Nostalgia is a hell of a drug. With the remake of "Ghostbusters" releasing this week, I think now is a good time to discuss another phenomena dealing with nostalgia and horror: creepy-pastas. Creepy-pasta is the catch all term given to horror stories created and circulated on the internet. Spoiler alert: I don’t like them. “Oh, but Christian,” you interject ”you just don’t like scary stories.” That’s true. I don’t. I’m a scared little baby. However, I dislike creepy-pastas for a different reason.
Horror as a genre tends to riff on actual society wide fears, turning abstract, often subconscious concerns into immediate, personal, threats. For example, zombie movies are based on the fear that something (racism, consumerism, or a national disaster) is all it takes to reduce humanity to a primitive, shambling horde that recognizes no morality higher than instinct and base survival.
Slasher movies play on both fears of the mentally ill, our feelings of vulnerably, despite the numerous innovations of modern security systems, and our fears that breaking social taboos have somehow have almost cosmic consequences. Even other popular internet horror media does this.
The web series Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared uses elements of puppet horror (think a scary version of Sesame Street) to dramatize the faulty messages we give to children when we clumsily, or narrowly, teach children abstract concepts like love, thinking creatively, time, and mortality. For example, the clock teacher in the time episode brushes off the idea of the passage of time causing an old man to die by distracting the puppet children with new technology the passage of time has allowed us to create. He adopts a similar nonchalant attitude when the children themselves die of rapid aging. Good horror is both frighting and meaningful.
Creepy-pastas are neither, because they lean too hard on the familiar made uncanny trope and do nothing with it. You boot up your old copy of Sonic the Hedgehog, only to find Sonic is actually an ancient Japanese demon who feeds off of despair and drags children’s souls to hell. What. Or you ride Splash Mountain after midnight only to find that its somehow transformed into into a macabre spectacle of anamatronics acting out murder that leads to a possible secret graveyard of dead children behind the famous drop. What.
Or your watching a development episode of Spongebob, only for it to contain photos of child murder secretly spliced into the film reel that no one can or really seems to bother to investigate how they got there. What!? The main conceit of these type of creepy-pastas seems to be "Hey the things you thought were scary as a kid? They’re actually waaaaay more scary now. They’ll literally kill you!” So to bring this full circle, all these stories are variations on the threat of the Stay-Puff Marshmallow Man, a figure of your childhood suddenly turned demonic.
