Posted in: Movies | Tagged: creepy pasta, entertainment, film, horro, nosleep, reddit, slender man

Slender Man, nosleep And The Rise Of Grassroots Horror – Look! It Moves! by Adi Tantmedh

Published Mon, 03 Nov 2014 10:30:46 -0600

Adi Tantimdh writes,

A few weeks ago, I went to a panel at Youtube about Indie Horror filmmaking. In attendance were Troma head Lloyd Kaufman and indie horror directors Larry Fessenden, Glen McQuaid and Onur Tukel, all New York filmmakers who made movies outside the studio system and the mainstream.

Lloyd Kaufman produced The Toxic Avenger and Class of Nukem High, Larry Fessenden made the New York Downtown vampire movie Habit, thriller Wendigo and The Last Winter. Glenn McQuaid made the period body-snatching movie I Sell The Dead and contributed to the horror anthology movie V/H/S. Onur Tukel made and stars in the Brooklyn vampire comedy Summer of Blood. They were all passionate about making movies and passionate about the horror genre, pointing out that the greatest potential for the Horror genre wasn't the safe jump-scares that Hollywood Horror movies like to settle for, but for tackling truly uncomfortable, discomforting and transgressive subject matters. Horror is one of the genres that directly addresses the anxieties and insecurities of society, and often operates outside the mainstream. Horror was about disquiet, to remind us that things are not all right. You could say the ISIS beheading videos are the best horror films being made now.

The filmmakers talked about how much harder it's becoming for independent filmmakers outside the studio system to get their movies released now, how hard it is to then get reviews and marketing in order for the general public to know about their movies and see it so they can make back the money spent on production, The elephant in the room was the notion that theatrical movies was a dying business model. Kids and young people are spending more time watching their shows and movies online, not to mention following shorter films on YouTube and Vimeo and spreading the news through social media.

I looked around at the attendees at the panel. The place was packed with twentysomething filmmakers with YouTube channels and horror fans, and it got me thinking that the future of the Horror genre was on the indie, grassroots side before the mainstream eventually co-opt it. They all have smartphones now that can shoot high quality video, which means they could shoot horror movies and post them on YouTube and social media sites for everyone to see. That's a good way to create horror short films that can go viral. That might be where the future of horror films lie, as an underground indie movement.

There's already a grassroots movement in Horror Fiction online in the form of websites like Creepy Pasta and the nosleep subforum on Reddit. These are places where teenagers and horror fans gather to write and tell horror stories of all types. Creepy Pasta is where Slender Man was created, a crowdsourced campaign to come up with a horror urban legend that was entirely fictional. Slender man recently became notorious for inspiring two mentally unstable 12 year-old girls to try to murder a friend from school, prompting the types of moral panic in the media that used to be commonplace over horror movies in the 1980s.

I'm quite fond of nosleep. It invites readers to submit stories and to treat them as real, encouraging forum members to interact with the writers as if the stories were real to create a different headspace through roleplaying and fantasy. In that respect, nosleep becomes a repository for zeitgeist anxieties: stories of ordinary encounters with serial killers, stalkers, madness, ghosts, supernatural entities, unexplainable incidents that intrude on their everyday lives. There are stories of technology taking on a sinister side like a hacked computer spying on the writer and his family, a YouTube prankster who might be a serial killer, There are stories of a family member disappearing, presumed dead, but who keep sending text messages pleading for help from places unknown. There are stories of unfathomable things that happen in office buildings at night that the writer was unlucky enough to witness while working as a security guard. There's a story about a teenage who thinks that his new neighbour's mother has been murdering people who cross him that's a great study in paranoia and possibly psychosis as there are hints in the story that the neighbour and mother might not actually exist. There are even serialised stories told in instalments, like one about the writer stalking a hitman he'd hired for a cat-and-mouse chase to the death. There are one-off stories of disquiet, like being along in the house but realising there might be someone in another room who shouldn't be there. Some stories are more skilfully written than others. That many of them have grammatical and typographical errors only adds to the sense of people just sending in stories the same way you tell ghost stories around a campfire. Readers vote for their favourite stories every month, which then get compiled into an e-book later on. Some stories have gone on to get published.

Nosleep feels like a crowdsourced Twilight Zone in the way contemporary fears and anxieties are expressed through reader-generated horror stories without the guidance of an editor or showrunner, so the chaotic free-for-all gives the site a feel of an ever-evolving continuum where the weird, the horrific, the disquieting stories are gathered to create an alternate reality that may or may not be our own. That it keeps going without the attention of mainstream media means it's another underground pop culture venue where the really interesting stuff is being created rather than the more structured, predictable narratives of Hollywood or mainstream book publishers.

People who want to write and read horror stories are doing it for themselves on social media. I'm just waiting for horror filmmakers to start doing the same with their smartphones, whether it be a quick, improvised vignette or a full-fledged production, adapting to the speed and convenience of the internet and social media. That's often where the truly interesting stuff comes from.

Boo! at lookitmoves@gmail.com

Follow the official LOOK! IT MOVES! twitter feed at http://twitter.com/lookitmoves for thoughts and snark on media and pop culture, stuff for future columns and stuff I may never spend a whole column writing about.

Look! It Moves! © Adisakdi Tantimedh

Enjoyed this? Please share on social media!