Creepypasta, ‘Candle Cove’, and the digital gothic

Abstract

Throughout the past decade, a multimodal type of internet storytelling has developed that extends upon the early Web 2.0 viral narrative practices of chain emails as well as pre-digital folkloric storytelling traditions such as the ghost story and urban legend. This popular mode of digital storytelling, known broadly as ‘Creepypasta’, is produced and consumed according to folkloric practices that in turn shape its form and aesthetics. The author suggests that a precise genre has emerged out of the originally wide-ranging terrain of Creepypasta, a generic mode constituted of specific thematic preoccupations and aesthetics that she refers to as ‘the digital gothic’. Through analysis of the foundational story ‘Candle Cove’, the article outlines the digital gothic’s anxious preoccupation with dead and residual media, and with the interface between technological and personal change. She demonstrates how ‘Candle Cove’ deconstructs nostalgia in its tense negotiation of the relationship between analogue and digital cultures. The author’s analysis thus illuminates how vernacular online genres such as the digital gothic productively work through the aesthetic and conceptual tensions underpinning technological change in the networked digital era.