Kane Parson’s Backrooms film has been a massive success, beating out The Mandalorian and Grogu. Everyone is trying to draw conclusions from this, not least of all Hollywood, who has now encountered a potential gold mine. 

The subject of the film, a place where the world gets thinner called The Backrooms, sprung out of the broader memetics of “liminal spaces”: spaces haunted by an absence of commercial activity while retaining the features that would have made it possible. Abandoned rows of registers, McDonald’s playground structures covered in kudzu, office halls with bare fluorescent lights the same color as the walls. The original photo was posted on /x/, 4chan’s paranormal board (my board of choice, thank you), with the following caption:

If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms, where it’s nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in. God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you. 

From there, other people have made additions to the story of The Backrooms: different levels, etc. I’m giving you the broad view of all this because I’ll admit: I had my time with scary internet stories beforehand, and it was much before The Backrooms. I am explaining my sister’s internet horror stories. In the eyes of IP strip miners, there is no difference, though, just a rich vein. 

As someone who was there, though, everything that’s going to come  after Backrooms’ success seems very Toy Story: take what you used to play with and elevate it into middlebrow pathos. The garage band I played one show with in high school was not good, just very loud. Now imagine if Jimmy Iovine asked us to get back together.

Horror having these options has a lot to do with it having a more robust “indie” scene than a lot of other genre fiction. There might be a r/NoSleep for science fiction, but it definitely doesn’t have the eyes on it like r/NoSleep did. This runs parallel to Hollywood itself: horror births screen talent, on or behind the screen. Backrooms had a budget of 10 million, something it’s made about 20 times over at this point, and with no pesky rights holders to argue with about it other than the director expanding his Youtube series. 

 In this way, creepypasta is something of a dream for the producer. Nobody’s relatives have to be strong-armed or paid royalties (something you don’t have to do but it leaking out that you didn’t can create backlash). These stories may exist on Reddit or on random wikis, but the question of “ownership” becomes tricky. Do you own the comments you make? Does the website? It’s likely one reason Kerry Hammond wasn’t able to recoup what was hers when the “Search and Rescue” story’s single most defining image was plucked wholesale for Chuck Wendig’s The Staircase in the Woods, something I’ve been dutifully informed by the late trigintanarians of Bluesky is “not legally plagiarism”, which is fine by me because I could also just call him a hack much like the Reddit scouring producers who will, inevitably, attempt to create a Slendermansion Cinematic Universe, where Jeff the Killer and Jane the Killer can link up their Wondertwin rings together and do their fatalities to teenagers. 

But the point of defending creator’s rights doesn’t have to do with Creepypasta being, on the whole, good. I liked being in a shitty garage band. Our one show doesn’t deserve defending, but on the whole, innocent amateurishness will always have a place in making art. There’s a deep innocence to creepypasta between the video game cutscene serial killings and the hyperrealistic bloodshot eyes of Sonic.exe. The best parallel is to probably many of our initial encounters with horror These posters are a forums kid version of Are You Afraid of the Dark’s Midnight Society. Every creepy story on the internet was designed to scare some kids on some forum somewhere. With that initial innocence comes two things, however, once a critical point is reached. One, people made a career of creepypasta because there exists no free expression without someone seeing another commons of the imagination to put up fences around. When you strike oil, you get oil men. And two: scary stories on a forum are often written in the cant of forums. What books that exist that use forums, they are not completely replicating forums, but rather using forums as another way to array text to create literary meaning. That’s because forums English is not high prose. 

