Channel Zero, a new horror series on Syfy, begins when Mike Painter returns to his small hometown in Ohio after having nightmares about Candle Cove, an unnerving puppet show that ran when he was a kid. The show correlated with a series of missing children, one of whom was his brother. Painter is worried history will repeat itself.
If the name “Candle Cove” sounds familiar, you aren’t losing it. Candle Cove has been lurking the internet for years as a creepypasta, or an online urban legend. They’re the same kind of spooky stories we used to tell around the campfire, only now we share them on Reddit and other online forums. With Channel Zero, the ghost stories of the web are outgrowing their usual haunt, the most famous of which will be the the subject of each season, six episodes each.
Videos by VICE
Originating in 2009, Candle Cove comes from a conversation on a nostalgia forum where several users tried to reminisce about a puppet program they can only recall hazily. It starred pirates and a meatless “Skin-Taker.” One user describes a nightmare they had about the show, and another replies that their bad dream was an episode. They all agree it was nauseating for reasons difficult to describe. The thread ends when mike_painter65 reveals that in reality, according to his mother, the TV only played static whenever he sat down to watch the program.
“You had a big imagination with your little pirate show,” said mike_painter65’s mom.
In a phone conversation, Paul Schneider, who is playing Painter, a child psychologist in the series, told me about his first multimedia scare as a child. A variation on a moment that sticks with a lot of kids, Schneider mistakenly walked into a theater playing David Lynch’s The Elephant Man after using the washroom, while his family and friends saw Disney’s Song of the South.
“It was a black and white movie, the scene where a nurse brings John Merrick tea up to his room, basically sees him in the flesh for the first time. She drops the tray she prepared for him and I ran out of there, back into the correct theater. To this day the song ‘Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah’ has a dark undertone for me.”
Candle Cove, a show that haunted its young audience, is not real in any sense, and neither is the forum thread about it. It was created as a creepypasta by cartoonist Kris Straub, who is also accredited in Syfy’s series adapting it. Stories like these, mock web pages and vaporous documents shared throughout chatrooms are known as creepypastas, a recent extension in a long tradition of horror and technology.
The earliest gothic literature from the likes of Horace Walpole and Mary Shelley were, likewise, in the style of discovered documents detailing grisly faraway events. From the beginning, horror was presented as found stories as opposed to completely imagined fictions. Horror stories are scarier if they could be real.
Flashforward to the radio age and you get Orson Welles’ infamous Mercury Theatre War of the Worlds broadcast that sparked panic among an already war-wound audience in 1938, and an even more violent riot to the same radio drama in Ecuador a decade after. Action television has its Ghostwatch. Arcades their Polybius. Every technological rift has an iteration of the tall tale, because humans seem inclined to believe ghost stories.
Creepypastas are the latest phenomenon, and Candle Cove is one watermark among many. Ted’s Caving Page, an early aughts blog, documented a spelunker’s descent into a claustrophobic cave, possibly disturbing a creature within. Details of a Russian sleep deprivation experiment leads to grotesque results. A seemingly haunted Pokemon cartridge here. A seemingly haunted Zelda cartridge there. Making it impossible to remove the author from the art, many creepypastas revolve around whatever nerd junk the creator obsesses over. My brother and I have a drinking game where we YouTube “creepypasta” and any 90s cartoon to see which gets more hits. Remember Doug? I bet you didn’t remember that Skeeter was a heroin addicted ghost and Roger was never born. Or some crap like that.
The Ronald McDonald of creepypastas is Slender Man. A stringy faceless stranger in a suit, who lurks in the forest and is notoriously easy to photoshop into images, he spread ferociously through fan fiction, films, and video games. Slender Man was brought into the larger spotlight after a truly eerie and grisly incident in 2014 when two 12-year-old girls stabbed a peer 19 times hoping to appease the meme. The victim thankfully survived the attack. The stabbing incident seems to get its nod in Channel Zero, and while it could just as easily be an homage to Children of the Damned, Channel Zero resides in a world where creepypastas could be real, where cable access kid’s shows hide malicious intent.
Image: Syfy
Despite what creepypastanites think, changes to the source material and nature of Candle Cove is not Channel Zero‘s biggest problems. On top of the Candle Cove cast brought to life on screen, the first season also stars a child made entirely out of teeth, a soft rattle signalling its lurking, an image that could easily fit in any creepypasta.
Channel Zero‘s bigger problems are related to its open-faced slobbering over “legacy television.” In mimicking stylistic choices we see from HBO and AMC hits, the show moves at a snail’s pace with extremely slow pans, extremely pensive dialogue delivered like those sloths from Zootopia. Channel Zero certainly gets creepy, but only by the third episode, when questions of how characters outside of Painter relate to Candle Cove is mercifully established, and the grisly puppets become real-world phantoms.
Switching something from an online, often authorless and ambiguous medium to a televised serial will take inherent sacrifices. Channel Zero isn’t scary for the same reason creepypastas are scary. The essence of creepypastas, a story being out there on the same internet you’re on, that the monsters are crawling on the other side of the connection, are what popularized them. But as they grow more famous, or the shocking Slender Man incident in 2014, it’s clear that creepypastas cannot continue to exist as is. Many know that these ghost stories aren’t real, but as that fact becomes accepted, as the stories become publicized, they’ll grow less attached to their gothic style and sensibilities, instead sticking to conjuring new vague, grimacing ghouls that typically star in these stories.
I feel like I don’t have to Google to confirm if a major movie studio is optioning Slender Man. Fine, I’ll do it anyway.
Podcasts like No Sleep, which perform creepypastas from the subreddit of the same name, are upfront that it’s all fiction for entertainment purposes, and that every terror tale has an author. However, other audio dramas like The Black Tapes and Limetown treat their fictional supernatural phenomenons like Serial addresses its real-life crime stories, making few gestures to acknowledge itself as fiction. If creepypastas are being forced out by their own infamy, then fans of that brand of terror need not worry. Creepypastas’ tradition of reality-fiction conflation is moving from the written word to audio, not unlike the timeline between Walpole and Welles. As history repeats itself, each new technology trend is being followed by the strange and terrifying things that are standing right behind you.
