SHARE THIS IMAGE OR HE’LL BE IN YOUR ROOM AT 3 AM (NOT CLICKBAIT!!).

An ode to the urban legends of the internet and to the cringe teenagers who get it.

FEATURE | PŪRĀKAU / MYTHOLOGY

Written by Tahlia Coward (she/any) | Insta: @totallymothmann | Lttrbxd: cryptidfilms_ | Contributing Writer

Picture this. 

It’s 2008, and you’re sitting at the family computer, which is practically a brick, with the classic Windows XP rolling hills in all of its pixelated glory. It’s your turn to be on the computer, and you spend your time scrolling through MySpace blogs to see what everyone’s up to. Or maybe you’re looking through the Twitter timeline, checking out celebrities’ tweets that surely won’t be problematic in the future. It’s the perfect night.

Until you receive an email from a stranger and click on it, it’s a saturated, bright white picture of a creepy face with bulging eyes and a wide smile. You’re fully convinced now that you’ve been cursed, like some fucked-up version of The Ring, where instead of VHS tapes, it’s Yahoo emails. Do you have to curse someone else to be freed? You spend the entire night wide awake, expecting the man to just show up in the corner of your bedroom to murder you in your sleep.

My dear friend, what you just experienced was the origins of a creepypasta now famously known as Jeff the Killer. Originally, it was a famous Internet image that initially circulated on Japanese internet forums in 2005 and then gained popularity again in the 2010s as a means of “internet curse” to create fear-mongering, as social media became more common in households. The image of Jeff the Killer didn’t have anything tied to it―just a means to scare people, similar to how someone would show you the classic K-Fee car commercial and tell you to sit right at the computer screen in an innocent voice (maybe speaking from personal experience…)

Then, 2011 rolled around, and DeviantArt user GameFuelTV created the infamous Jeff the Killer story, inspired by the image. The story is about a boy named Jeffery Woods, who was attacked by bullies. Eventually, he planned revenge and killed the bullies. However, he ended up dousing himself with alcohol and was set on fire. This created the look seen in the famous image. Long story short, he ends up losing his sanity. He becomes a serial killer, known to whisper the phrase “Go to sleep …”

Let’s also not forget about the other infamous photo that practically haunted forums during the 2010s: a black-and-white photo of a faceless man lurking behind children. What ultimately became the result of the internet’s famous horror stories, Eric Knudsen entered a “Create Paranormal Images” contest. He submitted two photographs that had been altered to appear as though they were lost media. Other forms embraced the character and expanded on its story, giving these photographs a backstory that made the concept of a faceless man more than just a Lovecraftian entity. What was meant to be a contest entry became the Slenderman mythos.

These characters became the Internet’s attempt at digital horror mythology.

Deemed as Creepypastas, no, not actually creepy pasta. It’s the horror media that became massively popular in the golden age of the 2010s, where chokers, The Harlem Shake, and Lady Gaga’s controversial meat dress were the talk of the town. Producing well-known characters such as, of course, Jeff the Killer and Slenderman. But there were also others, such as The Rake, which was an entity with glowing eyes caught on footage like Bigfoot; Smile Dog, a photograph with red grains of a husky grinning ear to ear with human teeth; Ben Drowned, a concept inspired by a supposed haunted copy of Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask; and of course, my favourite one when I was a teenager, Ticci Toby, a character with a tragic backstory that led him to become a Proxy―former victims of Slenderman that he then claims as agents and puppets. These are merely the well-known ones that are talked about, but others slip under the radar, such as Dr Smiley, Bloody Painter, and The Puppeteer. 

These were forms of art that influenced interest in horror, continuing to spawn derivative media as each piece of creepypasta was continuously added to. Often taking the form of not just urban legends, but also inspired by themes of serial killers, “lost episodes” of television shows (e.g., Candle Cove, another personal favourite of mine), or even supposed paranormal encounters.   Each lore piece of a character was constantly being developed and added to, until eventually, a fully fleshed-out universe of fictional modern-day urban legends was being spread online. Not only are fictional horror stories shared online, but fanfiction, cosplay, and fan art are also driving forces within the fandom. 

This is how Creepypasta became the modern age of urban legends and folklore. Instead of being spread orally, they are disseminated digitally through various platforms. The term “copypasta,” a block of text that originates from the internet and is repeatedly copied and pasted across platforms, perfectly captures the rapid online integration that allowed these stories to spread. They function in the same way that modern myths do, by spreading as stories, but with the added power of the internet.

For many, Creepypasta served as a gateway into the world of horror media. However, it also had a darker side. The 2014 Slender Man stabbing in Wisconsin, where two 12-year-olds attacked their friend to appease Slenderman, is a stark reminder of the potential adverse effects of these stories. It’s the element of storytelling that can convince impressionable minds that there is a powerful entity that reigns over the universe, when in actuality, it’s an urban legend created purely to entertain and treated as a campfire story.

But they are just that. Creepypastas. It’s an underrated form of internet mythology that most wouldn’t assume is actually a thing. What started as a gateway for Tumblr and Devinart teenagers in the 2010s created a whole world of screams and cursed emails in the depths of the night. 

Also, shout out to the people who took my Which Creepypasta character are you? Quiz on Quotev, you’re a real one.