If you ever learn a story online about a haunted video episode , you ’ve already eaten the creepypasta . Scary viral stories , effigy , and vids , often very unforesightful , are creepypasta — some will pall you so much that they ’ve been nicknamed “ shitbrix . ” And they could be the tightlipped thing we have to folklore in the twenty - first century .
Over at Aeon magazine , Will Wiles has a really fascinating speculation on creepypasta , where he describes some of the best examples of the mass medium . Perusing the assemblage at theCreepypasta Wiki , Wiles notes how closely they resemble H.P. Lovecraft ’s definition of unearthly fiction . In his essay“Supernatural Horror in Literature,”Lovecraft wrote :
A certain atmosphere of breathless and unaccountable dread of extinct , unknown forces must be present ; and there must be a hint , express with a serious-mindedness and portentousness becoming its subject , of that most terrible conception of the human brain — a malign and particular temporary removal or frustration of those fixed law of Nature which are our only precaution against the assaults of topsy-turvydom and the daeligmons [ fiend ] of unplumbed space .
The Slender Man stories and imagesare perhaps the most far-famed creepypasta . you could see one of the first Slender Man images here , with a scary , tall , enigmatic figure lurking at the edge of a playground , menacing the children . Slender Man go forth from idea shared among users on the Something amazing forums , spread like wildfire , and became so famous that there ’s a Slender Man movie in the works . The earmark of creepypasta is that these are chilling tales design to be partake , and which often have no obvious original level behind them . Gallic cultural critic Jean Baudrillard would call them simulacra , or copies without an original .
Though creepypasta can be about anything , they are often about storytelling itself . save Wiles in Aeon :
Creepypasta forge good when the mass medium infect the message — in fact , when the messageboard taint the message , and you get a sense of the internet starting to let the cat out of the bag about itself . Since these stories are shared on forums , why not use the unmediated and nonliterary lingo of the everyuser to assure your news report , putting it as an anecdote ? Which is n’t to say that the storey ca n’t be pernicious and levelheaded . Kris Straub ’s ‘ Candle Cove ’ , a ‘ lose TV show ’ story and certainly among the good creepypasta out there , does precisely this . An obscure child ’s television programme is discussed by members of ‘ NetNostalgia Forum — Television ( local ) ’ . Each message elaborates and elucidate the premise and cast of the show as users reminisce and correct one another . Candle Cove rapidly set about to sound more like a nightmare than innocent amusement , with a swivel - eyed , light - rebuke puppet prognosticate the Skin Taker , and unexplained screaming and crying . Indeed , substance abuser who return spoiled dream about the show are assure by other user that those ‘ dreams ’ were tangible episodes . The last subject matter in the ribbon delivers a shuddery twist with Twilight Zone preciseness and force . And it ’s done without the ‘ 500 small fry killed themselves ! ’ overindulgence that generally chivvy the ‘ lost episode ’ subgenre .
Though revulsion pic like The Ring and Pulse have make do with haunted videocassettes and cyberspace chat rooms respectively , Wiles is right that creepypasta passably much have the “ terrific media ” tale . He speculates that perhaps this is because creepypasta itself is the ultimate reflection of industrialise media acculturation :
Creepypasta represent a variety of industrialized refinement of [ weird fabrication ] prowess . It is a networked effort to deliver apprehensiveness in as efficient a agency as possible , with the minimum of extraneous matter .
But I think there are two good understanding that creepypasta is n’t “ industrialized ” at all . It ’s much more like traditional , pre - industrial folklore than anything else . First of all , a lot of creepypasta is not actually write down . It comes in the form of pictures or videos . This mirrors one of the definitions of folklore , which is generally passed along orally , as a spoken story .
Often , folklorists will contrastthe macrocosm of “ orality ” with the world of “ literacy . ”Stories are shared otherwise in an oral culture , rest fluid and ever - changing with each retelling . In a literate cultivation , stories are fix — once they are written down , they can be copied but are seldom transmute . Though pictures are visual rather than oral , I think they make creepypasta more of a kinfolk phenomenon than an industrial one .
This becomes especially obvious when you consider that creepypasta stories — whether visual or written — are always undergoing transformation . Certainly some stories are written matter / pasted over and over , but many of them are modify and altered and “ retold ” in new way . Folklorists call the different versions of a familiar story “ variants . ” Many folk tarradiddle have regional variant where unlike character are highlight , the end is changed , Heron are killed rather than surviving , and so on . you may even track the ranch of a account across a region by investigating the evolutionary Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree of different discrepancy .
Creepypasta like Slender Man are perfect instance of variants . There are K of different Slender Man pictures , which want absolutely no literacy to translate . And there are many variant on the familiar story . An even more obvious example of creepypasta variants on“The holder ” tale , which are about century of stalk objects — all of which begin with the phrase “ In any metropolis , in any country , go to any mental mental institution or halfway house you could get yourself to . ”
The pre - literate , pre - industrial world that was the heyday of folklore has disappeared into history . But online , creepypasta has reinvented some of its most enduring tropes . Somehow , in our post - industrial existence , folk story make signified again .
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