How I became the author of ‘Scary Videos for Kids’
What started as a way to keep a bored kid entertained during lockdown slowly turned into something much bigger for me. Not just a hobby. Not even just a father-and-son project. More like a strange attempt to make sense of the world around us.
It all began back in 2020, when the COVID pandemic was still raging across the world. We were living for some time on the Greek island of Zakynthos, where my wife was working remotely, while I was trying to figure out how to spend time with our son without letting both of us go completely insane.
The island was beautiful, but also eerily empty. Restaurants were closed. Hotels stood abandoned. Streets that should have been full of tourists looked frozen in time. It felt less like a vacation destination and more like the beginning of some post-apocalyptic movie.
Like every other kid his age, my son mostly wanted to watch YouTube. I, on the other hand, wanted to drag him outside into the fresh air and explore the island. Eventually we found a compromise: we would make our own zombie apocalypse movie.
That was the moment everything clicked.
I grabbed a camera without having any real script or plan in mind. We simply wandered around the island filming whatever looked interesting: abandoned buildings, empty beaches, creepy alleyways, strange shadows, random objects lying around. Sometimes we invented scenes on the spot. Sometimes the environment itself suggested the story.
At the same time, I wanted my son to understand something important about storytelling: movies are not filmed in the same order in which people later watch them. You collect fragments first. The story only appears later.
So during the day we gathered pieces.
At night I tried to assemble them into something watchable.
Back then there were no AI video generators, no automatic editing copilots, no magical “generate cinematic sequence” buttons. Creating even a simple entertaining story required hours of manual editing. I downloaded random clips from YouTube, cut scenes apart, stitched together music, added sound effects, and tried to create some kind of atmosphere from the chaos we had filmed during the day.
It was exhausting.
But when my son saw the result, he became completely hooked. From that point on, every time we went outside, he would ask:
Are we filming a scary video today?
The next one followed quickly when we rented a quad and rode across the island’s empty roads. That was one of the best adventures we had so far together. At least that’s my impression of it.
And honestly, I was enjoying it too.
Not because the videos themselves were masterpieces. They definitely were not. But because they transformed ordinary walks into adventures. Suddenly every abandoned staircase became an entrance to a bunker. Every ruined wall became evidence of some forgotten catastrophe. Every empty landscape became part of a story.
And that changes the way you see the world.
The only problem was that the editing process took forever, so I published videos very infrequently. Life moved on. The pandemic slowly faded into the background.
But the apocalyptic feeling never really disappeared.
COVID was replaced by the war between Russia and Ukraine. Then came new conflicts in other parts of the world. Economic uncertainty. Political instability. Energy fears. AI disruption. Constant anxiety flowing through the internet twenty-four hours a day.
One of my favorite ways to measure society’s collective mood is by looking at Google Trends.
My personal rule is simple: if something starts competing with “cats” on the internet, humanity is seriously worried about it.
And unfortunately, in recent years, war-related searches have been doing far better than cats.
Cats vs Apocalypse
Cats vs War
Even the word “apocalypse” itself no longer feels purely fictional.
Fast forward to 2026.
Now everyone is talking about AI replacing entire professions within a few years. People are rushing to build personal brands, launch side businesses, create YouTube channels, flood Instagram with content, automate everything they possibly can. The amount of material being uploaded onto the internet since the AI boom started is almost hard to comprehend.
Everybody is trying to become a one-person media company before the machines become good enough to replace them too.
And honestly?
I think about it myself all the time.
What happens when one morning a cold, perfectly polite AI voice informs me that my role is no longer needed?
What kind of world will my son grow up in?
It sounds dramatic when phrased like that. Maybe even funny. But sometimes I genuinely feel that our little “post-apocalyptic survival” videos are no longer pure fantasy. They are becoming metaphors for something real.
Not necessarily the end of civilization.
But the end of predictability.
The end of the assumption that somebody else always has things under control.
And maybe that is why I keep returning to these stories.
Not because I expect zombies to appear tomorrow.
But because learning how to adapt, improvise, stay calm, build things with your own hands, think creatively, and face uncertainty together with your children suddenly feels like a very practical skill again.
So what is your plan?
If the lights go out for a week, what happens?
If the internet disappears tomorrow, what remains?
If your job vanishes because an algorithm learned to do it cheaper, faster, and without sleep — who are you after that?
And most importantly:
Are you teaching your kids how to survive in a world that may look completely different from the one we grew up expecting?