Editorials
Before Slender Man and CreepyPastas There Was ‘Ted the Caver’!
I’ve always been fascinated by early-internet horror. Before the rise of Slender Man, Creepypastas, and spooky YouTube videos, most people got their occasional dose of online scares from quirky flash games or viral e-mails spreading updated versions of familiar urban legends. However, that would all change in 2001, as the internet would be graced with an iconic scary story that would inspire many more to come, a tale that we now know as the infamous Ted the Caver.
In a time preceding the popularization of MySpace (or even the invention of Facebook, for that matter), customizable web pages were all the rage, with blogging having exploded in popularity all around the world. Several web-hosting sites attempted to cash in on the trend, and it was on an unassuming AngelFire page that spelunking enthusiast Ted began to share his growing obsession with the aptly named “mystery cave”.
Keeping its real name and location intentionally vague in an effort to dissuade curious readers from getting hurt, Ted used the website as a kind of journal to record and reflect on his exploration, describing his first innocent forays into the cave, accompanied only by a strategically unnamed friend (referred to as B in the story) and a disposable camera. Within the cave, he and his friend encountered a small opening that led into an apparently unexplored system of tunnels, and decided to expand the passage in order to reach the cavern’s uncharted depths.
Claustrophobia, anyone?
As Ted and his friend go about enlarging the passage through the use of power drills, sledgehammers, and sheer tenacity, the cavers encounter eerie noises, strange feelings and creepy sigils carved into seemingly unreachable rocks. Of course, things eventually take a turn for the worst, as these intrepid explorers unearth something that was best left undisturbed, but I won’t spoil the rest of the story here. Inquisitive readers can (and definitely should) visit Ted’s Caving Page for the full chilling tale, which is remarkably still online after all these years.
Ted’s story would eventually spread to all corners of the internet, becoming especially popular on message boards where users would argue endlessly about its authenticity. Through Ted’s believable insight and handy camera, we’re offered glimpses into the Mystery Cave’s claustrophobic innards, making this one of the most immersive horror experiences available online. A real group of experienced cavers would eventually pinpoint the actual cave’s location in Utah, adding another layer of credibility to the story. Nevertheless, after a few years, the real Ted re-emerged online and ended up revealing (rather anti-climactically) that the blog was a mix of his real-life spelunking adventures combined with some creative embellishment.
At one point, there was some amount of controversy surrounding a short story by Thomas Lera entitled “Fear of the Darkness“, which some internet users shared as if it were a completed version of the original tale. However, Lera’s take on the story was entirely fan-made, having clearly adapted Ted’s blog, instead of the other way around. While not a bad read in its own right, Fear of the Darkness‘ ending went out of its way to explain things that were better left to the reader’s imagination, making it an inferior version of the story.
After several years of internet infamy, an independent film adaptation of the story was produced in 2008, titled The Living Dark: The Story of Ted the Caver. Directed by David Hunt, the film took a whopping nine years to warrant a release outside of the festival circuit. While this is usually a bad sign, the movie is actually a surprisingly creepy retelling of Ted’s adventures, despite taking a few liberties with the source material.
One of the better Creepypasta-based films.
In spite of an obviously insufficient budget, Living Dark manages to retain the original story’s mysterious atmosphere and early-internet charm, even using some of Ted’s original photographs and journal entries within the film. The ending might divide viewers regarding how decidedly unambiguous it is when compared to the original blog posts, but I thought that it served as a satisfying compromise between showing too much and too little.
Even beyond the world of film, Ted’s Caving Page has had a notable influence on internet culture as a whole, having been considered by some as the internet’s very first creepy-pasta. The story also served as an inspiration for countless other infamous online stories like The Dionaea House (a personal spooky favorite) and the SCP Foundation.
To this day, the page remains incredibly popular, with people are still arguing over their interpretation of Ted’s account and what fate might have befallen him and his friends. I think a lot of this success can be attributed to the candid writing style and plausible presentation of an otherwise traditional supernatural horror story. It really feels like Ted is just relating a series of real events instead of authoring an epic tale of Lovecraftian terror (although you can’t deny the story’s Lovecraftian undertones).
Much like what happened to the Blair Witch Project, the scare factor here is significantly reduced now that we no longer have the benefit of uncertainty over whether or not this is a true story. However, again like the holy grail of found-footage films, Ted’s tale stands on its own as an effective work of horror, carrying all the traits of a good old-fashioned supernatural mystery regardless of its format.
As we reach the 17th anniversary of Ted’s first entry, I think it’s worth taking a look back at the grandfather of modern internet horror and appreciating its influence over our favorite digital scares. Luckily for us, Ted’s Caving Page is still open to anyone curious (not to mention brave) enough to enter, and I wholeheartedly recommend that you do so.
Steven Spielberg has always been conversant in the cinematic language of the horror genre, despite relatively few credits in the genre. His contributions as a writer and producer on things like Poltergeist are legendary, and films like Duel and Jaws certainly wield the horror genre in remarkable, often chilling ways. He may not be a horror filmmaker, but he knows when he needs to scare us, and he has the tools to make that happen.
