Candle Cove

Last updated

Candle Cove is an online creepypasta horror story written by web cartoonist and author Kris Straub. The story centers on a discussion of the titular fictional children's television series on an Internet forum. [1] Straub has stated that he was inspired to write the creepypasta after reading an article in The Onion entitled "Area 36-Year-Old Still Has Occasional Lidsville Nightmare".

Contents

Straub's story quickly became popular, inspiring numerous YouTube videos and fan fictions. [2] [3] In 2015, Straub self-published Candle Cove in a collection of short stories entitled Candle Cove and Other Stories. The Verge commented that Candle Cove differed from other creepypastas in that while most creepypasta have an "anonymous folkloric quality", Candle Cove's originated from a known source and author. [4]

The story was adapted for the first season of the Syfy anthology series Channel Zero , which aired in 2016. Additionally, Straub began the spin-off YouTube series Local 58 , centered around strange broadcasts from the fictitious public access television channel where Candle Cove originally aired. [5]

Synopsis

The story is told in the format of a thread on the fictional "NetNostalgia Forums", where a group of users discuss an unusual low-budget children's television show, Candle Cove, that they all remember watching on Channel 58 in the Huntington–Ashland metropolitan area when they were children in the early 1970s. The show is about a young girl named Janice, who imagines herself to be friends with marionette pirates.

As the users continue to reminisce, they begin to recall more disturbing details about the show, such as a character known as the "Skin-Taker" (a skeleton pirate who wears clothing made out of children's skin) and an episode that consisted entirely of the puppets flailing and screaming while Janice cries. The story ends with a user stating that he recently asked his elderly mother in a nursing home if she remembered the show; she responds that every time the user claimed that Candle Cove was on, there was only static on the screen.

History

"Candle Cove" was originally published by Kris Straub in 2009 on his website ichorfalls.com, under a Creative Commons license. [6] The website hosted Straub's horror stories about the fictional town of Ichor Falls. In a 2011 interview, Straub told Kindertrauma he got the concept of "Candle Cove" from a satirical Onion article titled "Area 36-Year-Old Still Has Occasional Lidsville Nightmare". [2]

Like other creepypasta — a neologism for horror stories circulated around the internet — fans promptly copied and pasted "Candle Cove" across numerous internet forums and websites. [6] [2] It was posted on creepypasta.com and the Creepypasta Wiki, the two largest repositories, as well as sites such as 4chan, Reddit, YouTube, IGN, and horror.com. [6] On some forums, fans recreated the story's exchange as if it actually occurred. [2]

Television adaptation

In 2015 the SyFy Channel announced their intent to adapt the Candle Cove story as the first season of a newly announced series, Channel Zero. [7] The season, named after the creepypasta, expands on the story and centers on a child psychologist who has returned home in order to investigate the 1980s disappearances of his brother and other children. [8] Channel Zero: Candle Cove stars Paul Schneider and Fiona Shaw, and premiered on October 11, 2016. [9] [10]

Reception

Will Wiles of Aeon wrote that Candle Cove was "among the best creepypastas out there" and a good example of using the forum format as a storytelling method. [11] [12] Adi Robertson of The Verge praised the creepypasta, stating that it was "a perfectly dark spin on our nostalgia for the half-remembered stories of our childhood, that realization that the things we liked as kids were much, much creepier than we thought." [4]

Related Research Articles

Syfy is an American basic cable television channel, which is owned by the NBCUniversal Media Group division and business segment of Comcast's NBCUniversal. Launched on September 24, 1992, the channel broadcasts programming relating to the science fiction, horror, and fantasy genres. As of January 2016, Syfy is available to 92.4 million households in America.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kris Straub</span> American webcartoonist

Kristofer Straub is an American web cartoonist, performer, and content creator. His key web comic projects include Checkerboard Nightmare, Starslip, Chainsawsuit, Broodhollow, and F Chords. Other notable projects include the creepypasta "Candle Cove" as well as collaborations with Scott Kurtz ("Blamimations"), Paul Verhoeven, and Penny Arcade.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nick Antosca</span> American writer (born 1983)

