Let's get spooky! A general thread on internet horror

Pop Culture & Media
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[CW Warning! This thread will be filled with horror. Which means it could get gory, disturbing, unsettling, anxiety inducing, etc. Let’s try to warn people with what we post just in case.]

Halloween is next month! So I figured it’d be a cool time to look at some creepy internet stuff.

I’m a pretty big fan of online spooky stuff. Creepypasta, videos, twitter accounts… There’s a LOT of great horror out there that is specific to the medium of the internet. To me, this stuff is the new Begotten’s of our generation. This is the best in experimental horror. I remember one of my first forays into online horror was Nine Inch Nail’s ARG for their album Year Zero:

The above videos are a really good example of the tone of the project. Just creepy imagery involved. But be careful looking for stuff relating to the project. A lot of the media releases deals with terrorism, fascism, body horror, and other harsh stuff.

Year Zero had a huge number of websites, audio files, numbers you could call, and video media connected to this story that a resistance group was sending fragments back in time to our current day to warn people about endless war and global warming, along with a number of creepy sci-fi elements as well which included body horror.

There’s a bunch of neat recordings you can find on youtube. I’m not sure if the sites are still up, but I’m sure someone has collected them in image format somewhere.

I honestly think you don’t get stuff like SCP without projects like Year Zero:

http://www.scp-wiki.net/

Speaking of, there are a bunch of neat projects that have come out of inspiration of SCP. A lot of people connect the game Control to the website. And we’re getting great internet projects trying for the same tone.

One of my favorites is the Local 58 series:

(CW for references to suicide on this one. Sorry, forgot about it until I saw it on a recent viewing.)

Local 58 is a series of small vignettes angled like breaks in broadcast television. They include contingency programs for the fall of the U.S. to some unknown force, a weather report that gets REAL moon specific, and some animation that is down right unsettling.

Next is Petscop. Petscop is basically based around the ‘haunted video game’ idea. A kid starts a let’s play of a game that he found in an attic, and the game starts to get more and more creepy and weird. Note, I’ve only seen a few episodes of this, and I hear it doesn’t get jump scary, but there are a number of connections to disturbing real world stuff.

And finally, a Twitter account that I’ve been enjoying:

A really great little project based on the idea that the sun randomly vanishes one day, and weird paranormal stuff starts occurring in the sky. Great production for what looks like only a few kids making a project.

What horror is getting you all goosebumpy lately? Link some stuff!

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That’s debatable. I’ve been watching Petscop and it seems to be going in a much, much weirder direction, especially since it’s being hinted that the main character seems to be involved with the incidents related to the game.

The major running theory right not is less haunted game and more other reality mirror.

As for my contribution, I have this old massive blog collecting stories and videos.

http://inuscreepystuff.blogspot.com/

Lots of stinkers, but some surprisingly good stories too. The archive is huge so good luck going through it. I will say that I remember Normal Porn for Normal People being especially memorable.

I also recommend the channel blameitonjorge. He does a lot, mainly lost media these days, but he also has some good videos on odd internet happenings, real crime stories, and a whole lot of other bizarre stuff.

I’ll throw out some of my favorite videos that fit the theme.

MAJOR WARNING: The first three videos discuss a few very sensitive topics, including murder, and the last video has some audio mixing issues. Some VERY loud audio is not edited down when shared, so you may want to keep your cursor on the volume slider.

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Ooo, ok.

That’s how Petscop was pitched to me, but yeah, I have heard that there’s a catch to it. One of the bigger twists I have heard is that the let’s play isn’t for us, the audience, but Kyle is actually playing the game for one specific person.

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Yup! As of the most recent episodes, you can hear him making a call to someone about the events in the game, but he doesn’t seem aware he’s being recorded right now.

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I always like to share Ted’s Caving page as a great example of this type of stuff.

Let’s not forget drr drr drr

edit: updated link

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I just read comic that fully for the first time recently. I never realized they came out the other side. I just though a monster inside had consumed the people who went in.

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It’s not especially scary, but I love The Cat With Hands.

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The end result is so much worse and I think about it all the time.

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I’m really surprised at how much the SCP fanbase has expanded on the lore with shorts, cartoons, and live action works…

Some of the notable ones are here:

Containment is a short form comedy animation based around SCP. Nothing ACTUALLY scary here, except for exaggerated horror gore. Some damn good animation behind it though.

Short film based around a paranormal house. Good spooky stuff here. Acting is a bit stuff, but the production quality is top notch. Nothing too violent in this short. Some disturbing imagery, but nothing really worth a CW. Maybe some cussing?

