Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

  This same phenomenon is addressed in “found-footage” horror movies, such as Cloverfield (2008), in which horror is viewed through the firsthand lens of a personal video camera. The exploding popularity of found footage horror seems to reflect the fact that amateur recordings are now the standard way of encountering real-world horror. Cinema broke ground first in this regard, but horror fiction has begun to explore the same concerns. Novels such as those by Danielewski and Grant drive this home, as does the more recent A Head Full of Ghosts (2015). This Bram Stoker Award–winning novel by Paul Tremblay has been compared to House of Leaves and features a self-conscious commentary on the negative impact of mass media, particularly that driven by the Internet and reality television. It follows the trials of an American family whose daughter, Merry, is the purported victim of demonic possession. Merry becomes the subject of an exploitative TV show, which only worsens the supernatural episodes. Added to this mix of competing realities is a series of online blog posts that further critique and complicate any sense of objective experience. Tremblay’s novel may not be as elaborate or as profound as Danielewski’s, but it has the benefit of hindsight where the Internet is concerned. As such it is perhaps the most focused treatment of new media in horror fiction so far.

  A Timeline of Horror in the Internet Age

  1972

  Ray Tomlinson, a computer scientist in Cambridge, Massachusetts, sends the first email.

  1974

  Computer scientist Larry Tesler first programs the copy and paste function into computer text-editing software.

  1989

  Tim Berners-Lee, a scientist at CERN, develops the World Wide Web as a new way of sharing information across computer networks.

  1997

  Mark Danielewski uploads a fifty-page excerpt of House of Leaves to his own website for friends to read. This is copied and reappears across the Web, garnering interest.

  1999

  The Blair Witch Project is released in cinemas. It is one of the first films to use online “viral” marketing. This includes a website that presents the cast members as authentically missing, complicating the audience’s understanding of whether the film is real or fictional.

  2000

  House of Leaves is published in book form.

  2004

  The emergence of “Web 2.0” (the transformation of the World Wide Web into a user-generated online community of social networking, blogs, wikis, and so on) is widely hailed in the mass media.

  2005

  YouTube is founded. This later proves essential to the development of Web-based multimedia fiction.

  2006

  The term “copypasta” is used for the first time on the online forum 4chan.

  2008

  Creepypasta.com is launched.

  2009

  Victor Surge uploads two doctored photos to the somethingawful.com competition. This marks the first mention of the online figure known as Slender Man.

  2010

  Creepypasta experiences peak popularity when it is the focus of an editorial piece in the New York Times.

  2014

  Creepypasta achieves notoriety following the attempted murder of a twelve-year-old Wisconsin girl by two twelve-year-old school friends who allegedly committed the attack as a sacrifice to Slender Man.

  2015

  A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay wins the Bram Stoker Award for best novel.

  This is only one half of the Internet’s impact on horror fiction, however. Perhaps more important still is the way that the Internet has provided the space for a new (or at least resurgent) form of horror writing, one that relies on the Internet’s tendency toward ambiguity and elusive origins. These online horror stories are known collectively as “creepypasta.”

  The term is a horror-inflected variation on “copypasta,” which originally referred to any material that was copied and shared around the Web. One of the earliest examples is smiledog, which consisted only of an image of a husky dog and the accompanying warning of a curse that threatened anyone who saw the photograph with madness and/or imminent death. This type of “cursed artifact” is a common trope in early creepypastas and constitutes little more than a macabre version of chain emails and spam that infested communication channels in the early years of the Web. Soon, however, creepypastas became more substantial and sophisticated. They are now a recognized online phenomenon, and entire websites and online forums are devoted to creating and analyzing the stories. Major websites include creepypasta.com and the No Sleep section of Reddit.com. Some breakout stories have since been published in traditional book form. One notable example is Penpal by Dathan Auerbach, which originated on the No Sleep forum but was subsequently self-published by the author to acclaim within the horror community.

