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A General Course in Horrorology 2016-05-22 00:49:58 Post No. 17719685
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A General Course in Horrorology 2016-05-22 00:49:58 Post No. 17719685
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I think we can all agree – most of the creepy pastas being posted nowadays are shit. It's the same old stuff, over and over again. “Innawoods”. “Hairy monster”. “Shot it with my gun”. “I'm scared, and I don't know what to do”. Why don't you kill yourself?
But it doesn't have to be this way. There is a core set of concepts at work in every horror story ever written, and once you know them, it's easy to take some novel ideas and make them into a scary story. It's so easy in fact, that after learning them, you might be motivated to write some creepy pasta yourself.
Come on. I know you've thought about it. I know you've got a few killer ideas floating around your head. But how do you execute them? Fear not, as the basics of horror writing have been well-established. In the following essay, available for free on JSTOR but posted here page by page for convenience, the fundamental concepts of horror will be laid out piece by piece. I'll be posting this essay one page at a time, along with my own summary and analysis of the contents. Following that, I'll analyze a few well-known creepy pasta, showing how these principles are well at work, even in the creepy pastas we've all known and have come to love.
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>>17719685
Page 1 doesn't offer much, just the typical academia type stuff you usually see in these types of essays. The author defines what exactly he means by the term "horror", and differentiates what he calls "art horror" from the type of horror one might experience when, say, reading about a terrorist attack. His definition of horror also excludes mundane things like muggers or kidnappers. Those things can be frightening, but they're not “horror” in the sense that this essay will be discussing.
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>>17719690
Page 2. Continues with some of the stuff introduced on page 1, but gets to the first noteworthy insight: horror stories contain some kind of monster/malevolent entity, AND - and this is important - the entity is seen as a violation of the natural order. This natural order need not necessarily be our own, but is defined by the story itself. Fairies, for example, are normal in a fantasy story, but could understandably be met with horror in a story where fairies are not supposed to exist (just picture yourself in bed, trying to sleep, and you look at your window you see a fucking fairy staring at you). This is a major component of all horror stories. The malevolent force/monster is an abnormality – a violation of nature. It's also perceived as a threat. But the essay will get to that.
This page also introduces another fundamental of horror – describing the fear the characters feel, to make readers afraid. Stated another way, when the characters feel afraid, we feel afraid. Authors will spend a lot of time describing the fear their characters feel for precisely this reason. This is one of those things you'll see everywhere when you start to look for it. I'll give examples of this at the end of the essay. So in the fairy example above, one way you would convince people to be afraid of fairies (in addition to conveying that they are violations of nature) is by describing a character shitting their pants at the sight of one.
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>>17719701
Page 3 introduces the idea of disgust or physical revulsion as an essential element of horror. This seems understandable when you think about how a person would respond to something horrifying. If you're scared of it, why would you want to touch it? Horror stories will often feature monsters that have revolting features - a horrible smell is the big thing nowadays. They're also usually portrayed as dirty and “impure”, which is also something this essay expands on later.
Important to note, however, is that this revulsion is beyond the sort you expect when someone is just afraid of something. You might be afraid of Jihadists, but you shouldn't be afraid of touching them. The characters in horror stories, however, feel a deep, visceral disgust towards whatever monster they encounter. This ties in with the idea that the monster, whatever it is, is seen as a violation of the natural order. The fact that it is a violation of nature is what's so repulsive.
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>>17719705
Page 4. The useful thing to note here is that fear is demonstrated to the audience through its physical manifestations. If you're writing a story, and you want to show your character is afraid, describe the shaking hands, the pounding heart, the dropping sensation in the stomach. Also stated is that the physical manifestations of fear are preceded by "cognitive elements", which is just the academic way of saying the character has to perceive something fearful, belief it's harmful, etc.
The author summarizes the fear response as involving three elements: a belief that the monster is real, a belief that is it harmful or threatening, and the belief that the monster is impure. The “impure” part is explained on the next page.
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>>17719711
On page 5, the author says that horror involves monsters that are both threatening AND impure. without the impurity, the primary emotion is fear, not horror. He then proceeds to give a very insightful and interesting definition of the word "impure", as he's been using it. The description is good, and I suggest you read it yourself if you don't plan to already.
Humans understand the world by sorting the objects of it into categories. This schema of categorization varies across different cultures. A few basic examples would include categories like land animals vs. sea animals, flying animals vs. non-flying, living objects vs. dead ones, artificial objects vs. natural ones, sentient things vs. non-sentient things. Etc.
Essentially, an object is impure to a given culture when it violates the schema of categorization they use to understand the world. Leviticus, for example, considers lobsters impure, because lobsters are sea-creatures, but crawled around like land creatures. From the essay:
"a lobster, in other words, is a kind of categorical mistake and, hence, impure."
Similarly, some tribal people of the Congo had an irrational avoidance of flying squirrels, because they could not successfully categorize it as either land creature or flying creature. Everyone has categories like these. Horror is experienced when a person encounters something that's threatening, but also violates their scheme of categorization. This perspective will come in handy later, when I describe a few different creepy pastas and why they work so well. Another good quote:
"the frequent reference to monsters by means of pronouns like "it" and "them" suggests that these creatures are not classifiable according to our standard categories."
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>>17719713
(page 5 cont.)
You can think of these categories as mathematical sets, containing a list of traits, and with objects being placed in a given category if they possess all of the necessary traits. For example, the category of “human” requires the traits of living, sentient, possessing face, behaving in the way we expect people to behave, contains a million different “not” traits like does not possess a tail, does not fly like a bird, and so on.
The author further develops the concept of categorical violations by showing the different shapes that these violations can take. There are "insterstitial" (or in-between) categorical mistakes, where something has elements of two different categories, and therefore cannot be pinned to one or the other. These interstitial objects are deep violations of the categories we use to understand the world. The deep ones from Lovecraft's "Shadow over Innsmouth", along with the lobster and flying squirrel examples above, fit into this category. And yeah, I know lobsters aren't scary. I'm just giving examples. Cars that drive themselves, Plants that attack like animals... all of these are “interstitial” violations.
