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Abnormalities

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Abnormalities (Web Video)
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trope [/trōp/]

Abnormalities (不思異:辭典) is an Anthology Series of horror videos hosted on YouTube and the Chinese video sharing website Bilibili.

The videos are generally very short, and often leave the endings to the viewer's imagination (though there's usually very little room to imagine happy ones).

Tropes

  • Art Initiates Life: In "Drawing", a man discovers that whatever he draws will appear in his cabinet, and gets to work drawing lots of money. He tries drawing himself a girlfriend, but gets up in the middle of drawing the torso to answer the door, and comes back to find a hand reaching out of the cabinet.
  • Bait-and-Switch:
    • In "Robbery", a convenience store radio warns of a knife-wielding robber just as a man draws a knife and threatens the woman at the cash register to take him to the back, where he finds a corpse. The radio then clarifies that the robber's a woman. Guess what the cashier pulls out.
    • In "Broadcast", a radio show narrates everything a woman does as she's eating breakfast, but she starts going against the narration, which has no effect because the narrator's actually talking about another woman in the same house.
    • In "Freshness", a boy's parents tell him that the fridge keeps things preserved, and asks them to speak their promises to stay a happy family into a jar, which they store in the fridge. Later on, the jar breaks, but despite the strains on the marriage at that point, the parents stay together... because he also put their marriage certificates in there.
  • Clingy MacGuffin: In "Leaflet", the titular leaflet keeps returning intact to whoever it was passed to, no matter how far it's tossed away nor how thoroughly it's destroyed, until it's passed onto someone else or the printed time limit expires... along with the owner.
  • Cruel Twist Ending: Nearly every episode ends with one.
  • Darker and Edgier: "Exchange" manages to be dark even by the standards of what is already a horror anthology, with three murders, an implied sexual assault, and the offender getting off totally scot-free.
  • Here We Go Again!: The protagonist in "Leaflet" receives a flyer that threatens him to pass it on within 2 hours, returning each time he tries to dispose of it with the remaining time adjusted accordingly. He unintentionally passes it onto his boss just before the time limit expires... and opens an envelope on his desk containing an entire stack of them.
  • Magical Camera: "Future Camera" features a camera that depicts what the subject of the photograph will look like in the future.
  • Mind Screw: "Interview" has a reporter asking people in the park about the air quality, when the only person she manages to get a hold of suddenly grabbing at his own chest and screaming in pain as he runs away. The reporter tries rewinding the clip over and over to make sense of the situation, eventually discovering that she can be seen strangling him when the video's played very slowly. The video ends with the reporter staring at the camera with blank eyes and a bloodied face. Even with how much episodes typically leave to the imagination, it's anyone's guess what exactly happened here.
  • Out-of-Genre Experience: "Trash Bin" plays out like a typical Abnormalities episode, but is framed like a comedic Silent Movie, complete with intertitles and funny sound effects replacing the typical horror stings.
  • Samus Is a Girl: "Robbery" ends with the reveal that the robber reported on the radio is a woman - the woman pretending to be the cashier, in fact.
  • Shout-Out: The Blue Doll from Ib is a plot point in many episodes.
  • Surprisingly Happy Ending:
    • In "Treasure", a young man murders his generous grandmother for her pearl necklace - but the grandmother comes back to life (and reverts back to youth in the process) by stealing enough years from her grandson's life to make him an old man. A very rare case of an Abnormalities episode ending with no deaths and good and evil being rewarded accordingly.
    • In "Guard", a woman's Creepy Doll saves her from a rapist with telekinesis, and she awakes in bed the next morning believing it to be All Just a Dream. Noticing the doll is damaged, she attempts to put it in storage - but the doll escapes. Despite the attempted shelving, the doll promises to keep protecting her, and she ends the episode with a smile.
  • Wham Line: In "People Nearby", a man gets creepy texts from an account with a Creepy Doll as the profile picture, realizes the doll is in the same room as him, and throws it away. All it takes for him to realize he has the wrong guy is the next text message:
    "What on earth did you throw at me just now?"
  • You Can't Fight Fate: Double Subverted in "Broadcast". At first, the person on the radio narrates everything the woman does with perfect accuracy, until said woman catches on and starts doing the opposite. The narration goes on... because he's narrating for the woman whose house she broke into.

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