3D avatar of bearded Alan Resnick shown in avatar creation software on a monitor

Alan Resnick

2011creatorclassic

Published August 15, 2026

Alan Resnick is a Baltimore filmmaker behind a run of Adult Swim horror shorts and the disturbing YouTube series alantutorial, which ran from 2011 to 2014. His work disguises itself as infomercials, home videos, and DIY clips before pivoting into slow-burn dread.

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Overview

Alan Resnick is a Baltimore-based comedian and psychological horror video artist best known for a string of Adult Swim shorts and the long-running YouTube series alantutorial1. His pieces almost always wear the skin of something mundane, a late-night infomercial, a home movie, a DIY tutorial, before quietly tipping into surreal, upsetting territory3. The look is deliberately cheap and low-fi, which is a big part of why the eerie beats hit as hard as they do4.

Online, Resnick's name is often used as shorthand for a very specific flavor of internet horror: sincere on the surface, deeply wrong underneath, and hidden inside formats that pretend to be harmless6. His projects spawned dedicated fan communities, alternate reality games, and shared documents built to pick apart the puzzles buried in his videos3.

Origin & Background

Platform
YouTube (alantutorial) / Adult Swim (broadcast + web shorts)
Creator
Alan Resnick
Date
2011

Resnick is based in Baltimore, Maryland, where he co-founded the performance collective Wham City Comedy with a group of other artists2. In 2012, an Adult Swim executive saw a live sketch he was performing on the group's national tour, Live Forever As You Are Now With Alan Resnick, and asked him to rework it as a 4 a.m. infomercial parody of a TED talk5.

The resulting short cast Resnick as a young tech founder demoing an app that builds an AI copy of your personality; the AI promptly renames itself Teddy and conjures a tan ball as its wife3. Uploaded to the Adult Swim YouTube channel, it pulled roughly half a million views and around 6,000 likes4.

How It Spread

His follow-up, Unedited Footage of a Bear, opens on 11 seconds of wildlife footage before smash-cutting into a fake ad for a made-up allergy drug called Claridryl, in which a suburban mother is attacked by a violent duplicate of herself who then torments her children3. Adult Swim built a companion Claridryl website letting viewers click through rooms of the house in the video, and the short reached about 2 million views and 15,000 likes3.

The third short, This House Has People In It, seeded a much bigger ARG around a fake company called AB Surveillance Solutions; fans compiled a shared Google Doc that cracked the site's login page and pulled out hidden videos and internal emails tied to the household in the film5. The video hit a quarter of a million views in its first week3.

Running in parallel, Resnick's alantutorial YouTube project posted from June 2011 through December 2014 and followed a childlike man making increasingly bleak how-to videos as he was seemingly abandoned by his family, then apparently kidnapped and forced to keep filming for his captors6. Traffic spiked after Cracked and CollegeHumor linked the channel around the How to Crush a Can with Slats of Wood episode, which cleared 1.5 million views and 30,000 likes5. A later Night Mind video essay explaining the arc brought in another wave of viewers6.

How to Use This Meme

There is no template to remix; the meme is Resnick's actual body of work. Sharing tends to happen by trading links to specific shorts as gateway examples of lo-fi internet horror, or by pointing newcomers to fan analyses and ARG walkthroughs that unpack the hidden material inside the videos6.

Frequently Asked Questions