The History of Creepypasta
How the subgenre of internet horror became mainstream media.
With a forever expanding history and fandom, you’ve undoubtedly heard the phrase “creepypasta” thrown around. With it’s beginnings spanning to the very beginning of the internet, rumored to have begun in the 1990’s by chain emails, it’s no wonder that creepypastas are so well known today as they have had 30 years to creep from the darkest depths of the web. But how did it all start, and why? Well, you’ve come to the right place. Allow me to educate you on the dark history of this subgenre of horror…
The Beginning
It all started with the invention of the internet. Seen as a luxury, before expanding into a common household service, and with little to no moderation… something was bound to happen at some point.
The rumored beginning of the creepypasta were spam emails, although I cannot find what they contained.
The first true beginning that we are aware of is a story named Ted the Caver.
It follows Ted, as he and a small group of friends traverse a local cave which continuously gets more and more horrifying. The story was uploaded online in 2001, and is considered the first ever creepypasta. It tells the extensive (and I mean extensive) tale of Ted and his friend, as they both explore the cave and stranger things keeps happening. It ends on a cliffhanger, where we are left to presume Ted has died.
While we now know about the beginning of creepypasta culture, there is still more to discuss. Particularly one subject that originated from this subgenre into mainstream media and entertainment — Slender Man.
Slender Man
Slender Man is a long, lanky humanoid with tentacles coming out of his back. With no face, and a black suit, it is said that he targets young children. He was first created (Or was believed to be first created) in 2009, in a Photoshop contest. A man going by the online name of Victor Surge had submitted two black and white photos with children playing joyously. However, behind them stood the creature of creepypasta legend that we all know today.
The images went viral, to the point where fanart and cosplay were abundant. Which eventually led to the creation of multiple creepypastas from multiple creators. The success of Slender Man was purely accidental, and it didn’t take too long for the increasingly popular character to leak into mainstream media in the form of video games, YouTube series and even movies.
Slender Man is a controversial topic, especially for younger children. This is due to a horrific incident that occurred in 2014 which is known as the Slender Man Stabbing.
The Slender Man stabbing was a tragedy, where two 12 year old girls in Waukesha, Wisconsin lured their best friend into the woods and stabbed her 19 times in an attempt to please the fictional character.
The girl luckily survived, and the two 12 year old girls were sentenced 20 and 40 years in a psychiatry ward.
After the incident, a panic had spread among parents and the creepypasta community alike. More incidents of young pre-teens attacking family and friends had begun to spread, and most of them had been in the creepypasta fandom. The creepypasta mythos Slender Man had been put to blame for the incidents, but it truly goes to show how parents should be monitoring their children’s internet use and making sure they don’t interact with content that they will perceive as reality rather than fiction.
However, Slender Man was not the only creepypasta character that was popular with young children scouring the internet.
Jeff the Killer
Jeff the Killer is among one of the most well known characters from the creepypasta fandom, while Slender Man is more so recognized as a horror character. Jeff the Killer was supposedly published in 2011, and tells the story of Jeffrey Woods.
Jeff moved to a new town with his family and brother at the age of 13, and on his first day going to school was approached by a gang of bullies with knives. Jeff had badly injured them, and his brother took the blame and was arrested which sent Jeff into a deep depression.
Not too long after the encounter, Jeff was again confronted by the bullies. He killed one of them, however the bullies had poured either bleach or gasoline onto him and lit him on fire. He was taken to the emergency room, and upon seeing his scarred and charred face he went insane.
After his discharge, he slices a large smile onto his face and cuts off his eyelids so he may never sleep again, and kills his family.
While the most popular creepypasta, Jeff the Killer is regarded as a fairly awful creepypasta in terms of literature. The story is not realistic enough to be frightening, there is little to no suspense to the story, and most of the characters’ objectives aren’t very clear.
It was not Jeff the Killers literary prowess that got him to the level of fame that he is at now, but rather young teen girls’ attraction to the fictional character.
You heard me correctly, although it may not be too surprising to you. Jeff the Killer has an insurmountable amount of fangirls, who wish to go out with the character and even be like the character.
The reason why I believe this is, is that the characters’ sad and dark past makes him attractive. They see the character as a sad and broken teen who they could fix, a bad boy if you will.
Now, I mean absolutely no harm to those who simply like the character romantically. As he is a fictional character, you can make him into anything you want him to be. However, there are always a slight few who take it too far.
Subgenre’s
If you have been on the internet and have an interest in gaming, you have undoubtedly heard of Sonic.exe and Ben Drowned. These are the most well known video game creepypastas there are, but don’t be fooled into thinking they are the only ones. There are plenty of subgenres of creepypasta, including lost episodes, where someone somehow comes across a lost episode of a show that is deeply disturbing or gruesome (a very hard genre to tell convincingly), haunted video games, most commonly bought at a garage or yard sale (occasionally for free because the owner is so desperate to get rid of the game), and plenty of others.
