(no subject)

[olivermoss]

* With a new Blair Witch on the way, the OG cast is once again asking for their fucking pay and also input on their likenesses being used.

For a variety of reasons, I keep hearing about Blair Witch and Polybius recently, both topics that make me want to like... either ramble or rant. But, I should probably stop caring about the Polybius thing. I should probably ramble here at a point about Blair Witch to get it out of my system.

I wish DW still had a space to talk about horror / horror games / creepy stuff. The indie dev who made Mortuary Assistant got picked to make a Paranormal Activity game!

Comments

[muccamukk]

I realise that "person" ≠ "space" but snickfic posts about horror a fair bit.

[mistressofmuses]

I saw the thing about the original cast once again asking to be fucking paid. I went from being real eye-rolly about Blair Witch (and the people who insisted it was all totally true they were like there and stuff and remembered this all happening), to actually really liking the original one as a pretty cool thing, to being deeply bothered by it for reasons a lot more related to the cast being taken advantage of.

Polybius is cool and the urban legend stuff that built up around it is a lot of fun in a lot of ways... but a lot of people are very confidently wrong about how much they know about it. (It's true you guys, my brother's ex's sister's dogwalker totally played it and got disappeared.)

ONTD Creepy is still *there*, but it sucks that it's pretty well dead. terror_sffa seems to at least still be keeping up with weekly posts, though I've never really interacted with the comm much, so haven't sussed out a definite vibe, but it might be an appropriate place.

[olivermoss]

Blair Witch got in trouble for making false claims about what it was, which is part of what lead to all the nonsense.

Polybius... some locals tried to copy Blair Witch's marketing strat with Polybius and one blames me for why it didn't work, like rage outs years later levels of blames me. It was a whole thing.

I tried so hard to keep ONTD Creepy limping along, even making new graphics and everything. I gave up. I tried to be in terror sfa for a while but somehow it was like I couldn't figure out the vibe.

[mistressofmuses]

Yeah. A lot of Blair Witch was filmed in a park that was basically literally across the street from where Alex was living, so having a ton of people descend on the area looking for "the truth," or even locals who suddenly claimed that yeah, they'd *totally* grown up hearing all those stories, definitely all became a deep annoyance. (Probably not dis-similarly to Polybius being local to Portland!)

I feel like it's come up before, but I really enjoy the sorts of meta-narratives that crop up around works like Blair Witch or Polybius. It's what I like about creepypasta or other urban legend type stuff, where you can choose to buy in and pretend it's all true and all of that. Letting yourself give in to the "I want to believe!" impulse to treat a creepy story as a genuine supernatural event that's real in the real world.

But it's still fiction. Trying to genuinely sell something AS truth when it is not is not okay, and a LOT of the Blair Witch stuff very firmly crossed over that line. I'm not surprised a lot of the Polybius stuff did too.

I miss ONTD Creepy. I tried to comment on a couple of FFA posts that went up, but the momentum just didn't build. I'm following terror sffa, but same: I just can't quite figure out the vibe, and don't know what would be welcome or not.

[olivermoss]

Oh, right I remember you talking about that being local and people claiming it was like a pre-existing urban legend or something along those lines.

I do love meta-narratives and unfiction and stuff, but it can also get wonky. Someone local tried to do a Blair Witch inspired ad campaign to do a 'real documentary' about Polybius and claimed he's already uncovered so much. He stole art assets for his promo materials and... posted a bunch of BS and stolen art to a community I modded. I recognized some of it, sourced the rest, informed all the artists and then posted a list of all the sources of the art to every places he'd posted his crap online. Years later he was still having rage outs about how he had the perfect plan and I ruined it. The other people on the project pivoted to doing a clearly fictional podcast based on the plot and I guess it ran a long time?

I also miss ONTD Creepy, but yeah, I burned out hard on trying to keep it lively.

[mistressofmuses]

Ugh, yes! People bought into the "this was a real documentary" thing and then got like... FOMO or something, and a bunch of people started insisting that of course there'd always been urban legends about The Blair Witch and that of course they'd totally grown up hearing about them and all. Very weird.

Unfiction, that was the term I was failing to remember. Yes! I do really enjoy unfiction, but it gets very dicey very fast when you're actively misleading people.

That's a beautiful outcome for the asshole who tried to just steal a bunch of stuff to promo. Like, just don't steal shit? Not stealing shit, and just honestly producing your own materials especially when it's meant to be hyping your own creative project, might have turned out differently! Strange how art thieves manage to stay so bitter for so long after their bullshit gets exposed. Of course it's never their faults for stealing shit, just for other people pointing it out!

I seem to remember hearing about a Polybius podcast?

That is probably the comm I miss the most from ye olde eljay days. I wish it had stayed active, but yeah... can't blame you for not being able to keep it up and kicking.

[olivermoss]

I think the term Unfiction is relatively recent, so we didn't even have a way to talk about canons like that. Reality blurring has been a thing, but it was mostly done by fandoms pretending The Banzai Institute is really real and the movie was a docu-drama. But creators doing that was a hard thing to find the right words for and that probably made it worse.

The Polybius podcast was a big thing for a while. I never listened, but it had a following.

[mistressofmuses]

Yeah, I feel like unfiction as a term isn't one I'd heard before the last few years, maybe? But I AM glad there's a term for it beyond just calling something a "meta narrative" or the like, because it IS a very specific *thing*, and a meta narrative or urban legend can cover a lot of different things that aren't necessarily the same. Reality blurring is certainly one aspect of it, but you're right, a lot of times it's been more based on the audience deciding to treat something as real, not the creators or their marketing pushing it as factual.