User blog comment:Archergirl131/Why?/@comment-24501610-20140421043016

Well, to put it bluntly, real life is terrifying. Think about it for a second. We live in a world where death lurks around every corner. Where terrible diseases wreak havoc upon us. Where wild animals can rip us limb from limb. And, where volcanoes, earthquakes, tornadoes, and all sorts of other natural disasters can destroy entire cities within minutes. Heck, and that's not even getting into things like radiation, severe allergies, vehicular accidents, and so forth.

Horror stories such as Creepypasta help us cope with those real-life terrors. Stories about monsters, ghosts, aliens, and tall faceless men in business suits are all ways in which we create some sort of metaphor for what we fear. They're also a temporary escape from reality and allow us to be scared of something fictional for a while instead of something all too real.

Allow me to give an example of what I mean. One of the biggest fears people had during the 1950s was that there would be a nuclear war and that atomic bombs would be dropped essentially destroying life as we know it. In particular, the country of Japan knew firsthand the horrors of the bomb (IE: The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945). Because of this, producer Tomoyuki Tanaka and writer/director Ishiro Honda decided to create a film that was an allegory about the horrors of the bomb. The film, released in Nov. 3, 1954 was known as "Gojira". Or, as we know it here in the USA "Godzilla: King of the Monsters".

Now, obviously there's never going to be a giant radioactive dinosaur rampaging across Tokyo or anywhere else in the world. That's just impossible. But, what Godzilla symbolizes in the film is very real. That, of course being people's fears of atomic warfare. That their home could someday be wiped out by nuclear fallout or an atomic blast. And, for the people of Japan, it represented the terror of what they went through during the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Creepypasta, in essence, are no different from the monster movies, horror novels, and so-forth of yesteryear. They are ways to help us cope with real life fears by replacing something real with something fictional.