Sunday 6 March 2016

DARK WEB: AN ESSENTIAL GUIDE TO CREEPYPASTA — PART 8: CANDLE COVE

PLEASE NOTE, THIS FEATURE FIRST APPEARED AT UK HORROR SCENE HERE. ALL SUBSEQUENT CHAPTERS WILL APPEAR AT UKHS FIRST.

My last two entries in this series of features on Creepypasta looked at stories made all the more potent by subverting and twisting media properties associated with the innocence of youth. However, these are not the only stories to do this to pack a dramatic punch — far from it.
This week we look at another of my favourite Creepypasta stories, one that also uses this approach, but with a twist — for while suicidemouse.avi and Abandoned By Disney used the familiarity of Walt Disney’s creations to craft its scares, this utilises a long-forgotten kids TV show from cable TV back in the early Seventies.
This show is Candle Cove.


The first appearance of the Candle Cove story was on the Ichor Falls web site on 15 March, 2009. It was submitted by artist Kris Straub, and took the form of a series of forum entries on the aforementioned cheaply made show, following the adventures of a young girl named Janice with a motley crew of pirates aboard the ship, The Laughingstock, around the titular Candle Cove. The crew would often experience dark and decidedly unsettling situations, often at the hands of the terrifying villain The Skin-Taker. As the members of the forum reawaken their long forgotten fears regarding the show, they build towards a terrifying revelation.
Read the story below:

NetNostalgia Forum - Television (local)
Skyshale033 
Subject: Candle Cove local kid's show?
Does anyone remember this kid's show? It was called Candle Cove and I must have been 6 or 7. I never found reference to it anywhere so I think it was on a local station around 1971 or 1972. I lived in Ironton at the time. I don't remember which station, but I do remember it was on at a weird time, like 4:00 PM.

mike_painter65 
Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid's show?
it seems really familiar to me…..i grew up outside of ashland and was 9 yrs old in 72. candle cove…was it about pirates? i remember a pirate marionete at the mouth of a cave talking to a little girl

Skyshale033 
Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid's show?
YES! Okay I'm not crazy! I remember Pirate Percy. I was always kind of scared of him. He looked like he was built from parts of other dolls, real low-budget. His head was an old porcelain baby doll, looked like an antique that didn't belong on the body. I don't remember what station this was! I don't think it was WTSF though.

Jaren_2005 
Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid's show?
Sorry to ressurect this old thread but I know exactly what show you mean, Skyshale. I think Candle Cove ran for only a couple months in ‘71, not ‘72. I was 12 and I watched it a few times with my brother. It was channel 58, whatever station that was. My mom would let me switch to it after the news. Let me see what I remember.
It took place in Candle cove, and it was about a little girl who imagined herself to be friends with pirates. The pirate ship was called the Laughingstock, and Pirate Percy wasn't a very good pirate because he got scared too easily. And there was calliope music constantly playing. Don't remember the girl's name. Janice or Jade or something. Think it was Janice.

Skyshale033 
Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid's show?
Thank you Jaren!!! Memories flooded back when you mentioned the Laughingstock and channel 58. I remember the bow of the ship was a wooden smiling face, with the lower jaw submerged. It looked like it was swallowing the sea and it had that awful Ed Wynn voice and laugh. I especially remember how jarring it was when they switched from the wooden/plastic model, to the foam puppet version of the head that talked.

mike_painter65 
Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid's show?
ha ha i remember now too. ;) do you remember this part skyshale: "you have…to go…INSIDE."

Skyshale033 
Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid's show? 
Ugh mike, I got a chill reading that. Yes I remember. That's what the ship always told Percy when there was a spooky place he had to go in, like a cave or a dark room where the treasure was. And the camera would push in on Laughingstock's face with each pause. YOU HAVE… TO GO… INSIDE. With his two eyes askew and that flopping foam jaw and the fishing line that opened and closed it. Ugh. It just looked so cheap and awful.
You guys remember the villain? He had a face that was just a handlebar mustache above really tall, narrow teeth.

kevin_hart 
Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid's show?
i honestly, honestly thought the villain was pirate percy. i was about 5 when this show was on. nightmare fuel.

Jaren_2005 
Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid's show?
That wasn't the villain, the puppet with the mustache. That was the villain's sidekick, Horace Horrible. He had a monocle too, but it was on top of the mustache. I used to think that meant he had only one eye.
But yeah, the villain was another marionette. The Skin-Taker. I can't believe what they let us watch back then.

kevin_hart 
Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid's show?
jesus h. christ, the skin taker. what kind of a kids show were we watching? i seriously could not look at the screen when the skin taker showed up. he just descended out of nowhere on his strings, just a dirty skeleton wearing that brown top hat and cape. and his glass eyes that were too big for his skull. christ almighty.

