Top Ten Internet Horror DON'Ts (Part 2)

**Note: Clicking on the links throughout this article will take you to horror of varying types and degrees, from mildly unnerving to gory to existentially terrifying. If that kind of thing wigs you out too much, or that's just not what you're looking for, this is your warning. I also take no responsibility for any curses, brainwashing, sudden deaths, or other similarly odd events potentially connected to these links. And, like Arthur Weasley said, don't trust anything intelligent if you can't see where it keeps its brain. Oh, and spoilers are going to exist in this article.**

Well, I hope you’ve read the first five don'ts in the last post, as well as the top ten dos. If not, they are HERE, HERE, and HERE, in publication order. Once you've caught up, swing on back here and we'll go through the top five things not to take from internet horror. Or my top five, anyway.

5: DON'T Underestimate Your Audience

Yep, I made this point in the do section, but I want to harp on it more. I want to harp on it over and over and over again, because damn it, it's important.

Your readers are not stupid. Your audience, if you're creating, say, film, are not stupid. Please remember that. You have room to be subtle. Seriously, I cover this in more detail in the dos, I just wanted to really drive it home. So much internet horror is done by amateurs, and those amateurs can be talented… but by and large, they overexplain. They give the reader too much handholding, and inadvertently damage their own work.

4: DON'T Hide Everything, Otherwise You Have Nothing

Okay, this may be counter to what I just said, but… well, it's a balancing act. Even the smartest reader needs something to work with. If you hide everything… what's the point of your story? Writers see advice (Like the advice I gave.) saying to be subtle and not play your cards too soon. So, rather than overexplaining, writers underexplain. You see no sign of anything weird. The character is therefore scared of… the next plot point?

It's fine to have a mysterious entity in horror. H.P. Lovecraft was a master of it, rarely ever describing the otherworldly horrors he created. But even Lovecraft mentioned a creeping tentacle or a flash of color. So many internet horror writers have this tendency to write their story without anything to actually horrify. And, perhaps in the worst horror of all, it's starting to creep into traditionally published writing. Professional authors… I just can't, with that. Give the audience enough without giving them too much.

3: DON'T Forget the Polish

Now, I did say that passion would make people appreciate your work. But if you don't pay attention to the polish of your chosen craft, you're not going to rise to any height. If you're a writer, you need to know your grammar. You need to know how language flows. Film makers need to know about their angles, the use of focus, their editing techniques. That kind of thing is what moves an okay, likable work into something worth paying attention to.

Polish is something I would really like more of in the world of internet horror. You see it in some work. Don't Hug Me I'm Scared is very polished and put together. TheRussian Sleep Experiment is wonderful. But by and large, even some of the best work out there (Marble Hornets, Candle Cove, Tribe Twelve) lack a shine and shimmer that a little more attention would have brought them. They're wonderful, but I can't say that they're great technical creations.

2: DON'T Forget Your Twist

There are no original ideas left. Sorry, it's true. Everything has been done. There are only three stories, in the end. Or thirty six. Or nine. Whatever you want to pick, there are only a set number of actual plots. Your idea has likely been done before, too.

I know that I'm focusing a lot on creativity, but that's because it's a massive success of internet horror, when it works. It's also a massive failing because, even though I think the idea of gatekeepers in publishing is patently ridiculous, there is something to be said for mitigating clichés. It doesn't mean it's going to be good, but it won't be something seen a million times unless something actually happens to it that's different.

Your audience will love you if you do that. So will editors and critics. There's very little people enjoy more than seeing something expected actually turned around. It can be hard to come up with the idea, but when you do, it can be some of the most powerful fiction created.

1: DON'T. Pull. Your. Punches.

Ignore everything else in these four posts if you have to. Seriously. This is easily the most important thing I have to say in this whole thing: don't pull your punches. Whatever the reason you may have for it, conscious or not, pulling your punches will only harm the end work. You have to fully commit to the work, and this is where internet horror falls flat and falls hard. Okay, that's contradictory to a previous point saying that they do well in this, but again: those are the outlying standouts, not the massive bulk of the genre.

You can tell when someone put the forethought and love into a piece to make it really special. But you can also tell when someone doesn't, and they just want to get popular without trying. The first step to actually throwing solid punches is training it up. This is where learning comes in. The polish. The passion. All of it.

Your punches will be weak if you don’t work up your skill. But even if they're strong, you can kill yourself on it. If you’re worried about not pissing anyone off… you're dead. You're throwing shallower punches. You have no follow through. I was taught years ago that, if you're going to punch someone in the nose, you don't aim for their nose. You aim for the back of their head, and their entire head just happens to be in the way.

Pulling punches is a way to absolutely destroy any emotional impact you might have had. You can't keep people 100% happy and deliver a powerful story. If you don’t want to risk ever upsetting anyone ever, your work will be placid and gray.

"If everyone likes your work, but nobody loves it, it will fail." That's from Mark Rosewater, and it's an absolute truth when it comes to internet horror. 99.9% of work produced in the "genre" fails. No one really watches the videos or plays the games or reads the stories, and those who do… they don’t care enough to fight for the work in question. And the only way to make someone love something is to risk other people hating it. It's that simple. So for the love of god: Don't. Pull. Your. Punches.

And that is my final word on the matter. I hope this has been helpful to you. It was helpful for me to write it. Really sets some things clear in my head.

Until next time, lovelies,

Voss

Top Ten Internet Horror DON'Ts (Part 1)

**Note: Clicking on the links throughout this article will take you to horror of varying types and degrees, from mildly unnerving to gory to existentially terrifying. If that kind of thing wigs you out too much, or that's just not what you're looking for, this is your warning. I also take no responsibility for any curses, brainwashing, sudden deaths, or other similarly odd events potentially connected to these links. And, like Arthur Weasley said, don't trust anything intelligent if you can't see where it keeps its brain. Oh, and spoilers are going to exist in this article.**

So, the last couple posts, I went over the do's from internet horror as its own weird little genre. What we can learn about writing horror, and just about writing in general, from the online scarefest that's been blooming over the past decade or so.

