Candle Cove

Candle Cove is an online creepypasta horror story written by web cartoonist and author Kris Straub. The story centers on a discussion of the titular fictional children's television series on an Internet forum.^[1] Straub has stated that he was inspired to write the creepypasta after reading an article in The Onion entitled "Area 36-Year-Old Still Has Occasional Lidsville Nightmare".

Straub's story quickly became popular, inspiring numerous YouTube videos and fan fictions.^[2]^[3] In 2015, Straub self-published Candle Cove in a collection of short stories entitled Candle Cove and Other Stories. The Verge commented that Candle Cove differed from other creepypastas in that while most creepypasta have an "anonymous folkloric quality", Candle Cove originated from a known source and author.^[4]

The story was adapted for the first season of the Syfy anthology series Channel Zero, which aired in 2016. Additionally, Straub began the spin-off YouTube series Local 58, centered around strange broadcasts from the fictitious public access television channel where Candle Cove originally aired.^[5]

Synopsis

The story is told in the format of a thread on the fictional "NetNostalgia Forums", where a group of users discuss an unusual low-budget children's television show, Candle Cove, that they all remember watching on Channel 58 in the Huntington–Ashland metropolitan area when they were children in the early 1970s. The show is about a young girl named Janice, who imagines herself to be friends with marionette pirates.

As the users continue to reminisce, they begin to recall more disturbing details about the show, such as a character known as the "Skin-Taker" (a skeleton pirate who wears clothing made out of children's skin) and an episode that consisted entirely of the puppets flailing and screaming while Janice cries. The story ends with a user stating that he recently asked his elderly mother in a nursing home if she remembered the show; she responds that every time the user claimed that Candle Cove was on, there was only static on the screen, and that they would watch only dead air for 30 minutes.

History

"Candle Cove" was originally published by Kris Straub in 2009 on his website ichorfalls.com, under a Creative Commons license.^[6] The website hosted Straub's horror stories about the fictional town of Ichor Falls. In a 2011 interview, Straub told Kindertrauma he got the concept of "Candle Cove" from a satirical Onion article titled "Area 36-Year-Old Still Has Occasional Lidsville Nightmare".^[2]

Like other creepypasta — a neologism for horror stories circulated around the internet — fans promptly copied and pasted "Candle Cove" across numerous internet forums and websites.^[6]^[2] It was posted on creepypasta.com and the Creepypasta Wiki, the two largest repositories, as well as sites such as 4chan, Reddit, YouTube, IGN, and horror.com.^[6] On some forums, fans recreated the story's exchange as if it actually occurred.^[2]

Television adaptation

In 2015 the SyFy Channel announced their intent to adapt the Candle Cove story as the first season of a newly announced series, Channel Zero.^[7] The season, named after the creepypasta, expands on the story and centers on a child psychologist who has returned home in order to investigate the 1980s disappearances of his brother and other children.^[8] Channel Zero: Candle Cove stars Paul Schneider and Fiona Shaw, and premiered on October 11, 2016.^[9]^[10]

Reception

Will Wiles of Aeon wrote that Candle Cove was "among the best creepypastas out there" and a good example of using the forum format as a storytelling method.^[11]^[12] Adi Robertson of The Verge praised the creepypasta, stating that it was "a perfectly dark spin on our nostalgia for the half-remembered stories of our childhood, that realization that the things we liked as kids were much, much creepier than we thought."^[4]