With Channel Zero being a four-season (as yet; it’s currently been cancelled but the door is theoretically open if someone picks it up) TV horror-drama, you’d expect I might want to discuss it at face value: the strength of the acting, the quality of the creature effects, the gripping tone.
But I just don’t feel the pull to make that kind of review. Not in this case. Oh, naturally we’ve got some outstanding stuff here, if we’re judging this show conventionally: the effects and creature-designs throughout range from impeccably creepy (Candle Cove’s tooth-child) to horrifyingly Savini-adjacent (the platter of imaginative gore placed before us in the gaspingly visceral and aptly-titled Butcher’s Block).
And even though the show is a more obscure offering than some of television’s biggest and brightest, the acting convinces throughout, especially on behalf of the ever-workmanlike John Carroll Lynch in No-End House, who stretches his limber acting muscles to swap from sympathetic to antagonistic at the drop of a hat, and of Rutger Hauer of Blade Runner fame in Butcher’s Block, deftly offering us grandfatherly reassurances and surreptitious dark intentions in the same breath.
But that’s not what I’m really aching to talk about with Channel Zero, is it? No, we need to talk about why this series’ existence is so cool to me. To understand that, you have…to go…inside.
See, as a creator, I cut my teeth in my formative years on online content, both posting and absorbing. So did a lot of other people. Over the 2000s, thanks to places like anonymous imageboards and forums that moved fast enough to have something new every time you hit Refresh, you’d see these things called creepypastas occasionally pop up: short scary stories, often anonymous or uncredited, bite-sized microfiction (or larger), often passed off as ‘this really happened to me/my friend’s cousin’.
In that way, those classic creepypastas were the internet age’s version of the urban legends earlier generations would pass around. You know – a guy, whom I perennially picture as dressed like a 50s prepper, takes his girlfriend out to makeout lane, despite warnings on the radio of a hook-handed serial killer on the loose. So as they’re making out, they start to hear scary noises outside, then after the cops come, they get out to find a hook on the car’s door handle. That sort of thing. And did I tell you my sister’s friend’s cousin was never seen again after trying Bloody Mary in a bathroom mirror?
We can take it even farther back to the folklore of the fathers of our fathers: tales to not stray from the lit path, lest you incur the wrath of Baba Yaga or the Fair Folk or the Aswang. And these tales come from primal fears rooted in stark reality: that which lurks in the shadows beyond the fires may not be your friend. It may be a wild animal chomping at the bit, or a psychopath who would find good sport in child abduction and murder. It’s been said that you can tell certain things about a society from its idea of monsters, but it’s in this shadowplay where we see universal fears take form.
These tales of that which lurks in the dark, have existed as long as we have lived in the light, for a reason. Quoth the Doctor, Not everyone comes back out of the dark…
Am I calling this deceptively humble online community a continuation of a creative tradition that’s stretched back since the dawn of our species? Well, why not? Certainly not its only legitimate heir, not with so many great horror films, stories, shows, et al out there, but part of the tradition, inarguably so!
So a couple old-school creepypastas, the kind of stories that started this whole movement, would go something like these:
https://creepypasta.fandom.com/wiki/Last_One_Today
https://creepypasta.fandom.com/wiki/One_for_the_Baron
https://creepypasta.fandom.com/wiki/Midnight_Game
https://creepypasta.fandom.com/wiki/Mr._Widemouth
https://creepypasta.fandom.com/wiki/Keeper_of_Eternity
https://creepypasta.fandom.com/wiki/Salvation
https://creepypasta.fandom.com/wiki/The_Socratic_Method
https://creepypasta.fandom.com/wiki/Lightless_City
I only posted the shorter stories, some of the old ones. Naturally, a whole community formed around the reading and writing of these things. Nowadays, ‘creepypasta’ has basically become shorthand for any horror fiction posted online, regardless of length or level of detail, and there are a ton of very long ‘pastas’ out there. I really think that Michael Whitehouse (author of Bedtime and its sequels) is one of the most talented horror writers of our time. He could right well be the Scottish answer to Stephen King if he keeps at it. Well, he got his start in the creepypasta community.