But as many of you probably already know, internet horror is far from perfect. For every Candle Cove and Marble Hornets, there's a dozen "WHO WAS PHONE" and "Jane the Killer" stories to muddy the waters (Although WHO WAS PHONE is at least funny.). There's a lot to learn from all that bad horror about what we should absolutely avoid doing, too. And I've got ten of those nuggets plucked from the pile here.

You can read the do's, as well as my definition of internet horror, HERE in the first pair of articles. This set will be largely self contained, but there will likely still be references back to the first two, so I do recommend reading these all in order.

Now, enough of all the lead-in crap – let's get right to what we all want out of this: numbers in descending order!

10: DON'T Abuse Internal References

This is low on the list, since it's not always applicable, but I feel like it has to be said nonetheless. The world of internet horror is largely composed of Creative Commons elements reconfigured into something unique. Whether that's good or not is not the point here. What matters is that it makes for a very self-referential genre.

If you're going to do something like that, you have to do it well. Slenderman, the Rake, Jeff the Killer, and the Brutal Obscene Beast all get cursed by Smile Dog and Normal Porn for Normal People… that's not a good story. That's a mess, and it happens way too often. Well-done internal reference can be seen in works like EverymanHYBRID (Slenderman/the Rake), but the key is that it's brought in well. It makes sense. It works within the world and, perhaps most importantly, the elements that are borrowed and included are not all that exists. They're not even the main antagonistic forces. That honor falls to Habit in that universe, and Habit is an entirely original character created by the guys.

Outside of actual internet horror, I'd say this has the most application in Lovecraftian fiction. Sure, Nyarlathotep, Hastur, and the Hounds of Tindalos might all be hunting the same guy together… but I doubt it, and I doubt even more an author could make it work without some very original worldbuilding to tie the disparate elements together. And really, the same could be said when using any mythological elements. Use them carefully, know them well, and bring something original in, but don't overuse any of it.

9: DON'T Assume Your First Idea is Clever and Amazing

It's not. I would put money on the first idea you have for something being trite, cliché, and generally predictable, in fact. It's not a mockery or me being rude or mean. You could say the same thing about my first idea for something, too. Our brain stores up ideas it's seen already. If we see a solution work once, our brain is designed to remember it, because from a survival standpoint, it makes sense to just do it the way you know for sure works.

That, however, is the absolute death of creativity. But the internet horror community seems largely ignorant of this fact. Almost every story in the internet horror community involves Uncanny Valley Creature #12 stalking Mary Sue/Marty Stu through a setting that is barely touched upon, causing insanity/sickness as well as electronic interference. Also this is the last journal entry Mary Sue/Marty Stu made. It's done over and over because there are several well-created, popular internet horror pieces that follow this formula. The plot is stored in your brain already, and it leaps out when presented with an opportunity.

I guarantee that, when you see a call or a specific theme, you come up with a half dozen ideas that you've seen somewhere else before you get to something worth dealing with. You may drop everything rapidly, but it comes up nonetheless. That doesn't mean you should write it. Well, not normally…

8: DON'T Just Reuse Someone's Idea (Caveat Incoming)

To go along with the last point, you can't just find a successful idea and do it over with a different veneer. You have to change something to make it work out as something worth doing. I mentioned that in the do's, but it's important. It's so important, and especially in internet horror, it's way too prevalent.

This phenomenon is really easily seen with Slenderman. So many Slenderman based creations floating out there, to the point where it has passed out of the internet and into the mainstream. And unfortunately, the mainstream does Slenderman… poorly, as a rule. Take a look at the Marble Hornets movie to see that in full glory… or, actually, don't. It's so bad. It's so bad, guys. Not only did they not understand what made Marble Hornets work, the changes they made… just didn't work. They weren't original. Instead, it actually took something that had some interesting elements, something original, and shaved off all the edges to fit it into the same box we've seen a hundred times in every forgettable horror movie.

Don't be Always Watching. Please, please, please.

7: DON'T Rely on Blood and Gore

I praised internet horror for subtlety… but again, that's the really good stuff, the stuff worth learning from. For the most part, the common horror tactic of "let's drop blood everywhere" is so overused. I'm a fan of splatterpunk, personally, but there's a way to eviscerate hundreds of people and make it actually work. Read Peel and Eat Buffet by Vincent W. Sakowski to see it well-used. Assuming you have a strong enough stomach.

This isn't a large, complicated point: use your blood and intestines sparingly. They're expensive, and they're best left implied, in my opinion.

6: DON'T Rely on Aesthetics

Internet horror is full of aesthetic terror. Pictures and videos, yes, but in a genre that has an unfortunate tendency to leave out grounding details, the horrific entities are often described in excessive detail, often to the point of just throwing up a photograph.

That is not enough, no matter what anyone thinks. Even the most unnerving pictures won't save a story. Jeff the Killer is popular, but widely acknowledged as just straight up bad. The plot is weak, the writing is awful, the characters are ridiculous. The image associated with Jeff the Killer is terrifying, but if you don't stop there, if you look at anything beyond the aesthetics, it falls apart. You have to bring more than some scary imagery to your story, whatever the medium. Otherwise, you end up with a mess. You end up with, at best, a work that will only ever be known for one, fleeting element of it.

And those are your first five don'ts. Tomorrow, we'll have the top five, and the end of a very fun series for me to work on. I like these bigger collections of blog posts… so you could safely expect more, most likely.

Top Ten Internet Horror DOs (Part 2)

**Note: Clicking on the links throughout this article will take you to horror of varying types and degrees, from mildly unnerving to gory to existentially terrifying. If that kind of thing wigs you out too much, or that's just not what you're looking for, this is your warning. I also take no responsibility for any curses, brainwashing, sudden deaths, or other similarly odd events potentially connected to these links. And, like Arthur Weasley said, don't trust anything intelligent if you can't see where it keeps its brain. Oh, and spoilers are going to exist in this article.**

Welcome back to hell. Or… my blog. Whatever. Yesterday, I did entries 10-6 on this series, and you can read that by clicking on the big happy face.

