Creepypasta al Dente: Prologue

Viewer beware, you're in for a scare...

Brain damage.

It's a real pain in the ass. The thing is, unfortunately, you don't have to take a hard hit to the dome or smack your head on a solid surface countertop to induce it. As it turns out, significant amounts of stress and mental duress can do the job just as well. Cortisol - a hormone the body produces when under duress, to put it simply - can actually have quite deleterious on the human brain when produced at elevated levels for extended periods of time. Kind of a bummer that it feels as if our entire society is specifically engineered to keep most people in a perpetual state of fear, anxiety, stress, discomfort, and exhaustion, all of which will keep those cortisol levels nice and high. I’m sure it’s all just a big coincidence, though, and totally not done on purpose.

Unfortunately, after spending years wracked by anxiety and stress so intense that I didn’t unclench my jaw for most of it - mostly self-induced, totally unjustified, and probably partially a side-effect of just plain existing in this clown-show of a country - my memory is a bit out of sorts, in some places more than others. Most of my early twenties are an indistinct blur; a collection of fragments, out of time, out of context, like a movie watch in unstructured, random clips of YouTube. I remember certain pieces, but not when they happened, and usually rely on third parties or certain events to piece together the linear connection between them all. It’s inconvenient, to say the least.

Despite my gimped memory, I can recall a certain flashpoints in my life; moments which would trigger a fundamental change in my entire being. Those that would set me on the course to become the loquacious simian I am today. Ironically, the younger these memories occurred, the more easily they slot into the narrative through-line of my life, unlike the jumbled mess of my early adulthood.

If you ever wondered, Damn, YakubianApe, the way you write implies you believe in a lot of crazy things that may or may not be designated as schizo by certain segments of Twitter - usually fellows with frog avatars drawn in MS Paint. Demons? Aliens? Ghosts? Fairies? Government conspiracies of unfathomable scope, scale, and malice? You can’t be serious. This is all some bit, right? Like, for the clout, or whatever the kids say. You don’t actually believe that stuff, do you?

It’s a question a lot of my friends have been asking recently. As they ask the question, I find myself wondering the same thing. But, after careful contemplation - and maybe a drink or two - I always come back to the answer:

You don’t?

Okay, buddy. Tell you what - if you ever find your Funko Pop collection trashed by a pissy poltergeist, maybe I’ll come do some amateur ghostbusting for you. If I’m feeling generous.¹

But in all earnestness, if you take a gander at the current state of the world and can honestly look me in the dead in the eyes and tell me, with a totally straight face, sober and serious, that you, at the very least, don’t even suspect that there just might be the tiniest bit of demonic influence at play… well, honestly, I don’t even know what to tell you, except that you might wanna invest in a little bit of holy water and a crucifix. Just in case. Turns out that what you don’t know sometimes can hurt you. Usually, that’s when it gets you the worst.

But, again - the question is usually comes to why do I believe these things? How did I get so invested in it? What had to go so wrong - or right - for me to end up in such a position?

Well, before I can tell you that story… I have to tell you this story.

The year is 1995. I'm but a small ape, scarcely but a… well, I was always under the impression that monkeys and apes had, like, a special word for their young that I was just unaware of, like filly or colt or kid (as in a small goat, not a small human), such as perhaps apeling. To my disappointment, there is no such term, and I’m tempted to make one up here myself, but whatever.

An actual baby photo of yours truly, taken from Yakub’s subterranean caucasian breeding pits.

Point is, I was young. I was a bright little homonid who was already probably writing my name, though I doubt I was spelling it correctly. It’s Halloween. My first real Halloween, where I’m going up to doors and collecting candy. In hindsight, I never was all that fond of the concept of putting on some dumb costume and panhandling for high-fructose corn syrup delights and American vomit chocolate. But, at the time, I was too young or dumb to have even a glimmer of self-awareness. I could barely even be said to be a properly concious being.

Anyways, my parents take me around the neighborhood, and we complete the loop, I collect a pumpkin-pail full of sugary sweets, and we come up to the last house in the neighborhood. It looks as innocuous as any other. Naturally, excited to claim my last piece of red dye #40 loot, I scurry up to the door, and ring the doorbell. And who answers the door?

King fucking Kong. And he doesn’t answer the door so much as throw it open, hollering like a man possessed.

