How to Make (and Possibly Un-Make) a Digital Monster

Abstract

Digital monsters are not present in the “real” – in this case, non-digital – world in the same way as other supernatural creatures. These monsters are “born digital”; that is, they are created with digital tools within digital contexts (e.g., photo and video editors, websites), and are encountered in the genre of expressive culture now known as “Creepypasta,” transmedial, Internet-based narratives about scary, usually supernatural, things. The most famous digital monster is Slender Man, who, despite his fictional status, was cited as the inspiration for real-world acts of violence, most notably the attempted murder of a young girl in Wisconsin in 2014. Traceable to a single creator, but passing through a long, collaborative process of telling and retelling across various Internet fora and media, Slender Man embodies the emergent qualities of much Internet culture. The story of Mr. Top Hat presented here, framed as a series of blog posts by a fictional anthropologist and reader responses to them, attempts to represent the type of collaborative dynamic that produced and continually reproduces Slender Man. Like Slender Man, “Mr. Top Hat” is surrounded by ambiguity. Are aspects of his story real, despite the evidence of his fictional status? The anthropologist, Dr. Richard Morgan, starts off as a researcher of the social processes that give rise to Creepypasta, but quickly finds that there is more at stake than the creation of a story.