The Horror Series That Only Drops Once a Year — And Has Been Building Since 2015
There's a small corner of YouTube where two familiar faces make craft projects in a kitchen. They're cheerful. They're enthusiastic. They're teaching you to make paper snowflakes and glittery portraits and potato prints. Everything is fine.
Except it's not. And it hasn't been for a very long time.
DanAndPhilCRAFTS began on April 1, 2015, as an April Fools' Day spin-off from beloved British YouTubers Daniel Howell and Phil Lester — better known online as Dan and Phil, a duo with millions of fans built on gaming videos, comedy sketches, and an unmistakable warmth that made them feel like the internet's best friends. The CRAFTS channel was a gag. A silly premise. Paper snowflakes explained by two guys clearly making fun of the crafts genre.
Nobody expected it to become one of YouTube's most quietly terrifying horror projects.
Once a Year, If That
The thing that defines DanAndPhilCRAFTS above everything else is its patience. This isn't a channel that pumps out content. It uploads exactly once: April Fools' Day. Sometimes. The full catalog is four videos across nine years.
- Squareflakes (April 1, 2015) — Paper snowflakes. Simple. Innocent. Mildly absurdist.
- Glitter Faces (April 1, 2016) — Glitter applied to faces in an increasingly stilted, uncanny fashion.
- Potato Prints (April 1, 2017) — Potato stamping that, by the end, is clearly something else entirely.
- Slime (April 1, 2024) — A full analog horror short film.
Seven years between Potato Prints and Slime. Seven years for the audience to sit with the growing dread of what the channel had been slowly building, and then — April Fools' Day 2024 — Slime arrived and confirmed everything everyone had feared.
The Lore Is the Horror
What makes DanAndPhilCRAFTS so effective is that it doesn't announce itself as horror. The early videos maintain a plausible reading as quirky comedy. The performances are wooden, but Dan and Phil's comedy has always played with irony. The aesthetic choices — harsh kitchen lighting, too-bright colors, stilted deliveries — could just be a bit.
But the lore accumulates. The channel's alternate Dan and Phil mention an "exceptionally prolific output" of craft videos that viewers never see. The April Fools' uploads begin to feel less like content drops and more like moments when something bleeds through from somewhere else — when a veil thins just enough to let these videos reach our world.
The fictional Dan and Phil are performing rituals. The squareflake, the glitter, the potato: each video's craft project resurfaces in Slime as a ritual offering, laid before whatever entity the duo serves. The vessel is complete. The ritual can begin.
Slime Changes Everything
Written and directed with collaborator KickThePJ (Peter Jacon, a creative YouTube filmmaker known for experimental short-form work), Slime is unambiguous about what DanAndPhilCRAFTS has been all along. The first half follows the familiar format — cheerful kitchen, easy instructions, the same uncanny performances. Then nightfall comes.
The second half is analog horror: stationary cameras, slow zooms, VHS-style degradation. The duo moves to a shed in the woods. Dan enters a room with a knife. When he exits, there's a bloody handprint on his shirt. The camera cuts away.
The video closes on a tableau that unmistakably echoes The Devil card from a tarot deck — Dan and Phil holding hands, a presence looming behind them. A redacted British government document appears in the opening shot. The number 6, embossed in red, on a painted potato.
This is nine years of setup landing with absolute precision.
Why Horror Fans Should Be Paying Attention
The horror community talks endlessly about slow burns, but DanAndPhilCRAFTS is something rarer: a glacial burn. Most slow-burn horror takes 90 minutes to get there. This one took the better part of a decade. And it worked because it trusted its audience.
Dan and Phil's fanbase — the "Phandom" — built theories across forums and fan wikis for years. They noticed the callbacks. They catalogued the symbolism. They debated the nature of the CRAFTS alternate reality. When Slime finally arrived and validated everything they'd theorized, the community response was unlike almost anything else in internet horror: not just fear, but a kind of vindicated awe.
That's the analog horror genre at its best. Think The Mandela Catalogue or Local58 — content that trusts the audience to do the interpretive work, to fill in the gaps with something scarier than any jump scare. DanAndPhilCRAFTS does all of this while hiding inside the brand of two of YouTube's most beloved creators.
It's horror built from trust, then turned inside out.
What's Next
Nobody knows. The channel has four videos. The ritual, whatever it is, appears to have been completed in Slime. There's a reasonable argument that the story is over — but there's an equally compelling argument that completing the ritual is where the real horror begins.
April Fools' Day 2025 came and went without an upload. That absence feels intentional.
Whatever comes next — if anything — will arrive exactly when Dan and Phil decide it should. That patience, that control over the audience's anticipation, is its own kind of power. While the horror genre churns out sequels and reboots and franchise entries, DanAndPhilCRAFTS has spent nine years building something genuinely strange and genuinely unsettling.
Four videos. Nine years. One completed ritual.
That's more than most horror films manage in two hours.
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