So there are certain creepypasta (creepypasta.com) that stick with you. Certain creepypasta tropes appeal to certain people and none of them are that scary in the light of day, but depending on what one’s preferences are there are definitely creepypastas that can get good and lodged under the skin.

What scares me is madness, the dissolution of the self, uncertainty as to what’s real, as to what’s dangerous, and at the core of it, what’s actually there. Or not there.

It stands to reason, then, that the creepypasta that frighten me are ones like Slenderman, The Russian Sleep Experiment, and Psychosis.

One of the elements that my preferred pastas share is an element of the uncanny.

Uncanny: [uhn-can-nee] adjective. 1. strange or mysterious, especially in an unsettling way. “The proportion of his tentacles to his knee joints was uncanny.” Syn.: eerie; spooky; eldritch.

Uncanny is synonymous with creepy. Psychologically, uncanny experiences are at the same time mundane and incongruent with what one expects. They’re the smiles that are just a little too wide. The eyes that are just a little too much pupil (or a little too little iris). They’re the possessed nine-year-olds spider walking backward down the stairs, in more overt examples.

Given my distaste for the state of insanity, that which is uncanny naturally sets me off. I don’t like Samara Morgan. From the ring. I pride myself on being open-minded but I can’t take the hair over the face or the fact that she walks like a wounded, unholy gorilla-hyena hybrid.

I know on its face the idea of a clown being scary is cliche and boring and silly. But the fact is that humans have evolved to categorize things and it stands to reason, psychologically, that many of us don’t care for clowns. They fit our schema for “human,” yet the skin is too white, the expressions are either wildly exaggerated or they often don’t match the clown’s actions, and we are wired to behave based on social cues deeply embedded in expressions, movements, and voices.

And then there’s the whole Gacy association. Which is honestly creepier than pretty much anything about a legit clown.

I don’t like (and at the same time am obsessed with) Slenderman for these very reasons. Slenderman, without a face, impossibly proportioned, and whose immediate intentions are unclear but whose long-term goal seems always to be to drive mortals to madness, drives me nearly too far.

So. I’m going to write a creepypasta. I don’t know how. I’ve never tried to write genre fiction before and creepypasta are not fiction. Inherently, they are different. But I am gathering ideas. Ideas to do with camera phones and webcams, hackers, burglars, and cognitive dissonance at its finest.

Creepypasta are a lot harder to write than they initially appear. I’m struggling. But I will press on. In the meantime, check out The Russian Sleep Experiment and Psychosis for good (in my opinion) examples of madness in creepypasta. Check out www.creepypasta.com/smile-dog/ for a great example of the uncanny.

Smile Dog’s not creepy, really. In fact, it’s a bit comical, but it’s a great example of uncanny and why, if it works, it has worked.