Frayed Branches

Tuning in to Channel Zero: Candle Cove But first, a short history lesson. In the early days of the Internet, people would often send out spam emails that claimed good or bad tidings would come depending on if people sent the email to others or not. For instance, you could have gotten an email in your inbox that read, “Send this email to 10 other people for good luck this week! But if you don’t send it to anyone, prepare for bad luck all year!” This would, in turn, prompt people to send it to others in order to avoid the dreaded “bad luck” showing up in their email. It was less about belief, however, and more about abiding by the cultural standards of emails and Internet posts like that back then. Given the rampant copying of these kinds of emails as they got around to different people’s mailboxes, people began referring to them in different ways. However, the term “copypasta” became one of the more recognizable ones, in reference to how one would have to “copy and paste” these emails i...

The Atmosphere of Creep Horror films really only need to do one thing in order to succeed (on top of having a quality story and characters, of course): Scare people. If a horror film can’t be frightening or invoke feelings of terror when being viewed, then there is little credence to refer to it as “horror.” “Thriller” or “supernatural mystery” would be more appropriate terms. Real, true horror is the kind that sticks in your mind even after you’ve put down the book or turned off the screen. Horror is something that has to be earned by a piece of media, a feeling that is invoked in the person participating on the other end of the story. And one film that manages to capture those feelings of terror and kept with me well after I was done watching it was Patrick Brice’s 2014 found footage film Creep. Creep follows a freelance videographer, Aaron, who has been hired by a new client, Josef, who is in the last days of his life due to a brain tumor. Josef hires Aaron in order to document his ...