Remember the happy face. You might need it as we go through the last five. I will… of course, I don't handle this kind of horror particularly well either. But it's there if you do need it.

5: DO Focus on Your Concept

I teach a short story class with another author, and one of the things we both try to drive home is the importance of your idea. Especially in speculative fiction (Including horror), the idea needs to be solid. You need to know what your idea is, and you need to know it well.

Again, internet horror comes in to drive home a point that I would make anyway. It is a singular concept that sells most written internet horror. Jeff the Killer, for its many flaws, hinges on a well-traveled concept: the consequences of your actions may be larger than they appear. Smile Dog: misery loves company. Candle Cove: perception may lie. One concept, and everything builds around it.

4: DO Have Passion

No one has perfect execution on every part of a creative project. It's fucking impossible, in fact. Even if someone actually produced exactly what they had in mind, someone else could hate it. Look at Van Gogh's Starry Night. It's a master piece… but some people think his paint was laid on too thick. Because of that, they not only dislike Starry Night, but everything Van Gogh painted.

You know what people respect, though? Whether or not they like something, they want to see you go balls deep into it. Even if they don’t like what you've produced, they can then see that you, as a creator, were passionate about it. And if they do like it, then that will help them love it.

I'm not going to run through specific examples of this one. Internet horror is full of missteps, things that could have been done better or had more time given to them. But you know what? The genre is still successful, and the people doing it are still passionate. And that is a testament to the creators, in my opinion.

3: DO Shirk off the Genre Shackles

… or at least wiggle around in them a little bit. Horror is a breeding ground for monsters and aliens and magic. I love all those things. I love them done and I love them redone. But I also love it when some creator throws caution to the wind and goes outside of their purview. Or, at the very least, takes the access road running next to what's "normal."

The best example I have of this is a fairly popular series on Youtube called alantutorial. It's not supernatural. It's not particularly scary, in the traditional sense. But it is one of the most unnerving experiences I've had with fictional media to date. To sum it up, alantutorial is the web series of a man with unspecified developmental issues. He makes tutorials on ridiculous things no one would need a tutorial for (Such as crushing a can with wood.), or just makes incorrect tutorials. But he loves it. It's his passion, and damn it, he's going to do them.

As the series progresses, he seems to love the tutorials less and less. He has some traumatic experiences. He becomes destructive, and eventually, his caretaker (We assume his brother from context clues) locks him out of the house and bars his windows shut. This is a man who really can't take care of himself. And the ensuing abuse that follows Alan is not any easier to play witness to.

The series isn't scary because there's a monster after you, ooga-booga. It's scary because there's a… depravity to the kind of person who would do that. It's scary because we know this isn't all that fictional – this sort of thing happens all the time when someone with one of any number of mental disorders, learning disabilities, et cetera becomes "too much" for their caretaker. It's especially scary if you know someone who is reliant on another person for so much of their wellbeing.

Alantutorial is entirely fictional, thankfully (As a side note, Alan Resnick, who was behind it, is brilliant. Check him out.), but it feels a little bit too real. Even when it's clearly going over the top, you can't help but feel dread for Alan in that situation.

Now, it's not the only piece that does that. A lot of horror feels maybe just a bit too real in certain places. Sections of a lot of these indie horror shows online have a lot of realism to them. I can't make too many recommendations because the more realistic they get, the harder it is for me to watch them. As the whippersnappers say: it's too spoopy for me.

2: DO Embrace the Unknown

Not knowing is the basis of all fear. What's in the dark that I can't see? What are the motives of this thing? Why is this guy avoiding the moonlight? What's going on in my dreams?

But often, those questions are answered. That's totally valid, don't get me wrong. But I tend to lean with H.P. Lovecraft on this one: the not knowing is worse than the knowing. Or, as I've heard it many times: the audience's imagination will come up with something ten times worse than you ever would have created. Something unknown and not seen can't be ruined by substandard description or bad effects or a lack of budget or any other problems. In the mind of the reader, that terrifying fill-in-the-blank can be the scariest thing in the world.

Again, it's not the only way, but it is a way, and it's one that the internet horror crowd has taken to heart. I'm going to point you back at the SCP Foundation. Redaction, Expungement, and Black Boxes are key components in many of their pieces. SCP-087 does something awful if you send more than one person. SCP-447 does something with dead bodies that's too horrible to detail out. And then you have SCP-231, which is one of the most heavily redacted entries in the project. And Procedure 110 Montauk to control SCP-231, which is so horrid you need special clearance to learn about it. That is the power of the unknown. A few clues, some information skirted around… and the audience's imagination, now their own worst enemy.

1: DO Twist the Unoriginal

Internet horror, as I kind of hope I've shown, is… vast. There's a lot of it, and a lot of it interconnects somehow or another. But more than that, a lot of it comes from seeing it, hearing it, reading it. When Marble Hornets hit the scene, suddenly another half-dozen indie horror shows in a similar vein started… and flopped.

Because we've all seen Marble Hornets, too. You can't just remake it with your characters. You have to do something that's actually original with the idea.

I love riffing on ideas. I love squishing two or three disparate things together. It's actually one of my favorite ways to create new fiction. But when I do it, my first question to myself is: what's the angle? Where and how am I approaching this to bring something fresh to it? That's unfortunately harder to find in the wild. What comes immediately to mind is the channel StanFrederick. After you've watched some of the other similar shows online, find that one and you'll see what I mean.

But by now, I've started you down the rabbit hole, or you've already been there. So what did I miss that twists the norms around? Let me know so I can tap into the new veins of horror even deeper. And stay tuned for the top 10 DON'TS we can learn from internet horror, too.