Nicholas J. Antosca is an American film and television writer, producer, and novelist. He is the creator and showrunner of the horror anthology television series Channel Zero (2016–2018) and the true crime limited series A Friend of the Family. He also co-created and showran the Hulu true crime limited series The Act (2019) and the Netflix horror drama limited series Brand New Cherry Flavor (2021).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Holland Roden</span> American actress

Holland Roden is an American actress. She is known for her roles as Lydia Martin in MTV's teen drama series Teen Wolf, Zoe Woods in Syfy's horror anthology series Channel Zero: Butcher's Block, Bridget Cleary in Amazon Prime Video's horror anthology documentary series Lore and as Erin Isaacs in the horror film No Escape.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Slender Man</span> Fictional supernatural character

The Slender Man is a fictional supernatural character that originated as a creepypasta Internet meme created by Something Awful forum user Eric Knudsen in 2009. He is depicted as a thin, unnaturally tall humanoid with a featureless white head and face, wearing a black suit.

Ben Drowned is a three-part multimedia alternate reality game (ARG) web serial and web series created by Alexander D. Hall under the pen name Jadusable. Originating as a creepypasta based on the 2000 action-adventure game The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask and published by Hall from 2010 to 2020 with a hiatus in-between, the series is known for creating many of the common tropes and themes of creepypasta that are used nowadays and for subverting themes from The Legend of Zelda series. The series concluded on October 31, 2020.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Creepypasta</span> Horror-related media shared around the Internet

A creepypasta is a horror-related legend which has been shared around the Internet. The term creepypasta has since become a catch-all term for any horror content posted onto the Internet. These entries are often brief, user-generated, paranormal stories that are intended to frighten readers. The subjects of creepypasta vary widely and can include topics such as ghosts, cryptids, murder, suicide, zombies, aliens, rituals to summon entities, haunted television shows, and video games. Creepypastas range in length from a single paragraph to extended multi-part series that can span multiple media types, some lasting for years.

Craig William Macneill is an American film director, writer, and editor. His feature film Lizzie, starring Chloë Sevigny and Kristen Stewart, premiered in the U.S Dramatic Competition section at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. The film was acquired by Roadside Attractions and Saban Films and released theatrically in the fall of 2018. Macneill's first feature film, The Boy, premiered in the narrative competition at the 2015 SXSW Film Festival and which was also based on a previous short film he co-wrote, directed, and edited titled Henley, which screened in competition at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival and won the grand jury prize for "Best Short Film" at the Gen Art Film Festival and Clint Eastwood’s Carmel Film and Arts Film Festival. In 2016.

_9MOTHER9HORSE9EYES9, sometimes abbreviated to 9M9H9E9 or MHE, is the screen name of an anonymous writer of creepypasta speculative fiction on the social news website Reddit.

<i>Channel Zero</i> (TV series) American anthology horror TV series

Channel Zero is an American horror anthology television series created by Nick Antosca, who serves as writer, showrunner, and executive producer. The series was greenlit for two 6-episode, self-contained seasons, which aired in late 2016 and late 2017 on Syfy. The storylines for the series are based on popular creepypastas. On February 9, 2017, Syfy renewed the series for a third and fourth season.

Amy Forsyth is a Canadian actress. On television, she appeared as a series regular on the Hulu drama The Path (2016–17), the second season of SyFy horror anthology Channel Zero (2017), and the NBC musical drama Rise (2018), along with recurring roles on the science fiction Western Defiance (2014–15) and the historical drama The Gilded Age (2022). She also appeared in the horror films A Christmas Horror Story (2015), Hell Fest (2018), and We Summon the Darkness (2020) and the drama films Beautiful Boy (2018), CODA (2021), and The Novice (2021).

Peppermint Park is a direct-to-video children's show consisting of six volumes, released in 1987 and 1988 on VHS. The show is a mixture of live action, animation, and puppets. Characters included Ernie, who sang a song about the letter M; Snorkee, a reptile who is often oblivious to his surroundings and lacks common sense; Maynard, an elderly man who laments over his wasted youth; and Piggle, a pig with a big appetite whose voice was similar to that of Kermit the Frog, among others. Many of the show's elements seem to have been copied from Sesame Street.