In that moment, I saw my first glimpse of true, profound, and almost existential terror for the first time.

At such a tender age, I don’t think my brain was even capable of imagining that a door may open to reveal a screaming gorilla on the other side. I mean, yeah, the costume wasn’t convincing, but a toddler just doesn’t have enough experience with the world to know that gorillas don’t live in North America, nor do they open doors and hand out candy.

Either way, it’s a testament to the fortitude of my bladder that I didn’t spray both myself and the monkey man with piss like a broken water main.

I don’t recall what happened next - that’s where the memory ends. My mother says that I pretty much did exactly what you would expect a young child to do when confronted by a screeching ape that just leapt out from behind a door, and, you know -

I feel like I recall the man apologizing and giving me a king’s bounty of candy as compensation for my newfound trauma. Not that it saved him from getting a mouthful from my mom, which, while understandable, I have to say - it was Halloween. Can’t really fault the guy for spooking people. I mean, it’s kinda what you do on Halloween.

Some kids, after all, liked the adrenaline rush. I was not one of them.

That was my first and last Halloween. Every Halloween after, I would consign myself to the upstairs playroom, turn off the lights, and watch nice, decidedly not scary movies throughout the night, and avoid going downstairs, lest some child in a cheap rubber clown mask spook me and, like a startled horse, I try to bolt up the stairs, snap a leg, and be put down right then and there. My parents would hand out the candy and take my sisters out to collect their seasonal sweets. They would usually take a spare basket for me and collect candy on my behalf. All the rewards, none of the labor - it was a sweet deal. Really makes you understand why the IRS is a thing.

I knew I made a good call to sequester myself in the safety of the rumpus room with my Pokemon VHS tapes after my sister had a similar experience to my own and had the devil scared out of her by a neighbor kid wearing a Ghostface mask. After that, I usually had company in the game room, year after year.

Of course, I grew out of my crippling fear of Halloween. Once I got to the point that small children with dollar store masks didn’t send me into hysterics, I began to sit at the computer in our front room and answer the door to dole out candy to the neighborhood kids while playing Team Fortress 2’s Halloween events, which were pretty much the only reason I looked forward to the quote-unquote holiday at all.

I’ll never forget what we had, Valve.

There was also that one year in my college days my girlfriend at the time and I were wearing Homestuck shirts while giving out candy at my parent’s place. She said it counted as dressing up, since Dave Strider and Jade Harley, at the start of the series, really just wear their signature t-shirts and jeans², but we were also missing their iconic eyewear, so, I don’t think it really sufficed.

She did have a pair of fake glasses she’d wear when we’d put those shirts on and, ah… actually, I don’t think I’m at liberty to disclose that information.

Good times.

Anyways, I was easily scared as a child, so, I avoided certain things like they were the plague and I had a compromised immune system. There’s a COVID joke in there, somewhere, but I’m not sure its topical at this point.

For instance - clowns. Oh, if I saw one strand of multi-colored hair from a fake afro or gleaming read nose, I was gone gone. Usain Bolt wouldn’t be able to chase my little white ass down. I remember local firefighters coming to school to give some fire safety demonstration bit and, for whatever reason, did so dressed as clowns. Because of course they did. Without saying a word to anyone, I just went back to the classroom and read Magic Treehouse books until it was over. I got in trouble for sneaking off, though, frankly, the teacher should have been thanking me for going back to class and calmly, patiently waiting for her return instead of making a break for it and staging my own personal Great Escape.

My mother tells me that the first - and only - time my parents ever took me to the circus, this fucker was a big deal.

He’s a famous Italian clown. No, not Pagliacci. His name is David Larible, and I remember seeing him pop up in some Disney VHS’s I owned when I was young. He didn’t bother me when he was on television, trapped within the confines of a plastic VHS shell and his eerie presence bound by chains of cellulose tape. However, at the circus, he was shackled by no such restraints, and, when he decided to come interact with audience, who - out of everyone in the entire fucking arena³ - did he choose to sit next to?

My mother tells me I just seized up, looked straight ahead, and refused to acknowledge him, tapping into the third option between fight and flight - freeze. Which was good for everyone, because I don’t think my mom would have wanted to chase me down, nor do I imagine Mr. Larible would have enjoyed me taking the fight option and decking him right in his fake rubber nose.

