Creepypasta

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Fan art of Slender Man, one of the best-known creepypastas Tonkii chelovek.jpg
Fan art of Slender Man, one of the best-known creepypastas

A creepypasta is a horror-related legend which has been shared around the Internet. [1] [2] [3] The term creepypasta has since become a catch-all term for any horror content posted onto the Internet. [4] 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. [1] Creepypastas range in length from a single paragraph to extended multi-part series that can span multiple media types, some lasting for years. [4]

Contents

In the mainstream media, creepypastas relating to the fictitious Slender Man character came to public attention after the 2014 "Slender Man stabbing", in which a 12-year-old girl was stabbed by two of her friends; the perpetrators claimed they "wanted to prove the Slender Man skeptics wrong". [1] [5] After the murder attempt, some creepypasta website administrators made statements reminding readers of the "line between fiction and reality". [1] Other notable creepypasta stories include "Ben Drowned", "Jeff the Killer", "Ted the Caver", and "Sonic.exe". [1] [6] [7]

Definition

The word creepypasta first appeared on 4chan, an online imageboard, around 2007. It is a variant of copypasta (from "copy and paste"), another 4chan term which refers to blocks of text which become viral by being copied widely around the internet. [8] [9] Unlike copypastas, creepypastas are all horror fiction and also encompass multimedia stories, with creators using videos, images, hyperlinks and GIFs alongside text. [9]

History

According to Sara Bimo, "there is debate over what exactly counts as the 'first' creepypasta". [9] Scholars and writers such as Time 's Jessica Roy have seen similarities in the chain emails of the 1990s, which disseminated hoaxes and urban legends, for example, by promising a terrible fate for users who did not pass them along. [1] [9] Horror stories such as the Rake, a fictional monster created by 4chan users in 2005, have been retroactively considered creepypastas. [10] Some consider the 2001 story "Ted the Caver" the first. [4] [11]

The earliest creepypastas originate from 4chan, and the website's culture was influential in shaping the characteristics of the genre. [9] Major dedicated creepypasta websites started to appear from the late 2000s: Creepypasta.com was created in 2008, while the Creepypasta Wiki and Reddit's r/NoSleep were both created in 2010. [12] [13] According to Time magazine, the genre had its peak audience in 2010 when it was covered by The New York Times . [1]

The definition of creepypasta has expanded over time to include most short horror fiction whose first publication is online. [14] Over time, authorship has become increasingly important: many creepypastas are written by named authors rather than by anonymous individuals. [14]

Cultural impact

The common depiction of the Backrooms, derived from one of the images that inspired the creepypasta. Backrooms model.jpg
The common depiction of the Backrooms, derived from one of the images that inspired the creepypasta.

Numerous short films, games, feature-length films and merchandise have been produced based on creepypastas, such as Always Watching: A Marble Hornets Story , Slender Man and Beware the Slenderman . In addition to merchandise and film adaptations, numerous amounts of fan content and independent settings/mythos have been established from creepypastas, such as with the SCP Foundation, the Backrooms and The Mandela Catalogue, with the prior serving as an example of the creepypasta descendant subgenre, analog horror.

Due to its online prevalence, a portion of creepypastas has been archived by American Folklife Center and added to their digital culture web archive under their initiative to document the development of web culture. [15] [16] Some folklorist view creepypastas as the digital age manifestation of legend, [16] [17] while others view the majority of creepypastas as anti-legends. [18] Anti-legends are similar to legends except that they seek to purposely subvert the legends of the era by challenging the audience's exceptions of what constitutes a contemporary legend. [19] [20]

In May 2015, Machinima, Inc. announced plans for a live-action web series curated by Clive Barker, titled Clive Barker's Creepy Pasta, focusing on Slender Man and Ben Drowned; [21] although following the shutdown of Machinima, the series was never produced. Each season of the American television series Channel Zero is based on a different creepypasta. Filmmaker John Farrelly was set to release a film titled The Sleep Experiment, based on the Russian Sleep Experiment, in 2020, [22] but the project never materialized.