Skyshale033 
Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid's show?
Wasn't his top hat and cloak all sewn up crazily? Was that supposed to be children's skin??

mike_painter65 
Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid's show?
yeah i think so. rememer his mouth didn't open and close, his jaw just slid back and foth. i remember the little girl said "why does your mouth move like that" and the skin-taker didn't look at the girl but at the camera and said "TO GRIND YOUR SKIN"

Skyshale033 
Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid's show?
I'm so relieved that other people remember this terrible show!
I used to have this awful memory, a bad dream I had where the opening jingle ended, the show faded in from black, and all the characters were there, but the camera was just cutting to each of their faces, and they were just screaming, and the puppets and marionettes were flailing spastically, and just all screaming, screaming. The girl was just moaning and crying like she had been through hours of this. I woke up many times from that nightmare. I used to wet the bed when I had it.

kevin_hart 
Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid's show?
i don't think that was a dream. i remember that. i remember that was an episode.

Skyshale033 
Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid's show?
No no no, not possible. There was no plot or anything, I mean literally just standing in place crying and screaming for the whole show.

kevin_hart 
Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid's show?
maybe i'm manufacturing the memory because you said that, but i swear to god i remember seeing what you described. they just screamed.

Jaren_2005 
Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid's show?
Oh God. Yes. The little girl, Janice, I remember seeing her shake. And the Skin-Taker screaming through his gnashing teeth, his jaw careening so wildly I thought it would come off its wire hinges. I turned it off and it was the last time I watched. I ran to tell my brother and we didn't have the courage to turn it back on.

mike_painter65 
Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid's show?
i visited my mom today at the nursing home. i asked her about when i was littel in the early 70s, when i was 8 or 9 and if she remebered a kid's show, candle cove. she said she was suprised i could remember that and i asked why, and she said "because i used to think it was so strange that you said ‘i'm gona go watch candle cove now mom' and then you would tune the tv to static and juts watch dead air for 30 minutes. you had a big imagination with your little pirate show."
  

It’s a wonderfully creepy tale and it went on to become a big hit online, especially after it was posted to Creepypasta.com on 5 June 2009, where it was met with massive acclaim, with a user score of 9.1/10 at the time of writing. Soon YouTubers started to post their own interpretations of Candle Cove episodes, while discussions of the mythical creepy show appeared on those heavyweight spreaders of Creepypasta, 4chan and reddit, not to mention numerous other forums and messageboards. 
As is so often the case with these stories, it wasn’t long before people were asking whether it was actually based on fact on various web sites, including Yahoo! Answers. Several mischievous web users (notably those on the aforementioned 4chan and reddit) have helped spread this belief by claiming to have seen the show themselves as children and acting surprised when asked whether the show is fake. 
It has since become so popular that a wikia has been created about ‘the show’, which includes detailed descriptions of the characters and even synopses of its fictional ‘episodes’.  
The reason for this popularity should be pretty apparent to most readers — it’s well-written and, most importantly, is legitimately creepy.
Straub’s story is a success that induces fear through several means, not least of which is the use of skewed or distorted childhood imagery mentioned above. However, let’s also not forget the inherent creepiness of marionettes.
The fear of dolls, puppets, ventriloquists dummies, among other semi-realistic artefacts that falsely represent sentient beings is known as Automatonophobia, while the specific branch that deals with puppets is called Pupaphobia. Like many phobias, it is said to originate in sufferers during childhood, often if they saw a puppet in a way that could be construed by their young mind as aggressive or frightening.
I think it’s safe to say that the skin grinding antics of Candle Cove’s Skin-Taker more than fits the bill here.
The fear of these types of item also builds on the ‘Uncanny Valley’ theory. The term was first coined in 1978 in the book Robots: Fact, Fiction, and Prediction, by Jasia Reichardt, describing a concept first lauded back in 1970 by robotics professor Masahiro Mori.
‘a hypothesis in the field of aesthetics which holds that when features look and move almost, but not exactly, like natural beings, it causes a response of revulsion among some observers. The "valley" refers to the dip in a graph of the comfort level of beings as subjects move toward a healthy, natural likeness described in a function of a subject's aesthetic acceptability.’