My mom says this was what started my fear of clowns, but I’m fairly sure what lit that fuse was actually this.

My father⁴ had a bad habit of not changing the channel from whatever he was watching when I came in the den. The living room was his domain, and I was but a lowly interloper that was not worthy of consideration. Looking back, I’m sure I was being fairly annoying, as I was wont to do at the age of three, so, I think him leaving on Killer Klowns from Outer Space when I came into the room was his way of teaching me a lesson about intruding on daddy’s quiet time.

It also fucking traumatized me, because instead of, y’know, vacating the area like a sensible kid, again, I froze and just kind of stood there and stared at the screen, hypnotized, enraptured, and ensorcelled by the candy-colored freaks, which I’m pretty sure were the scariest things I’d ever seen in my life up until that point.

Well, except for that young woman with gold-spun hair and eyes green like fresh clover that would come to my bedroom window on nights where the moon was absent in the sky and the trees shivered in an ill-wind. She’d stand there and whisper through the glass sweet promises in a honeyed voice of sublime delights and fabulous gifts, all of which could be mine should I only open the window and join her and the other children in the woods, beckoning me with fluttering, feathery lashes and a come-hither smile on her too-red lips. I mean, she wasn’t really as freaky looking as the mishapen alien clowns, but… I dunno. Something about her just told me she wasn’t really on the up and up.

“For the last time, lady, I am not interested in frolicking with the pixies and brownies in the ancient, sun-dappled grove, okay?”

Ironic that, today, I’m actually of the opinion that Killer Klowns from Outer Space is a masterpiece of schlocky horror, but it would take many years of grueling exposure therapy before I could even look at clowns without getting uneasy.

This is actually how it happened.

It’s a good thing I built up my tolerance for tiny cars and goofy clothes, too, because clowns don’t seem to be going anywhere. At one point, I hoped that we, as a society, had surpassed the need for the painted-faces and rictus grins of clown-kind, yet, unfortunately, they persist, now more visible and popular than ever. Also there is a really weird and growing fascination with sexy clowns - which are two words that really have no business being put together in the same sentence without a very emphatic are not between them - on the internet that I have a feeling may have something to do with demonic activity and witchcraft, but that’s a schizopost for another day.

Let’s just say that, for now, I’m down with the clown.

But they better not push it. Thin ice, clowns - you’re on thin ice.

Another thing I avoided when I was a child were the Goosebumps books.

I was an avid reader as a kid, and tore through just about every chapter book I could get my hands on in elementary school. Except for these.

I was so easily spooked that the covers alone, with their bright, saturated colors and freakish, beady-eyed monsters were enough to make me deeply uncomfortable, which was not a good thing, because if you were a child of the 90’s, you probably remember these books were fucking everywhere. During the run of the original series, between 1992 and 1997, the books were selling four million copies a month. In 1996, 15% of Scholastic Publishing’s entire revenue consisted solely of Goosebumps sales. Every classroom had multiple Goosebumps books on their bookshelves. My friends would have them at their houses. I couldn’t even escape them at church, since they were on the bookshelf in the kid’s classrooms there, too. I’d go to the bookstore and, I shit you not, put a hand against my eye like a horse-blinder to avoid looking at them as I passed them at the bookstore. I really, really did not like these things.

It seems silly, now, for a myriad of reasons. Least among them that, for horror material, they’re pretty tame. I mean, yeah, they should be, since they’re written for kids that are basically just learning how to read, but, for the most part, whatever creepy bullshit is happening to the prepubescent narrator, it’s resolved by the end of the story. The evil dummy gets thrown in a woodchipper. The monster blood is once again trapped in a magical container and all the people it ate are spit out. The mean ghost disappears. The scary werewolf turns into a hot babe the protagonist gets to take home as his middle-school girlfriend. Everyone’s happy. The end.

But I do recall, while scraping Wikipedia for the plot synopese while bored in middle school, there a few that ended like, And the child was trapped for all eternity at the amusement park for the damned, or, the entire school turned into weird lizard people forever. The end.

That’ll be $6.99, please.

R.L. Stine, the man behind the books, who certainly has the look of a man who writes about tormenting children for a living.