Genres

Lost episode creepypasta

Some creepypastas exploit childhood nostalgia and distort it into something more horrific, unfamiliar. Creepypasta.com describes purported lost episodes of television shows as one of the most popular tropes. [23] [24] These episodes often focus on suicide or imply the viewer will suffer great harm. Some lost episode creepypastas focus on local public access shows rather than nationally syndicated shows. Notable examples include Squidward's Suicide , Suicidemouse.avi , Dead Bart , and Max and Ruby 0004. [25] Another example is the original version of the Teletubbies episode "The Bear and the Lion", which was pulled off from further broadcast due to criticism for its unsettling cinematography, character design, and music. A SpongeBob SquarePants episode, titled "SpongeBob in RandomLand", had to re-edit a scene that referred to the Squidward's Suicide creepypasta. [17] [26] [27]

Video games

Video game creepypasta focuses on video games containing grotesque or violent content; this content may spill over into the real world and cause the player to harm themselves or others. Many video game creepypastas reveal the conflict to be caused by malevolent entities such as ghosts or artificial intelligence. [28]

Related Research Articles

The Hook, or the Hookman, is an urban legend about a killer with a pirate-like hook for a hand attacking a couple in a parked car. In many versions of the story, the killer is typically portrayed as a faceless, silhouetted old man wearing a raincoat and rain hat that conceals most of his features, especially his face.

A copypasta is a block of text copied and pasted to the Internet and social media. Copypasta containing controversial ideas or lengthy rants are often posted for humorous purposes, to provoke reactions from those unaware that the posted text is a meme.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">4chan</span> Anonymous imageboard website

4chan is an anonymous English-language imageboard website. Launched by Christopher "moot" Poole in October 2003, the site hosts boards dedicated to a wide variety of topics, from video games and television to literature, cooking, weapons, music, history, anime, fitness, politics, and sports, among others. Registration is not available and users typically post anonymously. As of 2022, 4chan receives more than 22 million unique monthly visitors, of which approximately half are from the United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Encyclopedia Dramatica</span> Parody-themed wiki website

Encyclopedia Dramatica is a satirical online community centered around a wiki that acts as a "troll archive". The site hosts racist material and shock content; as a result it was filtered from Google Search in 2010. An administrator of the website was the perpetrator of the 2017 Aztec High School shooting, and users of the site frequently participate in harassment campaigns.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Herobrine</span> Minecraft urban legend

Herobrine is an urban legend and creepypasta from the video game Minecraft, originating from an anonymous post on the imageboard website 4chan in 2010. He is depicted as a version of the Minecraft character Steve, but with solid white eyes that lack pupils. In numerous iterations, Herobrine has possessed several different unnatural abilities, from constructing unusual structures to possessing animals such as sheep. Other claims about Herobrine include those that describe him to be the deceased brother of Notch, the creator of Minecraft. After the original sightings were published on 4chan, livestreamers Copeland and Patimuss created their own takes on the story, staging sightings and the former creating a webpage oriented around the character.

<i>Slender: The Eight Pages</i> 2012 video game

Slender: The Eight Pages, originally titled Slender, is a short first-person survival horror game based on the Slender Man, an infamous creepypasta. It was developed by independent developer Mark J. Hadley using the game engine Unity and was first released in June 2012 by his one-man studio Parsec Productions.

<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">Black-eyed children</span> Urban legend

Black-eyed children or black-eyed kids, in American contemporary legend, are paranormal creatures that resemble children between ages 6 and 16, with pale skin and black eyes, who are reportedly seen hitchhiking or begging, or are encountered on doorsteps of residential homes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">SCP Foundation</span> Online collaborative writing project

The SCP Foundation is a fictional organization featuring in stories created by the SCP Wiki, a wiki-based collaborative writing project.

On May 31, 2014, in Waukesha, Wisconsin, United States, two 12-year-old girls, Anissa Weier and Morgan Geyser, lured their friend Payton Leutner into a wooded area of a local park and stabbed her 19 times to appease the fictional character Slender Man. Weier and Geyser were both found not guilty by mental disease or defect and committed to mental health institutions. Weier received a sentence of 25 years to life and Geyser was sentenced to 40 years to life. After seven years in custody, Weier was granted early release and will be under supervision until age 37.

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. 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".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lavender Town</span> Fictional town in Pokémon universe

Lavender Town is a fictional village in the 1996 video games Pokémon Red and Blue. Stylized as a haunted location, Lavender Town is home to the Pokémon Tower, a burial ground for deceased Pokémon and a location to find Ghost-Type Pokémon.

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.

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.

