Happy Halloween!
I’m in the process of returning from my honeymoon, and gazing into the abyss of my email inboxes after nearly two weeks away is one of the scariest things I can imagine. But while I return and get settled, I didn’t want to leave you hanging. Plus, Halloween is one of my favorite holidays—I love recreational fright.
So to get into the spirit, I asked some of my favorite people what the scariest thing they’ve seen on the internet lately has been. Some of these responses will certainly send a chill down your spine. They’re a mix of silly and serious.
To kick it off, I’ll start with my own internet horror. I’ll admit it: I enjoy a good scroll through Instagram Reels. They tend to involve cute videos of babies and cats, food recs, and travel inspiration. But every so often, the algorithm sends me something truly terrifying. And I don’t mean an overpriced NYC tourist trap. I mean jump scares. Liminal spaces. And giant monsters hunting you through the screen. This might sound silly to you, but when one of these pops up while I’m browsing Reels late at night, it’s more frightening to me than any horror movie. And I’ve watched a lot of horror movies!
Here’s an example of a liminal space one. I rank these on the lower end of the scary scale for IG Reels, but I’m not going to embed a really disturbing video because I’m not a sadist. This retro pool and playground-themed liminal space has 5 million views and more than 600,000 likes. And what’s most terrifying about it and most of these horror Reels is that they are often completely AI-generated. Yes, I’m getting anxiety from AI slop, and the people posting them are making thousands of dollars. See, I told you it was scary!
It’s really a seamless evolution of “creepypasta,” the internet’s homegrown horror genre, from run-on sentences that tweens posted on Reddit’s r/nosleep in the 2010s to infinite AI-generated combinations of online horror tropes. And it makes me a little sad, because even though most creepypasta is bad, there were genuine diamonds in the rough. Just ask Gen Z director Kane Parsons, who translated his YouTube channel inspired by liminal space creepypasta into Backrooms, A24’s highest-grossing film to date. There can be real artistry involved in creepypasta, but not in AI slop. The latter is just bait.
But not all of these horror Reels are AI. Some of them are good old-fashioned animation. Like this one (click if you dare). It features a giant Santa walking through a dark residential neighborhood, who notices you through the window and starts crawling toward you really fast. I’m actually terrified just thinking about it.
Okay, that’s enough from me. Let me tell you what my genius friends and collaborators have been scared about online recently.
The scariest thing I have seen online lately are people who are genuinely excited for the Glee reboot. Guys, as a former Gleek, we know only the first two seasons were good. Do you really want to see Mr. Schu rap agin? Shudder.
The scariest thing online is the rise of culture war extremism. The fact that there’s now a generation of young men who feel disfranchised and want to take out their own insecurities on anyone who dares disagrees with them terrifies me. The monster isn’t under your bed, it’s commenting on your Instagram.
I just reported an AI video of Ariana Grande and Osama bin Laden laughing at the Manchester concert bombing together.
Remember when, in the throes of 2020 boredom, Randonautica got really popular? The app invites you to set an “intention,” then sends you to a “randomly generated” GPS coordinate that’s supposed to help you explore the world and realize that intention. It’s like if a Ouija board could send you on a scavenger hunt. Back in the day, a couple of teenagers legit uncovered dead bodies in a suitcase on a beach while using the app.
I’ve been seeing videos about the app pop up on my FYP lately, and they’re almost certainly fake, but so fun to see the spirit of creepypasta alive and well through TikTokers uncovering eerily silent fields and random cages in the woods.
I highly recommend going down the rabbit hole of theories about Randonautica actually works — is it a truly random number generator people are projecting upon, an algorithm secretly scraping image data, or, uh, quantum tunneling? You decide!
I’ve been listening to this new podcast and they just tell creepy stories. it has a more journalistic viewpoint than some other podcasts and this episode scared the shit out of me. It’s the first podcast I’ve listened to that felt like I needed to sleep with the lights on.
The scariest thing I’ve seen on the internet? No, it wasn’t my address posted in a men’s rights forum. It would have to be the official Israeli state X/Twitter account, which, in October 2023, posted numerous appeals to Taylor Swift written in flawless stan Twitter lingo. I have to say, hitting “translate” on pretty much any tweet from an Israeli soldier or Israeli politician tends to yield what I find, genuinely, to be some of the scariest shit I’ve ever seen on the internet—often language about “exterminating” all Palestinians, and truly some of the most heinous commentary about human beings you’ll see in modern times. The worst of it truly comes from official Israeli state accounts, which often try to co-opt memes/cutesy language, as this just makes their genocide feel ever-more dystopian. You’re left wondering what Nazi Germany’s state accounts might have posted during the Holocaust had X/Twitter existed in the 1940s. (Not to self-plug, but I reported on Israel’s social media propaganda strategies back in October 2023.)
Veronika Rodriguez from Lebabon, PA was charged with wiretapping for recording audio of herself being assaulted because, get this, she did not have permission from her attacker to record. Veronika and advocates everywhere are calling for Gov. Josh Shapiro for a pardon. Speaking of pardons, we’re still waiting on Gov. Pritzker of Georgia to pardon Keshia Golden, a Black mom and survivor out of Chicago who was charged with murder after fatally stabbing her abuser as he violently attacked her. Punishing and criminalizing survival is downright ghastly.
And finally, a very timely fright (for me personally).
It doesn’t matter that Halloween is right around the corner, my current internet fear persists year round: brides going through detail psychosis. I’ve written about this before, but once I got married I discovered a sixth sense. I can tell when brides are absolutely losing it behind the scenes and have somehow decided the success of the entire event will come down to something utterly stupid. This is not their fault — this is what wedding planning does to a healthy human brain. And while staggering, eye watering sums are often involved, this is an equal opportunity fright that knows no bounds when it comes to income brackets. You know what I’m talking about, the vintage third look pieces that cost more than Teslas or the (I’m sure) sweet girl who hand-branded initials into all the orange peels for her wedding cocktails. This is mostly scary because it’s when I get the most parasocial online. It doesn’t matter if it’s the first time I’ve ever come across Ashleigh or MacKayLas pages before. I can see the future and it’s hard to watch them stress over minute details that will immediately be overshadowed when their mothers wear white on their special day. Yes, I understand you already went to Nordstrom Rack and bought her a dress. She will not wear it. That wedding painter you gave a cool band? She will most assuredly fuck your high school music teacher—completely drawing the attention away from the first dance you rehearsed for eight months. Anyway, I cannot save them from this fate and therefore I must immediately scroll.
Now, I hope you have an incredible, safe, and consensually scary Halloween!