These books have an interesting history unto themselves and bizarre cultural afterlife post their prime. Before writing this, I had no idea the book series was not just so fondly remembered, but currently experiencing something of a renaissance. Not only are new books being published in the series, and old ones being re-released, but there appears to be a relatively small but apparently very active fandom around it that, like most pieces of 90’s ephemera, seems to consist mostly of adults that grew up reading them. Stuck culture, stuck culture, et cetera, et cetera.

Goosebumps were not the only thing that I had to avoid. Looking back, I think the mid to late 90’s were something of a golden age for children’s horror content. Goosebumps wasn’t just a series of books, it was a television show, as well, that first aired in 1998. There was also Tales from the Crypt, which was another horror anthology for children, hosted by this freak. I never watched it - commercials were what introduced me to the Crypt Keeper, which might have been the genesis of my seething hatred of advertisements and marketing. I watched the Kids WB block every Saturday to get my fix of dubbed anime, except in October, where they brought this decrepit asshole to host the block for the entire month. Lucky me.

One particularly pronounced example of something I avoided was the cartoon Courage the Cowardly Dog, which gave us this piece of nightmare fuel.

When I say this terrified me, I mean that I never watched another episode of this show for the rest of my childhood. When Courage came on, it was time to change the channel. I wasn’t about to risk being exposed to this again. In hindsight, it’s silly, obviously, but I know I’m not alone in being scared something fierce by this. This quite commonly pops up in lists of things that scared us shitless made by people in my age cohort. If I’d actually watched a bit more of the episode, I would have seen that the terrifying spirit’s curse was just being forced to listen to this:

Actually pretty funny, I’ll admit, but not when I was eight.

Even the Scooby-Doo animated movies from my youth were a cut above the usual hijinks the cast of eternal teenagers and their talking dog got into. While they would normally bumble into some investigation where the monster was just some wealthy old dickhead trying to find a way to further enrich themselves at the expense of the local stoners, I remember Scooby-Doo and the Witch’s Ghost, in which the antagonist was, like, actually a vengeful ghost from the Salem Witch Trials that drags a Stephen King expy to Hell at the end. In Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island, they weren’t being chased by a bunch of hillbillies dressed like zombies, they were trapped on some remote island in the Louisiana swamps with very real, very creepy looking zombies chomping at Scooby’s tail. And the ghosts of Confederate soldiers. And were-cat people. It was a whole thing. Like I said, though - those 90’s Scooby-Doo movies did not mess around.

There was also another horror anthology, Are You Afraid of the Dark? which was a no-go for me from the name alone.

Yeah, that chick at the top looks real scared. Just terrified.

Oh, and there was also the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark franchise. Man, I thought Goosebumps were creepy, but when these fucking things turned up on bookshelves across the elementary school…

Oh, no. No, no, no. Like, actually, fuck Stephen Gammell, and fuck whoever decided to market this thing to kids. The whiplash between the stories and the art is enough to give you a concussion. If you never had the dubious privilege of being an easily spooked kid in the early Oughts, I’ll explain - you see that Collected from American Folklore bit? Yeah. That’s literal. The stories are just middling urban legends like the killer under the bed or the clown statue and the baby sitter or Bloody Mary. Not terribly scary or original stuff. But then you’d have an illustration like these accompanying it:

Like, I’m sorry. Mr. Gammell? Yeah. Hey. Look - I appreciate the effort, really, I do, clearly you are a talented man but good fucking lord, my man, there was absolutely no reason to be blasting this horrific imagery into my eyeballs. It’s supposed to delightfully spooky, to give a… y’know, a nice little chill down the back of the spine, not outright, stone-cold terrify. Did you forget these books were supposed to be for seven year olds? Or are you just a disturbed individual who revels in traumatizing children?

You know what, stupid question - you gotta be some kind of weird to even dream up stuff imagery like that.

So, yeah - there was a lot of media out there specifically designed to give children nightmares. And, even if I went out of my way to avoid it, it still succeeded in keeping me awake at night, because I still couldn’t escape it, despite my best efforts.

