Some railway crossings in Japan are illuminated entirely in blue light, as shown in this photo. This is because recent studies suggest that blue light has a calming effect, and it has been introduced in certain crossings to discourage people from jumping onto the tracks. It is also said that crossings equipped with these lights often have a history of tragic incidents.

Just as the United States has creepypasta, Japan also has its own internet horror stories. Surprisingly, books have been published in Japan that analyze these stories from a folkloric perspective.

I recently read a book titled The Folklore of Internet Horror Stories, written by cultural anthropologist Ryūhei Hirota, and found it absolutely fascinating. The topics it covers—such as Slender Man, Jeff the Killer, and more recent phenomena like The Backrooms—are all horror stories I am quite familiar with, making the book an especially engaging read.

In this article, I will translate parts of the book to show how Japanese people interpret and analyze creepypasta and other Internet horror stories, and in addition, although I am neither very knowledgeable nor well-versed in folklore, I have a lot to say about creepypasta, so I would like to share my thoughts as well.

Also, if possible, I would also love to learn how creepypasta is academically analyzed in its home country, the United States, and what kind of research and publications exist on the subject. Please share any insights you may have!

Retroactive Ostension

 It is known where Slender Man was first posted. It was on the English-speaking image board SomethingAwful, in the thread titled "create paranormal images through Photoshop." On June 10, 2009, two black-and-white photos were posted in this thread, presented as if they were taken in the 1980s.

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As is clear from the thread title "create paranormal images," the two photos were composite images, and the participants understood this. However, these two "photos" seemed to resonate with many participants, quickly spreading across the English-speaking internet, pushing aside other posted images, and adding various settings and stories along the way.

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Slender Man was posted as a creation that could not be attributed to a specific author, far from the Kisaragi Station, and could be considered a "meme" in Japanese. However, the author, Serge, did not control the direction of the creation from the beginning, and most of the information we now have was rather co-constructed by others. Serge was the person who brought it from 0 to 1, but it was countless people on the internet who brought it from 1 to 10.

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Similarly, among the impactful images circulating in creepy pasta, there is the white-faced murderer "Jeff the Killer." It is a severely distorted image of a round-faced woman (?). Perhaps her already overexposed face was further flattened, and her eyes seem to be widely exposed. Like the Smile Dog, the origin of this face is unknown.

(The next page contained the picture of Jeff the Killer, and Precip.24 interrupted reading here.)

Hirota interprets these two phenomena as examples of a concept unique to internet culture called "retroactive ostension."

Let’s first clarify the meanings of the terms "ostension" and "retroactive ostension."

In American folklore studies, it is discussed that there are other forms of expression for legends besides representations through audiovisual media. This is called ostension. Ostension is originally a term from semiotics, but in legend studies, it refers to the act of testing, reenacting, or simply demonstrating something that is already stated in a text through personal experience.

Ostension is a concept discussed as one of the ways in which "legend" is expressed in American folklore. The author provided Japan-specific examples, but an American example that I know of would be rituals such as using a Ouija board or calling out "Bloody Mary" in front of a mirror, as well as the act of visiting a haunted mansion.

Like Slender Man, a series of actions in which "evidence" such as photos is created despite there being no original legend, and then "personal experiences" and "rumors" are continuously added, making it seem as if the legend has existed for a long time, is called retroactive ostension. Many Japanese internet ghost stories and horror content can also be categorized as retroactive ostension.

In other words, Slender Man and Jeff the Killer can be understood as cases where eerie images initially existed, and then a large number of internet users added horror stories to them, forming a collective narrative. Hirota refers to this phenomenon as "collaborative construction" and points out that it is an essential process in the development of internet horror stories.

Incidentally, the photo at the beginning was taken near Kyoto Station, my hometown. At the time I took it, I was drawn to the exotic blue-lit scene and captured the image for that reason. In reality, it's unclear whether blue light has any scientifically proven relaxing effect. Moreover, in Japan, it is common for accident sites to have flowers, offerings, or other markers indicating that an incident occurred. Since I didn’t notice anything like that when I took the photo, it’s doubtful whether a suicide actually happened there.

