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Spotlight [10] is a podcast feature series that highlights sound storytelling through fiction, non-fiction and comedy productions. Learn more about the world around you, or dive into a new reality built on sound storytelling.
Welcome to Spotlight 10. We share our favorite stories with you, spreading the full range of fiction, non fiction, and comedy. Learn more about the world around you or dive into a new reality built on sound storytelling. Each of these feature episodes has been crafted by a different host with a different style. Let's jump into this week's episode.
Speaker 2:For many Gen Z who grew up on the Internet, childhood exploration online often came with an unexpected side effect. Horror somewhere between gaming forums, early YouTube, and late night scrolling. Many encountered something that stuck with them. These digital scares appeared in many forms. Written stories, short films, images, and video games becoming a shared language on the Internet.
Speaker 2:Part of what made those experiences so powerful was how unregulated and unpredictable the early Internet was. There was no trigger warnings, no content filters, and very little oversight.
Speaker 3:The video that scared me the most, and to this day, I struggle to say this creature's name because there's some childish part of me that believes it exists and believes it will come after me if I say his name and it is the Rake.
Speaker 2:In 2005, an anonymous user on 4chan shared a collection of monster concepts on a paranormal thread. From these ideas, one in particular took a life of its own, the rake. The creature quickly became one of the earliest iconic creepypastas, inspiring countless other online horrors.
Speaker 3:There was one creepypasta video in which he tells the story of the rake, which is this creature that's like humanoid and like emaciated, pale.
Speaker 2:Part of the rake's appeal came from its simplicity. The creature didn't rely on any elaborate backstory or complex lore. Instead, it tapped into primal fears. The feeling of being watched, of waking up in the middle of the night to find something standing at the foot of your bed.
Speaker 3:There was this story of the rake stalking this young man, and so mister Creepypasta kind of made it seem like there was, like, audio recordings of this young man getting, stalked by the rake. And this young man ended up going on to kill himself because of the horror of having this creature stalk him, stalk his family, I think it like killed his dog, killed his family members, just ruined his life. And so at the end of this tape, the guy kills himself. And in the sound design, you hear the gunshot go off, you hear the guy die, and then you hear from down the hall breathing and then crawling across the floor to where this man's body is, and then you hear the rake eating this man's body. And it was the scariest thing I had ever seen or heard when I was a kid.
Speaker 2:The term creepypasta also comes from 4chan as a portmanteau of creepy and copypasta. Copypasta referring to blocks of text copy and pasted across different parts of the Internet. As the community grew, new creatures, monsters, and stories began to surface.
Speaker 4:I know about Jeff the killer and the smile dog and I mean, generally, creepypastas are. Sonic.exe, that's another one. And so they were generally supposed to be short and terribly written, but eventually, they kind of stopped being that and just evolved into being, like, scary stories from the early Internet. Growing up, I mean, was it was unavoidable. If you were on the Internet, you knew or heard or had seen at least one creepypasta even if you know what it even if you didn't know what it was.
Speaker 4:Like, especially Jeff the killer, you'd see that image of of the dude with, like, the white skin and, like, the the red lips smiling.
Speaker 2:One key difference between The Rake and what would come next is how the audience engaged with the story. Early creepypastas were mostly static pieces of text that people consumed passively. But as the Internet became more visual and participatory, users wanted monsters that they could see, edit, and contribute to. This shift with how we interacted with online narratives paved the way for a new kind of creature. As digital tools like Photoshop became more accessible, the boundaries between fiction and reality began to blur.
Speaker 2:In 2009, a user on the Something Awful forums posted two edited photographs. In them, a tall faceless figure in a black suit stands ominously near groups of children accompanied by captions hinting at local disappearances. This figure became known as Slenderman.
Speaker 3:So for me, 2010, 2011, I was with my brothers. We would go on YouTube and we would watch PewDiePie and Markiplier play The Eight Pages, which was like my first introduction to it, was the video game, which is pretty late in the Slender Man, like, lore arc. But then after that, it was just there was a strange amount of people who almost found comfort in this creature that was horrifying in every way. But Slender Man really did scare me and I remember specifically, I live in a kind of wooded area and when I was a kid, I would refuse to look out into the woods after sundown because I was horrified I would see Slenderman.
