In the mid-1990s, I grew up with my grandmother until I was 5, in El Ksar Gafsa, in southern Tunisia. There, beyond the tangible, the scenery of our reality delicately incorporated haunted objects, cursed places, metamorphosed beings and strange entities watching over children... These myths, transmitted with seriousness or playfulness, amused or frightened while subtly conveying hints on how to navigate the world.

They strengthened community ties and calmed fears and resentments. From these communal myths flowed family myths which, in the face of situations beyond their control, adapted, interpreted or invented personalized legends, while modulating their functions according to their needs.

Lulled by these stories, I believed them without question, until I left this world to join my parents in a newly-built neighborhood, Diar Snit, in Ras El Kef Gafsa. There, the place seemed strangely immune to all paranormal entities. It was as if the collective imaginary was inversely proportional to the amount of concrete and tar that dominated the new, heavily asphalted neighborhood.

Faced with this incomprehension, I eventually confronted my grandmother: why had I never seen, heard or touched these creatures? She replied that these beings fear iron as humans fear wildfire. And our lifestyle, increasingly dependent on this material, had driven them to flee to the deserts.

In a way, she was right. If iron is a metaphor for industrialization, it's clear that these myths have little place in the new formats of towns and villages. These creatures don't belong in a fast-paced world, because they need time to stalk and haunt their prey; they don't belong in generously lit streets at night, because they need darkness to be seen; and they have no interest in staying in places with almost constant noise, because they need silence to be heard...

Distanced from the stories told by our grandparents, parents barely managed to perpetuate this oral heritage. These myths gradually lost their societal role and were reduced to simple jinn tales we would whisper as children, in the darkness of the night. At the same time, the world was gradually revealing itself to us, demystifying the incomprehensible of the past while offering new sources of fascination and thrill...

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With the advent of digital technology and the democratization of the Internet, the very notion of myth and legend has evolved considerably. Today, in the virtual realm, “online myths and legends” often refer to hoaxes propagated on a massive scale, from the mildest to the most conspiratorial.

Beyond this mainstream evolution of the term, on forums and YouTube channels that are still relatively niche, a reinvention of urban legends and folklore, closer to what they once were, is taking shape.

Creepypasta:
 

Creepypasta combines “creepy” with “pasta” (derived from copypasta, which refers to viral content shared online by copy and paste).

The term refers to fictional stories that originate and spread online, often rooted in horror or the paranormal.

In simplified terms, a creepypasta often begins with a media posted on an online platform. It could be an image, text, sound or video with intriguing features. Sometimes these media are created and published spontaneously, but they can also result from a desire to produce a viral phenomenon.

If the media attracts enough attention, it can trigger a collaborative dynamic of worldbuilding around it: Internet users create and enrich a story around this media, and seek to extend and deepen the universe that surrounds it. Through sharing and commenting, users adopt the story as their own, complexifying its plot and spreading it across several platforms, until it becomes, if the magic of the Internet so decides, an online urban legend.

 (This does not involve an intention to create and propagate false information, but rather a collective desire to invent and share imaginary narratives).
This collaborative process is reminiscent of oral folklore, where each generation and community modulated and enriched their tales and myths through word-of-mouth. With creepypastas, this transformation process now takes place from post to post, via copy-paste.

To better understand these collective writing dynamics, let's take the example of Slenderman, the best-known creepypasta character to date, which owes much of its notoriety to a tragic incident in 2008. (In Wisconsin, two teenage girls attempted murder in the name of this imaginary character):

This urban legend features a skinny, faceless humanoid known for kidnapping children. Its origins can be traced back to a thread on the “Something Awful” forum, where users were invited to edit photos to add paranormal features. Among the images submitted, one stood out: that of a group of children with, in the background, a creature that would later be named Slenderman. The photo, posted by the pseudonym “Victor Surge”, quickly went viral. Internet users then created a multitude of fanarts, videos and fictional stories around Slenderman, helping to collectively build the character's universe and personality traits through various audiovisual productions.

Image posted by the pseudonym Victor Surge on the forum “something awfull”.