Hidden menu operations suggested they were designed in. At night, anonymous officials collected data from the machines. Polybius the game never existed. Polybius the urban legend is, however, as real as these things get. As a subcultural phenomenon, Polybius is significant enough to have produced at least one eddy in the mainstream: the game can be glimpsed in the background of a episode of The Simpsons. As with most urban legends, the origins of the story are obscure and tediously contested.
But hunting around for more information, I found that Polybius was simply the most prominent among scores of similar accounts of haunted or malign video games. Subliminal high-frequency sound in the LavenderTown level of Pokemon was linked to the suicides of more than children. A bootleg copy of Spyro 2 turns out to be menacing and vengeful.
Initially, the episode is scratchy and glitchy, then it becomes photorealistic. Long unbroken scenes of mourning end in an apocalyptic prophecy. Again, none of these games or shows is real, but stories about them exist in truly bewildering numbers.
The uncanny has been crowdsourced. In its sinister variant, it flourishes on sites such as 4chan. 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.
Creepypasta aspires to be urban legend: dark social memes with just enough familiarity to give a frisson of awful possibility. Indeed, this might be what creepypasta aspires to be: urban legend, dark social memes with just enough familiarity to give a frisson of awful possibility. Much of it is spread with little authorial ego. But it is also self-consciously fiction, created for perverse pleasure, the pleasure of fear. It is weird fiction. Some of it, however, is rather good.
As in an effective joke, it is pared down to the absolute minimum, and the scene is set with literary economy. Brevity is nearly always a virtue in creepypasta — as a form of meme, it lives and dies by being read, copied and shared, and fast-acting stories have an obvious advantage. Some items are circulated as JPEGs with text written on them; some are no more than a single eerie image.
A subgenre consists of photographs containing an impossible or disturbing element, such as a hidden face. Besides delaying impact, greater length also increases the chance that a story will outstay its welcome. But although the Alice Killings themselves never actually happened, there was a real-life serial killer who followed a similar MO.
The reason for the name, of course, should be obvious: He left playing cards on the bodies of his victims. Eventually the Playing Card Killer surrendered himself to the police ; he's now serving years for his crimes. I'm cheating a little here by including three stories in one entry — but it's a biggie, so I don't feel that bad about it. Lost episode stories are the bedrock upon which creepypasta is built, so it's perhaps unsurprising that there's some truth to the subgenre.
I mean, no, there isn't an actual scrapped Mickey Mouse cartoon floating around under the file name "suicidemouse. That said, though, it's far from unheard of for cartoons to face censorship over questionable content. Beyond those, though — which, to be honest, probably should remain retired, because perpetuating offensive stereotypes is definitely not OK — there are plenty of other examples that have occurred in more recent years, and some of them are … kind of weird.
Personally, I think it's more likely one of those episodes that's meant to appeal to both kids and adults, because let's face it: Bleeping out bad language with dolphin noises is hilarious. The Cartoon Network show Dexter's Laboratory also found itself in some hot water regarding a segment that was originally intended to air as part of the second season in Eventually it saw some screen time on Adult Swim's YouTube channel.
By Lucia Peters. Who needs sleep? Five political prisoners were supposedly deprived of sleep for 30 consecutive days for a military-sanctioned experiment done at a testing facility, locked in a room where a specific chemical compound was distributed to keep them awake.
They became more deranged as the days went on, tearing themselves apart in the process. The story was hailed upon its release for being an authentic account, despite the fact that no humans could survive what occurred in the facility.
The inauthentic premise, use of the "Spazm" Halloween decoration as photographic "proof", coupled with its blatant political fear-mongering made it lose its impact eventually. One of the first chain letter Creepypasta legends to receive a long life on the internet, Smile Dog also known as Smile. There is a hand near the dog seeming to beckon the viewer who, upon receiving the image, must pass it on to their friends. If they don't send the image on, their dreams will be infiltrated by the dog, who will take on more disturbing forms as they continue to procrastinate.
The victims are normally driven to insanity and in some extreme cases, suicide. The legend, aside from showcasing readers' gullibility, has lost its appeal for generally being regarded as nonthreatening and more amusing than anything else.
A more recent Creepypasta that first appeared on 4chan, The Backrooms refers to a simple photograph of a yellow-carpeted hallway with matching wallpaper, which a person may "enter" by noclipping a cheat term used to describe moving through walls and other objects in first-person games. By entering The Backrooms, an endless series of corridors and empty hallways, they will be trapped there forever in a world of monochromatic yellow, plagued by the sound of humming fluorescent lights, with the fear of malevolent entities around every corner.
No one has been able to identify the origin of the photograph, and it remains one of the less frightening Creepypastas to date.
It often visits victims in the night while they sleep and whispers strange things to them before savagely ripping them apart. The Rake became an urban legend, picking up momentum in the mid-'00s when internet sleuths began adding information about sightings of the creature, in anecdotes from a mariner's log in , to personal accounts from the modern day. Eventually, it was made into a movie in that lacked any of the nuances of the original tales, and the legend passed into irrelevance.
NoEnd House began as David Williams' fascinating journey through a haunted house with nine rooms, each new room more terrifying than the last. Creepypasta fans enjoyed the long story and descriptive detail of David Williams' descent into madness but didn't appreciate that the author ruined his own twist ending by making several sequels, eventually declaring the friend who originally put Williams up to the quest to be its mastermind. Wikipedia has been a reliable source of information for over a decade, and in the case of Creepypasta Annora Petrova, the source of a scary legend.
The tale begins with Annora Petrova's Wikipedia page, which features in the story about Petrova, a fictional figure skater who makes a "Help Me" a Creepypasta template appeal to readers about her circumstances.
Most tales, however, rely on the creep factor more than on building suspense. The Disney name adds nothing to the story, but its presence makes the financial failure of the park around the time they suffered financial troubles with EuroDisney in France seem even less plausible.
The good creepypasta handle suspension of disbelief with finesse. Going back to Candle Cove , the story appears as a discussion on an online forum. Even with the twist at the end, the episode summaries create creepy images. Why does the disparity between good and bad creepypasta exist? The Internet provides that answer. Unlike in traditional publishing or even electronic publishing, a writer can publish creepypasta anywhere.
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