But, I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

In fact, that’s a good thing. Most people like to be scared. Terrified, not so much, nor do they like to fear for their life, but horror wouldn’t be a thing if people didn’t enjoy that tingle work down your spine as you watch some dipshit in a movie approach the door where you just know some gruesome beast is waiting to lunge out and make a meal of them. Children are no different. Even I, for as much as I detested scary stories and grotesque imagery, came around eventually. In fact, I think that my resistance to embrace the macabre is exactly why, around twelve or thirteen, I became almost feverishly obsessed with it. Today, horror is probably my go-to genre of entertainment. Or fantasy, depending on my mood. But if you combine horror and fantasy? Oh, yeah - now you’re speaking my language. That’s probably why I’m such a big fan of Lovecraft, Warhammer Fantasy, and traditional fairy lore.

It’s difficult to articulate why, but the Cottingley Fairy photos always unnerved me.

Either way, I can remember when the epiphany hit me - when I knew that I needed… more.

I was twelve. For some reason - I couldn’t tell you why - I decided, You know what? I wanna read a book about ghosts. I didn’t like ghosts. I sure as hell never wanted to encounter one. With an imagination as active as mine, I didn’t need to be reading about ghosts, either, since I would soon discover that reading about ghosts turned every innocuous creak of the house as it settled into a creeping specter shuffling down the hallway to come kill me in my bed, or something. But, against my better judgement, I had my mother take me to Borders. You remember Borders, don’t you? It was a national chain of bookstores. They’re closed now, unfortunately, which did wonders for Barnes and Nobles’ business.

The interior of a Border’s, post liquidation.

There was one directly across the street from the school my mother taught at, so, that was also the bookstore I found myself at the most. My mother was always happy to take me to get a new book. I’ve always been a voracious reader, and she was eager to encourage that habit, so I could always count on getting a book if I wanted one. Also, I distinctly remember the cafe at Borders had the biggest snickerdoodle cookies I’ve seen in my life to this day. Plush, soft, moist, and sweet - I’ve been chasing the high of those cookies, the smell of a brand new, untouched book, and the peaceful, soothing elevator jazz that would play over the loudspeaker ever since.

Anyways, once at Border’s, I went up to an employee and I told her - I want a book about ghosts. Not like Goosebumps, though. I want a book about real ghost stories.

I can even recall the woman I asked. She was young. Blonde. Her lips were full and her smile wide, and there was something oddly familiar in the glint of her eyes as they caught the fluorescent light droning odiously overhead.

Curious, but, I’m sure it was nothing of consequence.

If I could go back in time, somehow, back to that very moment, I'm not sure if I’d thank that woman for inadvertently - I think - setting me on the path I follow to this day. But I also think I might say, Are you stupid? What are you doing showing this to a twelve year old? And picking up one of the books on tantric sex magick that was on the same shelf of the New Age section as the books about ghosts. She should have just handed me a Goosebumps book and told me to quit being so pretentious.

But, she didn’t, and now, almost two decades later, I know more about folklore, cryptids, fairies, monsters, demons, angels, and other such esoteric things that I do about the field I work in. Though it was a tough choice, I ended up selecting this book from the shelf, because it had a cool cover and I wanted to know everything I could about these so-called mysterious beings. It did claim to be a complete guide, after all.

This book changed my life in the most literal way a book can. John A. Keel - author of the equally intriguing Mothman Prophecies - didn’t just open my third eye, he pulled back the lid and stapled it to my forehead, ensuring I could never shut it again. This book wasn’t a red pill, it was a red suppository. Within a week, I was hooked. I needed more esoteric knowledge.

It was to defend myself, you know? Good lord, if Mothman, Bigfoot, all sorts of aliens, cryptids, and other strange, unsavory, and untowards beasts were creeping around out there, I needed to know exactly what to do to make sure they didn’t make a meal out of me. Yeah, aliens may have been snatching people out of their bedrooms at night to conduct all manner of insidious experiments upon them, but I’d be damned if those little gray bastards were gonna get me. My anus was going to remain thoroughly un-probed. I would make sure of that.

So, the next weekend, I asked mother dearest if she’ll take me to the bookstore again. This time, we went to Half-Price Books. At the time, I didn’t like it as much as Border’s, because it didn’t have a cafe and I couldn’t get one of those bomb snickerdoodle cookies, but I learned quickly that you could find some very interesting reading materials at Half-Price Books, since everything there was second-hand.

