The horror landscape is undergoing a fundamental shift, moving away from haunted houses and supernatural entities toward the digital phantoms that populate our shared online consciousness. A24, the independent studio synonymous with elevated genre filmmaking, is now channeling this very modern source of fear with its latest project, Undertone. Writer-director Ian Tuason, recently announced as the filmmaker tasked with rebooting the Paranormal Activity franchise, has revealed to Polygon that his new film for A24 is explicitly constructed from the raw material of internet urban legends.
The Creepypasta Cinematic Universe
Creepypasta—a portmanteau of “copypasta,” internet slang for copied-and-pasted text, and “creepy”—refers to short, user-generated horror stories and images designed to be shared online. These digital folktales, like the infamous Slender Man or the backstory of the haunted video game Petscop, thrive on plausibility and a specific, internet-native aesthetic. They often present themselves as found footage, leaked documents, or firsthand accounts, blurring the line between fiction and reality in a way traditional media struggles to replicate. Tuason leaves no ambiguity about Undertone‘s origins: “I would say it’s a creepypasta movie,” he stated. “Their podcast is a creepypasta podcast, and the 10 audio files that were emailed to them are creepypasta media. So yeah, this movie was built on top of creepypastas.”
From Viral VR to Mainstream Horror
Ian Tuason is not a traditional Hollywood hire. His background is firmly rooted in the viral internet video space, where he gained recognition for immersive, first-person VR horror experiences that often mimicked the visual language of video games and online exploration videos. This expertise in crafting visceral, immediate scares within a digital framework made him a natural candidate to revive the found-footage Paranormal Activity series. That same skill set is now being applied to a more narrative-driven, but no less internet-born, concept with A24. His trajectory signals a studio recognition that the most potent new voices in horror are those fluent in the dialects of online culture.
Why Creepypasta Resonates in the 2020s
The power of creepypasta lies in its collective authorship and its distribution model. Unlike a novel or a studio film, a potent creepypasta feels discovered, not created. It spreads organically through forums, social media, and YouTube narrations, accruing details, variations, and believers along the way. This process mirrors ancient folk tale traditions but at the speed and scale of the internet. For a generation that has grown up online, the fear is not of the attic or the basement, but of the corrupted file, the mysterious URL, the glitch in the game, or the unverified broadcast that appears on a dead channel. Undertone seeks to translate that specific, digitally-native anxiety to the big screen.
The A24 Horror Alchemy
A24 has consistently demonstrated a knack for identifying and elevating horror concepts that tap into broader cultural anxieties. Films like Hereditary (family trauma), The Witch (religious paranoia and isolation), and Midsommar (toxic relationships and grief) use genre frameworks to explore deeper societal fears. Venturing into creepypasta is a logical next step, targeting the pervasive modern anxiety surrounding technology, misinformation, and the haunting of our digital selves. By pairing Tuason’s internet-horror sensibilities with A24’s reputation for artistic integrity and potent storytelling, Undertone has the potential to legitimize creepypasta as a source material for prestige horror in the same way graphic novels were embraced two decades prior.
Beyond Slender Man: Evolving the Format
Previous attempts to bring creepypasta to film, most notably the 2018 Slender Man movie, often stumbled by diluting the source material’s enigmatic, user-generated essence into a conventional monster movie. The failure typically lay in over-explaining the mystery that made the original story compelling. Tuason’s description suggests Undertone might avoid this pitfall by structurally embedding the creepypasta format into its plot. The film’s protagonists reportedly run a creepypasta podcast and receive mysterious audio files—the narrative itself is about the consumption and investigation of creepypasta. This meta-approach could allow the film to preserve the unsettling, “found” quality of its source while building a cinematic narrative around it.
The Sound of Digital Dread
Tuason’s emphasis on audio files as a central plot device is particularly noteworthy. In an era of podcasting and ASMR, audio has become a primary medium for intimate, immersive storytelling. Horror audio dramas and podcasts have flourished, proving that sound alone can be profoundly terrifying. By focusing on “10 audio files,” Undertone taps into the fear of the unseen and the power of the human voice—or non-human noise—to convey horror. This auditory focus could differentiate it from more visually reliant internet horror and connect to deep-seated fears of what we hear in the dark, now transposed to our earbuds and headphones.
A New Blueprint for Franchise Horror
The dual announcement of Tuason’s role in rebooting Paranormal Activity and his original film for A24 is instructive. It shows major studios and influential independents alike looking to the internet’s grassroots horror communities for fresh DNA. The Paranormal Activity series itself began as a viral, low-budget phenomenon that felt like something one might stumble upon online. By hiring a director like Tuason, the franchise is attempting to recapture that authentic, internet-age feeling of discovery. Simultaneously, with Undertone, A24 is betting that the next wave of iconic horror won’t come from classic literature or even previous films, but from the collective, unnerving creativity of the web.
The true horror of the internet age is not a monster with a physical form, but a pervasive, ambient wrongness—a glitch in reality, a piece of data that shouldn’t exist, a story that feels too real to be fiction. Undertone represents a deliberate move to mine that specific vein of fear. By building its narrative directly upon the foundations of creepypasta, the film is not just telling a scary story; it is attempting to replicate the very experience of falling down a digital rabbit hole and emerging unsettled, unsure of what is real. In doing so, it reflects a broader cultural moment where our online and offline lives are inseparably intertwined, and the most compelling ghosts are made not of ectoplasm, but of pixels and bandwidth.