  The stories themselves tend to cluster around themes, with nostalgia for 1980s and 1990s media being a major trend. Many creepypastas center on video footage, usually a television program or old video game that they present as having either sinister content or dangerous consequences. Two famous examples are “Ben Drowned” and “Candle Cove.” The former tells of a teenager who buys a secondhand copy of a video game at a yard sale. The game turns out to be haunted by the spirit of a drowned boy, whose presence manifests in technical glitches in the game. Some recent versions of the story include video footage of the supposed glitches. “Candle Cove” is written in the form of an online forum thread, in which numerous parties discuss episodes of a fictional children’s television show from the 1970s. The “conversation” turns increasingly to disturbing aspects of the show, involving a monster known as the Skin Taker. At the close of the thread a final contributor reveals that once he asked his mother about the show, only to be told that no such show ever existed and that he merely used to sit in front of the television and watch static for thirty minutes.

  Both stories are representative of creepypasta’s interest in the uncanny or spectral nature of digital content. They exploit ignorance about how such content is actually created and stored, as well as gesturing to the issues of nostalgia and faulty memory. At the heart of creepypasta’s effectiveness is the inability of readers to verify the extent of truth involved. Was Candle Cove a real TV program? The writer describes it as “half-remembered,” and it is reminiscent enough of actual children’s shows of the time that it could well be conflated in readers’ memory with another “real” show. Similarly, “Ben Drowned” features an existing Zelda game. Creepypastas blur the lines between reality and fiction, and their folklorish proliferation, copied and told across online communities, further complicates their dismissal as fiction.

  One creepypasta stands above all others in its reach and impact, however. This is the modern phenomenon known as Slender Man: a figure who has been termed “the first great myth of the Web,” and who has, in disturbing fashion, effectively breached the Web’s fourth wall to influence acts of real-world violence: in 2014 two twelve-year-old girls in Wisconsin lured a classmate into the woods and stabbed her multiple times, later explaining their actions by saying they had been trying to become Slender Man’s “proxies” or followers, and that in order to do this, they had to murder someone. Ironically, unlike most creepypastas, the origins of the Slender Man myth are known and documented. In 2009 Victor Surge, a forum user on somethingawful.com, entered a competition to make a Photoshop monster. Surge (real name: Eric Knudson) doctored a pair of photographs of children to include an elongated, tentacular figure. Both photographs were accompanied by fragmented prose suggesting that something evil befell the children. From this obscure beginning the Slender Man has grown in stature to become a recognizable cultural icon, the subject of fiction, movies, video games, and merchandise. His story is now told across multiple platforms, including an interlocking network of digital narratives that use both video and text to build the mythology. The main narratives are Marble Hornets, EverymanHybrid, and Tribe Twelve, each of which uses a mixture of text websites and YouTube videos in the construction of narrative.


  Slender Man is the strongest example of the Internet’s impact on horror fiction. Freed from the constraints of traditional storytelling, creepypastas are able to expand beyond the confines of a single authorial vision. As such, creepypastas, and Slender Man in particular, are representative of a newly democratic, collaborative form of storytelling that evolves over time and across cultures. Thomas Pettitt suggests that creepypasta signals the closing of the “Gutenberg Parenthesis.” By this he means that it ends the period of literary history in which conventional printing (beginning with the Gutenberg printing press) cemented stories in specific forms. The Internet, in contrast, has created the opportunity to return to the campfire tale in a globalized oral tradition. Horror stories have always flourished in the oral tradition, and they have been given a major boost by the technology of the Internet age.

  Neil McRobert

  See also: Horror Literature as Social Criticism and Commentary; Horror Video Games; Page to Screen: The Influence of Literary Horror on Film and Television; Small Press, Specialty, and Online Horror; Part One, Horror through History: Horror in the Twenty-First Century; Part Three, Reference Entries: Bram Stoker Award; House of Leaves; New Weird; Unreliable Narrator.

  Further Reading

  Auerbach, Dathan. 2012. Penpal. N.p: 1000Vultures Press.

  Blake, Linnie, and Xavier Aldana Reyes, eds. 2015. Digital Horror: Haunted Technologies, Network Panic and the Found Footage Phenomenon. New York and London: I. B. Tauris.

