By James Herd
Reporter
You find yourself in a dark forest, with only a flashlight and a cheap camera to chronicle your experience. You begin walking through the forest, the only noise being the gravelly sounds of your footsteps as you venture deeper and deeper into darkness.
Approaching a makeshift tunnel, you notice something that shouldn’t be there. A white piece of scratch paper taped to the inside wall. Picking it up you can see what it says with help from the flashlight.
“DON’T LOOK… OR IT TAKES YOU.”
You turn around and find an extremely tall man with a black business suit and no face stalking you. You black out.
Welcome to the world of the Slender Man, one of many “Creepy pastas” ‘eyewitness’ accounts of supernatural or theoretical experiences.
The art of creepy pastas is that, according to its name, it makes an effort to be creepy in nature. This means that they either focus on supernatural creatures, such as the Slender Man or the Rake (a feral creature that causes victims to revert back to childlike behavior before attacking), or more recently, they expose theories in popular childhood TV series or video games and “reveal” a darker or more sinister theme in them. An example of the latter includes “The Rugrats Theory,” or “The Ed, Edd, and Eddy Purgatory Theory.”
When it comes to the supernatural aspect, many talented individuals have taken it upon themselves to chronicle their “experiences” with their camera and upload the resulting videos onto YouTube. Such series have recently exponentially increased, but the most well known include “Marble Hornets,” “EverymanHYBRID,” “DarkHarvest00,” and “TribeTwelve,” all of which feature the Slender Man. But some go even further with other creatures that have been created via the Internet.
The origins of the Slender Man can be traced back to the SomethingAwful forums in 2009 when a user posted a paranormal photo contest for users to submit their own creepy photographs that they made out of normal photographs.
Another source of creepy pastas is “the S.C.P Foundation,” which is a fictional organization designed to “Secure, Contain and Protect” the world from foreign creatures and strange devices. The Original S.C.P., SCP-173, is similar in nature to the Weeping Angels, of “Doctor Who” fame. Supposedly, both creatures were created independently of each other, but the Weeping Angels did not start cracking their victims’ necks, the SCP-173 signature, until about two years after the S.C.P foundation posted the page.
But now you’re probably wondering why these “creepy pastas” matter in the general scheme of things. Let’s face it: Horror movies have lost their edge that they once had.
It seems like horror movies can’t exist unless they are about possession, serial killers or ghosts, and the genre has been milked beyond recognition with sequels after sequels after sequels.
It would seem that if the Horror genre is to survive, it must pass the gauntlet onto creators who made their start on the Internet, such as the creators of “Marble Hornets” or “TribeTwelve.”
This time of year has been dedicated to the horror movie genre for years, and it’s about time that someone make a movie that hasn’t been done before. It’s the least they could do for bringing back “Halloween” and “A Nightmare on Elm Street.” Seriously.
Interested parties can write their own creepy pasta stories by publishing them on the Creepy pasta Wiki page, or by spreading them around on Facebook or Twitter.
You’d be surprised at who would take interest.