So, I walked up to an employee, who was suspiciously blonde, green-eyed, and smelled faintly of wet grass and ozone, and told her, I’m looking for a book about ghosts, aliens, and monsters. But not, like, Goosebumps, or anything like that. So, she led me along with a slightly-too-wide, come-hither smile, and beckoned me deep into the musty bowels of the dimly lit Half-Price Books. Again, I was faced with a panoply of tomes, ranging from tarot reading guides to collected issues of Fate magazine to your bog-standard ghost hunting books and more esoteric things. The one that caught my eye that day was this beauty.

Oh - an investigator’s guide to magical beings, huh?

Well, I was an investigator into these murky waters of the unknown, and the last guide had served me quite well as a primer to the world of the preternatural and unknown, so, I chose this. Not only did it introduce me to John Michael Greer, who is one of the most fascinating and intelligent authors I’ve ever come across (and writes a blog here that you should read), but, more importantly, it did include some beginner’s steps to fashioning protective charms and fetishes that, in theory, could possibly maybe help you ward off certain spirits. It was here that I first read that stone-cold iron is anathema to fairies. Since John Michael Greer drew the parallels between the alien abduction phenomenon and fairy lore - a fascinating theory that I think does hold quite a bit of water - I was convinced I’d just found the silver bullet to protect myself from their wicked machinations.

This is how I saw myself by the time I wrapped up this book.

“You wanna play? Let’s play, Tinkerbell.”

Unfortunately, access to raw iron and woodworking tools are in scarce supply when you’re twelve or thirteen, so I had to make do with what I could acquire. I was not, sadly, going to be fashioning my own metal tridents or talismans, or those cool silver guns that Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith had in Men in Black. Fortunately, metal horsehoes were not impossible to come by, and crucifixes and other religious iconography was similarly attainable. Even though we were Christian, and I was raised regularly attending church, by this time, life had gotten busy and we went less and less. I knew we had a bible somewhere in the house, but where, exactly, I wasn’t sure, so I asked for my own personal copy.

I still sleep with that bible by my bedside. It’s an important tool. Not only does it provide good reading material, and, really, you should read the thing, since it’s only the single most important text in human history, but, in a pinch, it provides a decently weighty object to hurl at nocturnal intruders, both preternatural and mundane. Since Greer also drew parallels between aliens, fairies, and demons, I figured that if I found some little fucker from beyond the stars scurrying around my room, I could either start shouting psalms until it pissed off or beat it into submission with the heft of the book. And, listen - it sounds ridiculous, I know, but, look, I was thirteen, and, also, a man who sleeps with a machete is a fool every night but one.

So, for better or worse, I continued to accrue my collection of paranormal books over the years. By the time seventh grade rolled around, I was probably the most well-read fourteen year old in matters paranormal on the planet. I struggled with Algebra 2, but I could tell you more about the Patterson-Gimlin footage or Mothman than you’d ever want to or need to know. This was about the same time most boys start finding girls intriguing and bizarrely beguiling rather than just annoying, stupid, and generally gross. I was a bit of a late bloomer in that sense, too. The only woman I wanted to see in my room was a sultry, buxom succubus, with black sclera, garnet skin, and caprine horns curling down from her temples, with a head of bushy, ebon hair and an ass, as some would say, like damn. Not so I could get some demonic strange - I would have rather beat her within an inch of her infernal life with a crucifix, tied her her up, and waterboarded her with holy water while interrogating her about the nature of Hell and all its diabolical denizens, if only so I knew how better to protect my immortal soul from her devilish cohorts.

I don’t care how hot you are or how big your boobs are, you are hellspawn and I am giving you a one-way ticket back where you came from.

I was gravely serious.

This is to say that I think being so intensely averse to horror and fear kinda threw me out of whack. I got into some weird shit over the years… dove down some deep rabbit holes that even the most foolhardy spelunker wouldn’t think to touch. I won’t get into them here. Maybe another day. You’ve heard enough of this haggard ape’s life story, for the time being. You don’t know me well enough to have unlocked the rest of my tragic backstory.

The point is, I have to wonder - if I’d just nutted up and cracked one of R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps books as a kid, would I have turned out different? Would I have been a bit more well-adjusted? Would I not have spent long, sleepless night, feverishly reading my bible for fear of some interstellar invader teleporting into my room and trying to use me as a guinea pig for their sinister, unknowable experiments?

