Remember those chain emails your most obscure contacts would send you during the wee hours of the night that read something like “IF U DON’T FWD DIS A CREEPY CRAWLY GHOST OF A GIRL WILL COME OUT OF DA CLOSET AND KILL U” ?
Well they’re back. And they’re coming to get you for not forwarding all those emails.
Creepypasta is a term used to refer to internet horror stories & urban legends that are designed to frighten and disturb readers. A derivative of “copypasta” (think “copy-paste”), it is used to describe scary stories that are copied and pasted repeatedly across the internet in forums and web pages. There are countless creepypastas circling the web, but we will be focusing on one of the best known: Slenderman.
According to the Knowyourmeme entry, Slenderman began as a challenge on the Something Awful Forum’s “Create Paranormal Images.” He is usually described as a tall, thin, and faceless entity wearing a black suit. That’s right, faceless. Part of what makes Slenderman so scary is this ambiguity. This has led to Slenderman becoming very popular around the internet and has spawned stories, fan art, web series, and even video games.
“Marble Hornets” is one of the Slenderman based web series. It consists of roughly 133 videos uploaded by YouTube users MarbleHornets and totheark. The videos feature the lives of five friends whose lives are turned upside down by the presence of an entity they call “The Operator” (Slenderman). The videos feature various recurring characters and entities that all add a frightening touch to the show.
One of the characters comes in the form of youtube user totheark who uploads cryptic videos in response to the videos uploaded by the main channel. Most of the videos feature text, images and sounds which all end up producing a form of eerie poetry. Totheark is a recurring character in the webseries that creates unintentional e-poetry in each of his entries.
Totheark is one of the most important and mysterious characters in this webseries. What makes this character even more intriguing is the fact that his identity remains a secret. Interestingly enough, all of the e-poetry produced by totheark comes in the form of unintentional e-poetry. The videos are composed mostly of images, audio and text that all end up creating and incredible and chilling experience you will not soon forget.
In the end, Marble Hornets and Victor Surge are almost single handedly responsible for the creation of the Slenderman mythos, and although unintentional, totheark brilliantly combines art, text, and sound to create brilliant works of e-poetry that make this webseries unique.
If you are interested in diving head first into the discovery of Slenderman, be sure to check out the playlist below where you will be able to find all MarbleHornets and totheark videos. It is sure to chill you and who knows, maybe even make you a believer.