I Feel Fantastic

About

I Feel Fantastic refers to a short, creepy video of an android singing a song in a mysterious house, which went viral in the early days of Youtube. The video sparked a number of conspiracy theories about the story behind its creation, and is considered a classic work of internet horror.

Origin

The video first surfaced on the Internet in 2004 along with other music videos featuring the same android. The android is named Tara (after the mathematical term "tera"), and was created by a man named Jon Bergeron, who first posted about the project in 2001.^[1] He created Tara with the goal of selling her to be used for security, entertainment, or research purposes, but later rebranded her as a musical android, programmed to be able to sing songs he wrote. In 2004, he began offering music videos of Tara singing on a DVD (original compilation shown below), available to interested viewers for a fee.

For many years, the videos were occasionally passed around the internet, but remained in relative obscurity. On April 15th, 2009, a user named creepyblog uploaded the most well-known video, reposting the song "Please" to YouTube, under the title "I Feel Fantastic," along with a long description comparing the story of the android to an ancient greek legend. As of October 2020, the video (shown below) has garnered over 24 million views.

Spread

After being uploaded to YouTube, the video quickly gained a reputation as one of the most unsettling non-graphic videos on the internet, recognized not just because of Tara and her unnerving singing, but also because of the strange geometry of the house in which it is filmed, and mysterious shots of what appears to be an empty field interspersed throughout the video. With no context given by the uploader, people began to theorize about the origins of the video, and a rumor sprung up that Tara was created by a serial killer who would dress Tara up in the clothes of his victims.^[2] As for the shots of the seemingly empty field, those were presumably the locations in which the bodies of the victims had been hidden. It was theorized that Tara had also killed her creator, considering John Bergeron had not been heard from and could not be contacted ever since the video was released. None of the creepypastas told about Tara have any basis in fact, and it is suspected that John Bergeron simply retreated from the internet due to harassment by fans. Soon after the video was uploaded, various videos parodying the original video appeared. For example, on July 23rd, 2015, YouTuber Tobias Manns uploaded a video with the lyrics humorously mis-captioned (shown below, left). Other videos include remixes to electronic music or people re-enacting the video. On March 21st, 2016, Hunter Jackson uploaded a video of himself recreating the video that gained over 24,000 views (shown below, right):

"I Feel Fantastic" has also been a popular subject of explainer and reaction videos. On July 29th, 2015, the channel "YouTube Explained" uploaded an explainer video on "I Feel Fantastic," gaining over 810,000 views (shown below, left). On November 11th, 2017, YouTuber Gattor Martin uploaded a reaction video that gained over 284,000 views (shown below, right).

Search Interest

External References