Cool October air has always brought with it chilling tales to read, watch and listen to, for as long as humans could frighten each other by the fire at night. And the internet era is no different.
Take the story of the Slenderman. If you haven't heard of him, picture a man…. just out of view, at the edge of a forest…. standing eight feet tall, dressed in a sharp black suit and tie. You aren't quite sure if he's really there or not, but just when you catch a glimpse of what should be his face….you see no features at all, just a blank white surface…and your head starts to throb with what feels like static in your brain. You look away, only to look back and see the tall man suddenly closer to where you sit…. and somehow taller…now with tentacles snaking around his shoulders menacingly.
Slenderman is a ghost story that internet commenters have been copy-pasting between comment threads online since 2009, when one message board user posted a Photoshopped image with a slender-suited figure hiding ominously in the background. Like perennial campfire classics like "The Hook" and "The Woman in White," these "creepypasta" short horror stories have become remixable folklore, a collective memory starting with a single image spawning thousands more.
As today's storytellers search for inspiration to terrify, they've been looking to the past to find horror in the vast quantities of mundane and bizarre media ephemera that has piled up online, especially as more and more video has been digitized and been made searchable through sites like YouTube and Archive.org. That trend, the "analog horror" movement — part of this week's full hour on the mundane of our world being twisted into terror — taps into our collective anxieties of what effects the latest technologies and social trends might have on us.
—Mark