While you could place every creepypasta into a genre, that would take far too long to do and thusly most have no specific genre. While I would absolutely love to tell you the first story ever posted for every genre, that is the issue with the internet. It’s not very well documented, and for that I have no clues on where to look for this information.
However, I would like to mention creepypasta’s special relationship with video games in particular. As the collaborative nature of creepypastas has led to the creation of many fan games for many of the horror works.
Creepypasta Fangames
With the very unofficial nature of the works in question, plenty of fans have created games with the original stories in mind. These are playable games, open to the public that are based off of the original stories. Some include Sonic.exe, Slender: The Eight Pages, Polybius, Lavender Town, and more.
It was these games that helped creepypasta’s rise in popularity at the rate that they did in the early 2010’s, as then (and even now) famous YouTubers played the games per viewer request which exposed the original stories to a broader audience. The same can be said vice versa, with popular creepypasta game adaptations helping to bring certain YouTubers into the limelight of the fandom.
The Decline
The early 2010’s were prime time for creepypastas, but the popularity didn’t last long. Google Trends shows us that the term “creepypasta” hit it’s peak in terms of searches in June of 2014, and ever since then has hit a steep decline. (However, it does appear that in July of 2020, it hit another peak in terms of YouTube searches.) So what happened? While there is no concrete answer, I have a few theories.
I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that the same year that the Slender Man stabbing occurred, the search term hit its peak. However, I believe that may have implemented a negative idea of the community in peoples minds, which may have caused the growth of the community to stagnate. Not only that, but while originally intended for a mature audience, I believe that a good portion of the creepypasta community’s fanbase was children, and it could be that after the incident, parents began to pay more attention to what their children were doing online.
However, the exact opposite may be true. Over the past decade, children have become increasingly prominent on the internet, and thusly upon seeing creepypastas decided to try and make their own. This resulted in a plethora of ill written stories, with little to no literary understanding. The older members of the community noticed this, and content creators began to make videos highlighting their best of the worst creepypastas for laughs. It was because of this lack of quality control that caused the general perception of creepypastas to be seen as generally childish, and silly.
And of course, my final theory being that just like many things, creepypastas were merely a fad. While there are still many enthusiasts out there, it’s widely agreed upon that creepypastas are no longer what they once were in terms of popularity. With a history of tragedy that proceeded the growth of a child audience, I think that the history of creepypasta is much like the internet’s.
The internet used to be for a predominantly mature audience, but due to parent’s negligence of their children, many problems have occured, ones that the parents blame on the internet. This is also similar to parents’ relationships with video games. With all of these connections in mind, it’s no wonder the three are so tightly knit.
The Legacy
Despite creepypastas decline in relevancy in the mid 2010s, its legacy lives on in many places. Regardless of the opinion one holds, creepypasta profoundly shaped how horror would be experienced in the internet age and has birthed numerous pieces of derivative media that can be found anywhere you look. Its popularity was even enough to garner mainstream attention, with movie studios adapting the popular Slender Man creepypasta for a wider audience. On the internet, one can see how tropes created by creepypasta have been readapted and improved, such as the “haunted game” cliché that evolved from subpar short stories to creepy and complex video series like Petscop.
The greatest example of the evolution of creepypasta’s legacy is its sister project: SCP. The SCP project is an online collaborative writing project centered around the clandestine SCP Foundation (SCP standing for “Secure. Contain. Protect” and “Special Containment Procedures”), an international shadow-governmental group that maintains normalcy by keeping anomalous entities and phenomenon secret from the general population. The writing project found its humble beginnings in the primordial soup of the 4chan /x/ board, alongside other horror posts. What set the original SCP post apart, however, was its style: written like internal documentation with cold scientific descriptions and procedures, the piece named “SCP-173” soon gained a cult following, spawning numerous other articles that followed the format and added to the story of this mysterious organization. Ultimately, the SCP project was born.
SCP spawned out of the world of creepypasta and demonstrates the evolution of creepypasta’s evolution. Perhaps the most clear of these evolutions is the concept of community and creativity. Much like how creepypasta left horror open to anyone with access to the internet, and thus opened up doors for aspiring writers to get their work out easily to a community of like-minded fans, the SCP project retains its community element, allowing all entries on the site to be made by anyone. The evolution, however, becomes evident in how the SCP project made greater use of this, as they introduced quality control and community voting to ensure a certain amount of quality is maintained, unlike creepypasta who partially fell victim to the oversaturation of mediocre or outright poor quality works produced by its community.
The longevity of the SCP project and its continuous growth and success (from numerous game adaptations to short films) stands testament to how it took the pieces of its creepypasta roots and evolved them to thrive. While SCP may be the best example, one can see scattered examples in practically all horror media on the internet. It’s for this reason that anyone that enjoys online horror should know about the history of creepypasta and its profound influence, for despite all its shortcomings, it paved the way for online horror as we know it.
So perhaps this Halloween, if you choose to huddle up by the screen and read some vintage internet horror to set your hairs on end (or maybe, just to share time with your friends), you can learn to better appreciate the rich history behind those words of ghoulish delight.
