The Loose Lore of "Life of Luxury"
Piecing together the disjointed mythos of a clickbait horror YouTube channe
During the summer of 2020, one of my younger brothers showed me a creepy video that consisted of a bedroom filmed by a grainy black and white camera. A young woman was lying in bed in a small, bare-looking room across from a closet. A creaky, high-pitched voice said, “Emily, come into the closet and play.” The woman sat up, slid her legs off the bed, and some creature shot out from under the bed and started chewing on her leg. Distorted screaming blasted from the phone speaker before the video ended. I looked up where it came from and found the channel Life of Luxury on YouTube filled with videos of horror-themed content with titles such as “Her Doll Comes to Life at Night..”1 and black and white thumbnails showing scary, distorted faces with a red arrow somewhere in frame.
Since I came across this channel in the middle of the pandemic and had little else going on, I binged most of the videos within the first week of discovering it. This admittedly became a guilty pleasure of mine for a while. The videos themselves were all painfully formulaic, with poor acting, and predictable plots. The productions and practical effects were very elaborate at least, making for some decent horror potential but the hackneyed writing habits and implicit motivations (content farming and virality over quality filmmaking) of the channel's hosts holds it back from being a truly great horror channel.
I'm not sure if the creators ever intended for their stories to be interconnected in any way, but there were some patterns I noticed in the videos that hinted towards something going on in the background. None of the episodes have an overarching story that spans across multiple installments (barring, perhaps, the same hosts), but they incorporate very light recurring elements surrounding the monstrous beings in the stories. Probably against my better judgement, I’ll be diving back into this guilty pleasure of mine to pick out whatever tangible connections I can see in these videos and piece together what is going on.
The Life of Luxury channel originally began as a “predator hunting” channel (known as LuxuryPranks) with staged performances of the hosts catching stalkers and child predators. The focus of the channel changed after YouTube demanded they explain their content was fictional or risk being demonetized. I'm not sure where the idea for horror content came from (other than perhaps 3 AM challenge content being a popular form of “slop” influencers could use to trick iPad kids into giving them clicks) and lack of any “behind the scenes” or in-depth research from other internet essayists makes it even more of a mystery. If I had to hazard a guess, the general aesthetics of the thumbnails and creatures appearing in the videos vaguely resemble the illustrations from the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark books. The found footage subgenre, particularly the Paranormal Activity series, must have also been a prominent source of inspiration for these creators as the standard format of their videos uses similar techniques with handheld and CCTV-style footage. The first horror video featured on the Life of Luxury channel was one titled “Dolphin Man Found in Her House” (I’m quite serious and it’s linked in the footnotes below if you’re curious).2 This 5-minute video is essentially the pilot episode or proof of concept that establishes most of the formulae and tropes used in every video following on the channel, which I’ll break down here:
The hosts, Parker Hajiaskari and Chester Beckington, receive an email from someone having problems in their home (usually young women aged 18-23). Later episodes also show a video attached to the email that gives a quick peek of the creatures the hosts will be dealing with.
The hosts drive (always in the dead of night) to their contact’s house and have a very stiffly-acted interview expositing the situation up until now. Sometimes, if the creature is a family member, it may swing by to drop a creepy line or two.
The hosts set up GoPro-like cameras in each room, maybe running into clues or foreshadowing along the way. They also manage to convince their contact to let them spend the night (always sleeping in the same bed).
The video fast-forwards through most of the night, showing footage from each room Parker and Chester set up cameras in. It slows down on moments meant to build up suspense such as the creatures moving through the house or talking to itself (or mysterious presences).
At some point in the early hours of the morning, the creature moves in on the contact, trying to drag them somewhere else in the house or outside.
Most of the time, Parker and Chester wake up in time to follow the screams of their contact and come face to face with the creature, usually saving their contact in the nick of time.
The videos usually end with the hosts escaping and some kind of twist or recap conveyed in title cards.
“Dolphin Man” doesn’t have much particular “lore” of note, other than that it is implied the titular creature might be an escaped asylum patient as the young woman in this episode mentions her house, which is being occupied by the Dolphin Man, “[is] next to a mental hospital…” The theme of mental hospitals is something that recurs in these videos as potential sources for where these creatures are coming from.