Voss

Top Ten Internet Horror DOs (Part 1)

**Note: Clicking on the links throughout this article will take you to horror of varying types and degrees, from mildly unnerving to gory to existentially terrifying. If that kind of thing wigs you out too much, or that's just not what you're looking for, this is your warning. I also take no responsibility for any curses, brainwashing, sudden deaths, or other similarly odd events potentially connected to these links. And, like Arthur Weasley said, don't trust anything intelligent if you can't see where it keeps its brain. Oh, and spoilers are going to exist in this article.**

So, this is going to be different. And long. On a random fluke, I wrote up a two day blog post a while back. I didn't expect that, but I went with it. This time I'm expecting it. I'm expecting twice as long, actually. This is probably going to spread across 4 blog posts, so I hope you're in for the long haul.

So, Top Ten Do's to Take from Internet Horror. Two posts. Top Ten Don'ts to Take from Internet Horror. Two posts. But what the hell am I talking about when I say internet horror? What makes it special or unique? I'm a reader/horror fan/random passerby, why do I care about any of this? I'm not a writer!

What I'm talking about/What makes it special: Horror is an old, old genre, and it's gone through countless permutations. Gothic horror, with vampires and werewolves. The existential dread of H.P. Lovecraft and his contemporaries. 80's slasher flicks. The 90's brought splatterpunk. And in modern times, there's what I consider a new genre of internet horror. It's… hard to define. It encompasses creepypasta and the ARG phenomenon. We'll learn more detail about it as the list goes on.

Why you should care: admittedly, I'm putting these articles together with an eye to helping writers… myself included. But, at the very least, you may find some new things to read/watch/listen to. At the most, you could find it interesting to peek behind the curtain and see Professor Marvel pulling at the levers.

Okay, this intro is already getting too long for my tastes – let's get going.

10: DO Experiment

Now, this isn't exactly unique advice to be gleaned from internet horror, but I feel what people are doing with their online spooks drives it home very well. Traditional horror is just that: traditional. It follows a narrative structure, and it's told the normal way a story is. And that's great.

But internet horror doesn't need that to function. In fact, the lack of traditional narrative structure can be used to make it better, if handled correctly. One of my personal favorites is Candle Cove. It's just a basic, epistolary short story, told via forum posts, but it wouldn't be the same if told simply from beginning to end. Or, perhaps a bit more famously, you have the SCP Foundation. It's easily got to be the largest collaboratively written spec fic online… maybe ever. The community behind it creates everything. While there are narrative pieces involved, you don't need it. It's not the core of the work. Instead, everything comes from "internal files" written as a record of contained phenomena, detailing effects, encounters, and security measures. And believe you me, that shit is scary. Which, speaking of that…

9: DO Scare the Audience

I honestly can't believe I have to put this in when talking about horror, but here we are. I recently read one of the recent editions of Year's Best Horror. I put it off, because I read at night… and fuck that noise. But when I eventually started in on it… there was not a lot of terror there. The first story was, at best, funny. At worst, it was dumb and disjointed. But it was not God damn scary, and even if I was a little cautious about reading it, I wanted scary from my horror. Go figure.

Scary is not hard. If you try, you can sit there for a few minutes and come up with a list of shit that's scary. Big things, small things. It doesn't matter, something should be there that actually qualifies your work as horror. Even if it's just creepy.

Internet horror turned a husky into one of the most prevalent horror creations in decades: Smile Dog. Huskies are fucking cute, and if they can be scary? You can do something with it, trust me (Sorry, that was angrier than I intended it to be.).

8: DO Devote Yourself

Any modern indie creator will tell you that it's not easy. We're all struggling in one way or another. You can't start in as a creator of any sort if you're not ready to accept that, and lots of people quit when it doesn't work out how they want.

But let me tell you a story. It's a very short story about determination. In fact, it's seven words that speak to my point: EverymanHYBRID has been going for five years. Here's another one: Marble Hornets lasted for five years. Or how about this one: the SCP Foundation began in 2008.

Internet horror thrives on a devoted base of creators. These are people who do it for the love of what they're making, and that love drives them through the process of creation, come hell or high water.

7: DO Respect Your Audience's Intelligence

While it can be tempting to spell everything out, people are smarter than a lot of content creators seem to give them credit for. They can pick up on context clues. They can piece things together, and that’s especially important and useful when you're working with horror.

Now, this can be in a narrative sense. Take Candle Cove again. The ending could have been spelled out very clearly, thus robbing it of any value and ruining one of the best new horror stories in quite a long time (Okay, my opinion. But still. It's damn good). Instead, the author leaves it with the revelation that, as a child, he would watch static for half an hour when he said he was watching Candle Cove. That's creepy as shit, guys.

But there are broader strokes to it, too, and sometimes cleverer. SCP-231 has hidden text that can only be revealed if you mess with the scripts on the page. Marble Hornets and other similar projects hid actual ciphers and codes to be resolved in their work. Hell, NOC +10 may as well just be called "See if you can crack this code." Or heck, try pulling up all the information about "This HouseHas People in It." And good luck.

The modern horror audience doesn’t want to be spoonfed every scare. They want to have the realization that they should be terrified, and it's the creators job to just stay out of the way.

6: DO Embrace Subtlety

To go along with the intelligent audience, it's worth it to use subtlety to your advantage. I'm going to chime in with Marble Hornets stuff again because it's very popular and, of the three big-time Slenderverse Series, it's the one that I think is creepiest. And a lot of that is down to subtlety.

At first, you don’t see the monster. Not really. Anything you get from him is fleeting. A quick turn of the head, him standing in the background, the camera just quickly panning past him. That changes as the series goes, sure, but it's subtle to begin with. The Operator in Marble Hornets is… there. And that's the real terror. It could be there at any point. It probably is. It's probably around the corner. It makes every single episode tense, because you're watching and waiting for the Operator to show up, just like the characters.

In fact, the very original Slenderman "story" is all on its own very subtle. It was literally just two photos with the Slenderman in the background, and some implications of missing or dead children. That was it. And that was all it needed to be.

And with that, I'm going to put this aside for the day. I'll be back tomorrow with entries 5-10, and I hope you'll be back, too.

