“Dark and Wicked Things”: Slender Man, the Folkloresque, and the Implications of Belief

“[A] story about a child is scarier than one about an adult roughly 80% of the time”: Creepypasta, Children’s media, and the child in media discourse

“…1 Like horror and the contemporary legend, creepypasta depict both the supernatural and the preternatural and, as they locate these mysterious forces in contemporary settings, practices, and technologies, can be interpreted as expressions of "anxieties about a group's cultural worldview" (Ellis, 2003: 12). While creepypasta are, first and foremost, fictional horror stories, they are characterized by their attempts to depict the experiences they describe as plausible and are invested in establishing what Jeffrey Tolbert (2015) calls an "atmosphere of belief"-"a context in which tellers and audiences of supernatural narratives may be open to the possibility that a supernatural narrative is real" (40). To affect this "atmosphere of belief," creepypasta typically begin by invoking the real-by way of, for example, citation of a real-world event or artifact-and then proceed down a literary slippery slope that leads to a revelation of horror.…”

“…While scholars have examined these popular writings about Geyser and Weier to offer commentary on creepypasta and Slender Man (see : Peck, 2015;Tolbert, 2013Tolbert, , 2015, a sub-generic strand of creepypasta that makes young people and television media its subjects is an additional and untapped source of critical analysis. These creepypasta represent vernacular contributions to discussions of young people's interactions with mass media that, as they both evoke and contest dominant and institutional discourses employed in scholarly and mainstream analyses, suggest a popular interest in questioning the "established mythology of childhood innocence" (Jenkins, 1998: 1) referenced by and within these discourses.…”