The inability to use prose as anything other than a fact delivery device, what Gordon Lish would call “the news” hobbles a lot of these stories. If you take the idea prose is only supposed to deliver plot details as quickly as possible, this won’t bother you, but horror is a genre that has always taken well to prose innovation. Even Stephen King has used stream of consciousness in some of the most popular horror fiction on the planet. The end effect of the originally quoted post is basically the same as flavor text on a Magic the Gathering card, down the faux-proper “God save you” probably because it sounds more “horrory”. But “God help you” would have kept you from sounding like you walked around with a briefcase in high school. Today, the pressure is greater than ever to make sure you can produce an RPG module along with a story that makes people laugh and cry, and where I depart with a lot of these projects is that overarching sense of needing to explain, of making sure somebody doesn’t poke holes in your paper boat. In that sense, it is a perfect launching point for franchises because many creepypastas already operate on the logic of story bibles. In some instances, like the constant references to characters looking like film stars in “The man in my basement takes one step closer every week” already come equipped with Hollywood casting calls, giving an impression of an errant episode of Animaniacs where Dot disembowels somebody and then intones “But I am a GOD” like Dagoth Ur.  A man has “Clint Eastwood vibes”, a mysterious interlocutor (related to our Creepypasta Clint Eastwood) has“Young Marlon Brando vibes”. The genre’s strict attachment to “This really happened to me” creates the impression of a horror Penthouse letters, something the appearance of celebrity faces definitely doesn’t help. What creepypasta’s best utility might be is what pulp novels used to produce for directors: something you could take the elements from and “adapt” to your own ends; after all, Dr. Strangelove was a novel first. In many cases, these stories sprout from one indelible horror image: an impossibly tall and slender man who chases children, a dog with a toothy grin, or endless yellow rooms, all of whom can create easy work for Hollywood. (It may seem like I’m ignoring the existence of SyFy’s Channel Zero willingly, but I thought the first season’s adaptation of “Candle Cove” invoked many of the same issues I’ve brought up here. I hear good things about other seasons, though, and the expansion of those stories makes them feel more transformative than what I expect to come). 

It’s probably not an accident many of best creepypasta stories exist in cyberspace. “Candle Cove”, one of the mythical 3-10 creepypastas I think holds up on reflection, uses a message board about nostalgia, the glue of the internet, to discuss a tv show only a miniscule number of people have seen with otherworldly origins (possibly). “My dead girlfriend keeps messaging me on Facebook” utilizes Facebook messenger screenshots (crucially, it’s revealed, the new messages are composed of old messages from the chat history) to tell an effective and sad story long before the way to authenticate horror is by making it about either grief or trauma. Of all these, my personal favorite is the SEO unfriendly “Normal Porn for Normal People”, which uses the forum tone alongside the implication that he is not unlike you because you are both staring at a screen looking for something disturbing or odd (I’d argue it’s a pretty good companion piece to Red Rooms and Demonlover). In this story, it’s the titular website, which posits itself both as a pornography company and an “institute for the Eradication of Abnormal Sexuality”. While the climax of the story tips into the ultraviolence of Creepypasta stories (though I’d argue it’s the most effective use I’ve seen of it), perhaps the most unnerving entry is about a video called jessica.avi:

Another four-minute cameraman video. This time he’s outside a house, talking to another young woman. They talk about canoe rides. The camera zooms out to reveal the city streets behind them occasionally.

The strange thing is that no one so far has been able to identify where this street is. Guesses have ranged everywhere from Europe to Australia to the Philippines, but there’s yet to be a match for the street shown in the video.

For a story that could be accused of nu-metal style edgelordism, this is an unquieting detail, never fully explicated. Like all horror, Creepypasta is most effective when the unsettling detail removes all semblance of logic, leaving the reader without a net. This is what literature does so well: literature is a specific illusion, entirely conjured by words, already signifiers for an abstract reality. You can click on a video that might not even be from our world or from places you would never consider. It’s a slip into the genuine weird and the biggest issue with most Creepypastas is they become staid, falling into their own genre signifiers, delivering comfort instead of unsettlement. You can imagine what stories Hollywood prefers. 

 

I don’t do this often. I like to maintain a degree of kayfabe in these columns, because they’re my place to do cultural criticism.

That being said: I’ll get into some personal stuff. The last year has been pretty rough on me. I’ve been mostly underemployed. I have hopes for jobs and I have hustled together enough money to cover rent. 

You probably don’t know this, but I do actually make some money writing, including for all Kittysneezes projects. But: you can imagine, it’s not enough. 

Ways to support:

1. Subscribe to Kittysneezes! You’ll be supporting not only me but the Remarkable Media Cafe Show, Infinite Danger, and server costs. 
2. I’ve had a GoFundMe going for a couple of months. 

We’ll talk again next month.