Snake’s true breakthrough came with the 2021 interactive livestream "72 Hours in the Terrarium," where he locked himself in a glass enclosure while viewers voted on his next actions. The event blurred the line between performance art and reality television, drawing millions of concurrent viewers on a then-obscure platform called Coil . Mainstream media dismissed him as a "gimmick," but his underground following grew, attracted by his rejection of traditional narrative structure and his eerie, unscripted charisma. Regina Rizzi’s trajectory is almost the inverse. A child star on the hit 2000s sitcom Just My Luck , Rizzi spent her twenties fighting against typecasting. After a public meltdown at the 2015 Kids' Choice Awards—where she famously released a bag of crickets on stage—her acting career stalled. But her producing career skyrocketed.

In the chaotic landscape of modern popular media, where algorithms dictate taste and franchises recycle nostalgia, a new kind of anti-establishment entertainment has slithered onto the scene. At the center of this movement are two unlikely collaborators: the enigmatic digital provocateur known as Paul "The Snake" Venn (commonly stylized as Paul Snake ) and the former teen idol turned avant-garde producer Regina Rizzi .

As Snake himself said at the end of the Snake Oil finale, staring directly into the lens as Rizzi watched from a monitor off-camera: "You can build a bigger terrarium, Regina. But you can’t tame the instinct to strike." Then he smiled—just barely—and the screen went black.

Rizzi leveraged her personal wealth and industry connections to fund low-budget, high-concept horror-comedies. Her 2019 film Bait , about a cursed fishing lure, became a cult hit on Shudder. Yet it was her pivot to "unproduced digital content" that set the stage for her collaboration with Paul Snake. In a 2022 Variety interview, Rizzi explained her philosophy: "Audiences are starving for danger. Not simulated danger—real, sweaty, might-get-canceled danger. Paul Snake is the only person on earth who still has that." The partnership crystallized in 2023 with the launch of Snake Oil , a hybrid documentary/game show on the streaming service Nebula+. The premise is deceptively simple: Paul Snake, acting as a cynical carnival barker, presents three contestants with bizarre artifacts (e.g., "a jar of Hollywood backwash," "a script for the lost Cats sequel"). Two contestants are genuine eccentrics; one is a trained actor planted by Rizzi. Snake must "smell the fake," and if he fails, the planted actor wins $100,000.