Scary Things

I always forget how much I like shitting my pants from fear until genuinely awesome horror presents itself to me. Lately though, it's been a much bigger part of my daily intake, which I can thank the guys over at my forums in the scary shit thread for.

I recently read 2 horror novels. They were both thoroughly entertaining and it felt awesome to read books again. The last time I read this much for recreation was too embarrassingly long ago to even want to remember.

The first book was House of Leaves. Pretty much it's about this guy who has sex all the time then finds this manuscript to a movie that doesn't exist and then continues to have sex all the time until he has so much sex that he is homeless. The manuscript in question is called the Navidson Record. It's the story of a family who moves into a house that is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. A door pops up in their living room that leads into a never ending abyss of scary. The stress and fear this instills in the people living in the house is so bone-chillingly real that you will actually start to question if just what the hell you're reading is nothing more than a novel.

The other book is John Dies at the End. This one is a horror comedy and let me tell you that I have never seen a more beautiful combination of the two words. This book is abso-freaking-lutely hysterical! I have never laughed audibly at a book. Maybe a smirk here or there but this shit had me rolling on my bed. It's about two slackers called John and Dave who take a drug they call Soy Sauce that opens up a world to an alternate and monstrous dimension that they often believe to be hell. They start seeing freaky shit and they start a business where people see weird shit and they take care of things. What makes the book so funny are all the genuine characters. John and Dave are the type of guys I'd expect to find at the mall on weekend maybe without all the hell-beast adventuring part.

What strikes me as neat is that these are two very well-regarded horror novels and they both circulated around the internet before they gained an audience and were published into novel form. The flood of creative media that comes out of the internet is so immense that I wonder what is out there left to be found and enjoyed.

Which leads me to Slenderman. Slenderman is a tentacled, suit-wearing, 6 foot tall and faceless monster that is currently the the king of horror on the internet. The legend goes that he stalks children and likes to hang out in the woods and the deeper you get into his whole lore the closer he is to getting his crazy tentacles around your mind and then nobody knows what happens once he has you.

It started off as a simple horror photoshop game on the SomethingAwful forums and then it took off and spread like wildfire. There are now a bunch of blogs, youtube accounts and community forums based around the mysterious entity. Some of them are utter crap but there are quite a few decent ones. Easily the most recognizable Slenderman tale is MarbleHornets. It's a series of viral videos about a kid who is being stalked by Slenderman after his friend disappears trying to escape him. This series gave way for a rush of new fan created account of Slenderman attacks and sightings.

The scary thing about Slenderman is that it comes to a point where there are so many stories that other blogs and videos start to reference one another and you essentially end up with this fictional world set within the rules of another fictional world. There were a few days where I became paranoid that all the Slenderman research I was doing would result in some sort of hallucinogenic freakout that I would then write about in a tumblr account and restart the cycle for some other helpless sap. It never did. I've been wanting to write my own Slenderman story for a while now but I'm still kinda freaked.

The next step into my downwards spiral of crippling fear-induced anxiety is Uzumaki. Some horror manga type deal. Sounds like fun! Which reminds me that I have to finish Death Note...

P.S. I'm sorry if you don't like horror and you just happened upon this post. Please accept this picture of a flying kitty-cat if I have left you too scared.