Maybe. Probably.

So, in turn, I ask - what are we doing to our children today, depriving them of horror? Now, I’m not advocating for sitting your three year old down with a bowl of seed oil drenched popcorn and making them watch Killer Klowns from Outer Space. I’m certainly not saying you should give your kid a book by John Michael Greer or John A. Keel, or by any other John who may write about aliens, ghosts, demons, or the like.

But I am saying that children’s media is very… sanitized today. As much as I would love to get five minutes alone with Stephen Gammell for actually, legitimately giving me nightmares as a child with his bullshit illustrations, I think it’s important children be exposed to that kind of stuff.

Okay. Maybe not that one, in particular, but I do think that kids needs to be exposed to some kind of horror, if only to indulge that little itch to be spooked, frightened, and most importantly, uncomfortable. In a safe way, of course. A controlled environment, where they can explore the dark and (acceptably) grotesque, stretch the limits of their imagination, face challenges and learn to work them out, if only in their own imagination. It’s mental exercise, in a way, not dissimilar from letting your kid loose in a place like this, where they can get their daily exercise in and get scared shitless.

Do you hear it? Because it heard you.

There’s really nothing wrong with getting a quick but easily dismissed fright from one of R.L. Stine’s talking, living, evil dummies, nor is Ernest Scared Stupid going to ruin any kid’s life. Because, even despite my aversion to anything even remotely Halloween related, I did watch that movie, and, creeped out though I was by the villainous goblin, what I remember more than anything is -

BULGARIAN MIAK!

Hilarious.

I think the appeal of horror goes deeper than just getting a quick jolt of adrenaline, for both adults and children. There is something about the dark, the macabre, the transgressive, and the unknown that naturally attracts curious minds, for better or for worse. There’s also a link, almost Freudian in nature, between sex and horror, but I’m not entirely sure I’m equipped to explore that here, now, or at all. I think it’s probably why people who post on FetLife and are polyamorous also tend to really, really weird about Halloween and have tattoos of Freddy Kreuger and Jason Vorhees. Because, y’know, there’s really nothing more I want to see in an intimate setting than Leatherface, Pinhead, and Jigsaw’s little puppet guy leering back at me from her upper-arm. Just trust me - there’s a reason that everything in the film Alien, er… looked like that. Maybe we’ll go into it in a future installment.

Behold, one of the most dangerously horny men to have ever held a pencil.

Yet, in today’s era of both the most overbearing, over-protective, and neurotic yet distant and absent parents, horror media for children is notably scarce. As stated before, Goosebumps appears to be going strong, but, as also previously stated, it seems largely predicated on an older fanbase. So far as I’m aware, there aren’t any new horror anthologies in the vein of Are You Afraid of the Dark or Tales from the Crypt. That’s too gruesome for children. Too scary. Yet, the very same parents who are deathly afraid of their child hearing the word death or catching a glimpse of a monster even slightly more ghoulish than Count Chocula are usually the same folks who will sit their three year old down with an iPad and let them watch Cocomelon videos until they either pass out or their brain is melting out their ears. Whichever comes first.

Worse still - remember the whole Spiderman and Elsa phenomenon? Yeah, the same parents who think Timmy would be traumatized listening to Monster Mash are the same breed that were, by and large, the root cause of this becoming the dominant form of children’s entertainment for a good half decade.

And if you think those thumbnails don’t look like suitable children’s entertainment, believe me when I say that isn’t even scratching the surface of this colossal ship-killer of an iceberg. It’s as mysterious as it is unnerving and pernicious - far scarier than any Goosebumps book you might read. Elsagate, as it’s known, is an incredibly sinister phenomenon that you can take one look at and practically feel the dark energy radiating off the screen. Even the least spiritually attuned individuals can take one look at something like this:

And know there’s something deeply untoward at work.

Oh, and don’t mistake this content for horror media but tailored to the internet age. When I’m talking about child-friendly horror content, I’m talking about that one Goosebumps book where the kid’s favorite comic book character comes to life and starts stalking him - there’s a world of difference between that and cheap animations made by drugged-out Indian dalits of Elsa from Frozen getting an abortion, which is exactly the kind of content you were liable to find in the deepest depths of the Elsagate rabbit hole.

