sharpestrose:

frog-and-toad-are-friends:

kramergate:

I think one of my least favorite traits of many many top rated nosleep stories is the thin almost invisible line between “something creepy happened and I can’t explain it” and “here’s a bunch of creepy imagery that I as an author have put no effort into devising a link between or a backstory for” and it’s just… Readily apparent sometimes

I read a good story about a guy who went hunting with his dog and stayed in a cabin for like a week. His dog is acting weird and goes missing and three days later comes back… Except it’s just not his dog. It seems “too long” sometimes and doesn’t appear to blink. He hikes in the woods without it and comes across a clearing of completely mutilated skinned animals, decides he’s had enough, and plans to leave the next morning. Overnight, he hears his “dog” calling his own name out the back door and whistling, and in the morning, the “dog” is gone along with all the meat he had hunted. To me, it was a case where we knew as much as the narrator knew, which wasn’t a lot. It was creepy and unsettling but not over the top.

Later I read one about a couple staying in a foreign resort where they had been rude to the desk clerk so they were moved into a different… Haunted… Building? All the lights were off and they heard voices and a little girl appeared crying outside their room and at one point they looked down the hall and all the other residents were outside their respective rooms “smiling creepily” (of course) directly at them. It felt cheap. There was no substance. I dunno. Maybe I’m a picky stickler for stupid shit

I think you’re exactly right tbh

Good horror stories are written about what scares the author, bad horror stories are written about what rational atheists on Reddit think scares those silly superstitious phony crumb-bums.

I think another key element for creepiness is a lack of resolution. Creepypasta/nosleep stories are a couple of paragraphs, meant to send a shiver up the spine of someone reading on their computer late at night. While some of the best and most infamous do have resolution, or at least a sense of a circle closing, for the average example it can be a real detriment.

“There’s a weird deep sound nobody can explain coming from a trench in the ocean” is creepy; “there’s a weird deep sound nobody can explain coming from a trench in the ocean, and when decoded it says ‘hell is real, and we are there’” is terrible and not creepy at all. 

The best tone to aim for is for something to be off – call it unheimlich or the uncanny valley or whatever you want, it just needs to be something that’s almost ordinary, almost your dog. That crawly feeling when you’re in an unfamiliar elevator alone at night.