The first video where I started considering there could be some kind of interconnected story was “She really needed our help, but it was too late..”3 (which is actually one of the channel’s better videos). There are several details in it which appear in other videos prior to and after this one. Generally speaking, it follows the formula listed above, but plays a little bit with its concept in terms of the backstory and execution of the horror. It’s riddled with the issues endemic to Life of Luxury’s videos (stilted acting, gaps in logic, convenient timing and the like), but ignoring these, this particular video tells a decent story.
The video begins with Parker and Chester being contacted by a young woman named Amber who is facing strange issues with a house she inherited from her uncle. She sends a clip taken from the bottom of some stairs, showing the shadow of a long-haired figure playing on the wall of a landing. The figure whispers indistinctly before hearing Amber and gives chase. Parker and Chester drive with Amber to her uncle’s house and spend the night, setting up cameras in the different rooms. At 1:54 AM a camera set in one of the hallways captures a young woman, her face covered by her long hair. She makes her way to the third floor at 2:08 AM, where there is another camera and begins singing a creepy, off-key song whilst swaying back and forth: “The blast is coming…everybody hide.”4
The trio review the footage in the morning and see the clip of the woman on the third floor; Parker and Chester investigate to ensure she isn’t still there and that there isn’t any way she would have been able to break in. As they are searching, they find a bookcase in front of a door. The room behind it is empty except for an old metal chest and an IV bag filled with black liquid. The pair theorize Amber’s uncle might have had something to do with the items and why the girl is in the house (i.e., he might have imprisoned her there). When they confront Amber about her uncle and what he did for work, she avoids answering. They leave for the day and come back the following night to see if anything else happens. At 4:04 AM, the same strange woman is captured walking down the hallway. A minute later, we jump to the camera set up in the room Parker and Chester discovered, but the chest in the middle of the room is now open. At 4:15 AM, the woman appears in the basement and writes the words “Help Me” on a piece of cardboard, which she holds up in front of the camera. Soon after she does so, however, a tall, lanky creature with long black hair rushes from behind her and knocks over the camera. The video cuts ahead to 4:29 AM in Amber’s room where the creature from the basement slowly opens her door and peers inside before the camera cuts out.
Parker and Chester wake up hours later (at 5:02 AM) because Parker got an uneasy feeling about the house. He tells Chester to wake up Amber so they can all review the footage. Chester checks inside Amber’s room and finds a figure huddled under a blanket on the bed. He speaks to it, assuming it’s her, but leaves when he gets no reply. He convenes with Parker to review the footage by themselves and after witnessing the events in the basement, head down there. They find the camera disturbed and soon afterwards hear Amber screaming upstairs. They follow her voice and find her in another room, which she claims the creature locked her in “all night” (although there was no locked door leading into the room and the gap between the creature entering her room and the pair discovering her was roughly 40 minutes). The trio are chased out of the house by the creature, which is only shown sparingly around corners and in the shadows. After they escape to their car and drive away, the episode ends with a title card claiming, “[Amber] refused to tell us who her uncle was and has since blocked our numbers.”
After seeing this episode I compared the story details with some other videos on the channel and made a few inferences based on the recurring patterns in each story. The biggest clue was the black liquid in the IV. This liquid appears in other episodes in relation to the monsters, as a bile they often spew or excrete. One creature in an earlier video, titled “We Found Him in her Basement..”5, is depicted as being entirely black, perhaps having been covered in the black liquid itself. An IV with similar blackish liquid is seen in “He Shouldn’t Be Allowed to Have a Daughter..”6 which a girl named Chloe is hooked up to by her monstrous father. Later, she is transformed into some sort of dog hybrid monster. I believe this black liquid changes living things it comes into contact with into disfigured monsters. It is possible Amber’s uncle might have been experimenting with this liquid and the creature in the episode might have been one of his subjects. I figured that whatever the subject became was locked in the metal chest in the hidden room (it’s possible it was able to be contorted to the point it could fit in such a small space) and abandoned when Amber’s uncle died. The woman in the house might have been one of his next subjects but for whatever reason couldn’t escape. Creatures potentially altered by this black liquid appear in a lot episodes beginning with the title “There’s Something Wrong With…” (or some variation of that). Most of these episodes follow similar plots wherein the hosts’ contacts claim their family member, friend, or pet is acting strange after some sort of accident or event.
