Following the disappearance of his wife, a video archivist buries himself in his work and stumbles across some disturbing footage of a masked weirdo doing something that resembles performance art in a serial killer’s fever dream version of Hell. He becomes fascinated by the titular occurrence of video piracy and tracks down another instance of the weirdness but the tape is missing. When asking about it, he discovers is was seized by the FCC and when his professional contacts turn up nothing but red tape, he goes to some shadier corners. More disturbing footage is exposed and there’s an underground legend surrounding it called the SAL-E SPARKS incident. The mystery hacker was never caught and the level of intrigue is just too much for our hero to let it go. He finds out that each intrusion date disturbingly coincides with the vanishing of a young woman and the so-called unverified third incursion just so happens to land on the date his wife seemingly evaporated from this realm. James manages to decipher some hidden messages in the footage and his mind starts slipping as he falls down a rabbit hole. He loses his job thanks to his obsession but he also gains an ally on whatever message boards he’s haunting who points him in the direction of the missing women theory. The more threads he pulls, the worse things get because that’s just the way things go. It’s a hell of a journey that doesn’t always manage to keep things interesting but works more than it doesn’t. The infamous I Feel Fantastic video from those early YouTube days serves as the building block (and also the Max Headroom signal hijacking) for a mildly disturbing time which unfortunately doesn’t exactly land its ending.
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