Speaker 2:What made Slenderman stand out wasn't just the imagery, it was the ambiguity. The photos looked real enough to spark curiosity, yet vague enough to invite interpretation. What started as a simple image editing contest rapidly transformed into an evolving mythology. Fans created timelines, fabricated police reports, and shared supposed sightings from around the world. Sunderman became a collaborative internet project shaped by thousands rather than a single author.
Speaker 3:It kind of expanded into this huge universe in which all of these different monsters interacted with each other. There was like the whole Slenderman mansion where like everything evil existed, but people somehow wanted to escape to that or would like write fan fictions about it, which is crazy.
Speaker 4:Like, was, you know, there was Slender Man, and then there was Slendy Tubbies, and there was Shrek Love Is Life, which, you know, all the same game. You've collect the eight pages, collect the h VHS tapes, collect the eight onions, and avoid the character staring at you and the annoying orange parody where he puts himself in Slenderman.
Speaker 3:I mean, because if you think about, like, what horror was before creepypastas and before things like Thunderman and before the games, it was incredibly like, for games it was like Resident Evil and Silent Hill, like very like corporate established games. And for horror, was horror films. It was like The Evil Dead, it was The Exorcist, it was like these established things. But I think after Creepypasta and after Slenderman, which was like probably the biggest Creepypasta, it kind of democratized horror in a way that was really interesting because all of these games that were coming out after Slenderman the eight pages, they were all made by like one or two people who were just very fascinated by the subject.
Speaker 2:Shortly after the original post, a YouTube found footage series titled Marble Hornets introduced him to an entirely new audience, presenting him as a part of a cryptic documentary styled mystery. It was one of the earliest examples of internet horror using the mockumentary format to make fiction feel real. The series encouraged viewers to analyze every frame, hunting for clues and hidden appearances. This participatory element made viewers feel like investigators. A few years later, an indie developer released Slender the eight pages, a minimalist horror game where players wandered around the woods collecting notes while avoiding Slenderman.
Speaker 2:Despite its simplicity or maybe because of it, the game became a viral sensation. Then, in 2014, a stabbing involving two young girls who claimed inspiration from Slenderman shifted the public's perception entirely.
Speaker 3:It was the first time that the fandom culture around Slenderman and around Creepypastas hit the news and actualized in a way that created genuine horror. Like, this was a genuine tragedy that happened for the first time and the girl was able to survive, I think her name was Peyton. And I think people a lot of people were expecting it to be bigger than it was. As I mentioned before, there were people who were writing romance fan fictions about Slendermen. For every person that was horrified by this creature, there was a person who was absolutely compelled in a strange sort of desire for this tall man.
Speaker 2:News outlets framed the stories as evidence that online horror was dangerous, sensationalizing the role of creepypasta culture. Overnight, a community built around creativity and shared storytelling was treated as a threat. Parents, educators, and lawmakers began asking how exposure to horror content might affect children. Discussions about media literacy, mental health, and internet safety took center stage. Many smaller creepypasta creators deleted their work or stopped posting altogether.
Speaker 2:But even as mainstream attention died down, the community quietly persisted. New platforms emerged. Reddits, alternate reality games, analog horror channels on YouTube. While the golden age of creepypastas have faded, the genre's influence continues to ripple through modern internet horror. This episode was written, produced, and directed by Benny Wren.
Speaker 2:Special thanks to Sydney Jenkins and Trent Henry for their inputs.
Speaker 1:Like what you hear? Rate us on Spotify, give us a like, and follow Audio Video Land on Instagram where you can find more Spotlight 10 updates, teasers, and behind the scenes content. Spotlight 10 is an Audio Video Land production by digital storytelling students of Michigan State University in collaboration with Impact eighty nine FM.