One question I had as I was watching Life of Luxury (aside from questioning plot holes) was where did the black liquid come from? A common theme in the “There’s Something Wrong With…” types of videos is that most of the creatures who were formerly (or are impersonating) the contacts’ family members spent some time in “the woods” for whatever reason. It is my theory that “the woods,” as an ambiguous, nebulous place in the world of these stories, is the source of the black liquid. One video where the motif of the woods appears along with the black liquid is “There’s Something Wrong With Her Dad..”7 where the father of a young woman named Emily allegedly returned “different” from a hunting trip in the woods, and tries feeding his daughter milk mixed with a blackish substance. I might be giving Life of Luxury too much credit when I say that in folklore it’s common to find the concept of the wilderness as a source of monsters or strange occurrences, and the hosts might have had that in mind when writing these stories (although, for all I know they could have just used it as a “spooky” setting). Life of Luxury’s videos usually take place exclusively inside older-looking houses that always seem unfurnished or in the middle of some renovations, which are often located near wooded areas. The unintended themes here are strangely traditional for the sort of channel Life of Luxury is, as they might depict some encroachment of the wild and unknown into these homes by altering the people who once lived in them.
Since the woods remain largely unexplored, it’s unclear what else besides monsters and the black liquid can be found in there. One idea I have is that there might be some other entity (or multiple entities) somewhat separate but in connection with the monsters. There are several videos where some of the monsters are seen or mentioned as speaking with themselves or something else. In the episode “There’s Something Wrong With Her Brother..”8 the brother of a young woman named Annabelle returns from a work trip (it’s not specified where he went) changed. Aside from his monstrous appearance, one of his defining characteristics is that he seemingly holds conversations with himself at the thresholds of his bedroom door and closet. Again, I may be giving Life of Luxury too much credit for this sort of motif but Annabelle’s brother might be using these liminal spaces to talk with whatever otherworldly entity changed him on his trip. It’s unclear if he went to “the woods” or came into contact with the black liquid, but it is possible there is some entity that changed him and still manifests around his person. In another video, “She Thought Her Little Brother Was Dead..”,9 the father of a young woman named Milly changes after the death of his son and uses a ventriloquist dummy (implied to have the heart and lungs of his deceased child placed inside of it) to represent him. It’s later revealed that the father, while physically supporting the dummy, is missing a hand, thus indicating the dummy is speaking and acting on its own—it is at several points seen speaking with the father as a separate entity. While the black liquid and “the woods” are not referenced, if we go by the sorts of properties the substance has it is possible that it allowed the organs of the son to
To summarize my own theory of what is going on in the fictional world of Life of Luxury, I believe there is some sort of entity or group of entities living in “the woods” that are the source of the black liquid and the monsters in the videos. People who wander into the woods or come into contact with the black liquid are changed into or replaced by monsters. The black liquid might be some sort of extension of the entities or their powers, providing grotesque, new life to whatever it comes into contact with. There are some people, such as Amber’s uncle or Chloe’s father, who might have tried to harness the power of this liquid, but ended up with horrific results that are doomed to haunt the darkness, better off forgotten and abandoned. The accounts recorded by Parker and Chester only show the surface of how these entities and their foul offspring affect normal people; neither of them venture too far into the potential truth of the matter, leaving the answers in the shadows of the old, creaky buildings they frequent in their investigations.
I might also just be looking too deep into a content slop channel, but I can’t help but speculate…
Thanks for reading this week’s post! If you’ve subjected yourself to any Life of Luxury videos, did you notice any patterns in them that might hint at broader lore? Comment your thoughts below!
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I'm not sure if the double period (..) is some “algorithm cheat code” or if the creators genuinely don't know how ellipses work.
“Dolphin Man Found in Her House”:
“She really needed our help, but it was too late..”:
I’m not sure what “the blast” referenced here is supposed to mean. Whether the woman means a blast of wind or if it’s her name for the specific monster in this video is unclear.
“We Found Him in her Basement”:
“He Shouldn’t Be Allowed to Have a Daughter..”:
“There’s Something Wrong With Her Dad..”:
“There’s Something Wrong With Her Brother..”:
“She Thought Her Little Brother Was Dead..”:
I haven't watched everything but the patterns in this channel are a function of the host's skills in using practical effects. They have a few standard techniques such as the black liquid and glowing eyes and they build everything around that.