The Problem with Creepypastas

I used to love Creepypastas as a teenager; it was before I discovered Gothic and Lovecraftian horror. I thought that Suicide Mouse was scary or Slenderman was persistently terrifying.

However, as I got older, I got exposed to The Tell-Tale Heart, The Colour out of Space, and The Turn of the Screw (among many others). I have found that many of the Creepypastas that I used to like were, in fact, always bad.

Some of them still hold up in one fashion or another. Smile Dog’s iconic image is unsettling in the manner all good demonic citizens should aspire for. The Russian Sleep Experiment was disturbing in how it reflected the horrors of Soviet state crimes onto the perpetrators. NES Godzilla Creepypasta is scary until the ending, and Ben Drowned still unsettles me with its significant build-up of tension.

https://villains.fandom.com/wiki/Smile_Dog

However, those are not the norm, at least until recently when the site got its act together and cleaned the site of a ton of rubbish. It was why I was uneasy about producing content for Creepypasta because I was/am afraid of submitting anything there. That it is just going to get lost in a rubbish pile

The rubbish is what I want to talk about today; I want to talk about what I believe to be the main problem with most Creepypastas.

No tension:

Any thriller, especially horror, lives or dies on the suspense and tension building. A big problem with amateur writers is that they don’t know how to set and build the tension. Creepypastas are often terrible at this, with things going from zero to eleven within paragraphs, or they are persistently at eleven, leaving the reader numb or unengaged. An example of this would Squidward’s Suicide; barring the apparent unreality of the story, it just explodes way too quickly for there to be any impact. The now often memed Hyperrealistic blood/eyes were not scary then, and it's not scary now. This problem of characters getting into messed up situations or being too quickly is a persistent problem with many creepypastas due to the apparent amateur nature of many writers.

Needless cruelty:

There was a particular lost episode Creepypasta that involved a child's tv show (cause, of course, they do) where a child is traumatized after seeing said episode, which involved lots of gruesome details. The child is never mentioned again, nor is the story about trauma or loss of innocence. A child is traumatized because that is scary. Characters often suffer for no real rhyme or reason, for a cheap scare or emotional reaction. Horror is not about needless suffering or darkness but a means of exploring the darkness. If you have kids getting hurt or suffering, have it be thematically appropriate such as in Skinamarink. Otherwise, it feels cheap, worthless, and mean-spirited.

Thematically empty:

Sometimes you might get Candle Cove, which explores the dark inversion of childhood nostalgia and imagination. But most of the time, you will get something like Suicide Mouse, which simply shows something fucked up happened but for no real reason. I love the fan-made videos of Suicide Mouse, but I will not kid myself by saying the story has any merit or staying power like great horror tends to have. The imagery without the theme to back it up results in the literary equivalent of popcorn, enjoyable but doesn’t stick with you.

Repetitive:

How many creepypastas have you read based on a video game or children’s tv show where some fucked up shit happens where the narrator is a passive observer in the nightmare with little to no threat to them? Chances are (until the purge) you would have to shift through dozens of stories that revolve around this concept. There is so little creativity on the Creepypasta site to the point it is somewhat off-putting. I think this is due to the until recently weak rules that didn’t prevent the sheer amount of unoriginal swill that drowned the site. How am I, or any good writers who want to work on a site oversaturated with derivative crap?

Those are my problems with Creepypastas, which are also the problems of platforms that don’t effectively moderate their content submissions. I hope amateur writers can also spot these problems in their work and take steps to improve them.

Thank you for your time!

Acknowledgments

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Photo credit goes to Klarqa.