If my understanding is correct, my act of "adding a frightening story to an otherwise ordinary image" at the beginning qualifies as "retroactive ostension," and through this act, I became one of the "collaborative constructors" of a (yet-to-exist) internet horror story.

From "Narrative" to "Database"

In the latter half of his book, Hirota discusses the uniqueness of The Backrooms as an internet horror story. However, before delving into that, it is necessary to touch on Lev Manovich’s discussion of "narrative and database." (And for some reason, before explaining that, it is also necessary to mention the culture of searching for strange places on Google Earth.)

While this book does not provide a specific definition of the terms "narrative" and "database," as a Japanese reader, I would like to note that "narrative" appears to be used in the sense of "story" or "horror tale."

In the final chapter of his 2016 book Net Lore, Ryuhei Itoh states, "When considering the 21st century of cryptid folklore, I believe that 'Google Earth' will become one of the places where future folklore will emerge." He introduces the story of the Ningen, a humanoid figure that was reportedly spotted on Google Earth.

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Even today, for example, the TikTok user "Google Earth", who introduces strange things appearing on Google Earth and Google Street View, has over 6.1 million followers.

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The videos posted are screen recordings where the user continuously operates Google Earth, traveling across the globe until they arrive at strange landscapes, and viewers can easily try this themselves. In this way, the ability to perform ostension on the spot is one of the advantages of Google Earth.

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The act of browsing Street View is difficult to capture with the previous folkloric concepts of ghost stories. It is not an ostensive act accompanied by physical trials of fear like a kagami-tameshi (a test of courage), nor is it the act of reading a story or watching a film.

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Here, we can observe what Lev Manovich pointed out in the 1990s regarding new media (various media made possible by digital and computer technologies)—that databases are superior to narratives. According to Manovich, "A database as a cultural form represents the world as a list of items and does not try to organize that list. In contrast, a narrative creates a causal trajectory between seemingly unordered items (events). Therefore, databases and narratives are natural enemies."

When we think of a "ghost story," we often understand it as a narrative in which, for example, a protagonist encounters supernatural phenomena that are eventually resolved or left unresolved, presented in a chronological sequence. However, in the case of Google Street View, such an orderly narrative does not originally exist. There is only a database of images taken from various locations, and the events within those images are not constructed as a narrative. The previously mentioned sudden appearance of a dark landscape is geographically continuous with surrounding images in the database, but it has no narrative. However, it is possible to weave a narrative, such as "the vehicle filming Street View accidentally entered another world for just a moment," in order to explain the dark landscape. The idea that databases and narratives are "natural enemies" is not an exaggeration, but rather this situation illustrates the point.

Furthermore, Manovich discusses how, in pre-new media cinema and literature, narratives existed first, whereas in new media, databases exist first, and users create narratives within them. For example, in Google Street View, there is a database first, and from those images, the viewer individually creates their own narrative (ghost story). In this way, one can imagine a situation in which users (participants) consume the content without ever deriving a narrative.

Traditionally, horror stories that have been passed down over time, even without the internet, required a narrative. With the rise of new media—particularly in internet horror stories—it has been common for narratives to develop and evolve through the process of "retroactive ostension," as seen with Slender Man and Jeff the Killer.

However, Hirota points out that a new form of internet horror is emerging—one based on databases rather than narratives. And at last, The Backrooms has appeared, serving as a symbolic example of this "database-style" internet horror.

On April 21, 2018, a thread titled cursed images was created on 4chan’s /x/ board, which deals with paranormal phenomena. On April 22 of the same month, a slightly tilted image of a yellow room was posted in this thread. The floor is covered with a slightly dark yellow carpet, and the door, along with the walls, is yellow, with the same color extending up to the ceiling. Fluorescent lights are lined up on the ceiling. However, there is nothing else in the room. There is no furniture, no fixtures, no windows, and no door. It is simply a yellow room with yellow walls.