I didn’t go into Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s alien epic, expecting outright horror, and indeed the film leans much more into thrilling than frightening. This is not a horror film, but for a few minutes in the middle, much to my surprise, it became one.
Spielberg has filmed more than his fair share of scary scenes over the years, but with Disclosure Day, he directed a new contender for the scariest scene of his entire career.
SPOILERS AHEAD for Disclosure Day!
Josh O’Connor in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
Among the various alien secrets laced throughout Disclosure Day are a trio of palm-sized rods, the color of pencil graphite. These rods, originating from another planet, can be used for a number of things, but for the purposes of this scene, the most important is “diving,” gripping the rod in one bare hand and using its power to “dive” into the mind of another person.
The person holding the rod in this scene is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), head of shadowy cybersecurity firm Wordex, who is hellbent on keeping human knowledge of extraterrestrials secret from the general public. Scanlon’s trying to find whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who’s got all of those alien secrets tucked in a backpack while he’s on the run, and while Daniel’s more experienced mind is protected from diving, his girlfriend Jane’s (Eve Hewson) is not. So, monitored by medical personnel at Wordex headquarters (diving is dangerous), Scanlon pushes his way into Jane’s mind to find the location of Daniel’s safe house.
A telepathic invasion is scary enough on its own, but Spielberg doesn’t stop there. When Scanlon dives into Eve’s mind, he appears to her to be sitting across the kitchen table, like he’s in the room. Her bright blue eyes turn Scanlon’s dark brown, and she loses much of her control over her own body, not to mention her mind. Moments before, Daniel finally shared with her the secrets in his backpack, so Jane is shocked, conflicted, deeply vulnerable when Scanlon slips inside her head. This is not just telepathy. This is possession.
Spielberg underscores this not just through the visual language of the scene, as Jane breaks out in a sweat and struggles to sit upright as Scanlon invades her mind, but through Jane’s background. As she revealed to Daniel earlier in the film, Jane is a former novitiate nun who left her convent when she began to question her calling. She still believes firmly in God and, more importantly, believes that perhaps proof of alien life should be kept secret from the public because, in her eyes, it would upset the entire balance of faith in the world. God is a defining factor for humankind, Jane argues, and showing humanity proof of creatures from the stars would undercut that in dangerous ways.
This context, combined with the crucifix necklace Jane’s holding in her hand at the time of the dive, makes this scene the closest thing Spielberg will ever shoot to something out of The Exorcist. It’s not just a battle of wills, but a battle of faith. As an amoral technocrat worms his way into her memories, her beliefs, her faith, Jane turns the crucifix into a weapon, squeezing it until her hand bleeds when she discovers that a pain response can momentarily push Scanlon out of her head.
Of course, when you put a crucifix and a bloody hand together, it conjures images of stigmata. Screenwriter David Koepp pushes the allusion further by having Scanlon quote Christ on the cross to Jane by way of convincing her that she must be the one to stop Daniel by any means necessary.
It’s easy to see why this is scary, right?
On a very basic level, you have a powerful, wealthy man subduing and assaulting an innocent young woman, which is frightening enough. Then, the layers of the scene kick in. Scanlon doesn’t just assault Jane, but possesses her, seizes her memories, her knowledge, and finally her own free will, all while Jane literally clings to her faith in an effort to fight back. Disclosure Day is, among other things, a story about who has a right to the truth, and Scanlon believes that he should be the arbiter of that truth. Not just the truth as he sees it, but the truth as Jane sees it as well. If they don’t see eye to eye, he’ll make her.
But the possession, as it turns out, cuts both ways. Using the rod to dive is, for a normal human being, an intensely strenuous process. Scanlon admits that previous attempts almost killed him, and for some members of his time, so much as touching the rod results in a near-death experience. Even accessing an unprepared mind like Jane’s takes a lot of Scanlon, and when she kicks him out by squeezing the crucifix – again, so much meaning embedded in the details here – his team holds him back and tries to offer medical intervention. But Scanlon persists, pushing them away, and keeps diving back in.
This means that Jane can’t escape him because he just won’t stop pushing back through her defenses, but it also means that each time Scanlon enters her mind, and thus the safe house, he looks more monstrous. By the end, through a combination of lighting and makeup, Firth barely looks human, conjuring up images of the possessed Father Karras at the end of The Exorcist.
Colin Firth (center, standing) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
On a pure, visceral craft level, all of this is quite frightening, but the real trick to making this scene into Spielberg’s most terrifying lies in the more existential horror surrounding all of this. Disclosure Day is a film about the battle for the truth over extraterrestrials, but it’s also about a fight against an impossibly powerful surveillance state, the devaluing of human and alien lives in favor of some nebulous collection of assets, and the value of the individual in a world that increasingly lumps people into demographic boxes and writes them off.
In this scene, the surveillance state becomes supernatural, a human life is worth less than a piece of information, and an extragovernmental technocrat would rather sacrifice his own humanity than see reason. In 2026, few things could be more terrifying than that. Spielberg knows this and wields it mightily, proving once again that, while he’s not a strictly horror filmmaker, he can direct horror with the best of them.
Disclosure Day is in theaters now.
Eve Hewson (second from left) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
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