It might surprise some people, but the internet is a fantastic place to go if you want to find unique and immersive horror content. Sure, you'll have to apply Sturgeon's Law here and wade through some low-quality content in order to be spooked, but if you're looking in the right places, you'll find some golden nuggets. Due to the internet being a naturally interactive medium, Internet Horror as a genre works best when people are given the opportunity to believe that what they're reading or watching is real, and to get involved in a way impossible with traditional mediums.
I can't say that most Creepypasta stories still hold up, but I can also say that at the core, it was a bunch of people embracing their love of horror and creating content out of that passion, and I can't fault people for that.
When most people think of Internet Horror, a specific subgenre comes to mind. A genre that features a lot of heavily-mocked works like Jeff the Killer, Sonic.Exe, or Happy Appy, as well as some beloved works like Candle Cove, Funnymouth, and Psychosis. That's right- we're talking about Creepypasta.
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| The face that somehow had thousands of fangirls. |
As a genre, Creepypasta is often seen as nothing but a bunch of kids writing grimdark slasher stories featuring tropes like "hyper-realistic blood", horrific spins on beloved nostalgic cartoons, and excessively detailed gore, along with bad grammar to boot. The villains are invincible murder machines with edgy, Hot Topic fashion and tragic backstories, and, as expected out of the horror genre, happy endings are a rarity if they exist at all. People often sigh or cringe when they think back on the old days of writing and reading stories like these, passing it off as an early-Internet fad, and trying to let these stories fade back into obscurity. After all, kids do dumb things online all the time, and every modern generation has their own embarrassing memories associated with it. For people my age, it's Creepypasta stories, shock-humor YouTubers, and silly Facebook posts. For a lot of kids younger than me, it'll be thirst-trap TikTok videos and YouTube "kids" content, among other things.
But what made Creepypasta so popular? Why did it ever become such a widespread genre, and was it ever scary to begin with?
The original meaning of the term "Creepypasta" was to describe internet urban legends and fake, but true-sounding, stories. They were meant to trick and scare people into believing what they were reading was true, and to be spread around to scare more people. It's based off the term "Copypasta", and early works like Candle Cove, as well as Alternate Reality Games such as Ben Drowned, followed this style. Candle Cove, for example, was written as though it took place on an early chat room, with anonymous posters discussing a TV show they remembered from when they were kids- the ending twist being that the show they remember so vividly, a show that gave them all horrible nightmares and only seemed to exist on one channel, was simply just TV static that they would sit and watch every day. Ben Drowned existed as a blog and YouTube channel, updating the audience on the story of Jadusable and his haunted copy of Majora's Mask, as well as a weird website run by a cult. Then you had more obscure works, like The Wyoming Incident, which began as another forum-post-and-YouTube story, eventually becoming a meta story that still exists to this day. Even the early Slender Man stories, like the pictures created by Something Awful, vlogs like Marble Hornets and EverymanHYBRID, and various short stories, circulated around the internet as alternate reality works with interactive elements.
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| Aw, look at the kids playing, they're- oh god, what is that? |
However, the genre would soon become a catch-all for any sort of internet horror. Eventually, stories would stop trying to convince you they were real, and simply opt for scaring you with as much gore and dark imagery as possible. The genre became dominated by children who would create entire universes for certain characters, draw fan art, and even ship the characters romantically. Trollpastas emerged to make fun of the trends, and YouTube channels like the MichealLeroi "Bad Creepypasta" series would poke fun at everything further. No longer were people being legitimately frightened by these stories- now it was about exploring and embracing edgy teenage angst and the macabre, similar to how people would embrace aesthetic blogs om Tumblr and write slashfic for their favorite TV shows. While it's a lie to say that nobody took the genre seriously or tried to write genuinely scary content, it had by-and-large become a bigger and more chaotic genre primarily run by kids.
To this day, Candle Cove still gives me creepy chills, and the best horror works are still embracing the interactivity of the internet and delivering surreal, immersive, and frightening experiences. The Backrooms is a new one that caught my eye recently, with its endless and creepy hallways that provide countless opportunity for lore and imagination to take hold.
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| The empty yellow hallways from our nightmares, now in pasta form. |
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