User blog:EtherBot/Urban Legends: Are They Dead?

Just a heads up, this is a long one. It's both a thesis and a vent, so if you lack the patience, this might be too much of a challenge for you to tackle head on. I've made maybe four blog posts now about this site and about general creepypasta and have over those posts repeatedly talked about my fascination with the genre but never really directly discussed it. This blog will be an in depth look at horror but through the lense of my life dealing with it. Perhaps you think that perspective is pointless, perhaps it doesn't appeal to you, but at the end of the day, my opinion is trite without proper context. This is both my perspective on horror as well as a vague reflective peice on my life and how horror has shaped it, probably half of both. Beyond just general horror, I'll be talking about urban legends specifically, and why I think they're incredibly interesting, and also why I think they're going extinct. My first blossoming interactions with horror were probably the same things as many kids my age. Goosebumps, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, Courage the Cowardly Dog, even Scooby-Doo. These were the kinds of traditional children's media that fueled my horror-engines but there were also some less traditional ones. My older sister at one point introduced me to several Edgar Allen Poe stories, in exactly the perfect setting: a fire in the fireplace, at night, reading out of an old "Complete Works of" book under a blanket. I should also clarify that same older sister was the one who owned the copy of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark I read. My mother wasn't happy about either of those things, let me tell you, and with good reason. I had nightmares as a kid, bad ones. I'd wake up terrified, or screaming. I don't even remember these dreams -- I don't even remember the fact that I had any, I was only informed years later, well into my teen-hood. Despite these nightmares, I loved being scared. I had, for years, (and still to this day is it in my bookshelf, I think), a children's Poe collection I nicked from the school library in elementary school. It had the complete collection of the Raven, and an exerpt from Tell Tale Heart alongside a ghouling illustration of a man with a sleeping cap creeping down a staircase. My most remembered formative experiences with horror all took place in my earliest years of awareness. As soon I started gaining a sense of who I was...I had always liked horror. It was just the way it's always been. My stories I wrote had monsters, the drawings I drew had fangs -- and to be honest, most of my stories or drawings weren't supposed to even be scary. Sure I drew the occasional horror comic or wrote a spooky tale, or one time i made a coloring book with pictures of ghosts and stuff, and my favorite holiday was halloween, but for the most part my stories were superhero stories and action adventures with robots and shit. In elemntary and middle school, common internet legends like Slenderman were treated with genuine legtimateness. Sure, it was fictional, but no more fictional than say, werewolves. I grew up in washington and often walked home, or would explore the woods with friends. When I first had Slenderman explained to me, all I had to go off of was an image of a man without a face, except the description i recieved lead me into incorrectly picturing him with a farmers outfit. I was genuinely terrified of this weird faceless scarecrow-esque character, who supposedly stalked the woods. I was, as a kid, specifically fascinated with these things: urban legends. Slenderman, the Wendigo, Razorblades in candied apples, rats in sodabottles, everything of the sort. I discovered the "boring" notes section of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, the bits I always skipped were suddenly fascinating to me; thats where all these stories came from? That's what these stories meant to these people?? These were URBAN LEGENDS! As I got older, I explored deeper into the realms of where that slenderman thing came from. Creepypasta, he was a creepypasta. A fellow named Victor made him up, photoshopped some pictures, made a whole thing out of it. He was a story......The truth is, it's not like I didn't already know this. At least in some level, I know he was fake, I didn't truly believe in Slenderman. But seeing the creative process laid bare....it made something inside my click. I was terrified, by a story. Better yet, a story written by a person. What was stopping me from doing that? I can tell stories! I can make up monsters! It is the only central dream of a storyteller to affect people's lives, and although I didn't know what that meant at the time, I had an epiphany. My life was affected by whatever kind of loser Victor was. My life was affected by Edgar Allen Poe, and by Alvin Schwartz, and by John R Dilworth, and R L Stine. It was like I'd found my calling, in a sense. Because I could do that. Affecting peoples lives in the way others affected mine was achievable, by mere mortals, like me. By losers on the internet. So I started writing stories. Never really anything intended to be taken seriously, just spooky jaunts. An overly long story about a haunted chess set. Halloween specials of comics I was already writing. A comic about a killer arcade game, or something. I never uploaded these stories anywhere until I uploaded One Single Instant to...here. This website, this wikia, was the first place