A24’s horror movie Undertone channels a viral internet trend

The first movie from creepypasta author and viral VR filmmaker Ian Tuason channels the only thing that still scares him — collaborative online horror

“I would say it's a creepypasta movie,” Undertone writer-director Ian Tuason tells Polygon. The viral VR filmmaker was recently tapped to reboot the Paranormal Activity series. “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.”

The early 2010s saw a wave of independently made, barely distributed movies based on creepypasta, the frequently cut-and-pasted (hence the name) internet horror threads that often center on creating new urban legends, like Slenderman, Jeff the Killer, and Eyeless Jack. When studios started joining in with films like 2018’s Slender Man, they were immediately derided as stealing ideas from viral internet threads without understanding the unique vibes that make those threads scary and addictive.

Just a few years later, though, films like Jane Schoenbrun’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and Kyle Edward Ball’s Skinamarink became widely praised hits, as creators who were actually invested in the creepypasta scene started trying to put its tremulous feelings of late-night uncertainty and obsession on the screen. That influence is showing up more and more in current horror, from Markiplier’s Iron Lung to A24’s upcoming Backrooms. Undertone sits squarely in the middle of the movement.

“I wasn't consciously deciding to hop on any wave,” Tuason says. “I was influenced by film in general, just wanting to make the best film I could make. Didn't matter which genre I was in — but I love horror. So I wasn't really paying attention to what other people were making when I was making mine. But now that I am, I can see [the trend]. Maybe [horror directors] feel more free to do it because so many other people are experimenting with the genre.”

Tuason describes himself as a creepypasta fan who was on board from the very beginnings of the form. He remembers being unnerved by the first Slenderman images online, then immediately jumping in to contribute his own lore to the internet threads he was reading. Inspired by the incremental style of creepypasta, he wrote a novel, The Online Profile of a Serial Killer, in the form of a series of blog posts on the free platform Wattpad. The book has logged more than two million reads, and won a 2016 Watty Award. He eventually rewrote the book and published it as Everyone and No One.

“I wrote that like a creepypasta,” Tuason says. “People were starting to read it, and then the comments — it's kind of like YouTube for books, so people would comment on each chapter, sometimes each line. And they would be like, ‘Is this real? Is this real?’ So that was my foray into creating creepypasta content.”

In Undertone, longtime friends Evy and Justin co-host a podcast about the paranormal, with Evy as the house skeptic and Justin as the true believer. When they get a mysterious email containing the 10 audio files, which warns them not to listen to all of them, they naturally start playing them and discussing the unsettling, then alarming events they hear playing out in the clips. As they continue, it’s increasingly clear they’ve been lured into opening a door to something dangerous.

At the same time, Evy is serving as caregiver for her comatose, terminally ill mother — an element of the story Tuason took from his own life. He shot Undertone in his childhood home after moving back to care for his parents when they were both diagnosed with terminal cancer at the start of the COVID pandemic. The dark thoughts he had while his mother was incapacitated — “What if she started talking in a different voice? How scary would that be?” — became the seed for Undertone.

“I was caregiving my parents for two and a half years, same scenario as Evy, in that house,” he says. “I was writing Undertone during that time. Once my mom passed, and then finally once my dad passed, I was in a state of mind where nothing could scare me.”

He turned to creepypasta influences for Undertone because it’s the only kind of horror he still finds frightening.

“I like the thrill of watching a horror movie, or going through some haunted house experience, except that it's very hard to scare me,” Tuason says. “Movies have not scared me since probably the third Paranormal Activity. So when I was writing Undertone, I was trying to write something that would scare me.”

Why is creepypasta scarier than other forms of horror? For Tuason, and in Undertone in particular, it’s because of the way it ties mundane real-world events like the classic “bump in the night” to horrific supernatural entities, making them more plausible.

“Anything could actually happen to you out of the blue when you wake up in the middle of the night,” he says. “[Even if you weren’t] worried about anything else before, if you hear a couple of loud bangs in your house […] that could be explained. But it doesn't really matter, because once you hear that bang, your mind starts imagining the worst.”

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Undertone opens in theaters on March 13.