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Although this image didn’t attract much attention in the cursed images thread, on May 12, 2019, it was reposted at the beginning of the unsetting images thread, with the description "post disquieting images that just feel 'off'." Unlike the cursed images thread, this new thread featured many images of empty scenes, similar to the yellow room image. In addition, some of the images were accompanied by comments like "I remember a strange building I saw in a dream." Among these, one comment stood out on May 13.

If you're not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you'll end up in the Backrooms, where it's nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in

God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you

It is important to note that while Hirota does, of course, mention The Backrooms (Found Footage)—a video many of you may have thought of—his primary focus is actually on the "database" of unsettling images originally posted on 4chan, which served as the foundation for The Backrooms.

Hirota also points out that after this thread, The Backrooms rapidly gained popularity, leading to the creation of games bearing the same name and the addition of various narratives. As a result, the unique atmosphere that The Backrooms initially possessed was ultimately lost.

Additionally, the book explains the concept of "liminal space" and discusses the term anemoia, which was used before "liminal space" became widely popular. However, since covering all of that would be too lengthy, I will omit those details here.

If it’s not a narrative, what would we build in a database? In this chapter, we have frequently used the term unsetting alongside fear and terror. These emotions may not be a direct reaction to the database itself, but rather to the lack of a narrative. The unsettingness of liminal spaces is said to stem from the feeling that something might have been there—yet we cannot know for sure, lingering in a repetitive, unanswered question. This can be rephrased as anxiety over the inability to construct a narrative. Many of the internet ghost stories and internet horror we’ve discussed in this chapter are centered around this very anxiety and unsettingness. Fear no longer requires a narrative. Instead of a narrative, what participants construct is a genre as an element of the database.

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As we saw in Chapter 1, Christiana Wilsey argued that what participants share in internet ghost stories is not beliefs but emotions, and liminal spaces, for instance, are extremely inclined toward this. What people collaboratively practice is not the creation of videos or images themselves, but rather the "subdivision of emotions" as metadata for those images and videos.

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To expand further, many of the paranormal phenomena that happen (or might happen) around us are not well-defined events with concrete details and causality to form a narrative. Strange sounds in one’s room, suddenly seeing something odd, feeling a vague sense of discomfort in the landscape, or experiencing chills, goosebumps, or cold sweat may occur, but we might easily forget them without paying much attention. This sensory, vague unsettingness is paradoxically constructed as a clear object for "collaborative creation" precisely in the internet structure where databases take precedence.

This is Hirota’s argument. According to him, The Backrooms can be interpreted as a "database-type" internet horror story, unique to the modern era, where fragmented, short videos on platforms like TikTok and YouTube Shorts have become major content. In this context, the narrative I added to the photo at the beginning of the article is actually unnecessary in today’s world. Simply posting "disquieting images that just feel 'off'" in a similar thread could function effectively as internet horror.

Precip.24's View on The Backrooms

I also really enjoy this internet horror, and even though it's part of an enormous collection of works, I have spent an entire day watching a significant number of videos. However, as Hirota points out, the game version of The Backrooms feels less like a horror game and more like a unique, immersive pool that I would want to visit—more of a "game for strolling through beautiful scenery."

The horror I experienced in The Backrooms (Found Footage), before the black monster appears, was unlike any other horror I’ve encountered. It was something distinctly different, and I wanted to thoroughly analyze why I found it scary.

I have come across a description of the horror in The Backrooms as "a kind of uncanny valley of place." The term uncanny valley is mainly used in robotics and refers to the idea that robots with features that are far from human, like Disney characters, are cute. However, as their appearance becomes closer to that of a human, even the slightest differences between the robot and a real person become more pronounced, causing people to experience a strong sense of discomfort. This phenomenon is described as a sharp dip on a graph when the horizontal axis represents the similarity of a robot to a human, and the vertical axis represents the human's sense of familiarity.

