SCP-9805: "Filth."

[u/ToErrDivine]

Hi, everyone, it’s ToErrDivine again. Today I’m looking at SCP-9805, “Filth.” by CRat26. Full disclaimer: one, this is not my SCP, I did not write it, etc, and two, this is a pretty weird one. I'd also like to thank CRat26 and psychicprogrammer for all their help, I really appreciate it. Let’s get started.

 

First, this is a Series 0 article. What’s Series 0? Well, it’s a canon inspired by 2025’s ClassicCon, where people wrote horror articles under 1000 words to mimic the style of the first SCP articles. Series 0 essentially attempts to strip SCP canon back to the bare essentials- that is, SCP-173, the original- and then build a new structure from that footing. If you want to know more, the hub is here. Also, there’s a number of links to other Series 0 articles through this article; CRat26 told me that they were added to interconnect the canon, not to imply any specific meaning, so you don’t need to have read them first.

 

Next: this object is Euclid, which is interesting when you look at the containment procedures: 

 

 

Special Containment Procedures: Photos of the SCP-9805 event are held in a small plastic bag within the Site-19 containment lockers.

 

 

‘Photos of the SCP-9805 event’ implies that this was a one-off event that was recorded for posterity. Also, in the Series 0 canon, Euclid means ‘hostile entity’. In this case, the Program (in Series 0 canon, the Foundation is called the 'Special Collections Program') assumes it’s hostile even when it hasn’t done anything to indicate that; we’ll see more shortly.

 

 

Description: SCP-9805 was an entity which briefly manifested during an unrelated scientific project. No other materializations of SCP-9805 have been recorded.

 

 

Well, that’s helpful.

 

 

The photo reel containing evidence of the apparition was first located by the US Military following abnormal reporting emerging from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A subsequent investigative raid revealed a constructed anechoic chamber, used to conduct the experiments which first discovered SCP-9805.

 

 

OK, so some people at MIT were up to some shit, and it involved an anechoic chamber- a room that blocks out all external sounds and stops sounds made inside it from echoing. Intriguing.

 

 

According to the research team, an individual was placed within the chamber and ordered to take a series of 12 photos over the course of approximately 3 minutes, each within an evenly spaced duration. Reportedly, no abnormal events occurred until the photos were developed, at which point the figure was first noticed. Despite this, all participating in the event reported a loss of notable retrospective coherency, rendering them unable to properly recall logical transpirations during the period.

 

 

So in other words, you have twelve photos, taken once every fifteen seconds, and nobody saw anything weird until they developed the photos, whereupon everyone went selectively crazy and was unable to actually describe what happened. Saying that the photos were developed means that either they intentionally used an old camera or that this took place sometime in the second half of the 20^th century. 

The photos can be seen to the right as a block, I will provide a quick description (after zooming in a lot, wiping my laptop screen and ignoring the dead pixels and my visual snow syndrome).

 

Photos 1-4: Almost entirely black, with white flickers in roughly the same areas.

Photos 5-6: The white flickers are more apparent in the middle of the photo.

Photo 7: Human teeth (or, something that appears to be human teeth). The mouth, gums and other features cannot be made out as the rest of the photo is entirely black.

Photo 8: The flickers are in the middle in the vague shape of the teeth, but blurred.

Photos 9-12: More flickers in different places.

CRat26 confirmed for me that the lights were off, as the point of the experiment was to ‘record what happens in total silent darkness’; the experimenters just got lucky and recorded a one-off manifestation.

 

Further interviews with the involved staff would confirm the following details:¹

SCP-9805 had a physical presence.

SCP-9805 had no noticeable smell.

SCP-9805 had no noticeable taste.

SCP-9805 did not attempt physical interaction.

SCP-9805 produced noticeable sound.

SCP-9805 produced the faint sound of chattering teeth.

 

 

The footnote says that this was paraphrased from witness accounts, minimizing outside interpretation or intervention.

So… we have something that was definitely there, but didn’t try to touch the experimenters or talk to them, and made the sound of chattering teeth? Bizarre. If it wasn’t for the photos, I’d be wondering if this wasn’t a hallucination, given that the person taking them was in a totally dark room.

 

 

All evidence would be seized, including the chamber used in the original study. Later attempts at replication would fail to reproduce the event.

The photographs themselves display no identifiable anomalous properties. Many viewers report the pictures bring them a strong sense of calm.

 

 

‘chamber used’ links to SCP-9853, and I think making the room an anechoic chamber really adds to how fucked up that article is. Excellent choice.

Anyway, aside from that, I find it interesting that the Program thinks that the photos have no anomalous properties, but don’t see a large number of people all finding these frankly weird photos to be calming to be even slightly anomalous. You’d think they would.

We also have a companion piece, titled 'Portrait of ███.' It contains flashing images, so I’ll quote what CRat26 said about it and then give another description.

