I promised three posts ago that one of these horror-themed Raindrops on Roses posts wasn’t going to be strictly-speaking good, and I think even just looking at the title might give the impression that this one is the one I was talking about. But before we get into why I kind of adore these b- or c-grade stories, I have to do talk a little bit about the etymology of the internet.
Sometimes the internet really likes a certain turn of phrase (or, perhaps more accurately for the purposes of this post, a certain turn of text), and when that happens, it tends to spread rather quickly. In cases like “john is kill” or “He Boomed Me”, these phrases are mutable enough to become memes in their own right, but sometimes the actual text is deemed perfect in the eyes of the internet and becomes the go-to text for expressing an often sarcastic version of a particular emotion. Fake outrage, for example, draws the “Navy Seal Rant” (and yes there are variations on Navy Seal, but unlike the first two examples, they’re far less popular than the original text). These instances are referred to as “copypastas” or simply “pastas”, which itself originates from “copy-paste”.
But not every copypasta wants to associate with an asterisk everytime it wants to evoke an emotion. Especially with an emotion like horror, which needs to be taken seriously (at least the ironic sort of seriousness that a comedy-horror sort of story like Shaun of the Dead might go for) or risk utterly breaking its audience’s immersion. Because of this, these viral horror stories have distanced themselves a little from their copypasta roots and now tend to go by the name “creepypasta”.
So what makes a creepypasta? More specifically, what makes a creepypasta different from, say, a normal horror short story? Perhaps the most glaring difference is the insistence on a first-person past-tense perspective. Creepypastas want the reader to believe that this truly happened (as opposed to media like It Comes At Night which describes a post-apocalyptic scenario that might happen), and one of the ways they do that is with “I”. This also lets the author skip by a little bit of character establishment. Sure, the “I” might have an occupation or friends that spooky things also happen to, but their purpose is better served as the metaphorical cameraman, guiding the reader through a series of events.
The consequence of this, of course, is the same consequence that lets cameramen (in most cases) not die during action movies. The main character in creepypastas seldom dies, so the horror generally has to come from elsewhere. One of the ways they do that is downer endings or, in some cases, no ending at all. Frequently this hinges on a Shyamalan-like twist (As an aside/fun fact, the plot of Sixth Sense was originally going to be part of a horror anthology TV series, so the ancestry is certainly there), which lets the author narrate a proper resolution before pulling out the rug and going “Surprise!”
Just like Shyamalan movies, though, these twists can easily be marred by how out-of-nowhere they are. The novel Penpal by Dathan Auerbach, itself a collection of six connected creepypastas tends to fall prey to this, with each chapter describing a spooky event and then going “Haha! It was a pedophile!”
Lastly, creepypasta itself has its own subgenres. The most popular is what I like to call “corruption of the innocent,” which takes a piece of media and twists it. Some of the more famous examples of this are “Lost Episode” pastas like Suicide Mouse or “Haunted Video Game” pastas like Ben Drowned or the incredibly poorly titled Godzilla NES Creepypasta. The problem here is that if it is popular enough to spawn its own subgenre, it can easily breed familiarity, and familiarity can easily break immersion, which as previously discussed, can kill the reception of a pasta.
Do you recognize the pattern yet? Every trope that makes a creepypasta a creepypasta also can easily be a detriment to its quality. So why do I like them? Well, some of that I admit is because of how I consume them. I generally get these stories in audio form; I listen to them while doing more menial tasks where my mind would otherwise wander (closing up shop at work, for example). And in that way, it transforms these stories into almost campfire stories, where the focus is less on the quality of the story and more on the act of telling. So sure, creepypasta is generally on the lower end of the quality spectrum compared to a lot of horror, but just like everyone has a favorite campfire story to tell, everyone has a creepypasta they like to share around the internet.
I close, then, with links to and comments on some of my own favorites.
Candle Cove: This is one of those creepypastas that often comes with a the (italics included), as in the creepypasta. And that’s not without a good reason. Its forum-post style makes it easy to spread around, it moves deftly from beat to beat and is able to recontextualize old low-budget children’s tv in a way pastas like Suicide Mouse or Squidward’s Suicide never could. It was also expanded into a miniseries as part of SyFy’s Channel Zero, so that’s a fun fact as well.
Killswitch: I don’t think Catherynne M. Valente intended for any of her posts on her Invisible Games blog to be viewed as truth, but the legend of a game that is only playable once certainly stuck around. In my head, it influenced the creation of games like One Chance or Execution, though that’s just me guessing. I don’t even think it was the best story on the now-defunct blog (the link before goes to archive.org, which may not have grabbed all of them), but it certainly was a good introduction to the stories it wanted to tell.
Godzilla NES Creepypasta: Yes, the title is garbage. Yes, the plot has been done a thousand times down to the specific beats. But just like the game in the story itself, the narrative just keeps going, adding on more and more, slowly weaving its own mythos. Add on some creative sprite work to simulate screenshots from this haunted game, and it’s at least worth a look.
SCP-1981: I don’t generally like the SCP Foundation subset of creepypastas. They have a faux-scientific style that reads to me as more dry and boring than scary, and the community tends towards being fascinated with potential world-ending catastrophes as a source of horror, which, you know, doesn’t work if the world’s still here. But sometimes the foundation comes across something more mundane, (say, a videotape with some odd properties) and in those instances, I think the writing style can work.
-F
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