There are "contradictoral" mistakes, where something possesses both a trait and its negation. Think of the zombie. It looks human, but the category of human requires the trait “living”, while the zombie has the inverse of this, as they are “dead”. And yet “dead” requires a number of traits, like “doesn't move” and “can't do anything except rot”. The zombie violates this also. It's a like the paradox “this sentence is a lie”.
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>>17719720
(page 5 cont.)
There is the "incompleteness" mistake, where something lacks all of the elements necessary for membership in a certain category. As an example, the motif of a faceless person - no eyes, mouth, or nose - tends to pop up fairly often in horror stories, and is indeed frightening. “This a person, but people are supposed to have faces. So where's this guys face? Oh god...”
Last is the "formlessness" violation, which includes things that cannot be categorized at all. This is probably what's at play in horror stories where very little is revealed about the monster or malevolent entity. The reader, and the characters in the story, lack enough information to even attempt to categorize the thing they've encountered. This would probably also include stupid shit like "the blob". Apparently people get real wigged out by things that they cannot categorize. “The Mothman Prophecies” is also a good example of this.
As an aside, if you ever want to make a scary thing less scary, reveal information about it that lets you put it into a mental category. Sloppy creepy pastas often do this by accident. Too much information makes categorization easier. And once you can categorize something, you know how to deal with it. It still might be threatening, but the horror is greatly diminished.
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>>17719725
Page 6 continues with the“formlessness” violation. The author notes that H.P. Lovecraft, who tended to give vague descriptions of the malevolent entities in his story, often invoked this type of violation.
A good quote from this page:
“monsters are not only physically threatening; they are cognitively threatening. They are threats to common knowledge”.
This might explain why things like skin-walkers are no longer scary (at least to me). We've been beaten over the head with stories about these creatures for so long that they have become part of our fictional world order. We know what they do. They got their own category now. This is also probably why things like vampires and zombies are not scary anymore.
The author then goes on a bit about some academic stuff, explaining the reasons why people find horror scary. There's nothing important or actionable here.
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>>17719727
On to page 7. Here the author points out something very interesting about horror: most of the time, the monster in a horror story induces fear far out of proportion to what it genuinely ought to, in terms of it as a physical threat. You wouldn't be afraid of a little kid, so why are the kids in “The Children of the Corn” frightening? Why don't you just kick them? And why does no one try and shoot Slenderman? Isn't he just a guy? This essay claims that humans attribute near supernatural ability to the things that are culturally impure - things that violate categories and defy the natural order.
Consider Slenderman again. He's kind of human-looking, so what are you afraid of? Why don't you just shoot him? Well, Slenderman is a violation of the natural order. He is somewhat human, but does not fit neatly into the category. Slenderman is an “incompleteness” mistake, with a featureless face, long limbs, and various other traits that our understanding of the world demands no human should have. He's impure. It's also important to note that Slendy is relatively undefined, in terms of what he's capable of and what he does. You don't even know if he's sentient. We see him as a violation of the natural world, have no idea what he is capable of, and therefore... assume he's capable of anything. Of course a bullet wouldn't stop him. Run.
From an evolutionary-psychology perspective, this irrational fear makes sense. If ancient man encountered something he could not “categorize”, how should he respond to it? The safest response to something alien would be to run, to be afraid. The thing could be completely docile, or it could be the most dangerous thing in existence. You just don't know, and you have no frame of reference. The safest thing to do is run.
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>>17719733
(page 7 cont.)
Also noteworthy from this page is a brief examination of the two plot structures common to horror. Horror stories are primarily concerned with knowledge, either of a monster/entity, or of some forbidden knowledge that must be pursued and acted upon. These two concepts take the form of discovery plots and over-reacher plots, respectively.
In discovery plots, a bunch of people discover that some monster is responsible for a bunch of unexplained phenomena – usually deaths – and must either prove the monster is real to the authorities, or deal with it themselves. The authorities in this type of story, if they exist and can be contacted, will at first not believe that there is a monster running amuck. This seems to cover a large percentage of creepy pastas, especially the type where the narrator describes something scary that passively happened to them.
In over-reacher plots, a character has “embarked on the pursuit of hidden, unholy, or forbidden knowledge.” Once the character acts on this knowledge, some kind of malevolent force is unleashed, setting the events of the story in motion. Have you ever read the creepy pasta “The Strangers?” That's a over-reacher story. The narrator discovers something hidden and terrifying, but makes the mistake of acting on it. He should have just walked away.
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>>17719737
(page 7 cont.)
Next, more good info. The monsters in horror stories are “native to places outside of and/or unknown to the human world... or the creatures come from marginal, hidden, or abandoned sites... they belong to environs outside of and unknown to ordinary social life.” Take note – the most important piece of this definition is “outside of and unknown to ordinary social life”. This greatly expands the list of possible settings. Woods, abandoned buildings, basements, and caves are all good. But also your neighborhood during severe weather or during a black out; a busy neighborhood in a city that is unfamiliar to you; and pretty much any place during night time. “Unknown to [your] ordinary social life” is the key.
The most common setting, by far, is THE WOODS. Folks need to get more creative about where their monsters come from. I'll show some good examples once I'm done with the essay.
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>>17719748
And now page 8. Nothing really useful here, just included for completeness.
Now that the essays done, I'll post some creepy pastas, explaining how they use the rules of this essay to full effect.
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>>17719751
This ones great. Short and sweet, and drives a bunch of different points home. First, we have our “impure” setting. But rather than being a physical location, like the woods, the setting from which the monster originates is the authors normal neighborhood, which is RENDERED impure by the presence of a strong snow storm, and the fact that it's night. It's quite clever. Take a normal location, and subject it to unsettling but otherwise normal phenomenon. It's fresh, and shows what potential exists for coming up with new “impure” locations.
