The Vault is a YouTube thriller series created by Aaron Hann and Mario Miscione. The team released a series of prologue episodes as a teaser in the mid-to-late 2010s before releasing the first official episode on April 16th, 2011. The series went on for three more years until the series finale on September 12th, 2014, releasing a total of 16 main videos and a few side episodes.
The series takes place in the eponymous Vault, the finale of a reality game show. Students from several different schools have each been put into their own room in the Vault and need to figure out what they need to do to win the game and go home. Each room only has a small collection of objects in it, leaving their purpose up to the room's occupant. The show follows Henry, a student designated as the Vault's "operator" due to his room allowing him to call other rooms in the Vault, as he tries to help the students solve their puzzles.
Examples:
- Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": Major characters and the subtitles tend to refer to minor characters by their room's traits, such as "Bike Guy" or "Mail Room Guy". This sets them apart from Red Team, who always use real names.
- Good Angel, Bad Angel: Invoked with two rooms, one with a character dressed like an angel and the other a character dressed as a devil, both of them contradicting each other while trying to convince other characters to do something. Inverted with the "Devil" being a level-headed and reasonable individual while the "Angel" is The Gadfly.
- Jerkass Has a Point: The King may be arrogant and smug, but it's hard to argue with his pragmatic analysis of Fish Girl's room or his motivational speech to Henry when the latter is trying to figure out his fortune.
- Plot Tailored to the Party: Inverted, the players are put in rooms based on their weaknesses, such as a girl with coulrophobia being put in a room with a Monster Clown toy or an out of shape boy given an exercise bike. Played straight with Red Team, who aren't even phased by their respective rooms.
- Spot the Thread: Mail Room Guy decides to taunt the other characters by mocking the letters he has in his room, but his lack of knowledge about the other characters causes him to not notice the details are wrong. Henry immediately notices that "his" letter says he goes to a university he doesn't actually go to, while "Katie"'s letter doesn't get her siblings right.
- Wham Shot: Almost Once per Episode, usually as a cliffhanger.
- Episode 1: When the lights go out, Henry notices a glowing light behind the wall, then dozens more. Taking off wall panels reveals an entire wall of operator buttons. There are around 150 students in the Vault, not just 10.
- Episode 2: Eric's room contains a noose.
- Episode 5: The Vault is hit with an earthquake and the power goes out.
- Episode 8: The student in the balloon room is in a wheelchair.
- Episode 10: This one has it at the start: There's another Vault with another team of students.
- Episode 11: The phone in Phone Guy's room starts ringing.
- Episode 12: Red Team calls Blue Team's phone.
- Episode 13: Eric prepares to hang himself as the power cuts out.
- Episode 15: Henry spots a dead hanging body in a Vault's noose room. It's not shown whether it's Eric or Red Team's equivalent.
- Wham Episode: Episode 16, fittingly for the finale. The video periodically cuts to the producer and his secretary talking about the show, implying everything was planned... only for them both to suddenly die and the quake from episode 5 to hit at the halfway point, revealing it was a flashback and the show was truly over.
