Horror in general is a genre that relies completely on thrilling an audience. Part of what makes horror what it is lies in the scary images (i.e., death, supernatural elements, whatever), yes. However, that alone doesn't scare anyone except the people who are phobic about it in the first place. It's a little like the show-don't-tell piece of advice. You know. The bit where people tell you that you need to be detailed about your writing and have things happen in fully fledged scenes instead of just summarizing things, right? Well, if you just have a picture of a monster, that's a lot like telling us what we should be scared of. It might scare a few people, but the scare just isn't as powerful as it can be. However, if you tell us a story about how that monster is frozen in one place until you turn out the lights and look away, suddenly, that picture's probably going to be a lot scarier.
The point is that there's a second element to a horror piece: it plays with the reader's emotions in some way. Usually, horror capitalizes in the idea that the reader doesn't know what's going to happen, so it's the anticipation that something has to happen (because otherwise, why would it be a creepypasta?) that makes it scarier. In other words, one of the biggest reasons why my ability to predict how your creepypasta is going to end is bad? Because I know how it ends. There's nothing scary about it because I'm no longer getting a shock or thrill out of reading what you have to say. After all, I can recognize those story elements from a completely different story, so I can pretty much piece together from the endings of someone else's fic what I should be expecting. Ergo, no fear because I know what to brace myself for. There's no traps, no shocks... just nothing.
However, creepypasta takes it one step further by making the situation seem completely normal at first. ... To be a bit clearer, the style that a good creepypasta is written in isn't over-the-top. It's not overloaded with screams, and it doesn't beat us over the head with the fact that it's horror. Rather, real creepypasta is frequently told in an anecdotal manner. That is, it sounds like someone is telling a story. (Note: There are examples of good creepypasta that's presented in essay form as well. I consider the entire story of Polybius to be one, and beyond that, the earliest Pokémon creepypasta were typically essays about investigations linking Japanese copies of Red and Green to the insanity of hundreds of children. Example: Follow Me. However, in general, the more common form of creepypasta is the anecdote form, just because it's difficult to maintain the neutral tone of an informational article when writing creepypasta.) In doing so, the author performs a rather unusual move: downplays the horror. Yes, that's right. Creepypasta that works actually downplays the fact that it's supposed to be horrific. As a result, the horrors and thrills they talk about are done so in a way that makes it seem like they could have happened.
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But seriously, that's it. It's all in the delivery. Beating the "LOLHORROR" parts into our heads will not make your fic scary. It's not scary to see, for the hundredth time, your sprite getting mutilated, Pokémon dying instead of fainting, Hypno leading children off to be his playthings [forever], games predicting your death... no, none of that is scary if you keep on emphasizing that it's scary.
I guess you could say that the more you try to convince me to be scared, the less scared I will be. In order to make a creepypasta work, you need to know how to be subtle. Work your way up to a wham moment to heighten the chills.
And even more than that, as I've said earlier, you need to make it feel real. The creepiest creepypasta I've ever read were the ones that seemed like they could happen. Now, okay, I know that things like Candle Cove are fictional (in part because I read a blog post by the actual creator of the story... who, hilariously, wrote the piece during a call center job, which is to say I worship them right now), but for a second, you believed it could have been a normal day on a normal forum, right? Or, alternatively, if you didn't see this on a creepypasta site, it wouldn't be any stretch of the imagination to believe it was a real thread for a brief second, right? Even if that second was very brief? Same things with the other creepypasta that I consider well-done. They have that moment where it either looks at first like it could be completely real or (in the case of Polybius) could very well have been real for all we know. As a result, it gets chilling because for a brief second, the reader thinks it could happen to them. That's what creepypasta is all about: that single moment.