Next, the author goes to great lengths to describe the fear he's experiencing. It actually takes up a decent chunk of the story. By describing his fear, he completely changes the context of the story. Without the fear descriptions, the sense of paranoia, it's just a quaint story about a guy taking some photos of his neighborhood. Descriptions of his anxiety tell us that something isn't right.
Then there's the monster itself. Precious little is devoted to describing it or what it does. We have the location from which it came – guys own neighborhood, but during a strange snowstorm. For behavior, there's the slamming on door, and the remark that it is possibly stalking him. And we have a description – even a picture – that seems rather boring on paper. A guy with the head of a pig. Or something. Is that actually what it is? Oh man... The lack of full details here means we can't even say for sure what it is. IS that a pigs head? IS that a human body? It's rendered much scarier by the fact that we're observing it through a grainy photo. Can you even trust your own eyes here?
This idea of incomplete information means we cannot easily categorize what we're dealing with. On top of everything else, there's the whole dynamic of “maybe we're just seeing things”. This uncertainty is another variable that prevents categorization, and therefore increases the horror.
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>>17719757
The creature is a violation, since pigs are not supposed to have clothed human bodies. There's also the strange un-categorizable nature of it's behavior. It was just standing there, watching the narrator when he was outside. I'm tempted to put it in the category of “non-threatening”. But then there's the fear the narrator feels, and the slamming on the door. Is it threatening? Non-threatening? The fact that it seems to have characteristics of both is so unsettling. There's nothing decisive here that tells you one way or another which category it belongs to. It's very well balanced. Is the narrator just being paranoid? Or is something very dangerous stalking him? Notice the uncertainty increases the fear by magnitudes.
And is it categorized as sentient, or non-sentient? Who knows? Not enough information. The lack of information means it hovers in between the two categories, with the reader never able to fully resolve which one it belongs to. Even the pig-things behavior is ambiguous. Slamming into a door is something both a man and an animal can do. If it did something like write “I SEE YOU” in the snow, it would instantly become stupider. It makes it easier to categorize the thing (definitely sentient, possibly some idiot in a pig-mask), and therefore lessens the horror.
Did pigman cause the power outage? What does he want? We know so little about him/it, that we cannot characterize it. That makes it much scarier. Great pasta.
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>>17719763
Next, I'm gonna do the mack-daddy itself, the original tale of The Goatman. This is a very influential pasta, so it's worth studying closely to figure out what made it so great.
First, the location. Like all good horror, the story takes place in a marginal or unknown location – in this case, the deep woods of a state the narrator is not familiar with (he's a “city kid from Chicago”). The story is also replete with dark woodland trails, events that happen at night time (which can make almost any location marginal and unknown), and a camper deep in the woods. This is, by all accounts, a location on the boundaries of normal social life.
Then, there's the authors tendency to describe the fear felt or observed by the stories characters. This is done heavily, but again if you're not looking for it, it barely stands out. Pretty much every other sentence is someone freaking out of panicking so I'm not going to take up 2000 words describing everything here. I'll just give a few good examples.
There's the part with Tanner, Rooster, and the girl, who all go sprinting into the trailer near the beginning of the story, with Tanner described as having blood shot eyes from crying, and who proceeds upon reaching the trailer to hysterically tell the narrator that “no, fuck no”, nobodies going outside.
The part with the bratwursts, where the girl starts screaming “oh god get out” after realizing there are 12 people in the trailer instead of 11 – notice how the author describes her shaking and crying, and then proceeds to describe how he feels his “heart fucking sink” as soon as he realizes it too.
The authors constant description of how he is always hit with the sense that “something is off”, a kind of general anxiety that I think speaks deeply to the human tendency to assess situations through intuition, and generally sense when things are off before we rationally know why.
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>>17719769
Read the story over, you'll see it constantly. Actually, there's an interesting part in the story, near the end, where a potentially scary situation falls flat because the author does not describe anyone freaking out. It happens right after the part where the Goatman knocks on the trailer door and starts talking like a cat. Right after that, one of the hillbillies busts out with a gun, looking for whatever was knocking on the door. He shoots into the air, sees and hears something moving and screaming in the bushes, fires at it, and then goes inside. Then the narrator says:
“Reese says something had come out of the bushes, super low to the ground crawling toward the cabin, he had shot at it”.
That's actually pretty freaky if you think about it. But when I read this part of the story, it didn't immediately stand out to me as scary; the reason for this is that there's no description of anyone freaking because of it. Reese at the very least should be shitting his pants. Throughout the story, the narrator had been using descriptions of fear responses as a cue for us to understand how freaked out they were, and therefore how freaked out we should be. The lack of it here messes things up.
Of course for there to be fear, there has to be danger. The danger in this story comes from two things primarily – various “violations of nature”, combined with an impure monster aggressively stalking the characters.
We have the torn up pig at the beginning of the story, with the remark that big cats and coyotes “usually don't fuck with live animals”; the implication is that the pigs death is unusual – the natural order (coyotes and big cats don't attack live animals) has been violated.
There's the constant appearance of terrible smells, amplified by the fact that the smells have unusual properties like appearing and disappearing instantly. This is a violation of the natural order – smells just don't DO that.
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>>17719777
An aside – in addition to spending time describing fear responses, the narrator spends a lot of time describing how unusual certain events are. The strangeness of the smells is the most prominent example. This drives home the point that the thing happening is a violation of the natural order, and is recognized as such by the characters in the story. Doing this emphasizes how weird the event is.
And of course, there's the Goatman himself. He is a violation of nature, an “impure” thing that cannot be categorized properly. We get our first description of him/it when Tanner, Rooster, and the girl were walking through the woods. They hear a noise, shine their flashlight into the dark forest, and see someone standing there, with their back facing them. The person seems to move closer to them without motion on his part being visible. Then, they hear some kind of “gibbering”, and when they shine their light back on the strange person, they see him/it jerking itself towards the path, as the gibbering gets louder and louder.
