In my first article in this series, in which I offered a brief introduction to Creepypasta (short horror stories or unsettling images/ videos copied and pasted throughout the internet), I touched upon the fact that many Creepypastas rely upon suspension of disbelief to be effective.
Sometimes it relies on a reader willingly
working with the tale, but at other times the storyteller presents their tale
in such a way that the audience can’t help be caught up and go along for the
ride.
One of the most convincing — and famous —
of these is the story commonly referred to as BEN Drowned or Haunted Majora’s
Mask
The manner in which the internet
(especially message boards) allows for believable episodic storytelling, plus
the inclusion of supporting media such as images, sound and video files, was
beautifully utilised back on 7th September, 2010, when a user ‘Jadusable’
recounted a ghoulish tale of a haunted video game to his fellow 4chan /x/ board
users.
The very long and detailed story (which
you can read in its entirety here) is well worth taking the time to read, but to
summarise, Jadusable was a college student who got his hands on an old Nintendo
64 games console and subsequently sought out some games for his hardware. At a
local yard sale he discovered a strange looking copy of the classic N64 game
The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, which he was then given by the creepy old
man holding the sale.
Upon playing the game Jadusable noticed
the game had a saved file named BEN and, despite deleting this file, the ingame
characters would regularly refer to him by this monicker. Later Jadusable
describes attempting to use the famous ‘Fourth Day Glitch’ (a trick that can be
used to beat the game’s internal time limit), however, this caused the game to warp,
with messed-up graphics and eerie reversed music, and propelling him into a
series of spine-chilling encounters with characters within the game: the creepy
Happy Mask Salesman; the diabolical Skull Kid boss and a relentless, haunting
Elegy of Emptiness statue.
Jadusable went on to post links to Youtube
videos he made to support his increasingly spooky stories (day four.wmv; BEN.wmv; DROWNED.wmv; and jadusable.wmv.)
Finally an individual claiming to be
Jadusable’s roommate uploaded two last files at Jadusable’s request — one a
final video (free.wmv); the other a text file uploaded to MediaFire titled
The Truth, which you can download here.
Through these we discovered the true depth
to which the entity by the name of BEN haunted Jadusable, somehow possessing
his computer and conversing with him via unnerving cleverbot chats, all the
while playing a series of cruel mind-tricks on its victim. Jadusable eventually
points out that he feels he has been able to trap the entity in his laptop
which he would then destroy. However, the last lines of the text file (which
unwitting readers would have downloaded, hence downloading BEN with it) suggest
that BEN has now fled into the internet. Furthermore, Jadusable said that
nobody should trust anything coming from his YouTube account after 12th
September 2010. Shortly after that date, Jadusable’s profile pic became that of
the relentless Elegy statue from his story and his location changed to: ‘Now I
am everywhere.’
Plenty of web users found themselves
caught up in this tale, and for good reason. It’s wonderfully well-told and,
brilliantly, the final chapter even goes so far as to address any
shortfalls/shortcomings in the text/videos by revealing that BEN has been
altering and editing Jadusable’s work to undermine and discredit him.
It’s a fantastically worked piece of
fiction… but it IS fiction.
Since the story went viral, Jadusable has
revealed his true identity, Alex Hall, and stated that the entire thing was an
elaborate work of art he concocted while bored at college. Since then he has
gone on to achieve plenty of success thanks to the project (which even expanded
with a second arc revealed by playing along with an Alternate Reality Game, or
ARG, that incorporated a mysterious cult called The Moon Children) and is set
to soon release his first movie, Methods of Revolution. The movie draws
influence from his own battle with writer’s block and a lack of inspiration
following the tremendous success of BEN Drowned.
So what caused this success? Why did BEN
Drowned resonate so well?
As obvious as this statement may seem, it
worked first and foremost by being good. Well written, well plotted, well
supported and cleverly told, BEN Drowned is head and shoulders above some of
the more slapdash Creepypastas out there.
What’s more, it mines the inherent
creepiness of items that are out of time. Much like eerie gramophone records,
old film footage and even creepy and black-and-white photographs have become
horror staples due to their inherent ‘alien-ness’ to modern audiences (not to
mention the fact that older items have their own history, one which could
involve any amount of death or depravity), the passage of time is now shifting
familiar items from our own youth into the realm of artefacts. There is a whole
generation of youngsters who never used an audio cassette or watched a VHS. The
tech is completely and utterly unfamiliar to them. This same generation could
well have missed the height of cartridge-based video games. Majora’s Mask was
released in the year 2000, by the time Jadusable wrote his BEN Drowned story in
2010 there would have been teenagers reading it that had no memory of the N64
or its games.
Furthermore the cursed artefact trope has
been a staple of horror for as long as the genre has existed, with tales of
haunted books and paintings paving the way for the infamous cursed videotape of
Koji Suzuki’s novel Ring and its various movie incarnations. The potency of
taking the everyday and subverting it into something menacing cannot be
overlooked when it comes to crafting scares, especially something seemingly fun
and associated with the innocent days of our childhood.
What’s more, by the very fact that the
story is being told on the web, it’s pretty safe to assume that the reader has
a level of tech-savvy and probably a gaming background that makes them that
little bit more susceptible to the chills of the story, as they imagine how
easily they too could have succumbed to BEN’s trap.
Of course, the success of ‘haunted/cursed
video game’ stories was never going to go unnoticed, and perhaps BEN Drowned’s
biggest contribution to the Creepypasta community was the legacy of ‘spooky
game’ stories it bequeathed. The floodgates opened and since then there have
been hundreds of stories of similarly diabolical cartridges, including the very
cool indeed Pokemon Black.
Even today, six years on, BEN Drowned
remains relevant, whether it be via the scores of copycat stories or the masses
of fanart posted to sites such as DeviantArt.com, many of which featuring one
of the story’s catchphrases, such as ‘You shouldn’t have done that’ or ‘You’ve
met with a terrible fate, haven’t you?’. Hall created a legitimate phenomenon
among web horror stories, a contribution that was recently recognised when
web-based production company Machinima announced it as one of the titles to be
covered in its upcoming project Clive Barker’s Creepy Pasta.
A series of live-action shorts addressing
infamous urban legends, horror maestro Barker’s new programme will see BEN
Drowned reach an even wider audience, along with perennial favourites Slender
Man and last week’s subject, Jeff the Killer. Much like the sinister entity
lurking within Jadusable’s hard drive, the influence of Alex Hall’s story is
only set to spread and spread.
If you haven’t already, do please check out and like the Hickey’s House of Horrors Facebook page, which you can find here. It gives you a nice quick link to any new posts on this blog, plus regular news updates from around the web. I check the Internet so you don’t have to! Alternatively, follow me on twitter: The House@HickeysHorrors
Until next time, I hope you enjoyed your stay.
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