Spooky Spaghettis, Creepypastas, and Channel Zero

“Also Terrifying Tortellini”

I like spooky things, and sometimes I also write spooky things.  But I also like to read spooky things, like Stephen King or the exponentially expanding world of the SCP Foundation.  But my first dip into the world of horror stories came from somewhere else; the Creepypasta.

The name sounds like it should be part of stupid internet gibberish meme culture, and it absolutely is.  I don’t know if I can take anything that calls itself a creepypasta seriously, even though at one point I thought so highly of the website that I got myself published on it.  But regardless of its reputation now or the horrible stabbings associated with it, at one point in time, it was pretty cool to read creepypastas.  Or at least, less socially isolating.  And at that time, I was pretty into them.

Creepypasta, as a genre, was born out of one of those things that crawled its way from the dark web into the light of day; 4chan.  It’s a derivative of copypastas, stories that are copied-and-pasted (holy shit, I’m just now realizing where the name comes from) around the internet.  Creepypastas were initially just copypastas that happened to be scary, like urban legends or supposed true tales of terror.  They eventually grew to kind of be their own thing, with original stories and concepts, sometimes even spawning little subcultures of memes and internet forums around central characters or ideas.  Things like Jeff the Killer.  Ben Drowned.  “The Russian Sleep Experiment.”  Anansi’s Goatman.  The Rake.  And maybe the most infamous and widespread, the Slenderman.  Yeah, Slenderman, that seemingly ubiquitous video game boogeyman and shitty Hollywood star started as a creepypasta.

Generally, creepypasta stories are indebted and embedded in their form as internet fiction.  A lot of them appear as forum posts or greentext stories, or they have to do with electronic media, like cursed pictures spread through email or video games.  I haven’t read many of them in a while, and I briefly listened to a podcast that read some of them out loud, but honestly, a lot of them aren’t that good.  They all have the same general idea, and no real depth to them.  But then again, the ones that are good are really good.

Like, for example, “Psychosis,” which is maybe the only creepypasta I’ve read to both embrace and transcend the limitations imposed on it by being a strictly digital medium.  It’s eerie, it’s engaging, and in a world where computers are everywhere, it’s pretty damn effective at evoking a certain emotion.  Namely fear, but there’s more to it than that.  And, overall, it is just a well-written story, too.

Or there’s “Candle Cove,” which also embraced its existence on a forum by being told through a forum post, but went in a very different direction than “Psychosis.”  I loved this story when I read it, years ago, but then when I found out it was being made into a TV show, Channel Zero, I flipped my shit.  When that TV show was actually really, really good, I lost it.  When that TV show got three more seasons, I was ecstatic.  When the fourth season wasn’t as good as the first two, I wasn’t so happy.  I still haven’t seen the third season.

Channel Zero was kind of bizarre in its choice of stories, though.  I mean, even choosing to base a full-length, multi-hour, hundred-thousand-dollar TV show off of 2000-word internet horror stories is a bold move, but for a while, at least, it worked.  I can’t fault Nick Antosca for filling in the gaps in the stories to expand them to a wider world; the original stories fit so seamlessly into a larger narrative that it’s almost like they were already there.  But some of the stories that the show chose from were just weird decisions.

“Candle Cove” is one thing.  A haunted kids TV show?  Okay, I could see maybe a few different directions you could go in to make that a SyFy channel show.  None of them involve toothboy, so props for original monster design.  “NoEnd House” felt pretty natural for season two, since its twist in the original story is just asking to be expanded.  And adding all that sad shit with allergy suicide and John Carroll Lynch being a creepy motherfucker, not to mention bizarre sexual tension and deeply-uncomfortable-yet-familiar world design, it builds something unforgettable.

I still haven’t seen season 3 because I can’t find anywhere to watch it that doesn’t involve paying an additional fifteen bucks a month for another streaming service I won’t use.  But it’s based on “Search and Rescue Woods,” which is actually one of the most impressive Creepypastas I’ve read because it was able to keep the suspense and interest up over seven installations.  Plus it mixes in the real with the unreal, the horrifying with the depressing, and I’d easily recommend it to anyone for a spooky read.  I’ve heard that Channel Zero season three does none of that.  But I can’t say for sure.

But then the choice of story for season four was just off.  An simply titled r/nosleep post about a family that finds a mysterious door in their basement.  Oh, will this season be a new alternate reality one?  Will they let out a shapeshifting monster into the world, and have to figure out which of their friends are real?  Does the house go on infinitely deeper into the depths?  Are their puppets?  No.  None of that.  It ends up being a pretty standard slasher show for the first four episodes, and then finally gets interesting and unique in the last two with a couple plot twists, new monsters, and more spooky shit than just a murderous clown.  I’ve seen murderous clowns before.  Give me more tooth people.