This first encounter reveals a thing, nominally a person, that is spotted in the woods. As humans, we have certain criteria for how people should behave when we encounter with them, especially when we notice them suddenly near us in the woods. They might put their hands up and apologize for spooking you, expressing their understanding that their behavior is odd. They might also remain still, with their eyes on whoever spotted them, possibly in shock or possibly out of hostility (whuch you doin in mah woods boy?). They could also run off, like a predatory animal who had been spotted. All these are behaviors that at least make sense as being human, even if some are preferable than others.
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>>17719782
If you remember, there are various different categorical violations that are possible, according to the essay. I think, however, a good short-hand rule for understanding categorical violations – the presence of which creates an “impurity” - is the following:
[Things] are not supposed to [do this]
[People] are not supposed to [stand with their back to you when you shine a light on them in the woods]
[Sea-creatures] are not supposed to [crawl like land-creatures]
[Furry mammals] are not supposed to [fly like birds]
And so on. With regards to the Goatman's behavior, humans just aren't supposed to DO things like that. They don't shamble around the forest making gibbering noises. They don't stand there with their back to you, refusing to move even when you call out to them.
There is the very rational explanation that it could just be someone fucking with the characters; this is even suggested by some of the characters in the story. There's nothing that says humans cannot physically behave that way. However, we are not primed to believe this explanation, because we have already been exposed to numerous “violations of nature” that tell us something is adrift. The violations described in the beginning of the story prime us to interpret the story a certain way.
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>>17719788
If the beginning of the Goatman story lacked any kind of violations of nature, and instead opened with a description of how the main character was always being fucked with by his cousins, well then we would 100% believe that the Goatman they encounter was just a someone fucking around. In fact, if the narrator suggested otherwise – that he was encountering something paranormal – we would probably call him a dumbass. But this is rendered a totally different story by a few memetic triggers in the beginning – the shredded pig, the farmers warning about something strange in the woods, the unnatural smells. So when we see a potential human that cannot quite be categorized as human, in the context of all the other strange things going on, we understand it is not just someone fucking with us.
And why didn't Tanner and Rooster stand their ground and fight the guy? There was two of them, and a girl to impress. Why did they run like chickens? Their fear makes no sense, unless you remember what the essay said earlier – that humans are hard-wired to have an irrational fear of impure things that violate their categories of nature. The Goatman did this, so hence the irrational fear.
Later in the story, after everyone runs out of the trailer after realizing the Goatman is among them, the narrator describes how they eventually worked up the courage to fetch some sticks and go back in their trailer. But this is practically a joke. A bunch of sticks? It's understood at this point that the Goatman is a threatening, impure monster – a uncategorizable violation of the natural order. Of course a bunch of sticks wouldn't stop him. Run.
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>>17719794
And so on. The girl that Tanner's cousin encounters in the woods is uncategorizable as human due to her odd behavior; the Goatmans voice is an uncategorizable cross of human speech and animal noise; the Goatman's behavior in the trailer itself, as witnessed by the cousin who was watching it while pretending to be asleep, is uncategorizable as hostile/not hostile – it broke in, and now it's just shuddering and making weird heaving gestures? What the fuck is it. Run.
The weakest part of the story is the end, where the Tanner describes his final spotting of the Goatman. It “looked him dead in the eyes and walked into the woods”. This kind of sucks, because it makes the Goatman seem categorizable as sentient. Eye contact was too much. He was far freakier when he was doing things that make you ask is there even an animal intelligence in him, or is it something completely incomprehensible to us. The eye-contact practically says, “yes, I am the Goatman, and I was fucking with you! Muahhaha!” The Goatman before that was a kind of Lovecraftian horror – it was incomprehensible. Not even animal or man, but something obscene and unknown taking the shape of animal or man. The bit with the eye contact kills this.
Anyway, enough of that.
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>>17719802
Now obviously there is more to good story writing than what's been outlined here. This material refers to some basics of horror writing specifically. But with these basics understood, there should be nothing stopping you from experimenting with your own stories. This needs to be done, because the people most likely to post creepy pasta nowadays are the ones who are writing the same boring shit over and over. These guidelines should also prevent you from accidentally turning your nightmare-made-flesh into something stupid and too well-understood.
Has there even been any new horror creatures that have captured popular attention as well as Slenderman? And that fucking came out seven years ago. It's time for something new, and something more exciting than hairy giant sloths living in the woods. I suck at fiction writing, but I'm sure there are people out there who are good at it but just need a bit of guidance.
END
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A mighty good read OP. I would go as far as saying this needs to be stickied.
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What a fantastic post
Thanks op! I write horror and there is so much to take in. Really fascinating stuff.
Not sure if you've read it but Freud wrote about horror as well, in an essay on the uncanny. He posited it as a representation of all the things we we want to do but don't, so we're left with this uncomfortable sense of familiarity of desire mixed with the terror of the action we don't dare commit.
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>>17719685
Frankly I don't come to /x/ for creepypastas.
I come here for the stuff that inspires them.
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>>17719982
I'm just here for the memes
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>>17720040
/x/ has memes?
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>>17719938
I've been meaning to read Freud for a while. Someone I really respect is very fond of Freud and references him often, so I promised myself I would at least read "Interpretation of Dreams".
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Thanks based OP
sticky this.
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Not even gonna lie, I was just skimming until I came up to the pigman example. I'm glad I started to read after that.
You pointed out some stuff I've never really noticed. That irrational fear comes from not understanding. That fear comes from seeing things doing things they should not. Overall I think it was really enlightening.
Sticky this
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Excellent analysis, OP. Thanks for this! Here's to hoping for some good OC.
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bringin' it to the masses
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Today, OP wasn't a faggot.
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Fantastic analysis OP and really useful for new creepypasta writers.
Mods please sticky
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mods pls sticky
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Holy crap, amazing work OP
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>>17720045
/x/ is a meme
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I will tug on my balls until I'm hospitalized or this is stickied. Whichever comes first.