But essentially, Channel Zero is a show devoted to adapting creepypastas to the screen. Of course, there had been low-budget short films made of some of these things before, but nothing like an actual show with a real budget and professional actors.
And the reason I love talking about it from this angle is because we’re used to films and shows adapting books, plays, video games (granted the track record on that one is rather touch-and-go) – source material that is already Out In The World as a thing that you can buy, see, read, play. But the fact that there is (or was) a show about creepypastas is evidence that this burgeoning community of amateur (or not-so-amateur) horror writers has managed to affect the culture from the ground up. I love it.
Of course, it’s not the only: there was a one-off Supernatural episode, #Thinman, that was obviously inspired by the Slender Man. Slendy there also got himself a feature-length motion picture, but everyone I’ve talked to about it says that it was an unintentional comedy (I believe the word they used was ‘lolcow’) and borderline unwatchable, so let’s leave that there.
Channel Zero adapts four different well-known creepypastas, one per season. Structurally, this horror-anthology format brings to mind American Horror Story, but I can’t so much go into detail about that, because I’ll be honest, I don’t like what I’ve seen of AHS. The first season was very, very hard for me to get through, because most of the characters were miserably unpleasant to be around. If that was the point, it worked too well. Also, it’s a season themed around the deadly sin of Lust, yet it aired in a place that didn’t let it show any nudity, thereby robbing it of the visceral impact of said theme. Great, next let’s re-cut A History Of Violence to be PG-13, can’t be showing that brutal violence in a movie about brutal violence.
But back to our topic, let’s break down the styles of adaptation at play here in Channel Zero. First I’ll be talking about the original creepypastas, and then how the show chose to adapt them.
Our first offering is the infamous Candle Cove. Going back and reading Kris Straub’s original, after having seen the Channel Zero season, I was struck by how short the original story actually is. It exists entirely as a transcript of a forum conversation, where a small group online are discussing a strange, creepy show from their childhood.
I realized after the fact that I had forgotten that the whole angle of the child-murders associated with the show was not in the original pasta at all, and was added part-and-parcel by Channel Zero’s take. (Alternatively, my mind might have gotten it mixed up with a different, longer creepypasta about a strange children’s broadcast with untoward intentions, and that pasta did have a child-murder plot. You might recall the one I’m talking about, but the name escapes me.)
In fact, the original Candle Cove has no ‘plot’ or conventional narrative at all to speak of, which brings us to an interesting challenge the showrunners must have faced in the making: they had to build a story from the ground up around the base elements given in Straub’s short tale.
There are elements of the original pasta’s ‘forum topic’ that show up in Channel Zero, such as Mike Painter, the main character’s name, and the strange episode that was just the puppets screaming on-end, which is discussed at a dinner party rather than online.
The actual Candle Cove show-within-a-show segments we see on Channel Zero are the very thing that sold me on the showrunners’ intentions, credibility and ability. These creepy, off-kilter puppeteered segments are more-or-less exactly how I pictured them when reading the creepypasta. That almost never happens with me.
And there are even a few elements there to tease the fans of the original pasta – for example, that skeleton villain on the puppet show, called the Skin-Taker in the pasta, is called Jawbone on Channel Zero. But later, it’s said, “In dreams, he has another name… […] You can’t lie to the Skin-Taker.”
The season itself swiftly becomes a suffocating miasma of unease, mistrust and infighting as characters struggle to get to the bottom of the child disappearances that happened during the time Candle Cove aired in the 80s (updated from the 70s timeline of Straub’s version) and are now starting up again. It keeps you on edge. It’s creepy.
From where I’m sitting, they did a remarkable job building a world around a story as short as Candle Cove. While there are some wide-eyed shocking moments, the whole season dwells in the realm between ‘unnerving’ and ‘scary’, which is, I think, the intent.
Season number two takes us to No-End House, adapted from the creepypasta of the same name. The original pasta deals with the titular House, which is played up like the usual haunted house attraction, but if you make it through all ten rooms of escalating scariness, you’ll get a cool $500. So it starts off with typical dime-store Halloween decorations, before getting to some serious scares, some psychological manipulation against the narrator, and some reality warping, with the implication at the end that even though the protagonist is ‘out’ of the house, he’s not really ‘out’.