  Blank, Trevor, ed. 2009. Folklore and the Internet: Vernacular Expression in a Digital World. Logan: Utah State University Press.

  Boyer, Tina Marie. 2013. “Anatomy of a Monster: The Case of Slender Man.” Preternature: Critical and Historical Studies on the Preternatural 2/2: 240–261.

  Chess, Shira, and Eric Newsome. 2015. Folklore, Horror Stories, and the Slender Man: The Development of an Internet Mythology. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

  Edwards, Justin D., ed. 2015. Technologies of the Gothic in Literature and Culture: Technogothics. New York: Routledge.

  “The Gutenberg Parenthesis: Oral Tradition and Digital Technologies.” 2010. MIT Communications Forum. http://cmsw.mit.edu/thomas-pettitt-gutenberg-parenthesis.

  Jones, Abigail. 2014. “The Girls Who Tried to Kill for Slender Man.” Newsweek, August 13. http://www.newsweek.com/2014/08/22/girls-who-tried-kill-slender-man-264218.html.

  Krotoski, Alex. 2012. “Tales.” Digital Human, Series 2, Episode 5, October 29. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01nl671.

  Pettitt, Thomas. 2013. “Bracketing the Gutenberg Parenthesis.” Explorations in Media Ecology 11: 95–114.

  Wiles, Will. 2013. “Creepypasta.” Aeon, December 20. https://aeon.co/essays/creepypasta-is-how-the-internet-learns-our-fears/.

  HORROR PUBLISHING, 1975–1995:

  THE BOOM YEARS

  The great “Horror Boom” of the late twentieth century began slowly. Before it, there was no such thing as a “horror category” in publishing. Publishers had no “horror editor” the way they might have a science fiction editor or a mystery editor. There was no horror section in a bookstore.

  Change began in the early 1960s. While there had always been ghost story anthologies and books now recognized as classics of horror published in the mainstream, such as Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959), there was a significant difference in Donald A. Wollheim’s paperback The Macabre Reader (Ace, 1959) and More Macabre (1961). These began to define what a horror paperback looked like. Soon Ballantine Books followed with the first discernable line of horror paperbacks, all of them with Richard Powers covers of semi-abstract, swirling menace. Some books in this line included a paperback of H. R. Wakefield’s Arkham House collection, The Clock Strikes Twelve (1961), Fritz Leiber’s Shadows with Eyes (1962), and some others. Such packaging is very important in commercial publishing. Books aimed at a specific readership must be made to resemble other books aimed at that readership. What these were doing, cautiously, was determining that a horror audience actually existed, and that books made to look like “horror books” could be pitched to it. Meanwhile, during this period, the only press specializing in horror or weird fiction continued to be Arkham House, which issued the occasional new volume and began repackaging all of the works of H. P. Lovecraft in hardcover, opening up a new readership through library sales.

  Things remained in this state for about a decade. Meanwhile, as horror scholar S. T. Joshi has suggested, the public’s taste for and familiarity with supernatural or horror motifs was being built up through the films of Alfred Hitchcock and such TV shows as Thriller, Way Out, and especially Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone.

  The horror explosion was the result of three blockbuster novels and their associated film adaptations: Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin (1967), The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty (1971), and The Other by Thomas Tryon (1971). These, followed by the enormous success of Stephen King’s Carrie (1974) and ’Salem’s Lot (1975), changed the publishing scene completely. With King the publishing industry had a writer who could produce not just one fluke bestseller, but a whole series of bestsellers in a repeatable fashion, often more than one a year. The industry, as it inevitably does in such instances, suddenly began looking for more books of the same type, or more books to be pitched to the same audience. Suddenly lucrative careers could be made by writing only horror, and writers as varied in temperament and ambition as Ramsey Campbell, Peter Straub, Robert R. McCammon, F. Paul Wilson, Charles L. Grant, John Farris, J. N. Williamson, Rick Hautala, Bentley Little, Richard Laymon, and John Saul were cranking out enormous quantities of material. (McCammon is a rare example of a writer who began as an obvious King imitator, but broke free and discovered a significant and powerful voice of his own.) Dean Koontz, formerly a midlist science fiction writer, reinvented himself as a horror/suspense writer, and his best-seller status continues to this day.

