Dark Studios emerged in 2018 from a collective of former VFX technicians and indie musicians in Portland, Oregon. Their ethos—“ Make darkness visible ”—manifested in low‑budget productions that deliberately used and uncompressed AVI to retain a “raw, unfiltered” look (Morris, 2021). Their earlier work, “Midnight Ledger” (2020), already displayed a fascination with the intersection of surveillance capitalism and personal paranoia .