Call me crazy, but I think you’d be better off sitting your kid down in front of one of those midnight movie marathons and let them watch hours of old, black-and-white B-movies than whatever mind-melting nonsense is on “Kids” YouTube.

You might also be thinking, But YakubianApe, you stupid whitoid - Five Nights at Freddy’s is a children’s franchise! It’s so popular with kid’s they’re making a movie about it!

To which I say, no - Five Nights at Freddy’s was never intended to be a franchise for children, and it’s popularity with that demographic stems mostly from, again, YouTube, and children being allowed to freely roam in adult spaces on the internet unsupervised. Letting a five year old indulge in Five Nights at Freddy’s feels less like handing a kid a Goosebumps book and more like letting them watch Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Get ready for Freddy.

Five Nights at Freddy’s and the genre that sprung up around it occupies it’s own strange place in both internet and pop culture that is adjacent yet independent of the actual subject matter at hand that would warrant it’s own deep-dive, which may or may not come, depending on how fickle the muse is feeling about doing research on it.

The point is, as I’ve said about many, many other things before, if you deny someone something - especially children - they will often seek out an alternative on their own. And that alternative are often not good.

I think that a lot of the rampant sexual paraphilia we see in modernity stems from so many parent’s fear of educating their children - at an appropriate age, of course - on sex, both candidly and honestly. It’s enabled and exacerbated by other factors, but I think a big reason you see freaks who get off to Sonic the Hedgehog characters is mostly because they were still being sheltered by overprotective parents, so, instead of having the natural urges of a growing teenager going in a natural direction, the only outlet they have is Sonic the Hedgehog, or Nintendo games, or cartoons with talking animals.

I’m sure the reasons people turn out that way are legion, but making sure your son doesn’t even know what intercourse is when he’s fourteen or fifteen seems like a great way of ensuring he has a sixty plus part documentary (and counting) on YouTube documenting his exceedingly bizarre life and online antics.

Case in point.

Similarly, if you do your best to prevent your child from watching something like this:

Well, they might just end up getting into this:

Creepypasta - horror media for the internet age. From the depths of 4chan to the international stage, creepypasta has come to define horror content for a generation.

The above image may be silly, but make no mistake; beneath the juvenile facade and cartoonish aesthetic steeped in the corrupted icons pop culture, the community that fomented around the content that falls under this umbrella has had very real, and very unpleasant knock-on effects that transcend the internet.

Like the phenomenon of the brony community, there is something equally strange and odious about the creepypasta fandom. And it isn’t just because it’s steeped in gorey imagery, death, and darkness. More than the sordid and revolting sins of some of its most famous and infamous figures, I think the concept of creepypasta and those who made a name for themselves around it, as well as the stories and characters that became emblematic of the genre, represent and embody a marked change in horror media, our interaction with it, our consumption of it, and culture both online and offline; a shift which blends fiction with reality, blurs the borders between the real world with the digital, myth and fact, author and creation, and, most concerning of all… audience and participant.

Attempted murder. Suicide. Extortion. Harassment. Theft. Grooming. Sexual impropriety. Worse things still. How did short paragraphs of creepy text posted on obscure internet backwaters lead to all of this?

Join me next time beside the lake, where we’ll take a look at one of creepypasta’s most infamous creations; a menacing figure that, more than any other in the rogue’s gallery of creepypasta creatures, has transcended the bounds of the internet and extended its tendrils into the real world. Looming tall and odiously above all others, next time, I’ll take you by the hand and guide you into the dense, dark, and fog-choked woods to see if we can’t spot a fleeting glimpse of the one, the only, the lean, mean, killing machine, the man in black himself, the towering titan lurking in the darkest shadows of the internet…

1. I take payment in cash, booze, and favors in manual labor.

2. Half the reason I suspect Homestuck became so wildly popular with young teenagers was because the characters wore such simple clothes that cosplay was as easy as ordering the shirts and going into your closet.

3. This was in Dallas, Texas, by the way, so it wasn’t some small, rinky-dink venue where there were only a small handful of children to choose from, it was the old Reunion Arena, where the Dallas Mavericks played at the time.

4. If you’re reading this now, hi.