This guy does a bunch of machinima shorts as well in the SCP universe, usually using GTA V assets.

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omg - Petscop is amazing. had no idea it existed until last night.

thanks for the new addiction!

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Worth mentioning fans are trying to re-create the game, though it looks like the main recreation project on itchio isn’t there anymore. Other projects are around but it seems some sort of fandom drama got the most promising project canned (Nitro Rad even plugged it and now it’s gone :().

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These days I mainly just listen to Pseudopod and the Magnus Archives, but I used to be a creepypasta junkie. I can probably pick out some classics to add to this thread given the time (and maybe an indication on what others here are into), but for now there’s only one I have to plug, it needs to come with a lot of content warnings though…

The Interface Series is a body horror/cosmic horror collection posted piecemeal across the entirety of reddit. Apart from heavy uses of body horror and flesh imagery, it deals heavily with themes of drug use and addiction (which the author claims to have experienced themselves), and violence against children. Some scenes feature sexualised violence, some abstract, some explicit (the pre-history subplot is particularly bad here, and I’d recommend skipping those posts).

Additionally, one of the pov characters is a concentration camp guard, while another is an anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist. At some point, the author did make it clear that the intent was to disturb readers by positioning them in the pov of intensely racist characters, and had failed to consider that some would consider this an endorsement. On one hand, you could argue that being unaware of racism when you’re posting across reddit in 2016 borders on willful ignorance, but at least they acknowledged their mistake.

All that said, if the content warnings haven’t put you off, I highly recommend this series. It covers a lot of ground, and has some truly excellent sections, and some truly disturbing imagery.

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Is anyone else here obsessed with Petscop? I’m 15 videos deep and I can’t stop watching analysis videos. The Nightmare Masterclass stuff seems particularly good (spoilers obviously; each of his videos cover roughly three Petscop episodes). I haven’t spent much time with the forums yet, but he hits on a lot of stuff that would have flown right by me otherwise (mainly because I don’t have a ton of time to research connections). Any other good analyses out there? Particularly interested in stuff that connects references to real world events (not necessarily to perceived ARGs, most of which seem to have been debunked by this point).

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Nitro Rad had a pretty good episode on the series going over what it is and does a solid theory on what’s occurring. It’s a bit outdated now with some new info, but a lot of ideas he raised still seem to be on point for me.

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Q for this thread: What is Petscop and where should I start?

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Unfortunately all the ones that are fresh in my mind are kind of disappointing because they were terrific creepypasta stories up until the point a movie studio stepped in.

Like the saga of “Dear David.” That was a Buzzfeed writer claiming to be haunted by the spirit of a (potentially violent) child.

It started out very subtly and creepy, slowly building to him describing dreams, taking photos of things that only showed up on film, all of it in this kind of found-footage “it’s really happening to me” way. And it was great!

Then he announced he’d been contacted by the director of the IT remake to turn “Dear David” in to a movie and suddenly progress on the story froze up. No conclusion, no resolution, nothing. Hot and heavy “Yes, I am really haunted!” turning on a dime to “I guess the ghost randomly decided to leave me alone” for the last year and a half.

To talk about something a little more positively, following Trevor Henderson on Twitter was a very good idea. He does lots of photo manipulation where he essentially creates ghosts and monsters to insert in to real photographs, and usually writes one sentence stories to go with the images. Some of them get really popular, like “Siren Head,” which is gaining a considerable fanart following.

Another great creation of his is “Long Horse,” which is a decayed horse head on an eternally long neck. Here’s a (very short!) fan made video showing their interpretation of the creature:

Definitely recommend giving the guy’s account a look.

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I posted a quick summary at the top of the thread. I’d just start with Petscop 1. It sounds like all the background stuff is elaborated on by theory videos.

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I NEED his Cryptids shirt.

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I think ya’ll might appreciate Alan Resnick - he’s part of the Wham City collective that has made some of the weirder Adult Swim 3am infomercials, including This House Has People In it, which gets under my skin for days every time I see it.

There are some additional This House Has People In It videos on his personal channel here, along with some other weird stuff.

There’s also some bizarre ARG nonsense related to that series centering around the website for the fictional AB Surveillance Solutions website.

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Nightmare Masterclass Night Mind has a fantastic video summarizing all the additional This House Has People In It content. Definitely watch the Sculptor’s Playground video playing on their TV if you haven’t already. I don’t agree with many of the conclusions Nightmare Masterlclass comes to about the video, but his summaries of the content are great.

I also second following Trevor Henderson. He’s turned me on to a few spooky things over the last year, including The Sun Vanished.

EDIT: Gave credit to the wrong channel.

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