AEON article on Creepypasta

[Gnosticangel]

A rather thoughtful article on some of the contours of online horror:

Creepypasta resembles rumour: generally it is repeated without acknowledgement of the original creator, and is cumulatively modified by many hands, existing in many versions. Even its creators might claim they heard it from someone else or found it on another site, obscuring their authorship to aid the suspension of disbelief. In the internet’s labyrinth of dead links, unattributed reproduction and misattribution lends itself well to horror: creepypasta has an eerie air of having arisen from nowhere.
.... In praising creepypasta, I don’t mean to suggest for a second that it’s all worth your time. A lot, the landslide majority, is simply bad: either unoriginal, inarticulate or lacking the ‘seriousness and portentousness’ that Lovecraft stipulates.
.... This is the only test of weird fiction that matters: can the work excite, at its least mundane point, a particular emotional response, ‘a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers’? Creepypasta represents a kind of industrialised refinement of this art. It is a networked effort to deliver dread in as efficient a way as possible, with the minimum of extraneous matter. Like pornography, it is single-minded in its pursuit of a particular response.

‘Creepypasta’ is how the internet learns our fears | Aeon Essays