When it comes to horror, in a contemporary society where slasher films have been done to death and possessed dolls are old hat, successful horror relies on having a unique idea. It Follows became a huge success because its idea was as unique as it was terrifying and anxiety-inducing. A Quiet Place captured peoples’ minds by making them imagine how they might exist in a world where their ability to minimize noise was the key to survival. It takes a smart, creative mind to come up with something that’s both scary and fresh.
Bigwigs in Hollywood aren’t really content to sit on their hands while they wait for writers to strike gold with a new, inventive concept. They need their next big horror hit now, and they will plumb any depth to get it, which is why we have horror movies based on party games, like Truth or Dare and Would You Rather. The Internet, however, is always churning out new ideas from anybody who’s willing to post them to a public forum, and TV and film executives have, more and more, been eyeing these stories as potential inspiration.
The word “creepypasta” is goofy by design. It started with the word “copypasta”, which is a bit of a twist on calling something a copy-and-paste, the term likely originating on 4chan. Copypastas were originally large amounts of text copied and pasted on various sites, usually as spam. The definitions of what a copypasta is stretched and became more amorphous over time, to the point where a post that was in long-form, frequently telling a story of some kind, was considered copypasta, even if the user had written the post specifically for that site. Sometimes these short stories were of the horror variety, usually posted as if these were situations that actually happened to the user in an effort to enhance the scariness of the story with a sense of legitimacy. These stories came to be known as creepypastas, though sometimes they are referred to as other names, especially depending on the site they’re posted on. For instance, they can be referred to as “nosleeps” when posted on the NoSleep boards on Reddit (referring to the fact that readers will have a hard time falling asleep after reading them).
Online horror fiction has started to make the jump from anonymous Internet story to actual studio productions. In 2015, famed horror writer and director Clive Barker was slated to direct a TV series with Warner Bros. company Machinima Inc. based on various creepypastas. These included Eric Knudesen’s Slender Man, Alex Hall’s Ben Drowned, and Jeff the Killer, with plans to allow for user-submitted stories as the series continued. The series was set to be titled Clive Barker’s Creepy Pastas, although beyond the initial announcement nothing seems to have ever materialized from the series, and in early 2019 Machinima Inc. had officially shut down.
In 2016, SyFy began airing the TV series Channel Zero, a horror anthology series with each season based on horror stories that originated on the Internet, though these were slightly unique in that all the stories had attributable authors. The six episode seasons were based on Kris Straub’s Candle Cove, Brian Russell’s The No-End House, Kerry Hammond’s Search and Rescue Woods, and Charlotte Bywater’s Hidden Door, in that order. There had been rumors about what creepypastas might be adapted next for the series, including Ben Drowned (again). Despite receiving favorable reviews for each of its seasons, at the beginning of 2019 SyFy announced that they were cancelling the show.
In 2017, the CW’s digital media production arm CW Seed started their own Internet story-based anthology series titled Two Sentence Horror Stories. The series is based on a Reddit forum (referred to as a subreddit) where, exactly as it sounds, people are challenged to set up a horror premise with just two sentences. It originally began as five short films, but in 2019 the CW brought it to their standard programming network. This year, it was renewed for two more seasons, and the second season was set as the television show’s official first season with the eventual third season being set as the show’s second. 3 of the short films from the CW Seed version were packaged as one episode for the finale of the second/first season, which can currently be viewed on Netflix.
In 2018, the world saw two creepypastas films get released. The more well-known was Slender Man, produced by Sony Pictures, based on the incredibly popular stories that spawned from the Something Awful forums. The film was poorly received, though it earned back about double its budget. Another film was released that year as well by production company Red Band Films, this time based on the popular Internet creation The Rake. Running at under an hour and a half, the film is titled The Rake and can be found on TubiTV.com and Amazon Prime. The movie was also poorly received, though its release was significantly more limited than Slender Man.
One of the more popular online horror stories was “The Russian Sleep Experiment”. The story purports that, in the 1940s, Russian scientists did an experiment where 5 test subjects were locked in a sealed container and kept awake for 30 days using a special gas, with disturbing results. The story’s origin is the topic of some speculation, though a common attribution that it was posted on the Creepypasta Wiki in 2010 by a user known as OrangeSoda. When reposted somewhere, the story frequently features an image of one of the supposed test subjects, though the image is actually of a Halloween prop that people are able to buy for their own seasonal display. In 2019, two films were in production based on the film. Both are indie productions, but the one is notable for having Chris Kattan (of SNL and Night at the Roxbury fame) in its cast and is the only one that’s actually been released thus far, the other having been in post-production since November 2019.
Bringing obscure Internet fiction to a more mainstream audience is an ongoing experiment. It’d be surprising if major studios decided to abandon the practice, since the source material is right there, ripe for the picking. Perhaps Ben Drowned will finally get its due. There have been questions of the legality of taking these stories for production use, but perhaps there is some leeway since so many of the stories are from anonymous sources. That’s a matter for the studios’ well-paid lawyers to decide, however, but those who contribute their machinations of terror to the web should take heed that their story could be the next source of inspiration.
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