And… umm… here's some kittens to make you feel better, in case you actually went to any of those links. I did warn you.

Voss

My Personal Favorite Internet Horror Gurus

I said in the last post that I was just completely immersing myself in horror and weird fiction. A major part of that has been online, and a big part of that has been through the Youtube horror/dark fiction community. It's a relatively small (I mean, small compared to, like, the video gaming community.) group, but there's enough there to keep me occupied. And... well, I don't know, maybe some of you would be interested in my opinion on them. I'm going to give it anyway, but if you're here, I think it's safe to assume you might be interested in what I have to say. Or on the subject. Or something. I don't know, and fuck this transition. Here's my list of channels that, for me, are good jumping off points into the Youtube horror scene.

Night Mind:
I'm starting off strong. Night Mind wasn't my first introduction to the scene (I think I started with Marble Hornets, which inevitably led me to Night Mind.), but I feel like he's the quintessential hub for the community. His channel began as analysis with the big three Slenderman series (Marble Hornets, EverymanHYBRID, and Tribe Twelve). From there, Nick Nocturne (Our theoretically supernatural host.) devoted himself to not only analyzing more popular series (Don't Hug Me I'm Scared, alantutorial, The Mirror, Lasagna Cat) and videos (Unedited Footage of a Bear, This House Has People In It), as well as occasional forays into other media (The SCP Foundation, Urban Legends). Bur according to him, his main goal nowadays is to introduce new webseries to the public. He's where I found out about Eckva, HOOH, Ben's Playhouse, and a ton of others. And with almost 160,000 subscribers, he's pretty good at getting that word out there. Combined with a very alluring, dark voice and just generally high quality productions (From the beginning. Very little is known about the actual man behind the four-eyed cat, but I have to assume he has some background in editing/narration/AV Tech/etc.), Night Mind is the big daddy of Youtube horror, and if you only grab one of these channels into your collection, I would personally recommend it be Night Mind.

Midnight Marinara:
Now, this is less for the actual Midnight Marinara series on the channel, and far more of a recommendation for Undercooked Analysis, a long-running creepypasta podcast. It combines readings of various creepypasta with analysis from people experienced in the genre and a healthy dose of humor (The worse the story, the more humor included.). This one doesn't hub out into video so much, but it is the best channel I've found thus far to lead you into that world of creepypasta that is so important to the internet horror world.

SlimeBeast:
Now, SlimeBeast is not one I love at the same level as Night Mind and Midnight Marinara. A lot of what he does, I just can't totally jive with. So he's not exactly one of my favorites, but I think he is very important and very influential. He's a very successful, well-known creepypasta writer, and does mostly readings on his own channel. Not my cup of tea. But he does go into a lot of the more overarching content, and having a creator do that lends a unique perspective on that type of content. He sometimes goes too far for my tastes, and comes off a little bitter and angry. But some people will love his particular style, and he is still very worthwhile to check out.

Nyx Fears:
Now, this one's going to be short. Nyx isn't exactly an internet horror guru. Instead, he's a horror guru working on the internet. He covers a lot of modern major releases like Get Out and The Babadook. But he also, if you're looking at it as a writer or other creator, brings a nice look at everything. He understands a lot about film theory and structure, and can deliver that information through the lens of horror. Perhaps he doesn't belong on this list, but I do love Nyx and think he's a worthwhile channel to check into.

ScareTheater:
Now, the rest of these channels I found through Night Mind, in fact. Not ScareTheater. I will always prefer Night Mind above everything else, but a lot of the difference here is length. Nick Nocturne puts out long content, but puts it out considerably less often. ScareTheater's videos run anywhere from 3-7 minutes on average. ScareTheater covers a lot of short content, too. Videos like "Obey the Walrus" and "Mareana Mordegard Glesgorv." His content on longer-running series is, in my opinion, just not up to snuff, but I will happily queue up two dozen of his short videos and run through them while I'm working.

There are others who touch on the community that I think really deserve attention, but maybe don't quite fit the mold. Tats Top Videos has some excellent creepy content, but it's not the channel's main devotion. Arkham Reporter and The Exploring Series both have a fair amount of content if you're looking for Cthulhu/Lovecraft information. My last one is a real departure, but Pop Culture Mythology/Mixology is a lovely channel... or was, anyway. It's been six months, which is a death knoll for most Youtube channels. I'm holding out hope, though, because his content was so good. Not all horror, but... well, I guess I'm putting out a bit of a PSA. Not pressuring him to return, but maybe he'll feel better about continuing if he knows people are interested? I don't know. But, one creator to another, I love the content he created. A lot of people did, I imagine. So if it's life, I understand. But if you happen to read this and are just discouraged... you make good content. That's all I can say to you. You make good content.

So all that aside, that's what I've got. Hopefully it can help you out and, if you have any that I missed and just really need to know about, leave them in the comments below.

Voss

Author Interview: Andrew Michael Schwarz

Today, we have a guest. Huzzah! I met Andrew Michael Schwarz at Campcon back in June, and when I saw that he had a new release, I wanted to have him over here to talk to us. He has great taste in books, writes horror and dark fantasy, and shares my general disdain for actually naming favorite books. But I should probably shut up and let our guest get in a word.

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VF: So, tell us a little about yourself.

AMS: I’ve done a lot of different jobs and professions. I am able to pick things up quickly and do well with them. Because of this, for most of my life, I have been improvident, preferring adventure to stability. Growing up I fantasized about being a writer, but wrote very little. In my early 30’s I decided to get serious about it.

VF: You write horror and fantasy. Since we talk about subgenres a lot over here… where would you say the line is between dark fantasy and horror, if there is one?

AMS: I think horror is a very misunderstood genre. Like other genres there are many different styles of horror. I think traditional horror delves deep into subconscious fears and is heavily concentrated on death as the worst thing that can happen. In dark fantasy you get a more pleasing style of horror, where the fear of death is replaced with various examples of how to survive it--or I should say, how to keep living despite having died.

