#9: The long tail of internet screamers

The devil won't go back in the boot.

Happy Halloween! I’ve been digging into early internet history lately (clearly), and it occurred to me, I actually remember my very first time online.

We were in the basement, hitting all our usual haunts on the family computer — Nickelodeon, AOL. I was six, maybe younger, so I experienced technology over the shoulder of my older sister. But just this once, she said I could play. There was this super tough game that maybe I could try my hand at. All I had to do was navigate the cursor through a couple of mazes.

I leaned in and maneuvered the narrow corridors at the end of level three. All of a sudden, I was face-to-face with something indescribable. Which is to say I couldn’t describe it, because I had dove under the desk. Hiding. Screaming. I would nurse this antipathy for years.

The face on my screen was Regan MacNeil, the possessed girl from The Exorcist. The game was 2003’s The Maze, though, like the King and the Bard before it, it became so ubiquitous that it’s now simply known as the Scary Maze Game.

It represents a genre all its own: the “screamer,” a label referring to the games themselves but also to the era of video they produced. Screamers earned their reputation through the unending airplay they received via America’s Funniest Home Videos, the nascent YouTube, skits on SNL. Videos of grown-ups pranking each other (and, more often, their children) with screamers completely took over and, I think, illuminated for a lot of people what participatory horror could do.

The Maze’s genome contains Five Nights at Freddy’s, Undertale, streaming platforms like Twitch and horror ARGs. I don’t think its impact can be overstated. Occupying a once-ever pivot between modern horror and the horror of centuries leading up to it, The Maze rose to its occasion by being basically perfect. Like The Exorcist from which it pulls its jumpscare, it left its scar on a generation.

You’ll see a lot of claims about the first jump scare, in Carrie (1976) or in Cat People (1942). The earliest I can find is the unmasking of the Phantom in the 1925 silent film adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera.

The Phantom of the Opera (1925), Universal Pictures

But that one lacks sound. Does every jump scare need a sting, the audio cue that “accentuates the moment we’re supposed to be scared?” What counts as a jump scare?

Remember what we learned about slashers. Even when they appear to reinvent themselves, they paw at something deep in the collective consciousness. To talk about a “first jump scare,” we might as well talk about a jack-in-the-box.¹ Our experience of fear doesn’t change, only the technology surrounding it.

If you’re, say, a Bavarian woodcarver, your options for producing interactive horror are very limited. But as video games developed into their own art form, developers could take the horror of Phantom or Cat People and repackage it into something interactive. Digital toymakers learned to craft many new kinds of jack-in-the-box.

Horror games — or at least jump scare games, as opposed to more purely atmospheric games like Silent Hill — follow this exact format. You turn the crank, and sooner or later a jack pops out. But whether that crank requires you to repel zombies, or walk through a dark house, or collect pages in the forest, that depends on the game.

I think of The Maze’s key innovation as concealing its crank (uh, so to speak). Its title screen reads “test your skills!” and “how steady is your hand?” It claims, “sound effects will help.” And the game itself is fairly easy, because The Maze wants you to win it. Even if you fail, its extreme simplicity makes it easy to try again.

Then, level three — the one with the jump scare — presents you with an especially tricky corridor. Now you have to focus intently in order to succeed. I played The Maze for research, and my knowledge of the prank barely lessened its effect.

A growing architecture of virality surrounded the game itself. It could self-replicate as an unassuming link in an email, or as a video of someone pranking their skittish friend. Do you know someone like that? Think you could trick them?

Unsurprisingly, the game made big waves. Some entertainers realized that you could cut out the prank element and film yourself reacting to a horror game. As luck would have it, let’s plays were just coming into relevance, which were the perfect vehicle for something like this.

This created the first big branch of internet horror post-The Maze: horror let’s plays. If we distinguish between jump scare games and terror games, then between the two, the jump scare game is the obvious pick for virality.

Games like Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Slender, and the gold standard Five Nights at Freddy’s launched some of the largest channels in the biz — Markiplier and Pewdiepie come to mind. Eventually, some migrated to Twitch to stream the same content in a more authentic live setting. Developers began producing so-called “streamer bait” to catch those entertainers in particular. The reactions got bigger. The jump scares scaled in intensity.

Then there’s the other road taken in the wake of The Maze: a realization of the artistic potential of horror when you don’t know it’s horror. Doki Doki Literature Club, Omori, Undertale, Can Your Pet — these are just a few games that present a harmless face to lure non-horror players into a horror experience. Spooky’s Jump Scare Mansion is a game that assures you it’ll just be one of those streamer bait jump scare games, even as it pushes you into darker, more atmospheric places.

What’s special about this design direction is how it bleeds outside of traditional gaming spaces. Horror ARGs, online stories that are interacted with in the real world, have been played across social media. One second you think you’ve just stumbled on a weird post, the next you’re unraveling a mystery. Only, instead of needling in on a maze, you’re deciphering codes and brightening jpegs and scanning spectrograms.

Unlike jump scare games, you rarely know when you’ve reached the end of a horror ARG — but, now that the pioneers of the genre have done their pioneering, you typically do know when you’re in one. Artists have demonstrated a willingness to show their hand in order to tell more interesting and involved stories. Marble Hornets, one of the great early interactive horrors, almost single-handedly evolved Slenderman.

There’s a nostalgist in me that was happy to see a new generation of screamers on TikTok and YouTube Shorts, with titles like “It’s tradition, we got scared like that, now it’s their turn.” Videos of parents tormenting their children definitely feel less popular now than they were back in 2003.

I’m truly not here to say whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing. But as much as I love the old-school screamers, I disagree that they’re a rite of passage. Exposing my six-year-old self to FNAF would be like Sprite unto a pilgrim. What I’m saying is, don’t feel cheated that kids these days don’t have to suffer horror like The Maze.

They’ve got it much worse.

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Thanks for reading!

This year my girlfriend and I went as a scarecrow and a crow. (I was the crow.) Halloween’s also our anniversary. It’s tough, you never know whether to show up to your anniversary dinner dressed fancy or dressed like a crow.

Oh, we also almost borrowed a lab coat from a friend and reader who’s a virologist so we could do a Young Frankenstein costume. But then he started using words like “decontaminate” so we pivoted. Thanks anyway!

DR

1. The “Jack” in “jack-in-the-box” refers to… the devil! I guess an English clergyman named Sir John Schorne trapped a devil in a boot, and then a toymaker started making “devils-in-a-box.” This is pure speculation, but it may be the case that a jump scare like The Maze scares us because it gives the impression of something evil trapped and desperate to escape. That’s certainly a theme in FNAF. Or maybe it’s just pure animal instinct.