The funhouse represents the past. What we all wish to forget, but which we cannot turn away from.

The Filmer turns on the phone’s flashlight, plunging the video deeper into the trenches of horror. The beam of LED light shines a cone of visibility that turns the funhouse elements into threatening unknowns, while the phone's automatic exposure adjustment creates a constantly shifting visual field that mirrors the psychological instability.

The light pans over the walls. The messages of “Look for the towers,” and then “Look for the sandpipe,” and “Solar Plexus Clown Gliders,” and “There is no outside,” now read: “Controlled fear versus fearful control” and “Confused fear versus fearful confusion” in the same dripping blood red spray paint.

“Nah, nah, what the fuck is going on?” The Filmer’s voice trembled. “I gotta get out of this place."

ACT 2: Recursive Reflections and Othered Selves

“In a perfect funhouse, you’d be able to go only one way, like the divers off the high-board; getting lost would be impossible; the doors and halls would work like minnow traps or the valve in veins.” - John Barth, “Lost in the Funhouse”

The next room is a quaint, carpeted lounge with cushy chairs and end tables holding vases filled with plastic flowers. A Matchbox-20 cover of “Under the Boardwalk” somehow plays in the background, punctuated by the wails, explosions, and AKs & 808s outside. The room only has one way to exit, and the Filmer heads that way.

We can look at the familiar, though unsettling, funhouse entrance as a textbook example of a movie’s tight, fine-tuned first act. And here, the Filmer’s full psychological shift begins in what could be considered the film’s second act, in a room dominated by mirrors arranged in what appears, at first glance, to be a simple maze. Slow and hesitant, but with clearly no other options, The Filmer steps into the mirror maze.

No music plays. The only light comes from The Filmer’s phone, which obfuscates their face in the endless mirrors. It only takes two turns when they find themselves lost between reflective surfaces that multiply their images and their exit routes into infinity.

It’s no secret that all the rides and amusements at the carnival were janky, and this funhouse looked even more dilapidateder than most, yet the mirrors looked extravagant. Silvered glass in ornate golden frames designed to evoke a circus aesthetic in an arrangement that created spatial relationships violating geometry. (I have a theory that these mirrors might have been infused with biotetraboroxol, since that stuff has been popping up everywhere lately, but this is only a hunch and I have no evidence to back it up.) By this point, we, the viewers, could already tell something was severely disproportionate about the funhouse’s incomprehensible internal square footage, but the mirror maze leaves no doubt that this place’s dimensions break the laws of physics.

"Why does this hallway keep going?" they wonder. “Damn. Dead end.”

They encounter so many dead ends, they start singing, “Dead end. Dead end. Dead end, dead end, dead end, dead end. Dead eeeeend,” to the tune of “The Pink Panther Theme” and they inadvertently create this raw, nervous, and suspenseful tension that you simply cannot find even in the most critically acclaimed Oscar-winning movies.

Because that raw, nervous, suspenseful tension suddenly snaps when the screen populates with a dozen little red boxes from the phone’s facial recognition software identifying unknown faces in different mirror reflections. The Filmer screams and drops the phone.

They scoop it up and shout, “Hello! Is anybody there? How do I get out of here?”

The question echoes back, then silence.

"I can hear voices everywhere, coming from all the mirrors at once. So many voices, singing in harmony. So beautiful. So sad.”

After blasting the volume as high as possible (up to 11, of course) and then checking the audio file (along with what I’ve read from others who have watched Found in the Funhouse), the recording doesn’t seem to pick up any sounds during this portion of the film. Here, we, the viewers, become eyewitnesses to the technological embodiment of the "recursive" quality of postmodern irony. The advanced software, designed to distinguish individual identities, instead multiplies that single unseen face, just as postmodern metafiction multiplies narrative self-consciousness until it becomes solipsistic and collapses upon itself. The Filmer’s panic escalates not because they're seeing something supernatural, but because they're experiencing the breakdown of the very technological systems supposed to help them navigate and document reality.

"I can hear them breaking things out there like a…uh… but I can't find the exit. The mirrors keep showing me... showing me things that aren't there as if they’re…." 

They never finish an analogy or a metaphor or a simile. So many unfinished sentences that peter out like. Leaving the audience to wonder if the person is. In what had begun with a blasé, over-it attitude, the Filmer now only speaks with indecisive fear and childish naivety.

Trapped within entertainment technologies that promise connection but deliver only more sophisticated forms of isolation. The "things that aren't there" become more real than actual experience, just as social media creates "more engaging and controllable simulacra" that make actual life seem "paler and more frustrating" than our steady supply of online dopamine drips.

Act 3: The Exits Are Just More Entrances

The Filmer flails and flops through the mirror maze, desperately attempting to locate the exit, when they spy what looks like the exit to the mirror maze. They approach the threshold and see a long, straight hallway ahead with a clear line of sight to the other end.

“Ayoooo! Fiiiinally! Let’s do this!” says The Filmer, their primal yawp of relief palpable. Holding the forward-facing camera at chest height, they jog down toward the door at the other end. Unlike the rest of the funhouse, there are none of the cheap illustrations or gimmicky mechanics intended to make the “house” “fun” (or create the illusion of fun); just a long, narrow hallway with the walls, floor, and low ceiling all painted pitch black.