Alas, I believe that Channel Zero could have fixed its missteps, especially with the huge wealth of other creepypastas to choose from, but SyFy cancelled the show.  I’m still salty about that since at this point I’ll probably watch anything Nick Antosca tells me to.  Seasons 1 and 2 proved to me he can do it.  I was skeptical at first, especially since creepypastas are kind of cringey, even when season 1 was airing.  But it worked.  Channel Zero worked so well.  I just wish that maybe season four had chosen a different story.

Like what, you may be asking?  Well, how about this one: “Mr. Widemouth.”  I feel personally connected to this story, mostly because it was one of the first I’d read and really enjoyed, but also because I sometimes would retell this story at Boy Scout summer camp.  We’d all sit around the campfire, telling stories, and then I’d pull this one out and people wouldn’t sleep.  That’s what they told me, anyway.  We were, like, twelve.

Or there’s the infinite wealth of video game stories.  I already mentioned “Ben Drowned.”  But there’s stuff like Sonic.EXE, the granddaddy of .exe horror stories, or Polybius, which is maybe the most prolific video game urban legend.  “Lavender Town Syndrome,” a story about a Pokemon song that makes kids go crazy, is a thing that also exists.  And there’s Petscop, which apparently the fucking New Yorker wrote about.  Channel Zero wouldn’t even have had to worry about getting rights; they could have chosen the general premise and made up their own game.

Hell, they could have even worked with Marble Hornets to do something with Slenderman, and I’m confident it would have been infinitely better than the garbage fire that was the actual Slenderman movie.  Or maybe something like Smile Dog, that spooky fuckin’ dog picture.  It could have been like Cujo, but better.  Or there’s that relatively recent Momo nonsense, which could have been turned into a Black Mirror-esque commentary on viral media.

But none of it really matters in the end, because I don’t think Channel Zero is coming back, as much as I’d like it to.  But there are still plenty of creepypastas out there, even beyond the ones that I’ve mentioned, that might kind of scratch that horror itch.  The creepypasta website might be a good place to start, but it’s so covered in ads as to make it almost unreadable.  “The Devil Game” is a pretty good one.  I haven’t actually read a lot of the others.  But the more I look at that site and all its blinding advertisements, the more I want to throw it into the corner and leave it there forever.

You know, the internet is full of creepy things in other places, too, if you know where to find them.  Like “I Feel Fantastic,” or the Fresno Night Crawlers, or the Dyatlov Pass Incident which is terrifying because it really happened and was probably just secret Russian weapons testing but was also definitely The Menk.  And there’s always those gross-out horror sites or videos that exist only to be disgusting, usually in a body-horror or sexual-horror kind of way.  You know the ones I’m talking about.  No, I’m not linking to any of them.  Do not run the gauntlet, you sick fuck.

Some of those videos that I mentioned blur the line between fiction and reality, though, and not in a good way.  Generally I know which reddit posts are just stories based on where/how they’re posted, or I can deduce it based on the fact that ghosts and monsters don’t actually exist, but some of these videos are actually just people dying.  Like, real people.  Really dying.  That isn’t fictional horror anymore, that’s just nonfictional life.  It isn’t fun or tasteful or in good faith, and there isn’t a point.  No one gets anything positive out of it.  It isn’t even a learning experience, in most cases.  And I, for one, believe that people should be treated with more respect than having their final moments posted to reddit for the internet to gawk over.  Or Logan Paul.

The internet is a weird place.  Sometimes it can be great.  Sometimes it can be terrible.  Usually, it’s just an awkward middle-ground full of cat memes and millions of people screaming into the void, myself included.  Every so often, though, the internet figures out how to do something better than any other sort of communication.  To a certain degree, what with the sheer scale of it, I’d say that horror stories are one of these things.  If you want fun-scary from the internet, creepypastas are your way in.  If you want real-scary from the internet, where the scary is the fact that someone recorded a man getting hit by a train and thought it was funny, go to 4chan.

I used to be a part of the creepypasta scene.  I actually wrote several stories for the site, and got three of them published there.  None of them were particularly good, since I was like fifteen at the time, but they’re there, and one of them got a YouTube video of some guy reading it out loud, so that’s pretty neat.

But, at any rate, now that I’ve hopefully kind of explained what a creepypasta is, and given a rough sort of idea about what horror is like on the internet, now I feel comfortable sharing my creepypastas, the ones that I wrote and got published.  Because I don’t want their only repository to be the mess of a website that is Creepypasta.com.  So I’ll post them here.  And then promptly never refer to this post again because you don’t really need to know about anything here to read my stories.  They’re just stories, and I just wanted to talk about creepypastas because it’s Halloween time.

But hey.  The next time you’re around here, I’ll hopefully have three (wow!) new posts made.  At least one of them should be good, right?  I guess we’ll see.