Creepypasta Cookoff

The Creepypasta Cookoff is an annual event hosted by Bogleech, encouraging readers of the site to create and submit their own works of short horror fiction in various formats. Winning works are published at the top of the archive with a short commentary from Jonathan Wojcik, but all works are published in the yearly archives, which stretch back to 2012. Most works are prose fiction, but some other submissions include poetry, comics, short video and more.

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This website provides examples of:

• Ant Assault: In a story from 2013 by William Robinson, ants go from attacking each other to launching an all-out war on humanity.
• Ant War: In "Ants" by William Robinson, ants use tools against a rival colony. Before long, they start attacking humans too.
• Attack of the Killer Whatever: A rather common theme between stories.
  • “Watch For Wandering Towers” has TV and radio broadcast towers all over the country spontaneously coming to life and turning on humanity.
  • “The Hungry Rug” is a poem about a killer rug.
  • Another example can be found in “Piano”, although that one might be a hallucination.
  • One story involves “ascendants”, mysterious monsters which take the form of random inanimate objects.
• Author Appeal: As the stories are all written by members of the Bogleech fandom, they tend to cover the same sorts of themes covered on the rest of his site, such as parasitism and sympathetic attitudes toward monsters.
• Beethoven Was an Alien Spy: "The Game of Mush" doesn't cite a specific person, but it implies that the commonality of seemingly well off people becoming serial killers and murderers is actually part of a game played by alien lifeforms, the killers being either aliens themselves or people who learned of the game and tried to replicate it in a fit of madness.
• Christmas Carolers: Played for Horror in "A Christmas Peril" by Vague1. A group of Victorian looking carolers are Humanoid Abominations that attack the protagonist.
• Clap Your Hands If You Believe: In "Big Betty" and its spinoff "I Hate Snowmen", inanimate objects are granted sapience simply by humans giving them names and personifying them.
• Creepy Crows: A flock of intelligent, and apparently religious, crows are the focus of A Murder Of Crows.
• Deadly Game: "The Game of Mush," a rule pamphlet for a game played on Earth by extradimensional beings that can be described as a mix between Monopoly and The Game of Life. The players take on human guises, make as many connections, friendly or romantic, as possible, then cash in their points by murdering all of them and killing their vessel to return to their home dimension.
• Eldritch Abomination: Played straight and subverted multiple times every year. In 2016, one winning example was They Don't Have Tentacles, about an artist specializing in illustrations of a Cthulhu Expy who finally sees her in his dreams, learns how her author failed to convey her, and becomes a new vessel for bringing her worship to our world.
• Evil Is Deathly Cold: In "The Amundsen-Scott Incident", the temperature constantly drops lower and lower as things get worse.
• Extreme Omnivore: Played for Horror in “Baby Weight”, as a woman consumes everything from paperclips to glass beads as part of a twisted attempt to lose weight. Oh, and she forces the same diet on her infant daughter the way mother birds do.
• Genius Loci: The end of “Big Betty” has the titular character abusing the mechanism which brought him/her to life to grant sentience to the entire Earth. He’s named Derek.
• Ghost Train: A pair of these appear in “The Twin Lanterns”, and spirit a boy named James away to parts unknown.
• Hellish Horse: The subject of "An Equine Question" is creature resembling a horse, but it has hair thick enough to be used as rope, can talk like a human, and will apparently survive decapitation.
• Mid Life Crisis Car: “Car Enthusiast” kicks off when the middle-aged narrator buys one of these- a Chevy Nova that turns out to prefer blood over fuel.
• Objectshifting: The rather incoherent ending lines of “When You Buy A Green Car” imply that this happens to “you”, moments before “you” meet a molten fate.

  Your voice is like a horn and a broken radio and you try to blink but your eyes are blinding circles that only look forward and you laugh and laugh with joy and pain because it’s almost your turn! It’s almost your turn!

• Santabomination: The inflatable Santa in a story by C. Lonnquist. It has a disturbing Slasher Smile and kills a cat to eat it.
• Sentient Vehicle:
• Slasher Smile: The Santabomination in Inflatable has one described as "a death mask strapped to an innocuous face".
• Sliding Scale of Comedy and Horror: Some of the funniest works also manage to be the spookiest.
• Sliding Scale of Undead Regeneration: It'll be hard to imagine a form of undead regeneration not depicted in one of these works.
• Whole-Plot Reference: “Car Enthusiast” starts off as one to Christine, although the ending goes in a rather… different direction.