crafted to scare the shit out of you, with its exponentially horrifying deaths, the Painter themselves, and the truly haunting paintings that make Saturn Devouring His Son look like Bluey by comparison.
It doesn't help that invokes lots of Realism-Induced Horror.
- The Painter. A sadistic Mad Artist on the loose with a love for horrific deaths, painting the aftermath of their deeds.
- What makes them worse is that they're surprisingly more realistic than most monsters in other Analog Horror series. As scary the Alternates were, at least they couldn't be real.
- They have no regards for the victims, meaning that anyone could be a target. From adults to children to even animals...
- There also seems to be a pattern where they go after people who are related in some way or another to the investigation: the Collins family, Tom Harris (who was one of the detectives of the case) and Police Dispatcher Sarah Stone and her husband Michael (presumably because she was the one who answered to Isabelle's calls). Anyone is a potential target, but the killers somehow have enough information on the investigations to know who they want to target next...
- They also have different appearences: they appear either as a Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl or... whatever that thing on the page image is...
- Wild Mass Guessing opens some Fridge Horror too: What if there are 2 painters? And eventually, "Family" confirms this worst fear.
- All of those goddamned paintings, too. Many of them come straight from the dankest depths of the Uncanny Valley, chock full of terrifying Facial Horror - all of them are based on the Painter's victims, and every painting is symbolic of the way they died.
- In "The Lighthouse", a police investigation leads to them finding the remains of the Collins family stuffed into a barrel, and tests also revealed massive amounts of amphetamines. The best part? There's photos! These photos are supposedly of the Collins family moments before death... and before you can say "Bob's your uncle," they're staring directly into your goddamn soul with unnaturally wide smiles, presumably due to the amphetamines.
- It really doesn't help that they don't look human anymore - especially Bill Collins' face, which is elongated and completely fake. Whatever the Painter did, it wasn't pretty.
- Earlier on, the police end up finding Angel, the 2-months old daughter, hanging from the ceiling. And if you know something about hanged bodies, the title makes sense: the neck of someone who died by hanging starts to elongate after some time, due to the body's weight...
- Many of the painful things the Painter's victims are put through. Cruel and Unusual Death at its worst.
- Even worse, some didn't die on the spot, instead remaining alive for some time. Such were the fates of James Miller and Tom Harris: James gets his face ripped off and his wrists cut, leaving him to bleed out. And much like every victim, you get to see the aftermath in all of its glory. As for Tom, we find what happened to him in "The Clue" - he was Buried Alive under cooled wax after having his arms and eyelids cut off.
- What happened to the twins: Margaret has a brick shoved in her jaw, resulting in her mouth being stretched out horribly. Cory instead has his genitals torn off by the Painter. To finish, their bodies are cut in half and sewn together, with the other halves missing. Now, a question: do you remember the title of Cory's painting...?
- Prior to this: Cory's friends dared him to stay for 30 minutes in a cabin, but after merely 4 he ran away, screaming that he saw a face, with his arm badly bruised. What happened in that timespan? The photos answer that question: in short, he finds a place, and before he has more time, he's face-to-face with The Painter. Imagine if it was your house...
- A part of the fifth video has an image of Flora's face after the killer completely bashed her head in with a sledgehammer. It's not pretty, to say the least. Flower Face Flora wasn't too far off...
- For animal lovers, there is the fate of Sean's dog in "The Clue": Her legs were broken and she was left to die by the Painter. From the same video, there's the photograph
of the person who broke into Sean's house, which looks FUCKING HORRIFYING. - If the image of the other killer scared you, wait until you see a video of them in "Pigs".
- Also from "Pigs," the Painter apparently kept dozens of faces nailed to the walls of a house they invaded. If one takes into account the peculiar movement of the Painter in the video alongside that collection of faces, on top of the various different appearances of the Painter each time he appears, it may be likely that he wears the faces of his victims.
- One of the paintings has an elongated, screaming face crying what appears to be black blood from its empty eye sockets. The name of the painting? Tina the Witness.
- Another painting, called The Jigsaw Baby, has just that: a jigsaw with various parts of a child's face and a pacifier. The name alone tells us all we need to know...
- The corpse of Mae Ford is censored. In a recording where we see skinless faces, skulls with holes on their forehead, empty eye sockets with eyes floating, flayed faces, dismembered hands, and a lot more, it's THIS that is too gory to be shown.
- Speaking of Mae, she may have suffered the ghastliest death in the series, bar none. Mae died from internal bleeding, and police found a horse in her barn that died from heart failure caused by a sildenafil overdose - a drug that's sold over the counter as Viagra - and her portrait is titled Breeding Mount Mae. Her fate is all too easy to put together...
- "Family" gives us the backstory for the paintings at the end (save for Wet Skin George and Flesh Head Fred). Needless to say, shit hits the fan real fast:
- Anything around Janice's baby, who's torn apart by the Painter with her body parts scattered around the house for police to find. Even better? The killer puts the head of the child in Paul's mouth and forces him to watch his family die as he suffocates.
- And to top it all off, the video leaves the viewers with, for the first time in the series, an audio recording of a 911 call... a recording containing Isabella Jackson's last moments alive. It's about as chilling as it sounds.
- "Meat" is the first episode to have a disclaimer warning, and does it ever warrant one.
- For starters, a poor bastard named George White was found dead with his face cut off similar to other murders... as well as 487 stab wounds all over his body. Plus, traces of seminal fluid was discovered in those wounds, which can only mean one thing. If that wasn't messed up enough, during an autopsy, his body was discovered to have photographs of some unsettling looking faces crammed among his organs.
- As for the ending: remember how "Family" brought up the possibility of two killers? A full-blown animated look at the 2 killers is shown via a security cam, one of whom looks at the camera with a Nightmare Face as she places her hand on it.
- The unsung victim of the story resides in the in-story editor for these videos. At first, the videos start out very blunt and detached. However, as more are released and more people are found dead, there's very clearly someone trying to say things between the attempts at maintaining that cold demeanor. The harsh synths, the more jarring edits to showcase the gruesome crime scenes and disturbing paintings... all of it feels more explicitly like the build up to a more traditional horror video. It's as if the editors are so absolutely terrified of the Painter that they're trying to make anyone watching terrified of them too - so they'll do all they can to avoid falling victim, because that's the only thing they can do. It feels like they're showcasing the aftermath of a hurricane more than they are the crimes of a person.