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I also believe that this is a good example of a well written story. It's concise, but not too descriptive. It leaves a feeling of unease at the reality of the gravity of this situation without making it into a mind-twisting event.
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>>17724262
Damn, that's a good one.
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>>17724262
Wait, so was the guy at the house another guy who wears masks? Or was there an implication that the house guy was in a cult?
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So even though I suck at writing fiction, I decided to try and write a story using these rules, just to put my money where my mouth is. Let me know if this story sucks or is OK.
By the way, this actually happened.
This happened two years ago, when I was still in my small, shit home town in northwestern PA. It's an old coal-mining town, and if you know anything about PA you know that there's no coal mining anymore. The whole place is a dilapidated shithole. Economy was so shitty that even cigarette shops were closing down.
One night in late August, when the weather was starting to get cooler, something real fucking weird happened. Me and one of my buddies were walking to a gas station to get some dip, just as the sun was setting. We get to the store, and end up running into two girls we know. We chat for like 20 minutes before the clerk tells us to buy some shit and get out, which we do.
By this time, the sun had set. But at some point while we were in the store, the densest fucking fog you had ever seen rolled in. Of course we're all surprised by it and saying how cool it looks, and it turns out the girls came here in a car so we get a ride home from them.
This fog was so bad that even with the cars headlights on you could not see ten feet in front of the car. The girl driving literally just put her flashers on and was going like 15 mph, hunching over the wheel and staring at the road like an old lady. We're still laughing and shit, but now I'm worried about crashing or something.
I figured the fog would clear up at some point, but it didn't. It was the same dense fog wherever you drove. But eventually we get back to my house, and the girls don't want to drive to their place in the fog so they decide to crash at my place. And at this point I'm thinking this fog is the best thing ever.
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>>17724433
So we set up and start watching a movie, and like an hour later, I get a phone call on my houses land line. I use a cell for almost everything, so this was totally unexpected. I answer it, and it turns out it's my uncle who lives in the town but who I haven't talked to in like five years. I barely get to say hello before he starts saying my name over and over, asking if I'm OK and saying jesus f-ing christ. This guys a Vietnam vet, I don't think I've ever seen him show any emotion except contempt, so hearing him freak out gets me a bit nervous.
I'm running things through my head trying to figure out what could be going on here, and I assume maybe he's off his meds again or someone got into a crash because of the fog or something. So I ask him to calm down and explain what's up. And he starts going on about the fog, how it rolled in out of nowhere while he was out on his porch, like he literally saw it drop like a blanket from the sky in slow motion and knew that it's fuckin hell on Earth or something.
Whatever, it's just fog, but for some reason he decides to freak over it. And I just want to get off the phone so I tell him not to worry about it and promise to get it touch tomorrow, and then I hang up before he can reply.
I try and settle back on the couch, but I can't really relax. Listening him to go off into the deep end like that got under my skin, and I couldn't keep my attention on the movie. So I get up and start pacing a bit, then say I want to go check up on my uncle who lives on the other side of town.
Of course my buddy starts protesting because we got a nice thing going on here with the girls, and the girls just say there's no way there driving in the fog. I peak out and see the fogs still there, like I can barely see the edge of my porch through the window, the street lights have halos around them that are like three yard wide, but none of the light makes it to the streets. And I say we can just walk, and I say it'll be fun.
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>>17724441
One of the girls starts laughing at me but my buddy just furrows his brow and stares at me. Maybe I felt guilty about dissing family when I hung up on my uncle. I say there shouldn't be any issues with cars running us over since probably everyone else is going to be staying off the road.
My bud asks me to go into the kitchen, and we talk. I say I can't just dis family for some girls, and if he wants to stay that's fine. I could just go by myself, or see if one of the girls wants to go with me. He gets flustered by this and says no way some chicks going to run off on an adventure with me while he sits inside like a little kid. But I think he kind of picked up on how worried I was and maybe lost a bit of his mojo.
We tell the girls we're going to my uncles and eventually they say they'll come along. We all chug some red bull's I had in the fridge and set out walking.
Luckily I know the town well, so even though you can't see more than twenty feet in front of you, I was able to get across town by staying close to the store fronts and using them to navigate. We're all not really saying much, I guess we were all taken in by how intense this fog was. Like I said, the street lights had this intense aura around them and they just lit up the fog without actually revealing anything through it.
My uncle, like I said, is a veteran, and he's one of those people that hates the government, so naturally he lives on a property that's down a 100 ft gravel drive way in the middle of the woods. But at this point in our journey, we're just leaving the center of the town and getting near the edge of it, where it's mostly houses with woods behind them.
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>>17724433
I'm just walking trying not to get lost, when I hear one of the girls gasp and my buddy says OH SHIT. I look, and I see them looking behind us and some – guy, I guess – whose running down the sidewalk opposite us. I could only see his back since he was running away, and he was more of a dark human shape in the fog than anything else. Still as soon as I saw him I just froze and felt my gut start to squeeze. Something about the way this guy was running – his gait – was mechanical, like if you took a looped video of someone jogging and just kind of had that float over the ground.
That guy or whatever runs out of sight into the fog, and we all just book it. I know which way were going so everyone follows me. And eventually we get to my uncles driveway.
We trot down this driveway, and of course it's about a million times darker here because there are no streetlights. But eventually my uncles white-painted house appears in the mist, and I get a bit nervous because all the windows are black, meaning there's no lights on. So now I'm thinking that maybe he moved and never told me, or maybe he was somewhere else when he called.
But then there's a part of me that gets real scared, and I start having all these weird thoughts, like maybe it wasn't my uncle who even called, and now I just got lured to this secluded house, in the woods, at the edge of town, in the middle of the night with this weird-ass fog.
I knock on the door and start calling my uncles name, meanwhile my bud is just standing there panting and the girls are huddling under their hoodies. And I'm thinking he's not going to answer, when suddenly the door busts open. I whip my head and I see my fucking uncle with a 12 gauge pointed at my head.
