Over the winter and the beginning of spring earlier this year, Parker Barriault drove from Moncton to Amherst every day for work.
And every day, he wondered: what’s inside that big white cube?
It was easy enough to find out—it’s a large freezer for berries, owned by Terra Beata Farms.
But where’s the fun in that?
 ”Sure, it’s a cool technological advancement and really cool, really expensive, really good. But . . . it’s not that interesting story-wise,” said Barriault. “And I actually did wanna do a video on, like, the real story behind it. I could just never get access or an answer back.”
So he decided to make it up.
And so marked the beginnings one of the young Moncton filmmaker’s newest works, a 13-and-a-half-minute mockumentary titled There’s Aliens in the Cube.
Listen to the audio below:
Released on July 24, it tells the story of several residents in Sackville who noticed weird happenings after the Cube appeared, culminating with one of them—an alien conspiracy theorist—leading a team on a break-in of the facility to prove once and for all what’s inside.
It was a departure from the work Barriault normally puts out on his Youtube channel Lilpark Productions, where, over the last year, he has uploaded 74 videos dedicated to highlighting places in Atlantic Canada and their history—from dead malls to abandoned mines to explorations of small towns across the region.
And that interest extends to more than a few locales around Tantramar like the Dorchester Jail, the old Enterprise Foundry and the abandoned CBC transmission station off the highway between Sackville and Amherst.
Barriault said he has always been drawn to history and later found filmmaking, particularly through Youtube creators making history videos of places like Disney World.
 ”And then I’d look at that and be like, ‘this is so cool. I love knowing all this, but what if we apply it to what’s in my backyard? Like my childhood Disney World, Crystal Palace.”
In January 2025, Barriault pursued his dreams and attended film school in Toronto, but just days after starting his first class, he was diagnosed with pneumonia. He spent five weeks in and out of hospital before doctors operated on him. During the operation, they found a cancerous tumour in his lung.
He was forced to drop out of film school. After recovering at home in Moncton, he flew back to Toronto for a bigger surgery to remove the tumour and once again went back home to recover.
He said eventually he reached a point where he decided he needed to quit and never touch a camera again, or go all in and make his own thing, which he has been doing ever since.
After getting a few shorter films under his belt, he was able to make his most popular video so far, an hour-long documentary on the defunct indoor amusement park in Moncton, Crystal Palace, called See You at The Palace: The Story of Moncton’s Indoor Amusement Park.
Since then, he has been putting out videos regularly, but always in a documentary format. So why switch it up now?
He likes being unpredictable, he said.
 ”I like where people can see my work and go, ‘how’s he finding these places?’ This is like a, ‘well, that’s not what I was expecting, but I enjoyed it.'”
Barriault isn’t the first creative to take advantage of the ominous nature of the Cube. Earlier this year, Sackville artist Jon Claytor released a graphic novel called Beauséjour, which also featured mysterious happenings in a fictional small town possibly caused by a Cube that just appeared.
While Barriault said he hasn’t read Claytor’s work, and wasn’t aware of it until after he released Aliens, he’s not surprised others have been drawn to the building.
“ I think there’s certain people in the world that will see weird places like that and feel inspiration of whatever sense that becomes. For me, it was a mockumentary. For him, it was a graphic novel. For Sappyfest, it was projecting films on the side of it.”
Since the release of There’s Aliens in the Cube, which has racked up almost 7,500 views as of July 29, he’s put out three more short videos and shows no signs of stopping. As for what’s next, he said there’s something in Moncton he wants to give the mockumentary treatment too, but he’s evasive on details.
There’s always more in Tantramar, too, he said.
“ And there’s a few other things that I want to do, like the Vogue Cinema. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink, if anybody has a way.”
