Creepypasta

The word creepypasta first appeared on 4chan, an online imageboard, around 2007. It is a variant of copypasta (from "copy and paste"), another 4chan term which refers to blocks of text which become viral by being copied widely around the internet.^[8][9] Unlike copypastas, creepypastas are all horror fiction and also encompass multimedia stories, with creators using videos, images, hyperlinks and GIFs alongside text.^[9]

According to Sara Bimo, "there is debate over what exactly counts as the 'first' creepypasta".^[9] Scholars and writers such as Time's Jessica Roy have seen similarities in the chain emails of the 1990s, which disseminated hoaxes and urban legends, for example, by promising a terrible fate for users who did not pass them along.^[1][9] Horror stories such as the Rake, a fictional monster created by 4chan users in 2005, have been retroactively considered creepypastas.^[10] Some consider the 2001 story "Ted the Caver" the first.^[4][11]

The earliest creepypastas originate from 4chan, and the website's culture was influential in shaping the characteristics of the genre.^[9] Major dedicated creepypasta websites started to appear from the late 2000s: Creepypasta.com was created in 2008, while the Creepypasta Wiki and Reddit's r/nosleep were both created in 2010.^[12][13] According to Time magazine, the genre had its peak audience in 2010 when it was covered by The New York Times.^[1]

The definition of creepypasta has expanded over time to include most short horror fiction whose first publication is online.^[14] Over time, authorship has become increasingly important: many creepypastas are written by named authors rather than by anonymous individuals.^[14]

 

Numerous short films, games, feature-length films and merchandise have been produced based on creepypastas, such as Always Watching: A Marble Hornets Story, Slender Man and Beware the Slenderman. In addition to merchandise and film adaptations, numerous amounts of fan content and independent settings/mythos have been established from creepypastas, such as with the SCP Foundation, the Backrooms and The Mandela Catalogue, with the prior serving as an example of the creepypasta descendant subgenre, analog horror.

Due to its online prevalence, a portion of creepypastas has been archived by American Folklife Center and added to their digital culture web archive under their initiative to document the development of web culture.^[15][16] Some folklorist view creepypastas as the digital age manifestation of legend,^[16][17] while others view the majority of creepypastas as anti-legends.^[18] Anti-legends are similar to legends except that they seek to purposely subvert the legends of the era by challenging the audience's expectations of what constitutes a contemporary legend.^[19][20]

In May 2015, Machinima, Inc. announced plans for a live-action web series curated by Clive Barker, titled Clive Barker's Creepy Pasta, focusing on Slender Man and Ben Drowned;^[21] although following the shutdown of Machinima, the series was never produced. Each season of the American television series Channel Zero is based on a different creepypasta. Filmmaker John Farrelly was set to release a film titled The Sleep Experiment, based on the Russian Sleep Experiment, in 2020,^[22] but the project never materialized.

Some creepypastas exploit childhood nostalgia and distort it into something more horrific, unfamiliar. Creepypasta.com describes purported lost episodes of television shows as one of the most popular tropes.^[23][24] These episodes often focus on suicide or imply the viewer will suffer great harm. Some lost episode creepypastas focus on local public access shows rather than nationally syndicated shows. Notable examples of these include Squidward's Suicide, Suicidemouse.avi, and Dead Bart.^[25] A SpongeBob SquarePants episode, titled "SpongeBob in RandomLand", had to re-edit a scene that referred to the Squidward's Suicide creepypasta.^[17][26][27]

Video game creepypasta focuses on video games containing grotesque or violent content; this content may spill over into the real world and cause the player to harm themselves or others. Many video game creepypastas reveal the conflict to be caused by malevolent entities such as ghosts or artificial intelligence.^[28] Notable examples of these include Sonic.exe, Ben Drowned, Herobrine, and the Lavender Town Syndrome.

• r/nosleep
• List of creepypastas

• Balanzategui, Jessica (2019). "Creepypasta, 'Candle Cove', and the digital gothic". Journal of Visual Culture. 18 (2): 187–208. doi:10.1177/1470412919841018. ISSN 1470-4129.
• Bimo, Sara (2023). "The Horror of Networked Existence: Affect, Connection and Anxiety in Classic Creepypasta Narratives". In Ghosal, Torsa (ed.). Global Perspectives on Digital Literature: A Critical Introduction for the Twenty-First Century. Taylor & Francis. p. 1902. ISBN 9781000875270.
• Blank, Trevor J.; McNeill, Lynne S. (2018). "Introduction: Fear Has No Face: Creepypasta as Digital Legendry". Slender Man Is Coming: Creepypasta and Contemporary Legends on the Internet. Utah State University Press. pp. 3–23. ISBN 9781607327806.
• Grippo, Marisa C. (26 September 2016). "Internet Ghosts". In Pulliam, June; et al. (eds.). Ghosts in Popular Culture and Legend. ABC-CLIO, LLC. pp. 174–176. ISBN 9781440834905.
• Taylor, Tosha R. (2020). "Horror Memes and Digital Culture". In Bloom, Clive (ed.). The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic. Springer. pp. 985–1003. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-33136-8_58. ISBN 978-3-030-33135-1. S2CID 226618766.