  Packaging had changed with the times. Now a horror paperback was thick. It usually featured a dark or black cover, often see-through, with something brighter (a drop of blood or the grinning face of a demonic child) on the inner cover. There was a growing section of such volumes in the bookstore, as distinct as the sections for other genres. While there were some who predicted a flood of formulaic drivel followed by a bust, for a time such voices were not heard, and horror seemed to have conquered the commercial marketplace.

  This caused expansions in other areas beyond mass-market paperbacks. While there had been some attempts at horror magazines in the past, the most significant since the demise of Weird Tales in 1954 had been Robert A. W. Lowndes’s low-paying and mostly reprint The Magazine of Horror (1963–1971) and its companion, Startling Mystery Stories (1966–1971), which published Stephen King’s first fiction. But by 1981 there was a high-budget, and initially high-circulation, publication, Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone Magazine, edited by T. E. D. Klein, Michael Blaine, and Tappan King, which lasted until 1989. It had a digest-sized companion, Night Cry, edited by the writer Alan Rodgers, which was even more explicitly a horror magazine. Most of the leading writers of the period appeared in these magazines, and Twilight Zone also featured many interviews and a great deal of media coverage.

  There were also many small-press horror magazines, ranging from the Lovecraft-oriented fanzines edited by Robert M. Price, Crypt of Cthulhu and its companions, to Stuart Schiff’s elegant Whispers and W. Paul Ganley’s less flamboyant but excellent Weirdbook, and many others, such as Cemetery Dance (still being published), Grue, Eldritch Tales, The Horror Show, Fantasy Tales, and more, all of which encouraged a new generation of writers, including such eccentrics as Thomas Ligotti and W. M. Pugmire, whose work did not fit easily into commercial molds. On a somewhat larger scale, Weird Tales was revived on a solid basis by George Scithers, John Betancourt, and Darrell Schweitzer. This was the most sustained of all revivals of Weird Tales, which only began to become seriously erratic in its schedule in 2014.

  Anthologies proliferated. Two of the most import
ant were edited by the anthologist/agent Kirby McCauley, Frights (1976) and Dark Forces (1980). This last was something of a Dangerous Visions of horror (Dangerous Visions having been a groundbreaking and genre-defining science fiction anthology edited by Harlan Ellison in 1967), showcasing the finest talents, new and old, and containing everything from one of the last stories of Theodore Sturgeon to an original short novel (“The Mist”) by Stephen King. Poppy Z. Brite (now known as Billy Martin) was inspired by this book to become a horror writer, because it showed so many possibilities of the form. Charles L. Grant’s eleven-volume Shadows series was a showcase for “quiet” as opposed to loud and splashy horror, and published numerous excellent stories by a wide variety of writers.

  In contrast to Grant’s “quiet horror,” the “splatterpunk” movement arose about 1989–1990. It was very short-lived, and some of the writers associated with its hype notably distanced themselves from it (particularly David J. Schow), but for a time there was a distinct school of self-proclaimed rude, crude, gross-out horror fiction that might be described as the horror fiction equivalent of death metal rock music. There were two anthologies edited by Paul Sammon, Splatterpunks: Extreme Horror (1990) and Splatterpunks II (1995). The leading novelists of the splatterpunk movement were undoubtedly John Skipp and Craig Spector, whose vampire novel The Light at the End (1984) was the first of several such books. Skipp and Spector (and later Skipp by himself) also edited the 1989 anthology Book of the Dead and sequels, which mark the beginnings of modern zombie fiction, itself almost a subfield of its own. Such stories and novels featured zombies of the apocalyptic, brain-eating variety, as popularized by George Romero’s The Night of the Living Dead and similar films, not the shuffling, undead slaves of Haitian folklore.