From Slender Man to Candle Cove and beyond - internet creepypastas changed spooky campfire stories forever.
Cartoonist and writer Kris Straub remembers a prominent experience of child confusion and fear all thanks to televison.
They didnt show modern stuff, only old filmstrips and educational shows from the 1970s.
The production was so rudimentary to what we have today.
No resolution, just a dreamlike, half-remembered look at some uneasy choice or little misery.
Its a fascinating and truly terrifying deconstruction of one of the internets favorite pastimes: remembering when.
Real life has always been a confusing, often horrifying experience for young people.
Now those generations have Wi-Fi, and theyre treating us to a renaissance in scary storytelling.
Technology has changed horror in some sophisticated ways.
But the real impact of the internet on horror has come in the form of good old-fashioned scary stories.
The terminology for the phenomenon can be a little hard to nail down.
We just need a well-told tale of a convincing and terrifying monster and then let it take hold.
Slender Man is an interesting case study in the power of creepypastas.
The power of such a myth is undeniable and in one instance had tragic consequences.
Slender Man is clearly a fictional character with an easy Google-able creator,Something Awfulforum user Eric Knudsen.
Still, the legend proved stronger than the original story.
For better or worse though, the internet is amazing at not providing attribution to content, Straub says.
I never wanted Candle Cove to be a hoax its an epistolary story in the format of forums.
People didnt know if it was real or not.
If theyre not creeypastas, then what would the appropriate term for them be?
The NoSleep Podcastis an audio spinoff of the popular reddit forum r/NoSleep.
r/NoSleep has been up and running since the spring of 2010 and features thousands of first-person style scary stories.
You dont get these grandiose descriptions.
Theres an immediacy and a believability.
With the NoSleep sudreddit, theres sort of this debate going on about are they real?
You still need to bring authenticity to the story even if it is fiction.
This new NoSleep model of perpetual suspension of disbelief has, in many ways, replaced creepypasta mythmaking.
The format has been producing compelling and unsettling content ever since.
Ive got the screenshots.
I dont know what to do.
Unsurprisingly, the story is about exactly that.
Reddit user u/natesw chronicles his ongoing conversations with his dead girlfriend via Facebook chat.
The narrative was even convincing enough tonecessitate a Snopes page.
Snopes, for its part, classifies it as Legend.
Thats the thing about these stories.
And something about that is comforting like anyone is a good story away from becoming a legend.
As evidenced by their increasing success, creepypastas/campfire stories/whatever-we-want-to-call-them in many ways represent the promise of the internet.
The internet, as has been often observed, means the democratization of art and entertainment.
Not everyone can succeed in dramatic or comedic arts.
We all have one.
Now we dont even need to wait for that.
The writer, Ted, details his exploration of a mysterious cave with his friend.
Squidwards Suicide Squidwards Suicide is very low on the believability index but is appropriately chilling.
The storytelling is somewhat weak and a clear gambit to create a legend.
But the photo that always accompanies Jeff the Killer stories is synonymous with the concept of all creepypastas.
There is even some Slender Man vs. Jeff the Killer fan art out there.
That knowledge may ruin the verisimilitude of the story to a certain extent but its still profoundly creepy.
And its written in the same epistolary format as many creepypastas are.
Its pretty terrifying in its simplicity.
The Showers When describing the platonic ideal of what an internet campfire story should be, this is it.
It might not be the best, but it exemplifies the format perfectly.
All the while, having a strong sense of narrative and whats truly scary.
