Syfy Sheds Light on Creepypasta-Based Series Channel Zero: Candle Cove

Steve Barton |

Aug 4, 2016

Creepypastas, man! You’ve gotta love them. For those unfamiliar with the term, the official Creepypasta website has a great definition: A “creepypasta” is a short piece of horror fiction. The name is a play on the 4chan slang of “copypasta” – when the creepypasta meme first began, there was a set group of pastas that tended to get shared over and over. Many people actually kept them in a text file and just re-pasted them wherever and whenever the mood struck.

Since the site’s inception in 2008, many creepypastas have gone on to take on a life of their own, like Slender Man. Now Syfy is looking to these terror tales for new material and has found some in “Candle Cove.”

From the Press Release:
You may have watched “Are You Afraid of the Dark?” or “Goosebumps” on television as a kid, which gave children a lot of nightmares, probably even you. Now these scary stories and movies have advanced over the years, already having some popular horror writers and directors to give a good scare, like Wes Craven (director of A Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream) or Stephen King (author of The Shining and IT). However, most of those movies and stories don’t scare us that much anymore, but now there are these popular scary stories that are told throughout the deepest corners of the Internet, spread out onto websites for everyone to read. And this kind of storytelling has become popular after being discovered in 4chan, in what is now known today as Creepypastas.

For you people who are not familar with Creepypastas, they are horror stories told out onto the Internet, spread on websites for readers to feel unsettled or disturbed reading them. We already have a lot of familiar ones, like Slender Man, Jeff the Killer, Ben Drowned, etc. Most of these stories are based off either photos or videos, and some of them are based off cartoons and video games, just telling them in a way to frighten people. There are creepypasta YouTube channels that narrate and tell creepypastas, like Mr. Creepypasta; a few movies based off creepypastas, like Always Watching: A Marble Hornets Story or Slender; and video games based off creepypastas (the ones that are most familiar are Slender: The Eight Pages and Slender: The Arrival). Creepypastas are now being adapted into a new television show called “CHANNEL ZERO.”

“Channel Zero” is an upcoming horror/thriller television show coming to Syfy, with the show being made like “American Horror Story.” Each season will be based off a scary urban legend. The first season, which will premiere on September 27th, is based off the creepypasta “Candle Cove,” written by Kris Straub.

For you readers who have not heard what “Candle Cove” is, it’s about a couple of people who remember their past of watching a children’s show called “Candle Cove.” Written in blog posts, these users tell their experiences watching the show, most of them feeling terrified after watching the screaming episode, with a few of them being confused about seeing nothing but “dead air,” which, if you don’t know what that means, is static on the television.

“Channel Zero: Candle Cove” will have six episodes, and Season 2 (thus far untitled) will premiere sometime in the fall of 2017. “Candle Cove” centers on one man’s obsessive recollections of a mysterious children’s television program from the 1980’s and his ever-growing suspicions about the role it might have played in a series of nightmarish and deadly events from his childhood.

Craig William Macneill (The Boy) is directing “Channel Zero.” Nick Antosca wrote the script for the pilot and will serve as executive producer alongside Max Landis. Harley Peyton is a writer and co-executive producer. Don Mancini will also serve as a writer and supervising producer. The series stars Paul Schnieder as Mike Painter and Fiona Shaw as Mike’s mother, Shaun Benson, Natalie Brown, and Luisa D’Oliveira.

Candle Cove

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