"Ted the Caver" is a short horror story by Ted Hegemann, self-published on an Angelfire website in 2001. It is presented as the online diary of a man who excavates an unexplored cave with his friends. As he unearths the passage further, the entries become increasingly unsettling.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Roy, Jessica (3 June 2014). "Behind Creepypasta, the Internet Community That Allegedly Spread a Killer Meme". Time . Retrieved 17 October 2014.
  2. ↑ Considine, Austin (12 November 2010). "Bored at Work? Try Creepypasta, or Web Scares". The New York Times . Retrieved 14 September 2015.
  3. ↑ Henriksen, Line (17 Dec 2013). "Here be monsters: a choreomaniac's companion to the danse macabre". Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory. 23 (3): 414–423. doi:10.1080/0740770X.2013.857082. S2CID   191466919.
  4. 1 2 3 Romano, Aja (31 October 2012). "The definitive guide to creepypasta—the Internet's urban legends". The Daily Dot . Retrieved 1 September 2015.
  5. ↑ Dewey, Caitlin (6 June 2014). "The complete, terrifying history of 'Slender Man', the Internet meme that compelled two 12-year-olds to stab their friend". The Washington Post. Retrieved 17 October 2014.
  6. ↑ Newitz, Annalee (August 5, 2013). "Who is "Jeff the Killer"? And is his picture haunted by a real death?". Gizmodo. io9. Archived from the original on December 19, 2015. Retrieved 31 December 2013.
  7. ↑ Roncero-Menendez, Sara; Piedra, Xavier (September 18, 2018). "17 terrifying creepypastas guaranteed to keep you up at night". Mashable . Retrieved March 14, 2019.
  8. ↑ Blank & McNeill 2018, p. 6.
  9. 1 2 3 4 5 Bimo 2023, p. 82.
  10. ↑ Taylor 2020, p. 986.
  11. ↑ H.C., Luiz (2018-03-17). "Before Slender Man and CreepyPastas There Was 'Ted the Caver'!". Bloody Disgusting . Retrieved 2023-11-19.
  12. ↑ "'Slender Man' Cited in Stabbing Is a Ghoul for the Internet Age". NBC News. June 3, 2014. Archived from the original on June 7, 2014. Retrieved June 24, 2017.
  13. ↑ Bojalad, Alec (22 January 2017). "Beware the Creepypasta: Scary Storytelling in the Internet Age". Den of Geek. Retrieved 24 June 2017.
  14. 1 2 Peters, Lucia (25 December 2015). "What Is Creepypasta? Here's Everything You Need To Know About The Internet's Spookiest Stories". Bustle. Retrieved 24 June 2017.
  15. ↑ "About this Collection | Web Cultures Web Archive | Digital Collections | Library of Congress". Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 20540 USA. Retrieved 2023-10-18.
  16. 1 2 Saylor, Nicole (2014-09-26). "Creepypastas, Memes, Lolspeak & Boards: The Scope of a Digital Culture Web Archive | Folklife Today". The Library of Congress. Retrieved 2023-10-18.
  17. 1 2 Ramirez, Makayla (2022). The Case for Creepypasta: Defining the Genre and Finding the Horror (Report). Arizona State University.
  18. ↑ Koven, Mikel J. (2015-12-31). "Slender Man: A Dissenting View". Contemporary Legend. 5: 105–111. ISSN   0963-8334.
  19. ↑ Jolles, André; Schwartz, Peter J. (2013). "Legend: From "Einfache Formen" ("Simple Forms")". PMLA. 128 (3): 728–743. doi:10.1632/pmla.2013.128.3.728. ISSN   0030-8129. JSTOR   23489318. S2CID   161186978.
  20. ↑ Mould, Tom (2022-10-01). "Counter Memes and Anti-Legends in Online Welfare Discourse". Journal of American Folklore. 135 (538): 441–465. doi:10.5406/15351882.135.538.03. ISSN   0021-8715. S2CID   252763522.
  21. ↑ Rife, Katie (5 May 2015). "Machinima announces web series from Clive Barker, Bruce Timm, RoboCop, and more". The A.V. Club. Retrieved 14 September 2015.
  22. ↑ Lynch, Richard (February 22, 2019). "John Farrelly Set to Release Debut Feature Film The Sleep Experiment". I Love Limerick. RichardKnows. Archived from the original on December 15, 2019.
  23. ↑ Stoeber, Jenna (July 12, 2018). "Creepypasta and the psychology of negative nostalgia". Polygon . Retrieved April 14, 2024.
  24. ↑ Bimo 2023, pp. 86–87.
  25. ↑ Grippo 2016, p. 176.
  26. ↑ William Hughes (September 21, 2019). "Yep, SpongeBob just directly referenced a classic creepypasta about Squidward killing himself". The A.V. Club . Retrieved May 21, 2023.
  27. ↑ "What is a Creepypasta?". Tales by Travel. 2022-03-01. Retrieved 2023-10-18.
  28. ↑ Grippo, p. 176.

Bibliography

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