Channel Zero irises its main focus on two elements of the original story: the house turning your personal demons against you, and the idea – only merely implied in the original story, but expanded to form the crux of this season – that even if you get ‘out’, you’re not really ‘out’.
The vast majority of the season’s runtime deals with that last part: in the show, we find that those who enter the house find themselves exiting into an alternate reality of sorts, or a pocket dimension, which mirrors their own town. In this place exist facsimiles of those we have loved and lost…but there is a cost for this. Those copies, they…they need to feed to sustain themselves. And what they feed on, are your memories. Stay too long, and you’ll basically become a husk, barely remembering who you are.
It’s a modern-day lotus-eater machine in suburbia, and I think this was a brilliant way to adapt a deceptively simple, medium-length short story in a way that aptly fills six episodes. What a full-bodied way to follow up on what was essentially a Goosebumps-style ending-gotcha at the end of the original story, a mere implication without elaboration.
I love the initiative and the creative courage here: they’re both expanding on the original story, as well as weaving their own tale. It’s adaptation as proactive inspiration.
That said, I do start to feel that so much focus is placed at times on the ‘other world’, that the titular house gets a bit lost in it. Personally, given my glee at haunted-house attractions, I would have loved to see more depth and scares taking place within the house itself, but from a narrative standpoint, I have to concede that what they did was probably the route to go.
Season three takes us to Butcher’s Block, and it’s here that they really start using the source material as a true jumping-off point rather than as a setpiece bible. This one adapts the creepypasta I’m A Search And Rescue Officer For The US Forest Service, I Have Some Stories To Tell (abbreviated in the show’s credits to the slightly less mouthy Search And Rescue). And that’s easily the longest creepypasta they’ve adapted – hell, just click on that link and check the scroll bar.
The pasta itself is without the throughline of a conventional narrative, instead being presented as a series of online posts from an SAR officer discussing various anecdotes from their time in the rescue service, such as inexplicable disappearances and bizarre re-appearances, odd stairways that appear out of nowhere, stairways that everyone on the force is cautioned to never approach or ascend, officers experiencing lost time and other such oddities.
This is a pasta adapted in spirit rather than in body: much like with Candle Cove, Channel Zero needed to build around the skeletal framework with their own story, but unlike Candle Cove where the titular puppet show was the stark focus of the season, Butcher’s Block takes some of the basic ideas from Search And Rescue (Etc), and puts them to use.
Appropriately (and almost certainly a nod to the narrative style of the original story), Butcher’s Block starts out with a character telling one of the protagonists (and the viewers) tales of the strange and inexplicable doings in the town where they’re stationed. It puts you in the right frame of mind, especially if you’re familiar with the source material. This is a story where things aren’t as they seem, the grapevine may or may not be a reliable narrator, and you might not even be able to trust your own eyes.
The infamous Forest Stairs appear early and play a major role in the season. The implication in the creepypasta that they lead to some alternate or otherworldly place is fully realized in Butcher’s Block. It’s a case of taking an implication from the pasta (for many classic creepypastas play in implication rather than declaration, but it’s not necessarily something you can get away with in long-form television, because nobody wants another Lost) and expanding that implication to tell a larger story.
Mental illness plays a tremendous role in the season: one protagonist suffers from schizophrenia and her sister is at-risk for the same. I’m not here to say whether they did a good job of representing schizophrenia on screen or not, I’m simply not qualified to make a judgment on that, but I will venture to say it works well to accentuate the theme that you can’t always rely on what you see here.
Incidentally, since I mentioned Supernatural earlier, note the appearance of the ever-skeletal Julian Richings (Death in Supernatural) as an otherworldy groundskeeper in Butcher’s Block.
The fourth and final season, The Dream Door, adapts I Found A Hidden Door In My Cellar, And I Think I’ve Made A Big Mistake. This one does follow a conventional narrative structure, though it’s a surprisingly short pasta: to wit, the protagonist finds a strange door in their basement after tearing away the old wallpaper. It leads down a set of stairs, which terminate at another such door. The narrator opens this door. It bears mentioning at this point that the narrator details the physical dimensions of theirs and the neighbor’s houses and basements, and that these stairs and this door by rights cannot possibly exist as they do, at least not in the same physical space. Of course, that worry falls by the wayside when the creepy thing lurking in this hidden room rushes past the narrator and out into the world.