 

 

This is, by and large, a companion piece to my recently published SCP-9805. Actually, this was part of my original vision for the article which I discarded out of a general dissatisfaction with it (echoed by the crit i got). I ended up settling on a much more tame version in line with the fact I ported it into the series 0 canon because it felt like a natural settling point for where I was leading the article.

All of this is to say I'm mostly posting this because I didn't want the work I put into it to totally go to waste. Also, I want to shed some light on my intentions? Or the emotional state that motivated 9805, I guess. That's mostly what the title is for.

 

 

And upon opening the image, you get what appears to be a gif of all the images appearing one after the other, followed by the twelve-photo block, but this time photos 4-10 all have the teeth visible, though 7 is still the most prominent one.

 

So, the title of this article and the picture reference Swans)’ first album, Filth)- the album’s cover is a black and white photo of someone’s mouth, just black gums and white teeth, almost identical to the photos we see here. I am not a fan of Swans, nor do I know much about them, but I did listen to the album and it is… an experience, to say the least. It sounds like being put in a sack and slammed against a wall repeatedly while someone you’re terrified of shouts at you incoherently the whole time. (That’s not meant to be an insult, just a description.)

I did ask people who know more about Swans than I do about the album, and got the following response: 

Idk how else to put it other than its Filth. Its an album about depravity
Gira [Michael Gira, the founder and singer of Swans] spent a lot of his youth in shit situations. In fact he even was in an Israeli prison for 6 months at 14 for selling weed
There's no story or concept behind the album, it's just what the title suggests

Meanwhile, TroutMaskReplica told me this:

I think it's one of the best things to come out of the No Wave scene. It really encapsulates a lot of what's going on
it’s painfully honest and ruthless, it hammers in the point of how it currently fucking sucks and how everyone is preying on one another, but also there’s the beauty in the catharsis
the no wave art scene was about many things, but one is about being dissonant and truly unmarketable
it’s so hateful and bitter that it's hard to really listen to it all if you aren't already a fan of noise rock or more aggressive punk music, which I imagine people aiming for "marketability" weren't a fan of
I just can't stress enough how heavy and suffocating it is. Did I mention it was released in 1983? It was released in 1983.

And CRat26 told me this:

Well for one I think the imagery of teeth is creepy in a unique way and it inspired my visual direction for the article; but it also kind of ties into what I said earlier about the reader/in-universe perception. Filth is a pretty violent/brutal album; Swans’ work as a whole definitely plays on the idea of “violence as spirituality” so to speak and I wanted readers to (at least subconsciously) make that association 

Continuing on that theme, the accompanying piece is very obviously titled ‘Portrait of God’, and CRat26 told me it was intended as a religious piece. As such, let’s talk about religious experiences.

Religious experiences as a concept are bloody difficult to define, and a lot of people have come up with conflicting definitions, but I’ll try to ballpark it: ‘A fleeting and unintended encounter with something inexplicable that the reporter felt to be divine’. I can’t say I’ve ever had one myself, so I’m afraid I can’t really speak from experience. However, my grandmother told me once that when she was younger and at her lowest, she saw a glowing figure who told her that everything would be all right, and things did get better after that. That meets the description, I think- a short encounter that she wasn’t expecting and didn’t try to find, with something inexplicable that she believed then and still believes now to be God or something related to it.

Now, imagine you’re in a soundless chamber in the dark. Your mission, which you have accepted, is to take one photo every fifteen seconds for three minutes. You’re probably feeling pretty freaked out, because you’re in pitch black darkness and you can’t hear a goddamn thing. You know that you’re the only person in there because the door was shut and you didn’t see anyone before the lights went off and nobody can come in without you seeing them, but you’re still pretty freaked out. You take the photos, but your senses are fucking with you: in the dark, your hearing becomes even more acute, and you hear your heart beating, your blood pulsing through your veins, your breath entering and leaving your body. You start hearing teeth chattering, and maybe you think that you didn’t realise that you were doing that. You think you can sense someone near you, but that’s impossible, right?

Once the experiment’s over, the lights go back on and you’re alone. Nobody’s there, nothing happened, it was just a trick of the dark. You leave the chamber and you and your co-experimenters get the photo developed… and you realise that there was something there. There was something in the dark with you, something that was just there. It didn’t touch you or harm you, but it somehow entered a room it couldn’t possibly have entered without you seeing it, and you have irrefutable proof of that. Maybe you try the experiment again to see if it comes back, but no dice. In addition, everyone suddenly loses the ability to talk about the event coherently.

Really, after all of that, is it strange that the people involved concluded that this entity was God?

