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The face behind the madness.

Cyriak Harris, or simply "cyriak," is an animator from the U.K. who makes videos which are both incredibly beautiful and bizarre. Harris first gained exposure for his imaginative gif animations on the b3ta message boards, which soon drew a cult following.

He and his works have been featured in various other media, such as [adult swim] and the BBC Southeast Today.

His YouTube channel—which he primarily produces his stuff from—can be found here. His regular music profile can be found here. He has also designed several maps for Doom, including a well-received megawad named Going Down.

He now has a novel out, called Horse Destroys The Universe.


Tropes to apply to Cyriak's works:

  • Acid-Trip Dimension: Most of the worlds depicted in his videos.
  • Alien Geometries: In "cyriak's animation mix" a cow is walking on two parallel planes at once, front legs on lower one and hind on upper one, while said planes are moving in the opposite to each other directions.
  • All Just a Dream: The end of "Breakfast" has the video Fade Out to Richard Massingham sleeping on a bed in the middle of the road, the black car from the dream then drives into Richard and his bed, which is cut off by the "Cyriak 2019" screen.
  • Aliens Steal Cattle: In MOO! It goes horribly wrong.
  • Animalistic Abomination: In a world where everything is an eldritch entity terminally high on acid, most animals are just almagations of their smaller equivalents shaped into what they should be, or sometimes into another animal.
  • Anthropomorphic Food: "Festive Greetings from Cyriak" features a parsnip that looks like an obese woman's hips and legs. Worse, it's pumping out parsnip larvae!!!
  • Apocalypse How: Slam-dunking the moon into a spaceship drilling into Earth isn't exactly the best way to stop an alien invasion.
  • Awful Wedded Life: The music video of "Betray" by the Progressive Rock band Light. It is about an unhappily married woman who eventually snaps and plots to kill her husband.
  • Body of Bodies:
    • The rabbits in 7 Billion build larger and larger rabbits out of their own bodies. By the end of the video, they're four layers deep - that is, they've built a rabbit of rabbits of rabbits of rabbits.
    • The cat-creatures in Cat City start out as caterpillar-like things, but grow legs made out of cat heads.
  • Body Horror: DEAR LORD. Almost every video will have some form of this.
    • Indigestion has this as the entire point, as the camera travels through fleshy tunnel full of teeth and fingers, crablike creatures with a single eye and human fingers for legs, writhing tumors with faces, worms that are made of branched fingers that just keep growing, sphincters made of tongues, and for some reason have teeth with their tongues and eventually teeth becoming duplicates of themselves, and at the end is another mouth that is surrounded by fingers with eyes at the end of them.
  • Book Ends: "cyriak's animation mix" begins and ends with the same, short, looped-animation sequence.
  • Cheshire Cat Grin: Cyriak often has this expression in the videos where he appears.
  • Cute Is Evil:
    • "Meow Mix" features cats meowing menacingly in Hell.
    • "MEOW" is a gory, ultra-violent video about zombie cats taking over a city.
  • The Dead Can Dance: "RIP" features skeletons rising from their graves to throw a dance party. Even when the party's over, they still keep dancing during their daily un-life.
  • Dem Bones: RIP, his 2018 Halloween video, has skeletons. Lots and lots of skeletons.
  • Deranged Animation: Cyriak's animation style is instantly recognizable for this very reason.
  • Driven to Suicide: All of the surviving cats in "MEOW" kill themselves after realizing that the zombie cats can't be stopped.
  • Early-Installment Weirdness: His earliest videos, like "One Million Years BC" and "star wars out-take" are far more normal, making them "weird" compared to the rest.
  • Eldritch Abomination: Everything.
  • Eldritch Location: Everywhere.
  • Explosive Breeder: 7 billion has this in spades; it starts out with a single rabbit that splits into two, then they begin spawning more and more rabbits through splitting, budding, "birthing" from their backs and other surreal methods, which leads to thousands of rabbits swamping the fields. With many rabbits still spawning on the ground, a fluffle assembles in the shape of a giant bipedal rabbit which also spawns more of itself, which in turn repeat the process over and over again throughout the night. Come the next day there is a titanic bipedal rabbit composed of giant bipedal rabbits. And it spawns more of itself. In the end, these titan rabbits form a colossal regular rabbit composed of countless rabbits that hops offscreen.Trivia
  • Eyes Do Not Belong There: Almost omnipresent in his works, especially the creatures in "Something," which look like 1950s people with excess eyes and mouths.
  • Frivolous Lawsuit: "Because" ran into legal issues on YouTube for a time to see if Cyriak had the rights to use a photo in the video. The photo in question? A picture of his own face.
  • Gorn: "The Spirit of Christmas" features it courtesy of an utterly monstrous Santa, and "MEOW" features it with utterly adorable zombie cats.
  • Humongous Mecha: In the form of a bipedal cow made from the shards of buildings and built by another building that was converted into a giant speaker by the cable-like udders of a giant, mutant cow. This robot cow then fights a giant alien mining robot and destroys it by slamming the Moon down on top of it.
