CREEPY PASTA
Delve into the darkest recesses of the web, and your mind, to indulge in urban legends and faux histories with viral horror advice from Alex Davis
Alex Davis
No, it’s not some sort of special Halloween food product, but a term for a wide-ranging and very popular type of online horror story.
Often proliferated first on internet message boards or video sharing sites like YouTube, these are tales of terror that have their roots on the web and have gradually become ‘viral’. You could see the creepypasta as a sort of modern urban legend, not spread by word of mouth from person to person but more widely – and quickly – online. There are many very famous examples – some of which you may have encountered without even knowing it – that have left an indelible mark on our culture. But is there anything a horror writer in the wider field can take away from this particular new stretch of nightmare?
Coming to the boil – A Brief History of Creepypasta
The term ‘creepypasta’ comes from the idea of stories providing sustenance to those who like all things creepy, derived from ‘copypasta’, a web term for viral text snippets, which often lose meaning, or gain new ones, through being shared without context. That doubt about its authenticity is fundamental to the success of creepypasta writing.
As pasta feeds many of us, creepypasta feeds the darker parts of the imagination. It is, by its nature, edgy and disturbing, so non-horror fans may prefer to steer clear.
One of the first creepypastas – Ted The Caver – was told in the form of a blog that began in 2001, closing with a final, inconclusive blog post in 2005. The most famous examples would undoubtedly be Slender Man – a new urban legend that began in 2009 with a series of photoshopped images showing an incredibly tall, gaunt figure in a black suit with no facial features at all. He was said to target children, and has become a popular figure in a wide range of horror video games since. There was also a much more tragic impact of this creepypasta in 2014, when two twelveyear- old girls stabbed a classmate in the woods in what they said was an attempt to impress Slender Man.