For me, all horror can be defined as “all the ways we survive death.” From ghosts to vampires to killers you can’t kill (Jason and Freddie) to narrowly missing being slashed apart, you have examples of how to beat death. It’s very interesting from that viewpoint because it puts the whole genre into perspective. We actually need horror because it shows us how to live forever and tells us that, above everything else, we are eternal. Over and over again, through all the various monsters and ways to “come back” it seems to want to show it, say it, prove it. Very interesting.

VF: What’s your favorite speculative fiction book or series? What about your favorite non-spec-fic book/series?

AMS: Hmmm, that’s not going to be easy to play favorites. China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station is high on the list, but I love Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles and Mayfair Witch books, and they are probably the winners. I am geeky fan boy with those books, like it made my day to get the last signed copy of the new vampire book that came out a few months ago. When I read those books, I am not even aware that I am reading. I am just floating in another world.

Non-spec-fic, it might be Les Miserables. Though I am only half way through it at the moment, I am enthralled with it. I love those characters and their plights.

VF: Which authors inspire you? What is it about them/their work that connects with you in such a deep way?

AMS: I love a lot of authors. I am a fan of Stephen King, Clive Barker, Neil Gaiman, China Mieville, some classic authors like Dickens and Victor Hugo, but I think on a consistent basis, Anne Rice really scratches the itch for me.

I have often wondered what it is about Anne Rice’s stories and characters that captivate me so much. I have looked very hard at this to try and figure it out. The best answer I have is that out of the tragically damned nature of her characters comes profound statements on the human condition, which resonates deeply with me.

VF: Your books tend to take place in urban and contemporary settings. Why do you think those settings lend themselves so well to speculative fiction content?

AMS: I think the city or urban setting is an extension of the traditional haunted house with its trap doors and secret passages of gothic horror fame. Cities, like old houses, are “alive” with history. We, in America, might not be able to appreciate this to its fullest extent because our cities are so young, but all you have to do is walk through an old European city like Amsterdam or Paris to feel the layers of rich history that permeates every nook and cranny.

In urban fantasy, this history wants expression. The city wants to come to life like an old haunted house. I think we can add layers of complexity to our still young American cities through our mythology.

VF: Who would you say is your favorite character of all time?

AMS: Another attempt to get me to play favorites. I’m going to say Stile of Piers Anthony’s Apprentice Adept series. I find this character’s integrity to be awe inspiring.

VF: A few rapid-fire questions. Be sure to think on your feet!

How do you take your coffee? With half and half, always.
Favorite after-hours drink? I’m a big fan of the Appletini
Night-owl or early-bird? Night owl, to my own detriment
Guilty pleasure TV show? I watch very little actual TV, but if I’m being totally honest here, I have to go with Saturday Night Live.

VF: Your book Incorruptible just hit print. You mind telling us a little bit about it?

AMS: Incorruptible introduces occult PI Thomas Hunter who is a cross between Phillip Marlow and Corwin of Amber. I describe it as occult, paranormal detective fiction. Thomas Hunter has a trio of entities that reside in his body and carry out various biological and mystical functions that allow him to investigate occult crimes and issues. Some of these functions include advanced healing, the ability to see ghosts and increased strength for short periods of time. These entities also have personalities and since they control parts of the body, they sometimes take over Hunter’s mouth and embarrass him.

He has no idea how he got these entities because he has amnesia. In Incorruptible he investigates the occurrence of bodies that don’t decay, what Catholic mysticism calls Incorruptibles, associated with saints. (Another way to survive death.)

This series fuses hermetic magick, Catholic mysticism and Freudian concepts. All the paranormal aspects are designed to walk the line between magic and explainable phenomena. An example is one of Hunter’s entities named Animal. Animal is the personality of Hunter’s physical body who often takes over Hunter’s motor controls to perform certain actions. Animal will occasionally speak for Hunter and Hunter will often have conversations with Animal where the two of them use the same mouth. So, one might say that Animal is a self-aware entity that shares the body with the individual known as Thomas Hunter and affords to him certain supernatural qualities, like increased fighting skill. Or one could say that Thomas Hunter is suffering from schizophrenia. All the magic in the book is designed to go both ways. Hunter is always trying to figure out how a certain “trick” is being done.

VF: And just one last question: what’s the one book you think everyone should read?

AMS: Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

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Thanks for stopping by! While he's packing up and I'm cleaning up the coffee mugs, check out this little sneak peek from Incorruptible, available in ebook and now in print! (You can find out more about Andrew over at his website, by the by.)

Excerpt:

I made tracks for the basement, where I guessed the Relic would be.

She didn’t have to show me where the basement door was. I’d spotted it coming in. It was the only door that looked original. It opened to a rickety set of wooden steps, which fell straight down into gloom.

If the ghost didn’t scare me, the steps surely did.

I got you, bud, said Animal.

My toes spread inside my boots, cat-like, and my thighs rippled in a strange peristalsis. I’d had no idea legs could do that. After, I was steady in the dark.

Not gonna thank me? he asked.

“Fuck you.” I was still pissed, but aside from his asocial tendencies, Animal is the kind of guy you want on your side in a knife fight. The one guy you would take with you on a vertical cliff climb. A flex of muscle here, a quickened reflex there and voilà, he’d have you landing on your feet and running to the next death trap while making a snide comment.

The basement swirled with dust. I sneezed. Unfinished, yes, but not what I was looking for. I needed to find the oldest thing in the house, and I figured it would be down here. See, the upstairs was all new. New floor, new woodwork, carpet, paint, you name it. Remodeled. I wanted the original house. That’s the part the specter holds on to. What I call the Relic.

That’s my own term. You could call it the “Object” or, I guess, the “Thing.”

“Relic” is more descriptive. Find the Relic, find the ghost. A cracker barrel slogan. It works a good ninety percent of the time. After that there are other ways.

