![]() ![]() In this case though, with only a few exceptions (maybe The Girl With The Green Ribbon is a good illustrative example) do illustrations or photos emerge as emblematic of the story. Ghost stories and urban legends were primarily transmitted orally for most of their history, though they’d occasionally be collected into books. Maybe it was a kind of absurd 1:30 AM kind of conclusion, but it also provokes questions about what makes a creepypasta a distinct form of writing, their influence, and what they represent.Ĭreepypasta are essentially the evolution of the ghost story and urban legend in online space. The set up, the banal subject matter, the twist, the entire tone and structure… this was a creepypasta about mattresses, essentially. But the way it was so compelling, such a weirdly compulsive read (I had just decided to go to bed in five minutes when I saw the link and ended up staying up for another hour to read the whole thing and post about my disbelief), reminded me of something else. It’s really good journalism, because I can’t imagine most of us would have read much about online mattress review related litigation if it was written any other way. Sensible everyman who can’t say no to a convenient, free, brand-new mattress is sucked into a mysterious network of mattress sellers and reviewers and gradually a sinister air begins to seep in, leading up to a climactic reveal that totally changes the tone of the initial encounter. The way this familiar story, of pressure from companies impinging on the independence of reviewers in both carrot and stick ways becomes ridiculously compelling in how it is written, though. What’s weird about it is not really the content or the events it describes rumors or even evidence of review video YouTubers being bribed and/or bullied by their commercial affiliates are something I’ve also seen in the Makeup Artist sections of YouTube, and even the emergent area of slime videos. This weird article about online mattress sales was making the rounds the day I started working on this piece. Something that also spreads through similar channels and I think, takes advantage of this existing horror aesthetic, are various video game themed “creepypastas.” These games mostly spread through fan communities and message boards, as a part of other forms of production in response to games, theorycrafting, fanart, building walkthroughs and wikis, and so on. I mostly credit games made in RPGMaker, like Yume Nikki and Ao Oni as the main influences in pixel horror becoming a defined and viable genre, and as further evidence the number of spinoffs and fangames they’ve produced that have often become significant projects on their own. There’s recently been a lot of buzz around Faith, a pixel horror title styled around the even more limited pallette and capabilities of early home computers like the ZX Spectrum, and games referencing or in tribute to Yume Nikki’s minimal gameplay and visual style still come out regularly through its 10-year anniversary. In the time since I’ve written that essay, pixel horror has become a bit of a phenomenon. For the most part you were limited to a specific range of visual effects, actions, and user interface options, none of which looked like the survival horror tropes of the day, and to make things even more challenging you had to condense the ability to create atmosphere and disturbing imagery into fairly basic sprite-based imagery. ![]() ![]() What interested me about them was their built-in limitations from the RPGMaker platform that didn’t really make much sense on a basic level as something to try and make a horror game with. Reed - Writing Home > Writing Portfolio > Halloween Special: Close-Reading the Godzilla NES CreepypastaĪ few years ago I wrote about RPGMaker horror Games for The Arcade Review.
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