With their camera leading the way, The Filmer reaches the door at the end of the hallway. They push down on the handle with a shaky hand. The handle clicks down, and they push forward. There’s a massive exhale as they open the door all the way and shine the camera’s light into the next room to investigate.

It appears to be another hallway, no different than the current one.

“Seriously? C’mon. That’s just rude.”

The Filmer hustles down the hallway, not even bothering to hold up the phone to record the route. They reach the door at the end of the hallway, open it, and scope out the next room.

Another hallway, same as the current one.

“No, no, no, no, no. This isn’t funny.”

Hustle. Handle. Scope. Another hallway.

Hustle. Handle. Scope. Another hallway.

Hustle. Handle. Scope. Another hallway.

With each door opening at the end of the hallway, The Filmer’s wails get louder, no no no no No No No No NO NO NO NO NO until they scream so loud and hard, you can hear their throat burn in fear and disbelief as they realize this hallway with a clear sight line to the other end circles back to itself in a never-ending loop.

We, the viewers, could already sense The Filmer slowly losing their lucidity the further they got lost in the funhouse, but at this point, the video becomes their lifeline to normalcy and the instrument documenting their descent into something approaching absolute madness. Meanwhile, the phone’s battery life ticks down faster and faster the more The Filmer films, clocking closer and closer to the zero point.

Post-Credits Contemplations

It’s here where I feel I must include a caveat and a reminder. I’m a professional movie critic and reviewer, and I try to stay in my lane. The ending of Found in the Funhouse raises serious ethical and moral questions since the audience never receives any closure on whether The Filmer ever leaves the funhouse. The phone’s battery dies at 5:52pm as The Filmer pounds the walls and cries for help… and, well, the audience is left to wonder about The Filmer’s fate after that.

Unlike traditional found footage films that carefully construct the appearance of authenticity, this video's provenance remains genuinely ambiguous. The phone was found; the carnival was real; the riots were documented. Yet the person who filmed this descent into madness has never been identified, never claimed the phone, never provided context. This uncertainty creates an uneasy and tenuous relationship — one where the difference between reality and performance becomes genuinely unresolvable.

Sure, there are still plenty of questions about how this funhouse could have even possibly existed since, from the outside, it only appeared to be a single room. And many people have raised interesting points about how the dimensions of the funhouse in the video are, in their words, “without a shadow of a doubt, 100% physically impossible, no debate, no nothing.” And while those individuals might think their views are foolproof, we need only remember that most believed it was impossible to sail around the world and that the schematics of Jerry Seinfeld’s apartment doorway and the building’s hallway were physically impossible. And all those people were proven wrong.

But my sole attempt in this article is to hopefully show how even this found footage video, without a script, plot, actors, and barely any light, is a masterpiece of cinematic expression and a deconstruction of the current human condition.

Perhaps the concept of the hero’s journey and Freitag’s Triangle and Save the Cat as a literary trope has dominated our culture for too long. I’m not just talking about the meta-archetype that Joseph Campbell cobbled together; I’m referring to the emotionally charged, character-driven narratives that emerged with the 17th-18th century novels, and which have become, for better or worse, the de facto gold-standard-bearer for storytelling. Just as painters reacted to photography with Impressionism, Surrealism, and Pointillism, now moviemakers and writers and storytellers must respond to our post-content AI-generated reality by innovating novel ideas beyond novels and moving movies forward with new movements.

In this sense, Found in the Funhouse flips the script by deleting the script altogether. Like a classic Calvinball scrumble, FitF makes it up as it goes along, and along the way, it just so happens to make a genre-defining masterpiece.

Is not art supposed to be both the product of and producer of passion? Watching FitF, the passion flowed from the Filmer to the Viewer (me), and all I could think was, “This is what they call passion. I am experiencing it.” This is humanity at its most pure, most raw, most real. Extracted and condensed into the cognizant black hole of emotion and stoicism, intelligence and ignorance, memories and fantasies, empiricism and conspiracies, humility and hubris, and all the other gloriously contradictory, hypocritical, dichotomous messes that make us human. And in return, the Hawking radiation of this humanity seeps out to create culture, community, society.

In our age of ubiquitous recording, constant documentation, and viral mysteries, Found in the Funhouse represents something genuinely unsettling — a piece of media that refuses to resolve into either fiction or fact, authentic documentation or elaborate performance. It exists in this thinny space identified as characteristic of modern Orange Forest culture, where the distinction between post-content reality and the simulacrum of reality has not been transcended, simply rendered meaningless.

The funhouse was never really about fun. It was about getting lost — in space, in mirrors, in the very act of trying to find yourself. But Orange Forest culture has become one vast inverted funhouse, trapping us within increasingly sophisticated forms of mediated self-consciousness. Our discovered video implies that this process has reached its logical conclusion: we are all now wandering through such a maze, phones in hand, documenting our confusion while the world burns outside, never quite certain whether the chaos we're recording is real or just another reflection in the endless hall of digital mirrors.

We wished we were alive.