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>>17724445
One of the girls starts screaming, and I'm just frozen there while my uncle starts yelling at me saying who the fuck am I. I say it's me, that he called me like an hour ago and I walked here to check up on him. He asked why the fuck would I do that, and to “give me proof”. So now I'm thinking oh great, he's lost his mind and he's going to fucking shoot me.
But then he lowers the gun and says get the fuck inside, which we all do. And as soon as we're in he slams the fucking door and starts pacing around and breathing like a wild animal and shaking his head, saying “fuck fuck fuck”. I'm practically at tears because I have literally never seen him like this and have no idea what could be making him act so deranged.
One of the girls is sobbing at this point, and I just directly ask my uncle, what the fuck is wrong with you. And he says there's something in the backyard. I ask what and he says he don't know, it's just been running back and forth across this yard, and isn't running like any normal person is supposed to.
At that point my buddy says, “just like the thing we saw”, and then my uncle goes oh god and starts rubbing his face and then says “fuck you jesus” practically at the top of his lungs.
I tell him he's got a gun, if its still there why doesn't he shoot it. And he said he had no fucking idea what shooting it was gonna do so he wasn't going to risk it. I say it's just got to be some person, but I remember seeing that runner and really don't even believe it myself when I say it.
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>>17724449
But after a few minutes of talking, we all agree to creep up to one of the windows to his back yard and see if its still there. We're all staring out this window, and my buddy says that the thing must be gone, but then like four seconds later we saw it, running from the right side of his back yard to the left, just near the edge of the fog where it becomes impossible to see. Looked just like the thing we saw back on the street, like a runner with ridiculously over-exaggerated arm motions, his movements never changing or adapting to the terrain, just kind of floating across the lawn. And I'm just staring at this thing with my jaw hanging open and my eyes bugging out, and I think my uncles cursing and someones still crying, but I realize it' so fucking weird because it's moving slower across the lawn than it's body motion says it should.
It disappears into the opposite side, and we just go dead quiet. I don't think any of us was even breathing. We're staring for like another minute, and then it comes back, running the other way. Same fucking run, same speed, just opposite direction. We're all pinned there staring at this thing, and I feel like I'm going to puke.
I tell my uncle he has to shoot that thing, and to my surprise he agrees. So he slowly opens the window, when the thing is gone for like the minute where it's off in the woods or who the fuck knows what, just enough to stick his shotgun out the window.
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>>17724455
The thing comes back, and we're all tense as fuck because who knows whats going to happen. As soon as I saw the thing I thought deciding to shoot it was a big mistake, like doing so might make it “notice” us or god knows what. But apparently my uncle didn't have the same thought, or if he did he didn't act on it. He fires at it, and my ears instantly start ringing, and I see he hits the thing on its hip. I know this because you can see a bunch of crap – debris was the first word that popped into my head – explode off of the thing when it hits.
The weirdest part was as soon as the bullets hit it, it stopped moving. Like turned into a fucking statue, it's arms frozen like a jogger mid stride, and just fell to the ground like someone shot a mannequin. And I actually start to cry in horror when I see that, I don't know why but it was the most disturbing thing I had ever seen.
My uncle slams the window shut and practically chases us all upstairs. We end up hiding in a room on the second floor with no windows, just with a small lamp to give us some light.
So anyway, after the shittiest night of “sleep” in my life, the sun finally rises. And we leave the room, and thank god the fucking fog is gone. Naturally the first thing we need to do is go look at the thing my uncle shot last night.
I half expected it to have disappeared, but there it was in his backyard. My first impression of it was it was like a scarecrow, or a person who was wearing pants and a hoodie, with the hood up, and had stuffed their clothes with something for insulation.
So we're all walking towards this thing, with my uncle leading and with his shotgun pointed at it. And he gets to it and kicks it, and it doesn't move, so he starts poking at it with his foot.
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>>17724460
And no shit, it was a bunch of clothes, stuffed with densely packed little twigs and old leaves. My uncle starts saying SHIT over and over, and puts his foot down on it's chest, and it just compresses like a dense bag of sticks or something.
And we literally run from his backyard to his truck without even shutting the doors to his place and just hurl ourselves into his truck and peal out.
So my uncle dropsof the girls, and it's my uncle, me, and my buddy. We call the cops, who eventually meet us at the front of his driveway, because none of us to go back to his house. And they show up like 40 minutes later than normal. They hear the story and one of the cops just raises his eyebrows and goes, oh yeah, ascarecrow, huh? And we just say whatever and tell him to look for himself. So they pull up to the house, walk around the back, and see the thing laying there. And I don't know what they think, but they get real pissed and start yelling at the three of us. They don't even go near it, they just make us all go back to the street and start yelling at us some more.
Long story short, my buddy, who has a history with the cops, gets arrested because they think we're just fucking with them. He gets out later that day, but still. I ask my uncle what he's going to do, and he says he's just getting into his truck and driving to a buddy's place over in Ohio. I ask if he's going to get any of his stuff, and he says fuck no.
And I never heard anything specific, but apparently a bunch of cars went missing during the fog, and the cops just assumed that people had crashed into the woods. But none of these missing cars, or the people driving them, ever showed up. And apparently the cops for the entire town had spent the whole day dealing with weird calls about shit that had happened during the night. Disappearing people, for this town, isn't unusual, because someones always running from bail or child support. So no one ever follows up on the missing people.
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>>17724465
The fog never came back. I left the town like a week later when school started. Got an apartment near my school, never went back to the place. Haven't talked to my uncle for a while.
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>>17724397
The guy at the house was some form of criminal, presumably a serial killer. He assumed that the guy in the middle of the street in a creepy mask was a like-minded individual.
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>>17719982
an anon after my own heart
>>17720040
acceptable as well
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>Posted this on /x/ like 5 or so years ago, curious on OPs opinion
They can't have me.