  • Killer Robot: "Chimpnology" features a giant chimpanzee made of typewriters, which eventually goes berserk and starts eating the normal chimpanzees working on it.
    • The cows in "MOO" build one out of skyscraper debris to fight off their alien would-be captors.
  • Lighter and Softer: Cyriak has a playlist of all his videos that are, as he put it, "safe(ish) for small children". For instance:
    • While he always retains his highly detailed image-manipulation animation style, many of his music videos for various other artists tend to be much less surreal and creepy. His video of "Yellow Bridges" for El Ten Eleven, for instance, focuses solely on leaves and trees, and it becomes gorgeous.
    • While 7 billion still contains adorable bunnies morphing. It's probably the tamest out of all of Cyriak's videos compared to "Moo!" and "Beastenders."
    • RIP is one of Cyriak's gentler videos, despite its description and graveyard setting. The skeletons in the video throw a dance party and all seem to be having a great time, and the music sounds very joyous and energetic, giving the animation a positive vibe. There's still a good amount of Body Horror, but the fact that the characters are already skeletons makes it less disturbing. Overall, it can remind one of The Skeleton Dance.
    • HONK consists of a goose whose body morphs, but it is not as disturbing as some other examples.
  • Mickey Mousing: Features a lot in his later works, but especially his music video for "The Existential Threat" by Sparks, in which everything bounces to the music, including paving stones and buildings.
  • Monkeys on a Typewriter: His video "Chimpnology" appears to be based on the "Infinite Monkey Theorem," with a room full of chimps chugging away on typewriters who create a Humongous Mecha that devours half the room.
  • Mood Whiplash: Here, in honor of Elizabeth II, Cyriak ages her picture from her young self to her old self to her dead self.
  • Narcissist: According to Cyriak himself, "My Territory"'s surreal imagery is meant to symbolize narcissism and self-worship, hence making the titular "territory" out of the human body.
  • No Ending: Played for Laughs in "Because". It simply Smash Cuts during the middle of a continuously-escalating animation and soundtrack to the sole credit screen.
  • The Paranoiac: The protagonist of The Existential Threat lives in constant fear of an ill-defined "existential threat" that is pursuing them and is certainly about to catch them. Of course, in the video, these fears are justified.
  • Reality Is Out to Lunch: Happens often, the most infamous example being in "Malfunction."
  • Reality Warper: The little boy in "Boogie Maths" warps reality with his dancing, causing his body to distort and demonic clones of himself to emerge out of his mouth. Eventually, everyone melts and his head explodes.
  • Recurring Element:
    • Cats and kittens.
    • Cows. And cows and cows.
    • Robots and machinery, particularly in the form of animals.
    • The Queen, as an Eldritch Abomination. Patrick Stewart, as well, often many of him.
    • Spiders, and different creatures looking like spiders.
    • 50s-60s surburbia, starting at 2011 or so.
  • Recursive Reality: Often combined with Serial Escalation in visually amazing ways. "7 billion" involves rabbits getting together to form larger rabbits getting together to form larger rabbits...
  • Signature Style: Heavy morphing, weird loops, generous amounts of Body Horror, and just plain all-around weirdness.
  • Spiders Are Scary: "Cobwebs" features a bunch of nightmarish spider-like creatures, some of which are made from human body parts.
  • Surreal Horror: This is his bread and butter. Some of the surrealism is Played for Horror.
  • Surreal Humor: Also his bread and butter. Other times, the surrealism is weird enough to be funny.
  • Sweet Sheep: Cyriak manages to make a twisted take on this trope. "Baaa" starts out focusing on an adorable little lamb running in a pasture. However, said lamb quickly morphs into bizarre creatures and clones of itself. At least the lamb's cute "baa" at the end of the video is sweet to watch.
  • Those Two Guys: In "My territory," there are two "blokes" that appear several times that are the artists behind the music: Grand Popo Football Club.
  • Too Many Mouths: The creatures in "Something" have excess eyes and mouths.
  • Uncanny Valley: Most of the animations' absurdities come from using real-life photos and how "off" the animation flows. Everything looks real, at least until something moves.
  • Uncommon Time: cows & cows & cows is mostly in 6/4 time, but there's a segment in the middle which uses 7/4.
  • The World Is Just Awesome: Yellow Bridges shows a beautiful tree sprouting and taking form.
  • The Worm That Walks: The trope is cubed in "7 billion." The rabbits assemble into giant bipedal bunnies. Later on, those giants get together to create far bigger bipedals, and those are put together in the shape of a single colossal "regular" rabbit.
  • Waterfall Puke: One of the zombies in "DeadEnders" does this with green slime, in which another zombies is seen surfing on.
    • At one point, the goose in "Honk" turns into a short necked version of itself and vomits a thick stream of white goo, before dissolving into the pile of sludge and reforming.
  • Zombie Apocalypse: In "DeadEnders" and "MEOW."

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