What’s important here is the part about "a slight deviation from something familiar causing a great sense of unease," and this is certainly a characteristic shared by works referred to as liminal spaces. However, personally, I believe the emotion people experience in the uncanny valley is more closely related to "disgust" rather than "fear." I have long thought that this explanation alone is insufficient to fully describe the fear evoked by The Backrooms.

Incidentally, when I thought about what other experiences might evoke a similar fear to what I felt in The Backrooms, I ended up recalling two personal experiences. For a long time, I couldn’t explain why these experiences made me feel the same type of fear, but nonetheless, both of them instilled in me a similar sense of dread.

The Missing Persons Database

Have you ever accessed an online database of missing persons? It contains photos of missing individuals along with brief descriptions of their disappearances (for example, "On X date in 20XX, XX left home in the morning to go to work, but never arrived and were later reported missing. Search was called off in X month of the same year.") The impersonal writing style and the tragic stories inherent in the descriptions deeply frightened me. I was also terrified by the sheer number of unresolved disappearances within Japan alone.

The Scene at a Food Factory

Are you familiar with the experiment The Message from Water? This urban legend claims that when a glass bottle of water is exposed to kind words or music, the shape of its crystals changes compared to when exposed to harsh words or unpleasant sounds. When this rumor spread, many people took it seriously, and one food manufacturer, which produced children’s food, attempted to "play" recordings of repeated "thank you" shouts from kindergarteners in the warehouse where the finished products were stored. This was supposed to "teach" the food with kindness. The scene was broadcast on television, but the sight of children’s recorded voices echoing repeatedly in an empty warehouse with almost no workers was nothing short of abnormal (contrary to the factory owner’s intentions). However, I also thought to myself that if I ever became a film director, I would definitely want to shoot a scene set in an impersonal space with the recorded voices of children echoing in the background.

What these examples have in common with The Backrooms is that they all share the feature of "not featuring scary monsters," and for a long time, I couldn’t figure out why they were scary. However, after consulting ChatGPT about these experiences, she replied, "Perhaps it’s because there are traces of humans, but no actual humans present."

In the case of The Backrooms, I certainly see walls that appear to have been created by human hands, illuminated by fluorescent lights that would likely be replaced by someone, but I felt a strong sense of discomfort because there is no actual human presence.

The "Missing Persons Database" is supposed to include rich backgrounds and narratives about each person, but because of its nature as a database, all those stories are stripped away, and only the necessary information about the missing person is provided, leaving a cold, impersonal text. In other words, one can perceive it as "lacking the humanity that should be present."

The final example, the "food factory scene," involves children's voices that should be endearing, but when they are recorded and repeated, only the traces of children are left, and the actual children are absent, creating an eerie space.

ChatGPT’s explanation of "the discomfort of humans not being where they should be" really resonated with me.

I Want to Create an Internet Horror Story Like The Backrooms!

In the first half, I introduced a book I recently read and discussed how "retroactive ostension" and "collaborative narrative construction" have been actively occurring in internet horror stories. I also argued that with The Backrooms, which does not require narrative, the trend is shifting towards "database-type" horror. In the second half, I reflected on my own feelings towards The Backrooms, incorporating my personal experiences.

So, based on these ideas, how can we create a story like The Backrooms? There are actually various approaches to this, and Hirota himself does not provide a clear answer. However, I’ve considered that perhaps it involves a "temporal and intuitive sense" that no longer takes the form of a traditional "narrative."

In conclusion, the very idea of "wanting to create a scary internet horror story" may soon be outdated. But if I had to suggest something, it might be that the sense of discomfort or fear you feel in your everyday life—something that others might not even notice—could surprisingly serve as the inspiration for an internet horror story that could go viral worldwide.