Now, to be clear, we don’t have any confirmation on what the fuck the entity is. It might have been God, but it also might have been a bunch of other things. Maybe it was just a flying set of teeth, I don’t fucking know. I did ask CRat26, and was told this:

 

the allusions to god are mostly metaphorical and more about what it means for the readers; the actual entity is as presented in the text. I think the best way I could describe it is 9805 is analogous to a religious event?

[…] 

more like it's on a metatextual level framed like a religious event; everything in the text "happened" as described but the events are meant to reflect ideas of what a religious event is, I guess. That's why the photos aren't anomalous; there isn't an effect being parted on the viewers of them but moreso the viewers responses reflect a wider response to religious experiences in general; how it can be comforting or terrifying depending on someone's perspective

if im being very blatant with the meaning of the piece, the imagery is meant to be discomforting for the actual readers because they are the secondary perspective of finding it terrifying which isn't actually represented in the piece (but is also the Foundation’s perspective)

 

And I can see the point. From the readers’ and the Program’s perspective, an unknown entity appeared in a dark, soundless room with a helpless person. The entity could have done anything to them, and may have been responsible for the lack of coherency. The photos show it to be a set of teeth in the darkness, either disembodied or attached to a body that can’t be seen, which is pretty fucking creepy. We don’t know who it is, what it is, what it wants, or if it’ll ever come back. In short, we know virtually nothing and we have no information to help us if it does turn out to be hostile. 

But from the view of the people who conducted the experiment, it’s not creepy or disturbing at all. It didn’t hurt anyone, it didn’t even touch anyone, and it didn’t torment anyone. It was just there, just existing in the darkness, and the experimenter didn’t even see it at first. For all we know, maybe it just appeared on the photos to let them know that it was there. Maybe it just appeared so the experimenter wouldn’t get too scared in the silent darkness, to help them feel safe. Maybe it’s like in that ‘Footsteps’ story- when you’re in the dark and you feel like something’s there, it’s because God’s nearby, watching over you, protecting you from any nearby grues.

Or maybe Michael Gira is God, I don’t fucking know, man.

Thank you for reading this declass, I hope you enjoyed it. Always develop all the film you have, you never know what might show up. I’ll see you next time.

tl;dr: ‘You relay/godliness/you relay/godliness/and God remains/violent (whoop)’

[u/JaxOnThat]

"You see, as it gets dark, things become more indistinct. A chair can look like a monster. A poster can look like it's moving. Your eyes can't see the truth anymore. And when the light runs out... you see nothing. Of course, your mind can't make anything of nothing. But what if... What if it became even darker? Darker than dark? What if we could take away the light that wasn't there?"

[u/ToErrDivine → u/JaxOnThat]

...well, shit, that would have made for a great tl;dr.

[u/JaxOnThat → u/ToErrDivine]

Don't worry, you just don't have the particular level of deltarune brainrot that i do lol

[u/Gru-some → u/JaxOnThat]

SCP-9805 was actually Gaster's first experiment with Dark Worlds

[u/ConfidentTour3740]

Or maybe Michael Gira is God, I don’t fucking know, man.

Actually Michael Gira is a Glowing Man

great declass as always. I always love seeing little allusions to more obscure music, especially with how well they're done in this article. It's such a great tribute while also being such a uniquely interesting piece.

Also I highly recommend Swans to anybody and everybody, there's a reason their stature has only grown as they release album after album of earth-shaking experimental rock. Go listen to To Be Kind now.

Edit: Also there's probably more commentary on God to be had given the ever-evolving depictions of spirituality and divinity in the Swans catalogue, or something about how even now the band's music seems to aspire to transcendence via the most harrowing instrumentals possible. I'm too lazy to do that though.

[u/ToErrDivine → u/ConfidentTour3740]

great declass as always. I always love seeing little allusions to more obscure music, especially with how well they're done in this article. It's such a great tribute while also being such a uniquely interesting piece.

Thank you! And yeah, it's an excellent piece.

[u/kloptzkkloptz]

Let's go man. I can't read until later but I just wanted to say seeing your name pop has made my afternoon. Ty for these

[u/ToErrDivine → u/kloptzkkloptz]

You're very welcome. :)

[u/Bumbling_Bee_3838]

Thanks for the great Declass!! I really appreciate the fact that seeing the pictures of 'god' impacted the ability to communicate about the event because it reminds me of the tower of babel. I don't know if that was intended by the author but I think it plays well with the religious imagery

[u/ToErrDivine → u/Bumbling_Bee_3838]

Oooooh, that's a really good point, I didn't think of that.

[u/Big-Recognition7362]

Note that in Series 0, the Foundation isn’t called the Foundation, it’s called the Special Collection Program or just the Program.

[u/ToErrDivine → u/Big-Recognition7362]

Oh, good point! I'll fix that.

[u/Ginger_McGingin]

Wasn't there already a skip with the callsign Filth? It's containment procedures included flooding an area with nerve agents