i LOVE small town horror so much. I LOOOOVE small town horror. I love horror that's small and contained!! My biggest gripes with a lot of horror, especially in some indie scenes (creepypasta, args, digital horror etc etc) is that they always try and explain away every single thing. Or it grows so grandiose that the horror becomes lost imo. Like i dont need a detailed explanation of where the horror originated and how it became what it is, that takes away the fear of the unknown for me. Sure, the little bread crumbs here and there are fun! I love piecing together a story! But when there's a constant string of content just loudly declaring everything, it kinda loses the charm for me. Heavyyy on this for fnaf. Fnaf was at its peak when it was just about the murders in the pizzeria. That felt so personal and restricted to just that area, and I loved the atmosphere it built. It felt like the kind of horror that happens every day in your local area, something you'd read about in the news or hear about in creepy rumors. Now it's like... something something, William Afton uses the last bits of dying children as power (???) and Freddy's is now a global conglomerate with multiple high-end franchises, a mall, and a consistent merch line of products...????
I kind of blame the need people have for answers on every single thing ruining this aspect of horror. To me at least, the scariest thing is something unexplainable. There's no big overarching string that connects this all back to a massive entity/government conspiracy/etc. There's no perfectly explainable reason for a creature or a monster. It exists beyond our understanding and only within the shadows of places we don't think about. Maybe this is less the consumers' fault and more the idea that corporations think that everything should be at a Marvel Comics level of world building. Where it all exists on this massive scale to ump the antics more and more to sell MORE and MORE
Low-key, this is what put me off of stranger things. The more they kept adding, the less interesting it became. It was no longer a mystery and now just a giant mess lmao