They call themselves human, but I know better. I've seen the tubes they sleep in. I've seen their hidden cities, fluorescing that sickly poison green under the hidden places where they don't think the survivors dare go. I've seen the holes, just above the napes of their necks, where they insert those... 'feeding tubes' doesn't even begin to describe them, but it's the best I can come up with. But most of all, I've seen their faces. Their real faces. The ones they hide beneath those grotesque masks.
They used to be human, I've gathered that much. Some even still are, to varying degrees. I think that's the most sickening part - seeing one of them that's barely started to turn, and knowing just what they'll eventually become. It's so damned depressing. I don't know if their faces change immediately though - they always give the new ones a mask right away.
And that brings me to another point - the masks. Jesus fuck, it sends shivers down my spine every time I think of them. The long hooked noses, almost like beaks... Those perfectly round bespectacled eyeholes... Mostly, I think, it's the stark whiteness. It contrasts with those damned black cloaks too well - makes them look almost ghostly. They say it's to keep them safe from 'the ills of their charges', but I know better. I don't even think they CAN get sick. They're beyond that...
...I know what it is they hide.
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>>17724809
I know something else, too.
I know that they're after me. I know that they want me. With them. They say they want to cure the world... but of what? I look around, and I see what men have done to this planet... and I begin to wonder.
One of them nicked me with its scalpel the other day, while I was snooping around looking for one of their cities. I got away, but it's been burning like mad ever since. Writing this is the only thing keeping me from going mad from the pain, quite honestly. My leg has never burned so bad.
The flesh is starting to scar up - not just along the cut, but along my whole leg. I look like a badly treated burn victim. I had to wrap a thick black shirt around it to cover up the sight. Black seems to be the only thing the scars aren't visible through.
While I wait for my leg to mend up (but is this shit spreading?) I'll tell you why I know they want me. It was a mask, you know? I sat up this morning, and one of their fucking masks was sitting right at the end of the bed, on top of one of their fucking cloaks. Scared the shit out of me, I thought one had gotten in.
...Come to think of it though, if one hadn't gotten in, how'd the mask get there? Ah fuck. I'm gonna have to reinforce the barricades tonight with my bum fucking leg.
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>>17724811
And hip, apparently. I was right, whatever this is, it's spreading. An infection, maybe? Just like those assholes, to infect their scalpels with some kind of plague. Honestly, I hope it kills me quickly. I don't know if I can stand much more of this. It's already spread across my dick, though it's not like I had much use for it anyway. Not a female survivor within a dozen miles. I know. I checked. Everything is just wasteland, bodies, a few of my scattered brothers... and Them.
This is unbearable. It's already across my thighs and halfway down the other leg. My stomach looks like it went through a thresher. It sucks, but I had no choice - I took off the shirt and tied their damned fucking cloak around my waist. My mind keeps slipping back to that realization earlier, though... what if man really is a disease? After looking at what they've done... what WE'VE done...
...no. I can't start thinking like that. Not now.
...but maybe. Maybe we are. Maybe humanity really is an infection. A blight. A plague upon the earth. What then? What doctor would cater to the world itself? The scarring is up to my neck now, but it's okay. This is penance. I can see. This is penance for what we have done to this poor world and its inhabitants. It must also be the reason why I can no longer eat. My throat has closed up as penance. I'm wearing the cloak now. It hides my ugliness, not of the body, but of the soul. My ugly pillaging soul.
The mask too. Now that the mark of the Doctors has spread all over me, I don the mask to hide my shame at what I once did, and once was. I am that no longer. I'm a doctor now, and the world is pleased. Perhaps that is why I can eat again. The hole on the back of my neck pulses with hunger. I'm a doctor now.
I'm a doctor now, and I will cure the plague of Man.
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This seems like as good a place as any to file a complaint, so for your consideration:
>Nope.avi.wav.smokesignal.420
^ This needs to stop. It was funny the first time, that's it. You need to let it go. You have to let this joke go. If you're writing a greentext story and every other line is memetext file extensions, do everyone a favor and kill yourself instead.
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Great thread OP. I skipped around but read the majority of the stuff that interested me. One thing I feel like every great horror story should do is make you wanna get comfy. Idk if you mentioned it, but reading horror/watching a horror movie is probably one of the comfiest things to do. Writers and directors should focus on making their film one that makes you want to curl up with a blanket while you're on the edge of your seat.
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>>17719701
>This page also introduces another fundamental of horror – describing the fear the characters feel, to make readers afraid. Stated another way, when the characters feel afraid, we feel afraid. Authors will spend a lot of time describing the fear their characters feel for precisely this reason. This is one of those things you'll see everywhere when you start to look for it.
I already see it everywhere and desu I find it tiresome. Having characters go on and on about "OMG it was so fucking scary, 2spooky4me" is unnecessary, just describe scary things happening and it'll be scary. You can even feel scared for a character who doesn't even know they're in danger.
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>>17724433
nice dubs and nice thread OP, ill write a few critiques here
>you use shit way too much in the first paragraph
>actually you swear too much altogether
>>17724441
>why are you censoring swearwords now
>odd that your character went from "lol its just fog" to feeling uneasy in such a short time
>>17724444
nice quads
>and he's one of those people that hates the government
maybe because im from /pol/ and have a hard time taking things as not political, but that kind of broke immersion of the story for me. maybe it would be better if you said he lived far away bc was antisocial, distrusting of locals or paranoid about burglars/people trying to get into his house? also 100ft isnt far at all, say 100 yards at least
>>17724445
>more of a dark human shape in the fog than anything else.
>Something about the way this guy was running – his gait – was mechanical
wew lad, dont fall for the "oh shit its just a human but something is off maybe its not human" meme imagery
>>17724449
>I'm practically at tears
you just convinced everybody to walk an hour through some crazy ass fog, this dude should not be in tears yet, if he though is give it more context
>>17724468
is that it? if youre going to leave a cliff hanger ending like that, gotta make it spoopier. all in all not a bad read, maybe work on some imagery and more detail but pretty good OP, although i must say i did not like the abrupt ending
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>>17724262
I dunno, by the time I got to the end I still wasn't done being amused at the initial premise, so that kind of dampened the horror for me.