This is a pretty common phobia among people and horror films have been quick to play on the inherent creepiness of dolls (Child’s Play and Annabelle, for example), waxworks (Waxwork, House of Wax), scarecrows (Husk, Dark Night of the Scarecrow, Jeepers Creepers 2) and dummies (Saw, Puppet Master, Dead Silence). 
Furthermore, the format of the story works by very effectively replicating real life message board posts. By skillfully blurring the line between fiction and reality, the stunning twist ending hits that little bit harder, forcing the reader to wonder: ‘What if…?’ 
The ending is one which forces the reader to ponder the story, trying to ascertain if the tale is one of psychological or supernatural horrors. Ultimately, the biggest strength of Straub’s story could well be that he never gives us that answer.
However, fans anxious to get even more from the world of Candle Cove are in for a treat — TV channel SyFy has announced that it will be adapting the story for its horror anthology show, Channel Zero.
The show will be scripted by Nick Antosca (Hannibal, Friday the 13th), while Chronicle and American Ultra’s Max Landis will also oversee creative direction with him.
Channel Zero: Candle Cove is due to hit our screens in October.
Yet exciting as this news is, Candle Cove would not exist were it not for one man, original author Kris Straub. Artist/cartoonist/writer Kris’s work can be seen over at http://chainsawsuit.com and he was kind enough to speak with me about his phenomenal creation.


The House: Hi Kris, thank you so much for agreeing to answer my questions.
I’ll start with the most obvious one — what served as your inspiration for the story? 
Kris Straub: I've thought a lot about my own childhood and the idea that we all misremember details, things that should not have been frightening, or at least weren't intended to be. And as a child, you can't quite express your thoughts fully yet, so you can't get something subtle cleared up by an adult. You just accept it.
But I can point at two specific things which focused my interest in writing Candle Cove. One was my dad telling me about a comic or story book he'd had when he was very little, before he could read words. It was about Donald Duck, who had stolen fruit from a farmer's field. The farmer angrily chased Donald off with an axe, and on the next page, Donald was standing in a shallow pond, with his feet in the water. But my dad assumed the farmer had cut them off. That's what he thought the story was about.
The second thing was an Onion article from 2000, titled "Area 36-Year-Old Still Has Occasional Lidsville Nightmare", which is very funny and accurate, and got me thinking about my own childhood and the poorly-constructed puppets and TV effects which get passed off as fun or whimsical. But the cheap look of those old kids' shows always felt like it had an undertone of malice, of other-ness.

TH: Which writers, horror or otherwise, do you consider yourself a fan of?
KS: I like Lovecraft and his contemporaries, Stephen King, Steven Millhauser (although he isn't really horror, more like weird fiction), and lately Thomas Ligotti, who may be my all-time favorite. 

TH: The story has taken on quite the life of its own, complete with a wiki that boasts synopses of episodes. How does it make you feel to know that so many people have taken your story to heart and are inspired to create their own fiction in its world? Are there any examples of fan art in particular that have impressed you? 
KS: It's difficult because I was happy that the story resonated so deeply with so many people that they either wanted it to be real, or actually did believe there was a mystery around this fictional show, but I never intended for it to be a hoax. It was presented as short fiction. But early in its existence, Candle Cove was copied and pasted a lot of places without a byline or a credit, so it was assumed to be posts from an actual forum. 
So it's hard — because as an artist, I didn't want to clamp down on people enjoying it and sharing it, but I would get frustrated coming across others saying: "This is great! I'm going to make a video game/short film/book out of it and sell it!" And they never wondered if it was intellectual property.

TH: Congratulations on the recent announcement by SyFy that Candle Cove will be adapted as part of Channel Zero. How much input have you had in the creative process of the show? Is it strange/thrilling to see your story adapted from one medium to another? 
KS: Thank you! They've kept me up to speed on the series, but I haven't wanted input in the creative process. The reason why Max Landis won me over was that he understood the core of the story, what I wanted to say with it, and what Candle Cove represented; what it would mean to adults who remembered it. Being able to read writer Nick Antosca's work has been amazing. I think Channel Zero is being produced with a great deal of understanding, of this kind of horror that appealed to me in the first place. 

TH: Finally, with the show all set to introduce the story to a huge number of new fans, do you have any plans to return to the story in the future? Are there any other Candle Cove projects coming up that you feel at liberty to share with our readers? And what else can your fans look forward to from you in the days ahead?
KS: I love that Channel Zero will explore and expand on Candle Cove, but I never wanted to give it a sequel. To me, the horror comes from not knowing; not being able to express what you've seen and what you feel. With sequels and continuations, you run the risk of giving the viewer too much information, too many tools to dissect the intangible with. We are afraid to confront a thing that cannot be understood; even in stories we struggle against that.
I'm continuing my fascination with nostalgia-tinged horror at my comic series Broodhollow, which has completed its first two books, as well as a new faux found footage webseries called Local 58.

So now it’s time to set sail from Candle Cove. Come back next week when I’ll be looking at another haunting children’s television tale sure to chill the blood.

If you haven’t already, do please check out and like the Hickey’s House of Horrors Facebook page, which you can find here. It gives you a nice quick link to any new posts on this blog, plus regular news updates from around the web. I check the Internet so you don’t have to! Alternatively, follow me on twitter: The House@HickeysHorrors

Until next time, I hope you enjoyed your stay.

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