In the black and black city: What is kripi and what is it eaten with

The fusion of reality and virtuality sometimes takes bizarre but interesting forms. For example, we all know campfire horror films - and I bet that we just adore listening to these rustic, but truly creepy stories, sitting at night by the fire somewhere outside the city. Why people like to be afraid so much is a question over which the best minds of mankind have been fighting for centuries, and we will not touch it now. But what happens as a result of the collision of irrational fears of man and the possibilities of the global network? And it will turn out ... "kripi".

For those interested in the cut - a brief history of the emergence and development of the genre of Internet creativity called "Kripi", which spun off from the tales near the fire; small analysis of its features and disadvantages; dark thoughts about the crisis of this type of creativity; warm words addressed to Forchana, Dvača and Lurkomorye; and, since I publish a blog post, a description of the way I want to slightly expand the initially narrow audience of creep stories ( spoiler: talking about the Kriper.Ru site ).
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Story

The concept of “kripi” originated in the same place where a good half of Internet memes originate - on the foreign image board 4chan.org (by the way, the impact of this site on the Web is so great that its founder even got on the lists of the most influential people on the planet). The fashion of telling various horror stories “from one's life” in the topics created (threads) was born in 2006. Although “scary” topics appeared in various imageboards and general forums since the birth of the Internet, but in 2006 this phenomenon in the English-language Web segment assumed the character of a massive epidemic. I went to the people meme " shit brix ", expressing the reaction of the reader to good creep stories.

Runet, as usual, lagged a little behind the western tendencies, but in 2007-2008, on the well-known domestic imageboards (first of all on the then trendsetter 2ch.ru - “Dvache”, now deceased), there was also a boom of creep-stories. It was then that a significant part of the now-classic horror stories of this genre was composed. Since then, periodically emerging kripi-tops have become an indispensable attribute of any imageboard, and indeed of any self-respecting forum on a common theme. Some of today's large imageboards (for example, iichan.ru and 2ch.so ) have special sections in which you can post kripi-stories. And, I tell you, these sections are not empty at all.

Creep Features

Of course, Creepe cannot be called a completely new genre - there are many stories relating to Creepe, nothing more than retellings of the same ancient campfire horror films in a new way. But there are differences. So what are the distinctive features of kripi that separate them from the good old campfires of our childhood?

• Urban legends and horror stories were narrated by the narrators (unless E. Ouspensky tried to collect in his wonderful book the “terrible” folklore of Soviet children) and therefore underwent significant changes in each case made by a specific narrator. And kripi-stories thanks to writing are not subject to strong mutations during distribution on the Internet. They are published everywhere in their original form (therefore, they are often called “crypipasts”). Well, that is quite in the spirit of our age of victorious postmodernism. :)
• The situation in which the campfire stories were told disposed to the fact that listeners were more impressed by stories with a Gothic bias, which takes place in various dark and scary places alien to humans. Well, most people read creep history at home in front of the monitor screen (late night when the reader is sitting alone at home with the lights off is an ideal setting - the type of creep stories called “Don't turn around!” Is addressed to such readers). Therefore, among the kripi, the proportion of urbanized tales is high: the main characters live in urban environments, and the fears are often more physical and mundane. Stories about monstrous, but real beings are much more common stories of ghosts. Some cripples and completely or completely eliminate the mystical factor, to the splatterpunk style: blood, crime, clashes with lumpen, etc. In general, living conditions dictate new fears.

There is no future?

Despite the vitality and clarity of creep-stories, this genre is considered by many to be doomed and incapable of truly becoming part of contemporary folklore. The reasons?

• The fundamental problem limiting the future development of the kripipast genre lies in their very nature: no matter how rich the people's imagination is, the list of subjects that fit into the Procrustean bed of the crypie format is not rich and will be exhausted sooner or later - one “kripipasta” will start suspiciously reminding the other. So, actually, it happened. All the latest kripi-threads are bursting with tons of old kripipast. Since conventional plots have already been processed, and new worthy creations appear infrequently, the subject becomes “souring”. In a desperate attempt to revive the genre, users create topics with headlines like “Only original creep content!”, But their activity is rather sluggish.
• One of the biggest problems that prevent creep stories from entering the "big light" is due to history. The homeland of kripi, as I said before, is imageboards in which its own internal slang is spread (although in recent years thanks to projects such as Lurkmore.Ru , Internet users have more or less gotten to some of these slang words, infa 100%). Plus, illiteracy and profanity flourish in threads. All this in its entirety makes it almost impossible to read and understand most of the kripi-stories by philistines who are not experienced in the modern realities of Runet. Even interesting and really scary stories remain outside the annals of history, valued only in a narrow circle.

Kripi: Grammar Nazi Edition

Actually, this last reason prompted me to conduct my experiment. I was curious if creep stories could slightly expand their habitat if they were easily readable to the general public (remove slang and outright obscenities, correct gaping logical inconsistencies, and in some cases make a distinct ending - many stories suffer from a lack of an ending) and put together in a readable form (agree that the stories scattered across many different threads and sites cannot be called a good format). By way of illustration I will give a small example of my text processing.

Original text of the creepy story (caution, mats!):

in May, I quit the job ** with bydlogotapy, grabbed the amount due, my chan and sya ** l to the village to rest, not far from Penza ...

Edited text:

In May I quit my job, grabbed the amount due, my girlfriend and went to the village to rest (near Penza) ...

Similarly, I have processed more than a hundred classic creep stories and laid out as primary content on the Kriper.Ru site (I am going to continue to replenish the collection every day for at least 5 new stories). The first reviews from visitors invited to the site showed that the format, at least, does not cause rejection in people - users read stories, vote for them, make links from social networks. As a second stage, I decided to report on the project in Habré in order to collect more specific reviews. Well, popiarit site a bit, what is already there. :)

Little about the site

If anyone is interested, then from a technical point of view the site is nothing special: written in PHP + MySQL , a bunch of Kohana 3 + Smarty 3 . The main page, pages with a list of stories and some more or less static pages are cached for 10 minutes to reduce the load on the server, but in general special measures against habraeffekt is not taken (perhaps in vain) - I hoped that since my other server was hanging on a similar server the site mentioned in a recent post which got on the main page of Habr, sustained habraeffekt, then everything will manage also this time.

As for the functional, I always liked the “Bashorg” format - a clean text with minimal design plus a “like / dislike” dichotomous vote. Therefore, did not reinvent the wheel. But, since the purpose of the site is to popularize creep stories, I did everything possible to quickly share content — social buttons from AddThis , broadcast new stories to RSS / Twitter / Facebook / VK, etc. From special features I will mention the “Enable / turn off the light ”on the upper right corner, which changes the design of“ white text, black background ”to the usual“ black text, white background ”- experience shows that many people for some reason do not tolerate reading text on a black background.

PS I note that for my part I tried to uproot all the errors in the texts, but I, of course, is far from being a perfect proofreader, so surely there will still be various errors in the stories - I apologize in advance.