American Horror Story has changed the game, you guys. Anthology TV series are cropping up everywhere you look, from HBO’s True Detective and ABC’s American Crime to Fox’s Scream Queens. It makes sense, too. If a season turns out to be a drag, the show can hit the reset button and have a fresh new story ready to go. Also, high-end actors like Matthew McConaughey or Jessica Lange are far more willing to commit to a one season contract than a serial show, allowing networks to nab bigger and brighter talent.
Never one to shy away from big trends, the notorious SyFy channel is grabbing a slice of the anthology pie with a new show called Channel Zero. The first season of the show, to be produced by Max Landis (AMERICAN ULTRA) and written by Nick Antosca (Hannibal, FRIDAY THE 13TH 2016), will be based on a notorious creepypasta post: Kris Straub’s “Candle Cove”.
Candle Cove tells the story of a mysterious children’s television show from the 1980s and its role in a series of murders — and one man’s dark secret.
The creepypasta genre is as of yet untapped on the wider entertainment market, but it has long been a source of spine-tingling chills for Internet readers everywhere. Creepypasta is a user-generated format that allows writers everywhere to flex their muscles with short, unnerving stories that rely on creative and subtle scares (à la Slender Man) sometimes combined with harsh jolts to achieve their effect.
In a joint press release, Landis and Antosca said:
We love the idea of doing seasons of TV like rich, character-driven horror novels, and for Channel Zero: Candle Cove we’ve expanded this great short story Candle Cove into something really nightmarish and haunting and surreal. We can’t wait to dig in deeper and bring this to life with Syfy and Universal Cable Productions.
It’s hard to take a SyFy production truly seriously, but it is an immensely interesting task that they’ve chosen to take on. One hopes that they can breathe new life into an intriguing and underserved internet phenomenon.
You can read the original Candle Cove story here. And here you can read more about other types of creepypasta stories.