The Russian Sleep Experiment is a creepypasta which tells the tale of 5 test subjects being exposed to an experimental sleep-inhibiting stimulant in a Soviet-era scientific experiment, and has become the basis of an urban legend. Many news organizations, including Snopes, News.com.au, and LiveAbout, trace the story's origins to a website, now known as the Creepypasta Wiki, being posted on August 10, 2010, by a user named OrangeSoda, whose real name is unknown.

<i>Local 58</i> YouTube horror web series by Kris Straub

Local 58 is a horror web series created by cartoonist Kris Straub. The series is a spin-off of Straub's Candle Cove creepypasta. Currently hosted on the YouTube channel LOCAL58TV, each video in the series is presented as footage of a fictional public access television channel located in Mason County, West Virginia named Local 58, with the call sign WCLV-TV, created in the late 1930s, which is continuously hijacked over a period of decades with a series of ominous and surreal broadcasts.

Alexander D. Hall is an American writer, showrunner, horror fiction novelist, and documentarian. He is known for creating and producing the web series Ben Drowned (2010–2020) and showrunning the subsequent alternate reality game. He was the host of the podcast The Digital Fireside and created several documentaries.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">The Backrooms</span> Fictional location

The Backrooms are a fictional concept first mentioned on a 2019 4chan thread. One of the best known examples of the liminal space aesthetic, the Backrooms are commonly depicted as an extradimensional space containing impossibly large expanses of empty rooms accessed by "no-clipping out of reality" in certain areas.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Zalgo text</span> Digital text modified to appear frightening or glitchy

Zalgo text, also known as cursed text due to the nature of its use, is digital text that has been modified with numerous combining characters, Unicode symbols used to add diacritics above or below letters, to appear frightening or glitchy.

Analog horror is a subgenre of horror fiction and an offshoot of the found footage film genre, said to have originated online during the late 2000s and early 2010s with web series such as No Through Road, Local 58, Gemini Home Entertainment, and Marble Hornets.

References

  1. ↑ Peters, Lucia. "Creepy Things That Seem Real But Aren't: Candle Cove". Crushable. Archived from the original on January 2, 2017. Retrieved August 10, 2016.
  2. 1 2 3 4 Grundhauser, Eric (October 7, 2016). "Do You Remember Candle Cove?". Atlas Obscura . Retrieved October 19, 2016.
  3. ↑ Burkart, Gregory (August 25, 2016). "CREEPYPASTA: Revisiting CANDLE COVE — The Scariest Children's Show of All Time?". Blumhouse.com. Archived from the original on October 19, 2016. Retrieved October 19, 2016.
  4. 1 2 Robertson, Adi (July 1, 2015). "SyFy is making a TV series based on one of the internet's best scary stories". The Verge. Retrieved August 10, 2016.
  5. ↑ "r/local58 - Comment by u/krisstraub on "Did they ever air Candle Cove on Local 58?"". reddit. August 12, 2019. Retrieved June 11, 2020.
  6. 1 2 3 Balanzategui 2019, p. 193.
  7. ↑ Hipes, Patrick (November 18, 2015). "'Channel Zero' Anthology Series Gets Greenlight From Syfy For 2-Season Run". Deadline.com. Retrieved July 28, 2016.
  8. ↑ Goldberg, Leslie (June 30, 2015). "Syfy Prepping Anthology Based on Web Horror Phenomenon 'Creepypasta'". The Hollywood Reporter. Retrieved August 10, 2016.
  9. ↑ Abrams, Natalie (August 3, 2016). "Syfy sets premiere dates for 'Incorporated,' 'Van Helsing,' more". Entertainment Weekly. Retrieved August 10, 2016.
  10. ↑ Logan, Alex (September 15, 2016). "How SyFy Farmed 'Creepypasta' for New Horror Series 'Channel Zero'". Yahoo! TV . Retrieved December 13, 2016.
  11. ↑ Wiles, Will. "'Creepypasta' is how the internet learns our fears". Aeon. Retrieved August 10, 2016.
  12. ↑ Newitz, Annalee (January 7, 2014). "Has Creepypasta Reinvented Classic Folklore?". io9. Retrieved August 10, 2016.

Bibliography

Balanzategui, Jessica (2019). "Creepypasta, 'Candle Cove', and the digital gothic". Journal of Visual Culture . 18 (2): 187–208. doi:10.1177/1470412919841018. ISSN   1470-4129.

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.