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>>17724591
Or the thing at the house saw that one of his kin wasn't wearing a human mask and invited him inside to lend him a spare
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>>17724809
I like the imagery and the ideas behind it - the secret cities, the fact that the protagonist is looking for the cities (what for?), but I got this pet peeve against stuff that's written too "writerly", which this is. If you expend the story (is it the future? Alt-reality?) and tone down the style a bit, I think you could make something of it.
For what it's worth, the hostile forces seem a bit too human - their intentions and motivations are too comprehensible. If you make those things be not apparent through their actions, I think you could make them more frightening.
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Sticky dis shit!
I used this essay in my thesis! And an apt analysis!
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>>17725004
Thanks for pointers. I did curse too much didn't I.
I browse pol too (RIP Austria), but I meant that as if it was from the perspective of someone not from that culture. Good points though.
You know, writing that was actually kind of fun. I might keep at it.
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OP is cool guy
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>>17724809
I now have objective proof that I've spent too much time of my life on 4chan. I read the "Jesus fuck, it sends shivers down my spine every time I think of them. The long hooked noses, almost like beaks" bit, and the first thing that came to mind was "This is some joke pasta by a /pol/ack about Jews".
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>>17726929
...I laughed too much at that. But no, it was a creepypasta OC roll. The post I made rolled the digits for "Plague Doctors" and "Transformation", and this is what I plopped out 20 mins later
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>>17726538
>I used this essay in my thesis
Who would have guessed there were horror Ph.D.'s on this board
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>>17719685
OP what were your thoughts on Penpal?
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>>17728190
I haven't read ii, had never heard of it until I saw it mentioned in the thread >>17670692. You think it's worth analyzing? Some people say it was crappy, some say it "ticks all the "disturbing" boxes"...
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>>17728257
I thought it was pretty good. Some of the installments were kinda boring, but overall I was sincerely spooked. Had a nice ending.
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>>17719685
>Clips.
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>>17719685
Thanks anon!
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>>17719685
>>17719690
>>17719701
>>17719705
>>17719711
>>17719713
>>17719720
>>17719725
>>17719727
>>17719733
>>17719737
>>17719748
>>17719751
>>17719757
>>17719763
>>17719769
>>17719777
>>17719782
>>17719788
>>17719794
>>17719802
>>17719813
>>17724433
>>17724441
>>17724444
>>17724445
>>17724449
>>17724455
>>17724460
>>17724465
>>17724468
>>17724809
>>17724811
>>17724813
>>17724825
>>17724874
>>17724892
>>17725004
>>17726470
>>17726580
>>17726929
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>>17728375
I know this is b8, but anyone who thinks this should get back to plebbit. This fucking mindset is cancer.
Global warming is fucking horrible but undeniable. Eternal summer is coming.
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Overnight bump. I've been lurking and enjoy the thread.
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>>17726580
Little bit, sorry if that was a lot of criticism but I'm just trying to help. It's a good premise, with a little work it could become grade A pasta
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>>17719685
mfw every op isn't as god-tier as this.
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>>17728159
Theatre, actually. Which is even fucking worse.
I'm more autistic than a flat earther.
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>>17719713
>Leviticus, for example, considers lobsters impure, because lobsters are sea-creatures, but crawled around like land creatures. From the essay:
>"a lobster, in other words, is a kind of categorical mistake and, hence, impure."
this is really good stuff, thank you OP
horror as derived from the liminal spaces which demarcate (and define) species or taxa
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OP: Overall good analysis of formal narrative technique. Further study would look at the achievement of "voice" and consider the optic experiential quality of the reading. Creepypasta do not survive on strength alone. Man of the most popular got that way because of an infectious visual quality. Some screencaps certainly look nicer or are easier to read. A creepypasta with relevant pictures also changes the reading.
Also all good horror is founded on a coherent ideology, one which is not driven towards modern values, comforts etc. and instead registers as antithetical to morality anti-sociality anti-reality. ALL of these categories overlap. They are segregated and limited to three here, in order to demonstrate my point and to encourage this kind of thought in writers.
The most obvious anti-morality kick are in the torture porn genre. In creepypasta the 'living furniture' story and the 'boy called dog' story. In good examples disfigurement of the body is replaced with subtle mental violence (Both on characters and readers) - as in Shirley Jacksons crueler and more elusive stories like "The Witch" and "The Daemon Lover."
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>>17729660
Most stories which are antithetical to sociality usually involve weird behaviours which the protag engages in that is at odds with the expectations of society. In creepypasta a good example is the story about the mask wearing man.
An example of another kind is 'the ice diaries' which involves a nightmare social structure.
Anti-reality engages with or touches on a logic which is disagreeable with the material reality we take for granted. The possibility of this logic, or the capacity to imagine its existence, seems to have the potential to negate this world. In creepypasta 'Dogscape' is one of the best. The most basic example is the "wake up" copypasta. This effect is often better achieved in films, which seem most fixed to our sense of the everyday world, maybe because, as Dundes has suggested, we trust and utilise sight more than any other sense.
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>>17726929
Me too.
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>>17729211
No sweat, you made good points.
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>>17731069
yes, 'cause the fucking divination threads and endless discussions about tumblr and reddit were much more important contributions to this board, right?
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>>17729660
nice
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>>17731069
DONT WORRY PEOPLE WILL STILL READ YOUR CREEPYPASTAS STARRING URGOT THE 10FT TALL LEMUR
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>>17724465
Strange ending. I was expecting one of those "it was a trap and someone was trying to lure me out of my house" twists. Like the scarecrow was on wires or something
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>>17731096
People here, no i wont.
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Is OP still here?
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