I'd actually uploaded....any of my stories to. Looking back on it, I can't stand the story. The basic premise is based on a flawed understanding of how light travels and the monster that appears appears for basically no reason. But there are several hallmarks in it that show me what kind of horror I'd gravitate towards in the future. Descent into paranoia. The terror of thinking you understand what's happening until you find something obvious that doesn't fit the pattern. Thinking about it now, that story was almost completely inspired by the famous, "The last man on earth sits alone in a room. There's a knock on the door" story, which gets done in 15 words what it took me an entire short story, at the time. But I got better, I uploaded different stories. I exploited the sites writers workshop, I engaged in the community, at least to the best of my abilities. I started to think critically about horror, and specificially about creepypasta. What was a creepypasta anyway? "Internet Urban Legends." Hm. Well that didn't sound right, at least not at the time. No, say I, you must be mistaken. I've read urban legends, I've studied urban legends. These aren't urban legends at all! These are just stories! Psychosis, Jeff the Killer, NoEnd House, Slenderman, those aren't urban legends whatsoever! Why, there's no pretense of reality, I'm not expected to fall for a trick, to be wary as I wander. I am supposed to point and say "oooh" and then feel a chill. But in the end of the day, they are simply stories, and they don't pretend to be anything else. That's the thing about urban legends, you aren't supposed to know they're urban legends. When Slenderman was a vague famer-garbed shadow in my forest's third eye, he was real, he was an urban legend. That story with the babysitter and the phone call? True story! At least as far as me or my friends knew! Same for the one with the boyfriend being hung and dragging his feet against the roof of the car, or the hook hand one, or the "HUMANS CAN LICK TOO" one, or the "AREN'T YOU GLAD YOU DIDN'T TURN ON THE LIGHTS?" one. All these stories were things a friend of a friend told me so I told a friend who told their friend. It was, of course, my interest in horror that made me care, but even errant observers enjoy a good thrill and that was the heart of the urban myth. Moms scaring moms, and teen girls scaring teen girls, in essence. It didn't matter whether they were true, obviously, but when you told the story, you treated it like it was. But, the internet being what it was, and humanity being what is it, there developed a creepypasta community. Stories weren't just hoaxes on random forums but specifically targeted campfire stories, tales and yarns being spun over the world wide web for the delighted audiences of community members who knew the stories were stories and were instead looking for general enjoyment and a scary time....for creative exercises. That's the tricky thing about the internet. Try and make a hoax, and the truth spreads fast. "Have you seen THIS MAN?" Probably not, because THIS MAN was totally made up and now everyone knows it. It's sad, in a way. Nosleep was reddit's answer to this paradox. "Why bother trying to prove what is a lie, when we can, instead, just all agree to pretend, right?"...a valiant effort. On paper you can really see how it wants to punch at the ROOT of urban mythology. "Isn't 'just pretending' the thing that urban legends urban legends? Isn't a shared understanding of the fiction mixed with a shared desire for entertainment the dilema that makes urban legends work?" Perhaps it is, but honestly it is a doomed effort. A shared understanding doesn't amount to much when the artifice is so blatantly present. You aren't deciding to relax and give into the myth -- you're being asked to play along, which is just not anywhere near the same idea. This might not be a problem, but assuming it is, and I tend to feel like it might be, it is the rare problem that teamwork cannot solve. We cannot all agree to bring back the urban legend, it just isn't in our nature to do so. The closest equivalent would be to start an elaborate conspiracy, but that's clearly not the effect I'm going for, lol. So what? Is the urban legend just dead? I dunno, to be honest. I think it is on a macro level, but possibly still exists for individuals and their families. Perhaps some people really do think they've seen THIS MAN, maybe they even have, who knows? To be honest, I feel like superstition and storytelling are too natural of a human trait to ever go completely extinct. But again on that larger scale, I mean, look around you: Snopes is a website purely dedicated to debunking urban legends. "Creepypasta" refers not to urban legend, but to internet fiction. Perhaps its better that way, perhaps its worse, perhaps its just another beast. It's times like this that make me think back to the classic legends. Many of which, the loch ness monster, the message in a bottle by the bermuda triangle, that photo of bigfoot, were revealed to be hoaxes by the people who started them. I wonder if they really were what the world made them out to be -- tricksters looking for fame -- or if, like me, they were similarly affected by legends; perhaps they too heard stories from friends of friends, were scared of the shadows at night. UFO sightings are easy to feign, but mysterious and wonderful, aren't they? Perhaps they also had the glee of shared, agreed upon hoaxes, and wanted to create their own.