It’s really short, but in adapating this one, the showrunners followed the base narrative pretty closely: a couple find a strange door at the end of the basement that wasn’t there the day before, it leads down a hidden stairwell to another door, and when they finally get that door open, the room reveals a creepy thing (the thing on the show is much creepier than the one in the story, for my money), which escapes out into the world.
Right there in that first episode, they’ve pretty much wrung out the source material, so everything from there on out is fresh. I actually find some of the ideas and concepts they end up tethering the season around, to be more flavourful than the original idea that inspired this season. And here’s the wild thing: once the story gets going and leaves the source material behind, the chief idea they tether the season around – that of individuals who have the power through intense distress and concentration to create doors in their environment, through which emerge monsters driven by the maker’s subconscious desires – is worthy of being a creepypasta in itself! What a world.
But let’s attack this while I’ve got you here: as adaptations of creepypasta, are these seasons creepy?
I’d say yes. Candle Cove’s strength is in the uncanny, off-kilter presentation of the titular show. The biggest creep-factor of No-End House, I’d argue, comes from the role and performance of John Carroll Lynch, and the creep factor leans much on the way he, and his arc, dip between emotional extremes so effortlessly. Though a lot of it just gives you that feeling of letting a truly virtuostic acting performance wash over you, which isn’t quite as creepy; it makes me feel good to watch a great actor peacocking the shit out of emotional extremes like this.
Butcher’s Block is the most brutal and bloody of them all, and things like viscera and body-horror are from a different street in horrorland than ‘creepy’. But when Alice starts getting chased around by the personification of her looming schizophrenia, yeah, that’s creepy.
The Dream Door is less ubiquitously visceral than its predecessor, but it chooses its moments and it has some supremely creepy standouts. Without spoiling anything, I’ll say that there was a moment in the fifth episode that made me physically cringe and shout verbatim, “Oh, what the fuck, this is some Silent Hill P.T. shit!” And given that I made it through Butcher’s Block’s miasma of gory body-horror no problem, that should say something.
And by-and-large, this show revels in a perpetual mood of unease, and part of that is down to the cinematography: shots tend to linger just long enough for you to start to feel unnerved, even in the quiet moments. Or especially in the quiet moments.
And hey, that matters: gotta have creepy elements, those moments that dwell in the uncanny and the simmeringly fearful, rather than in-your-face grotesque all the time, to be a good creepypasta adaptation.
So in these four seasons, we see four different styles of cross-media adaptation:
Candle Cove: retain all the base concepts of the original (non-conventional narrative) story, filling in a more conventional narrative and characters to help tie it all together, while still anchoring the plot around the concepts of the source material.
No-End House: retain much of the source material, but expand and focus on concepts only implied in the original, thus making the adaptation a worthy companion to the original by emphasizing different elements.
Butcher’s Block: Use the skeletal ideas and concepts of the original, to craft an entirely new story.
The Dream Door: Straight-up adapt the source material pretty much as it comes, but that adaptation only lasts for a sixth of the runtime: from there, everything is new ground.
And I don’t exactly have an answer as to which variant is ‘best’, because they all have their own upsides and internal challenges. Because the synthesis of creator and creation can feel so much at times less like a static thing with defined rules and regulations, and more like a living organism, a symbiosis, where every creative choice just has to feel right as it’s happening.
Because, hey: if something like this can grow out of a thing that started as a bunch of mainly-anonymous short stories, truly adaptation from the ground-up, that’s as organic as it gets. Because fuck detached irony, I believe in the power of stories to grow on their own and inspire, and it’s nice when the universe pays it forward and rewards that faith with things like Channel Zero.
If this all sounds good to you, or you’ve been reading creepypastas for years yet didn’t know about this show and this is all kind of blowing your mind, check out Channel Zero. I don’t know if any streaming services have it, but they released all four seasons on one DVD set this year. I don’t know if there’s a blu-ray version, but they’re high-end DVDs that look fine on any good system, and it’s very affordable for the value you get.