Dollar Store Goosebumps.

I learned one thing from the movie Creepypasta; that beyond the realm of hack-fraud movie reviewers there’s a whole cesspit of hack fraud indie horror review websites. The kind of “no such thing as bad horror” slobbering nitwits who will give a movie 2.5 stars to look thoughtful and then say they have no negative notes about the film. I’m pretty sure most of them are functionally illiterate. They’re kinda like the army of morbidly obese YouTube food reviewers slowly killing themselves eating nothing but fast food for an audience of 100.

Creepypasta is an anthology series based on the internet phenomenon of the same name. Now I’ve been on the internet since 1997 when I was 8, and I can tell you something about Creepypasta. Creepypasta is like horror Saturday Night Live. 95% of it is irredeemably awful and written by authors who fall into some mixture of stupid and lazy or trolling. 4.9% of Creepypasta falls into the realm of functional as good literature. .1% of it is really well done.

Many works of media do not translate without massive changes. John Dies at the End didn’t work as a film, the Paul WS Anderson Resident Evil movies didn’t work as books, Bioshock 1 wouldn’t work as a book, and most Creepypastas could never translate to a visual medium. Why? Because like a lot of horror Creepypasta works best when your brain is the director. Even with big talent on board, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is infinitely creepier as a book than a movie.

Creepypasta was directed by Carlos Cobos Aroca, Berkley Brady, Mikel Cravatta, Carlos Omar De Leon, Daniel Garcia, Tony Morales, Paul Stamper, and Buz Wallick. It was written by David Bond, Gregory S. Burkart, Vincent Vena Cava, Carlos Omar De Leon, Daniel Garcia, Tony Morales, Marc Vidal Morcillo, and Rebecca Swan. It shows that if you put 1,000 monkeys in a room with typewriters that they will eventually write the work of Shakespeare, but if you put a large group of crappy directors/writers in a room they’ll just produce a series of really shitty short films.

First off let’s talk about the overarching plot of the anthology. Guy wakes up in house with corpses, starts watching short films on USB drives while his nose bleeds and a narrator spouts nonsense. He pees blood into the toilet at one point. It’s really stupid and I’m not sure who thought this would build up suspense and interest. It’s especially bad since the guy never acknowledges the fountain of blood coming out of his nose/dong, leading the audience to not care either.

The film explains his reason for being there, he’s looking for incriminating evidence on him, but it’s stupid. It doesn’t explain why he’s watching full episodes of spoopy stories he finds on various USBs through to the end. Also this is horror, where the boobies at?

One of the major issues with the horror stories is that they are overwhelmingly awful and even the film’s best attributes; its score and camera work, can’t save them. I said the same thing with Scary Stories, and the same runs here. Too many Creepypastas boil down to “and then the demon said ‘i’m gonna get you’ and then the demon got them.” Only in film that is accompanied by a jump scare. There’s a sequence in this film where it throws five consecutive jump scares in a row at the audience, guaranteeing to ruin the effect by the third one in.

The stories that do have promise are then harmed by the sheer fact that each sequence is a few minutes long at most, meaning the directors/writers have absolutely no time to do anything substantive with it. Once a story feels like it has something interesting going on, it’s over and the ending is unceremoniously shoved in our face. Some directors can work in this medium, many can’t. The writing here mostly feels like bad improv with the writer hastily stammering out an ending once the 30 second warning shows up.

And the shortness does hurt the film, because the good segments leave the viewer unsatisfied and just make them resent the bad segments for taking up precious time. There’s a few really stupid shorts like the adult emo-looking guy whose entire premise is he always does the opposite of what he’s told (don’t drink with this medicine, don’t watch this video, don’t scream) like a petulant teen. And then there’s one segment that goes on far too long that’s just an old lady on an oxygen machine getting tortured, that feels overly cruel even for this movie and is probably going to be where most of the audience turns on the film.

Creepypasta has 75 ratings on IMDB (four reviews) and no critic scores, and is a Screambox exclusive, meaning only myself and like ten other people probably actually watched it once you account for IMDB ratings bots. The soundtrack and cinematography are the only things keeping this movie from being an F. But not by much.

Rating: D-