I scanned the dismal dump. Lumps of dust covered stuff. Old mattresses, boxes, chests, sheeted furniture. The usual fare for such scenes. It bored me. God, it did. Hauntings had become so dull. It’s always the same thing. You rarely get variety. It’s equivalent to the private dick’s matrimony case. You get tired of chasing cheating husbands.

I strolled through the usual terrain and let my dead eye take the lead. Dust, dust, sheet. Dust, dust, sheet. Dust, dust, blue fire tongues outlining a rectangular pattern.

Bingo.

“Third, is that all we got, sweetie?”

No change in the scene meant, “Yes.” I stood back and did a quick eyeball measurement. Height and width of a door, yup, secret passage.

“Ani, need a kick,” I said and then waited. “Hello?”

“Waitin’ for Kairos, babe,” Animal retorted, using my lips to say it out loud.

“Jesus Christ, you guys are slower than shit today!” I yelled.

Then it came. The kick. My leg jolted forward at a speed I would not be able to tell you, and struck the blue flames on the far right of the door, about where the doorknob should have been. I felt nothing. Plaster exploded and an old, rickety oak door opened in a yawning creek, followed by a cold blast.

“Nice.”

The feeling in my foot would return after restoration of cellular homeostasis, about fifteen minutes.

Couple things to know: I died once, a fatal car accident, and when I woke up I wasn’t normal. I’d also forgotten everything that had ever happened to me, but for a single memory.

Afterwards, little by little, I’d learned that I had a bunch of weird fricking entities living in my head. I say “weird fricking” because that is the most apt description I have found to date. In time, I gave them all names. Or they had names and I discovered them.

Animal—or Ani—you’ve already met. Then we have Third, an entity that operates through my gray “dead eye.” I address it by Third and actually the thing answers up to nothing else. I have to address it politely, because if I don’t the little shit just tunes me out completely.

I’m not blind in that eye, but when I call on Third, she sort of hijacks the ocular nerves and changes channels. I get a spiritual overlay on the material world or really vivid visions depending on the application.

The best way to explain Third is like this: place a lens from someone else’s prescription over your left eye. Then imagine it had a dark tint to it. Now note how well your uncovered eye sees. That’s Third Vision, the eye that is not covered.

Kairos-Kronos: this is an entity that’s two sides of the same thing. The Einstein of the whole operation, Kairos-Kronos is always performing some abstruse calculation as relates to space and time. You address him as Kairos if you want opportune timing and Kronos if you want regular timing.

There’s one other, but we’ll save it for later.

My nipples went hard. Sounds sexy, but really it was just cold in there. I walked through the doorway and found what I was looking for. The room had not been touched. It had been sealed off and entombed. Preserved.

“Interesting Relic,” I said, “a whole hidden room.”

The temperature was an indicator, too, but it could have been colder due to the vault-like placement downstairs. This is yet another reason why I don’t use all those ridiculous gadgets. I mean, do I need an infrared thermometer to tell me my tits are hard?

Subgenre Special: Creepypasta

What? What’s that? This isn’t Saturday! You’re an imposter!

Nope. This is a bit of a special post for a couple reasons. One is that I’m actually posting one of these. Subgenre Saturdays are kind of on a bit of a hiatus for a lot of reasons. I really enjoyed writing them, but they are an awful lot of work on my part, and I’ve just recently signed several contracts (Seriously. Three contracts in a three day span.) and I have a lot of edits on the horizon. I was also running low on subgenres I have a lot of experience with. So I do intend to pick them back up eventually, but not within the next couple weeks, to be sure.

The other reason this is a bit special? Well, I don’t know for sure that you could really call this a subgenre. Today, I want to talk about creepypasta.

Scared? I knew you would be.

Oh, you’re not? And you couldn’t lie to me?

(A note, in good faith: some of the stuff in these links is really unnerving, including pictures that portray some (Photoshopped) body horror. You'e been warned.)

Creepypasta are a sort of internet-based urban legend. But also not quite the same. Urban legends are believed, at least by someone. Enough people that they move from mouth to mouth. Spiders in the bouffant, alligators in the sewer, that sort of thing.

With creepypasta, most people are fully aware that these are fictional accounts. Slenderman, Jeff the Killer (Warning: Terrible Writing), Smile Dog. You know, reading them, that they are totally and completely not real. But it doesn’t matter, because they’re still that kind of skin-crawling terror that’s so hard to capture.

Now, what kind of name is creepypasta? You’d be surprised how few fans actually know why these stories of fear are titled with such a silly-sounding name. It comes from the term ‘copypasta,’ which is just a block of text that gets copied and pasted from one internet source to the other over and over and over. Copy-paste to copypasta to creepypasta, for these deeply ‘creepy’ stories spread through the internet the same way.

It’s difficult to pin down exactly what makes a creepypasta a creepypasta and not just a horror story that’s been posted online. Part of it is the same as urban legends compared to other legends. They could maybe happen. Most normal legends, like most average horror stories, are so far-separated from our general, modern reality that they lack that creepiness. It’s not a hard and fast rule, but it’s fairly good starting point.

As a rule, creepypasta also leave a lot of room for experimentation and modern storytelling techniques. They don’t have to be linear narratives, or even traditional narratives at all. One of my favorites of all time is the series of creepypasta connected to Candle Cove. Seriously, those stories give me goosebumps every time, even when I know what’s coming. But the original and a number of the off-shoot stories are told in forum posts and interviews and other epistolary-style formats. A lot of them use pictures as an aid, or even audio and video. I’ve even seen some using hidden HTML code that are only available if you copy the base code of the website. Things like that help set creepypasta apart as a unique internet phenomenon.

If I were to recommend starters for you… well, I’d preface it by telling you to keep the lights on before you begin your dive into the realm of creepypasta. But aside from that, I’d say that you should go through and click the links to the creepypasta that I’ve shared in this post already. On top of those, I’d check out the Russian Sleep Experiment, Squidward’s Suicide, and Ben Drowned.

