The Cutprice Guignol

When I was a kid, there was little I was more obsessed with than The Simpsons.

Well, to be honest, that goes for my adulthood, too. But, growing up, I adored the show – I collected the VHS tapes, I ravenously consumed the extra features on the season-long DVDs when they started coming out, I’d sneak around to a friend’s house to watch the new episode on Sky when all we had was satellite. It defined a lot of my childhood, a little safe place for me to retreat into when life got a bit too much.

So, when I came across mention of a lost episode, I was intrigued. An episode which had, in the round-the-campfire retelling on the story I found on an online forum, been discovered by a show enthusiast after it had been wiped from the archives of The Simpsons itself. The episode revolved around Bart’s death after plunging to his demise from a plane – eschewing the show’s normal cartoony style, the episode instead used photorealistic and ultra-gory images of Bart’s body and a decidedly maudlin tone, with the surviving family sobbing through the entirety of the second act. When visiting his grave, they found his body laying on top of it, surrounded by the graves of Simpsons guest stars – engraved with the accurate date of their deaths, whether they had been deceased at the time of the episode’s creation or not.

While the story isn’t true, I still vividly remember coming across this creepypasta when I was a teenager, and that strange, discomforting feeling that it gave me – by the time I stumbled across it, a few versions of the episode had been created via edits of existing footage, and seeing these characters who had been a comfort to me in my formative years turned into horror fodder really unsettled me.

As you all well know by now, I love a good creepypasta, and the Lost Episode subgenre – for which the Dead Bart story is often credited with popularizing – is one of the most popular tropes in the modern creepypasta realm. I think there are quite a few reasons for this, perhaps the most obvious being that it’s a relatively simple premise to pull off – you’ve already likely got access to the existing episodes of the show (or occasionally movie or game) itself that you can feasibly edit in to something appropriately horrific or incongruous (like more realistic sound effects, imagery, or themes), along with an audience who already understands the general outline of the show and how a horror subversion of it might work. Like everything in the world of creepypasta, there’s some really fun and inventive stuff out there, and you have to wade through a lot of dreadful, derivative, and boring nonsense to get there.

But what’s really cool about this particular trope, for me, is the way it so often relies on children’s shows, or, at least, TV that has some kind of nostalgic factor for the teller of the story. Look at any iceberg of lost episode creepypastas, and you’re going to find dozens of takes on children’s TV – and, yeah, let’s be real, part of that is because subverting the innocence of children’s TV with something darker has an inherently unsettling feel to it.

But more than that, I think that there’s a really cool arc to be traced via the popular lost episode creepypasta, and that’s the way it shifts as new generations come to the world of horror and internet horror in particular. Dead Bart was one of the most prominent examples of this trope, and it’s no coincidence that it came out around 2010 – when, like me, loads of people who’d grown up with the show were starting to edge into more adult or disturbing territory. A glut of Spongebob SquarePants creepypastas that became popular not long after this, with Ren and Stimpy, Parappa the Rapper, and A Bug’s Life soon getting the same treatment – all iconic millenial media subverted into horror.

And you can see that carried on through the stories that have grown popular in the lost episode world since – as the people who grew up on a certain era of children’s TV grow a little older, they take these comfort-watches and turn them into scary stories. Some of the most prominent examples of these creepypastas, like Hetalia 23.5, even revolve around people sharing media with younger relatives, seeing these once-loved shows in a new light thanks to another generation’s gaze. It’s almost like this rock sediment you can sift through to see the point at which certain generations reached the phase of their media literacy where they went “hmm, wouldn’t it be fucked if this show I loved as a kid was Actually Horrible?”.

Like all horror, creepypastas serve as some reflection in what’s going on in the community around them. And, for the lost episode creepypasta, I think there’s a particularly endearing charm to seeing new generations come to this kind of storytelling and shine a dim light on the media they grew up with. I’ve got a huge soft spot for them for this reason, and because they were basically my introduction to this genre of internet horror – have you stumbled across any lost episode horror that really spooked you? I would love to hear about it in the comments!

Check out this article some of my other writing on internet horror, and if you’d like to support my blog, please consider supporting me on Patreon or dropping me a tip via my Support page!

(header image via Planet Minecraft)