E-mail: tatyanamirvoda@yandex.ru Tel.: +7 (495) 939-25-64
1, Leninskie gory, Moscow, 119991, Russian Federation
Postgraduate student, Folklore Department, Faculty of Philology, Lomonosov Moscow State University.
In domestic and foreign Internet space scary stories are widely spread and represented by a variety of genres. Internet users denote the whole variety of scary texts with a ge- neral term “creepy-paste” and associatively extend it also to all non-verbal forms of creepy items, placed on the Web.
In this paper, Russian children’s scary stories are considered in their new hypostasis — as one of the components of “creepy-paste” (as a socio-cultural phenomenon) in particular and as a segment of the world horror Web folklore in general.
Internet acts as a new platform for children’s scary stories, coming from the oral tradition as well as the place of creation of new products modeling by the well-known genre patterns of chills (“strashilka” or “pugalka”in Russian).
Children’s scary stories are included into the content of a large number of creepy portals, some resources are devoted to them strictly. Besides, there on many horror resources with “creepypaste” we can find parodies and imitations on these stories.
The main indicator of the popularity of children’s scary stories is their existence beyond the borders of the Russian Web “Runet”, manifested in the translations, performed by non-specialists. These translations act as new source for replenishing the funds of the scary children’s narrative folklore of the Runet.
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