Red Room (Akai Heya)

» see geocities.co.jp/SiliconValley/4358/red_room1.html as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Turkey had the Flash horror genre in full. Somebody in the internet cafe had a link, four chairs got dragged around one monitor, and the whole thing was a slow quiet buildup for thirty seconds followed by a face and a scream at full volume. We called them scary flashes and nobody knew who made any of them. Japan had the same genre, made by named authors, and the one everyone in Japan remembers is this one, which never crossed over.

Red Room went up in 2003 on a personal homepage called The Contents of the Refrigerator, hosted free on GeoCities Japan by a Flash author using the handle O-Toro, the same person who made Dancing Onigiri. The story runs a few minutes. A boy hears from a friend about a popup ad that appears while you are browsing, and if you close it you die. He goes home, browses, nothing happens, and he starts to forget about it. Then a red popup opens with a mechanical text-to-speech voice reading a half-finished question: do you like it?

He closes it. It comes back. He closes it again, and by the fourth or fifth time it is more tedious than frightening, which is the part of the thing that actually works. Then it opens on its own without a click, the text splits down the middle, and new characters push their way into the gap until the question has become: do you like the red room? The browser jumps to a page that is nothing but a list of names. His friend's name is at the bottom. The next morning at school, two boys from the neighboring class are dead in a room painted with their own blood, throats cut, and the list has a new name on it.

~ the dossier ~

~ the trick ~

The story is competent creepypasta. The reason it became the one everybody remembers is the last four seconds, which were not story at all. When the Flash movie ended, it triggered a real popup window on your actual machine. You had spent three minutes watching a character be menaced by a popup and you had spent those three minutes with your guard down, because it was happening inside the little rectangle. Then it came out of the rectangle.

That was 2003, when a web page could still just open a window at you and there was nothing installed to stop it. Popup blockers became standard equipment over the following two years. From then on the file played, ended, and did nothing, and every person who watched it after about 2005 saw a strictly worse version of it without ever knowing there had been a better one. It is a rare case of a work being disarmed by a browser preference.

~ the rumor ~

In 2004 an eleven-year-old girl killed a classmate at a school in Sasebo, and press reports at the time said she had been looking at the red room page. The claim traveled much further than its evidence ever did, and the sourcing on it has never been solid. What it did was move Red Room out of the Flash forwarding circuit and into the urban legend literature proper, where it has stayed. It has an entry in the standard Japanese urban legend dictionaries, and the O-Toro original tends to get mentioned there as a footnote to a story that has outgrown it.

A second Flash circulated under the same name, a so-called complete version, where closing the popup repeatedly sends you to a red page ending with Regan from The Exorcist. O-Toro had nothing to do with it. That is the ordinary fate of a story that gets big enough: other people start filing under your title.

~ the day it died ~

Yahoo Japan closed GeoCities on 31 March 2019, and the URL at SiliconValley/4358 went with everything else on that host. Twenty-one months later, on 31 December 2020, Adobe switched Flash off worldwide, which removed the runtime as well as the address. There is now no ordinary way to watch this at all: the file is gone from where it lived and the thing that played it is gone from your computer.

Plenty of famous Flash work got rescued into emulators and video rips. Red Room mostly did not, and a video rip would be pointless anyway, because the ending is not in the file. It was a window opening on the machine of somebody who was not expecting it, in a specific five-year window when browsers still let strangers do that. You cannot archive that.

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