Since the dawn of civilization, human beings have been scaring the crap out of each other with horror stories inspired by their immediate environments. Nowadays, however, many people don’t seem to realize that we spend most of our waking hours online, be it at home or work, on computers or phones, and our stories have adjusted accordingly.

That’s why I believe it’s time to discuss the Viral Horrors that surround us every day. From Creepypastas to killer memes, these sordid tales are as much a part of our culture as classic campfire stories, only on a much larger scale. Today, I’d like to talk about the infamous SCP Foundation, and see if we can come to appreciate these online scares and what they mean to us.

While we can often trace iconic horror stories back to a single creator, the fact is that most of our famous urban legends and monstrous folklore are the result of several generations of storytellers adding their own personal spin to age-old tales. After all, even geniuses like Bram Stoker and Lovecraft found themselves adapting local legends and historical fears when creating the likes of Dracula or even Dagon.

This remains true even in the age of the internet, with digital stories taking on a life of their own as people share and add to the digital mythos over time. We may know that a figure like Slender-Man was originally created by Victor Surge, but it’s this idea of collaborative fiction that helped the character evolve and achieve online infamy all over the world. Of course, it would only be a matter of time before a group of online scary-story enthusiasts would truly harness the power of collective storytelling, and that’s how the SCP Foundation was born.

We can actually trace the Foundation’s origins back to 4Chan’s /x/ board in 2007, when a user posted what would become the basis for a sprawling internet tradition, SCP-173. The post itself was written like a relatively convincing scientific report describing a spray-painted concrete statue that becomes aggressive when not being directly observed (similar to Doctor Who‘s Weeping Angels). The report was said to have been leaked from a secret organization, with SCP being an acronym for their motto: Secure, Contain, Protect. The post would then go on to describe the great lengths that this mysterious institution goes through in order to study and contain this metaphysical abomination, also including an eerie photograph of the supposed creature (though this would later be revealed to be a picture of a sculpture by Japanese artist Izumi Kato).

SCP-173, as seen in SCP – Containment Breach.

Naturally, folks loved this spooky description of otherworldly science and containment procedures, so it wasn’t long before other /x/ users produced more stories in this realistic format. The detached, pragmatic approach to the writing and the idea of a Lovecraftian underworld filled with cursed objects and eldritch creatures was something that the internet hadn’t seen before, so everyone wanted to be a part of it. These stories eventually became popular in other circles, leading to the creation of an SCP Wiki in 2008, where these stories are currently housed and the mythos continues to evolve.

It’s been over a decade since the original SCP-173, but the general format hasn’t changed much when creating new entries. Though the SCP community now also accepts standard fictionalized stories set in this universe, main posts found on the website usually share the same structure. A peculiar object, being or even location is labeled with one of the iconic item numbers (which have gone way beyond the original thousand), followed by a general classification that usually describes the Foundation’s difficulty in containing said element. Then, we see a brief description of the item’s containment procedures and general characteristics with the occasional photograph or illustration.

These posts can be bite-sized encyclopedic entries that leave most of the horror up to the imagination, but oftentimes we’ll see longform masterpieces of epistolary fiction, taking full advantage of the format to tell mind-bending stories that sometimes span multiple entries. Browsing the website can be much like getting lost in a Wikipedia from hell, where each new article leads to a related one in an ever-expanding world of horrifying browser tabs, making this one of my favorite places to procrastinate on the internet.

Bizarre creations like SCP-018 (a rubber ball that inexplicably bounces with 200% efficiency), or SCP-1756 (a DVD Player that transforms any video into an episode of At The Movies where Siskel and Ebert review said video, even if it was made after the end of the show) are shining examples of the creative potential when online communities gather to make something new. I’ll be the first to admit that a lot of these entries are kind of silly and don’t fit in with the truly terrifying ones (it’s hard to think that a traveling moth salesman exists in the same universe as a sentient, life-hating star), but due to the collaborative nature of the site, a few duds are all but inevitable; and I think it’s a small price to pay for all of the genuinely well-written content available at no cost.

Everyone has the right to feature SCP-106 in their nightmares.

At this point, it may seem surprising that there are no big-budget adaptations of the SCP mythos on the big screen (or even the little one, for that matter), but that’s mostly due to the fact that pretty much the entirety of the official Wiki is licensed under the Creative Commons Attributions 3.0 License. This means that, while anyone is technically free to adapt and reproduce the contents of the Wiki in their own work, they wouldn’t have exclusive ownership of whatever they produced, making the whole endeavor rather unprofitable for studios. While it’s kind of disappointing that we’ll likely never see a proper movie/TV adaptation of these memorable creatures and objects, the SCP Wiki represents one of the internet’s last bastions of complete creative freedom, and I think that’s worth preserving.

Nevertheless, we’ve still seen quite a few independent SCP adaptations over the years, mostly in the form of videogames, but there has also been a light novel and even a stage adaptation of stories from the Foundation. Here on Bloody-Disgusting, we have the SCP-Archives Podcast, which tells weekly tales masterfully adapted from the official Wiki. Unfortunately, as our own Pacific Obadiah explained, a certain Andrey Duksin has trademarked the SCP Foundation’s name and logo within the Russian Federation and Eurasian Customs Union, in the hopes of profiting off of years of other folks’ hard work. Not only does this jeopardize all the current projects derived from the Foundation, but it also clearly goes against the SCP Community spirit.

The site’s Admin team is currently seeking legal action, but only time will tell if the Russian legal system will agree that these stories should be available to everyone at no charge, with no one person in control of other people’s access to them. For now, however, I think we should celebrate the creative landmark that is the SCP Foundation, and how it represents a whole new frontier in collaborative fiction. The internet’s greatest strength has always been in how it brings people together, and that is still true when discussing online scares. The Foundation may be just a digital update to a long-standing human tradition of gathering to share scary stories, but it’s an important step forward, and I can’t wait to see what the future of horror storytelling has in store for us.

If you enjoyed reading about the Foundation and are interested in stepping into this bizarre world of flesh-eating gods, infinite stairways and interdimensional phantasms, I’d recommend a visit to the World’s Scariest Wiki, or checking out one of the SCP-Archives’ latest episodes. Just keep an eye out for escapees, as the Foundation can’t keep this stuff contained forever.