The Best Creepypastas That Never Became Movies

If there’s one thing Hollywood loves, it’s an inexpensive intellectual property ripe for the optioning. That’s why, for a moment there, it really looked like creepypastas were going to be the future of cinema.

For the uninitiated, a creepypasta is simply a scary story crafted for the internet. The noodly name derives from the memeable blocks of text known as “copypastas” that get copied, pasted, and shared across multiple forums on the web. The horror version of a “copypasta” is therefore dubbed a “creepypasta.”

Creepypastas have been a spooky season internet staple long before they were even known as creepypastas. Hosted across many subreddits, Wikis, and other online locales, creepypastas combine old-fashioned campfire storytelling with the urban legend-producing potential of the internet. As such, the medium has produced many iconic stories and characters like Jeff the Killer, Slender Man, Ben Drowned, and more.

And that’s where Hollywood was supposed to come in. Movie studios have made a handful of perfunctory attempts to turn the success of creepypastas into box office gold. After all, once something becomes an urban legend, it’s pretty challenging for an anonymous poster to come forward and claim copyright. But most of these attempts have borne little fruit.

Sony’s 2018 Slender Man movie was a critical disaster. Syfy’s creepypasta anthology series Channel Zero was great, but didn’t move the ratings needle much and was canceled after four seasons.* Indie productions of creepypastas have found considerably more success with Slender Man-centric YouTube series Marble Hornets standing out as a major creative win and Kane Parsons’ Backrooms series set to receive the A24 feature treatment soon.

*If you take nothing else away from this article, let it be that we desperately need more seasons of Channel Zero.

Still, the failure of creepypastas on a large commercial level has left many stranded spooky stories that deserved a stab at a bigger audience. If A24 is able to reverse the creepypasta movie curse with the aforementioned Backrooms, there are a whole bunch of stories that deserve to be seen on the big screen next.

Here are our choices for the best creepypastas that have not yet been made into movies.

The Rake

If Slender Man is the Michael Jordan of creepypasta cryptids, then The Rake is Scottie Pippen – still immensely talented but overshadowed by his more famous and skilled teammate. As many horrible things do, The Rake traces its origin back to the /b/ forum on 4chan. In late 2005, one of the site’s many anonymous users started a thread with “Hey /b/ lets [sic] make a new monster!” And thus The Rake was born and refined via internet hive mind crowdsourcing.

A pale humanoid figure that walks on all-fours, The Rake is just a fundamentally sound monster and a blank slate for many great spooky stories. He’s also tremendously popular among the image makers of the internet, which is why it’s a little surprising no one has tried to turn the ivory-shaded baddie into a horror movie star yet. While the Slender Man movie probably left a bad taste in Hollywood’s mouth, there’s no reason why The Rake can’t be a plug-and-play monster in the next hot horror script.

Penpal

While many creepypastas are designed to take on mythical urban legend status and get remixed across the internet, Penpal takes a markedly different approach. Originally posted on Reddit’s r/nosleep forum and then adapted into a novel, Penpal is the self-contained work of a singular author – Dathan Auerbach a.k.a. 1000Vultures. As such, it blends the usual first-person scary story narrative with a creative writing flair.

Told over the span of six installments (beginning with “Footsteps” and ending with “Friends”), Penpal finds an anonymous author recalling strange things that happened to him as a child and slowly coming to the realization that he was tracked by an obsessive stalker in his youth. Penpal isn’t the most obvious choice for a movie adaptation as it’s less visual than its creepypasta peers. But it’s easy to imagine a world in which its story of losing childhood innocence ends up as a thoughtful indie horror title.

Borrasca

Borrasca came about as close to becoming a movie as a creepypasta can without actually becoming one. That’s because this four-part series, originally penned by Rebecca Klingel a.k.a. The_Dalek_Emperor on r/nosleep, launched its author into the world of both podcasting and television. Borrasca itself became an acclaimed narrative podcast starring Cole Sprouse. Meanwhile, Klingel caught the attention of horror maestro Mike Flanagan and joined the writing staffs for several of his Netflix series.

Borrasca led to big things because Borrasca is quite simply very good. Like Penpal before it, the story is framed as recollections of the writer, Sam Walker’s, childhood in which his family moves to the small town of Drisking in the Ozark mountains. He soon learns that Drisking has many strange features, including a grinding noise in the distance that supposedly emanates from “Borrasca.” Though Borrasca has already had its day in the podcasting realm, it deserves a shot at brining its spooky mountain vibes to the big screen as well.

The Dionaea House

The Dionaea House dates all the way back to the old internet of 2004, before the concept of a creepypasta was even a thing. Written as a series of emails, blogs, letters, and other mediums of correspondence, The Dionaea House told a series of connected stories about a haunted house with a hunger for souls that transcends time and space. The series, penned by Eric Heisserer, didn’t confine itself to a singular web home (Reddit was in its infancy and r/nosleep wouldn’t arrive until years later) and as such it can be hard to track down the full narrative. Thankfully the Creepypasta archive maintains it as best it can.

Quite frankly, it’s shocking that The Dionaea House has not become a film yet. Though it must be said it hasn’t been for lack of trying. Heisserer optioned the story to Warner Bros. in 2005, almost certainly becoming the first creepypasta author to do so. The idea went through several iterations, name changes, and mediums before finally ending up in development hell, where it will likely spend the rest of its days. That’s a shame as the story only grows more impressive and spooky as time goes on. If nothing else, the experience at least launched Heisserer’s impressive career. The writer went on to pen Final Destination 5, Bird Box, Shadow and Bone, and Arrival, earning an Oscar nomination for the lattermost title.

SCP Foundation

In an entertainment landscape filled with storytelling universes, it really is inexplicable that no one has taken a chance on the SCP Foundation. Hosted primarily on the SCP Wiki page, the SCP Foundation is a sprawling collaborative writing project in which users craft horror and sci-fi stories all set within the same tenuous continuity. Within the site’s canon, the SCP Foundation is a mysterious group of paranormal investigators who look into supernatural anomalies that they ultimate dub “SCPs.”

The stories told within the Foundation’s universe cover all manner of SCPs from the standard movie monster SCP-106 to the haunted childrens’ program SCP-993 to even a magical coffee vending machine SCP-294. Figuring out who has the rights to all of these various concepts is surely a nightmare for Hollywood. But all it would take to establish a proper Creepypasta Extended Universe would be identifying a few choice SCPs.

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