I won’t say that these are the best (Although I hold that Candle Cove is one of the top creepypasta on the internet.), but they are definitely some of the most popular creepypasta you’ll find, and they do encapsulate a good amount of what you’re liable to see when you read creepypasta, if you decide you like this genre... or whatever you’d call creepypasta, anyway.

Voss

Clear Lakes 44

If you were here last week, you probably saw me talking about TV shows, and you probably saw Marble Hornets on that list as my number five SF/F show, and me bemoaning the fact that, even though it's an incredible program (One of the best horror shows I've ever seen. Ever.), the experience of waiting for a new episode and seeing it posted on the channel was gone. New viewers would miss out on that one thing.

If you keep up on all things Marble Hornets, then you probably already know where I'm going with this. You probably knew from the second you saw the title of this article. If not, keep on reading because you won't be disappointed. Not at all.

It's back. Something is back and happening on the Marble Hornets channel, now called Clear Lakes 44 | Marble Hornets. three new videos have been posted so far, with more on the way, from the sounds of things. But what's more is there's something extra. Something special.

Marble Hornets, a Film by Alex Kralie

There's something strange going on over at the film's website, and possibly on the Twitter feed as well (@marblehornets). If you want the full, immersive experience, check all of it out. I recommend it. I, for one, am going to be watching out for updates from totheark on Youtube as well. Maybe nothing will be there, but it's not worth missing some information.

And of course, as fair warning: don't watch this with the lights off.

Voss

Subgenre Saturday: Splatterpunk

So, we’re back again. If you’ve been around Subgenre Saturdays with me, or just around this blog, you’ve probably figured out that I’ll take just about anything if you slap the word punk on the end. I know this about myself, I accept it, I’m good with it. So yeah, a lot of the subgenres here are going to be X-punk or punkpunk or whatever your preferred catch-all is.

Write along with this (I realize that was a typo. I did catch it, but it seemed too good not to leave in.) is something that isn’t quite the same as most of our other punkpunk genres. See, most of them fall under the big category of ‘retrofuturism,’ which is a fancy way of saying ‘tech/science that just doesn’t belong.’ High speed zeppelins and complex difference engines and machine guns that run on kerosene.

The key there is that they somehow subvert their given time period. Steampunk balks at Victoriana, dieselpunk at the ‘greatest generation,’ and cyberpunk at the distant world of the 80s. All punk genres are subversive, I think. That’s the binding theme, and today’s entry is no exception to that rule.

Ladies and not-ladies, I give you splatterpunk. Right around the dawn of cyberpunk, there was something else going on in the horror community. If you read horror, you’ll probably notice that it’s mostly about the psychological side of things and the suspense and tension. Which is amazing. I don’t do well with horror because of those things. However, there were several authors who, all independent of one another, decided that horror was too clean and distant. So they decided to muck it up and bring in intense gore and violence (hence the splatter) and, yes, a little bit of weird sexuality, too. It was very in line with the general ‘edgy’ vibe a lot of people were going for in the 80s, but splatterpunk was cranked all the way past eleven. While it’s something of a flash in the pan, as far as duration is concerned, it does still exist out there and, more importantly, it shook up the world of horror and brought back the gore.

Probably the most famous splatterpunk author (and director, screenwriter, artist, etc) is Clive Barker. Yeah, that Clive Barker. Candyman and Hellraiser and Books of Blood Clive Barker. They were dark and bloody in a way that wasn’t really seen at the time. This was the era of books like Misery and
Red Dragon. Clive Barker wasn’t the first splatterpunk, necessarily, but he more or less codified a lot of the things about this subgenre. He was to 80s horror what Lovecraft was to 20s horror. Both of them still have ripples flowing out into the world, influencing what people create to this very day.

Other well-known splatterpunk authors: Poppy Z. Brite, Jack Ketchum, Matt Shaw.

But it’s not just books (is anything ever just books?). If you want splatterpunk, look no further than the Saw franchise, or any of the horror movies directed by Rob Zombie. Hell, for that matter, just go watch some Clive Barker movies and really cut out the middle man. Hostel would fall into splatterpunk as well, and there’s a large movement in Japanese filmmaking involving splatterpunk as well. I can’t come close to naming them all, but Tokyo Gore Police comes to mind.

A lot of people will notice a similarity between splatterpunk and bizarro fiction… and they’d be right. I describe bizarro as ‘magical realism meats splatterpunk’ (Another good typo I just had to leave in.), and I think that about captures it. So if you’re not quite ready for the intense gore and sex and violence in splatterpunk, I would point you at any number of bizarro books. If you are ready? Have at it.

Wandering Weeds

Yahoo! Or perhaps YAWP!

I've just been accepted into the great anthology "Wandering Weeds: Tales of Rabid Vegetation", edited by the equally great Frances Pauli and Jaleta Clegg.

Why is it so great?

It's an anthology of what happens when weeds--mostly tumbleweeds, but that's not exclusive--go a little wrong. Radioactive tumbleweeds, enchanted tumbleweeds, but mostly just pissed off tumbleweeds with a sore spot about the human race.

And it's awesome.

I can't say too much about it--lord, it hasn't come out yet, so I don't really know much anyway--but from what I do know, I know it's going to be AWESOME. So...you should all buy it when it comes out, since it's going to be awesome. Have I mentioned that yet?

Peace,
Voss

Just in Time for Santa Claus

Horror for Good has an anthology open (until the fifteenth) for new, unpublished horror fiction. Now, I know there's no pay, but all proceeds go to AMFAR to help fund HIV/AIDS research, and you get a copy of the book--plus some awesome karma. Besides, don't you want to butter up Santa Claus right now? He sees you when your sleeping, you know--you should make up for some of those horribly violent dreams you've been having by writing for this antho--yes, I know about those dreams...and so does Santa Claus.

Seriously, though, you'll have my eternal love and gratitude if you write for this anthology. It's a cause very close to my heart, so whip out your collection of Poe, Lovecraft, or King, study up, and thrill me, chill me, and fulfill me, darlings!

Off to frighten the masses,
Voss