{"id":471879,"date":"2026-03-12T17:39:09","date_gmt":"2026-03-12T17:39:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/471879\/"},"modified":"2026-03-12T17:39:09","modified_gmt":"2026-03-12T17:39:09","slug":"a24s-horror-movie-undertone-channels-a-viral-internet-trend","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/471879\/","title":{"rendered":"A24\u2019s horror movie Undertone channels a viral internet trend"},"content":{"rendered":"

A24\u2019s latest horror movie, Undertone, will feel familiar to anyone who grew up scouring or contributing to creepypasta forums<\/a> online. The plot centers on a mysterious set of audio files that tell a haunting story, and bring a pair of podcasters, Evy (Nina Kiri) and Justin (Adam DiMarco), into contact with a predatory paranormal force. There\u2019s a creepy doll, a cursed viral video, unnerving stick-figure drawings, and an eerie figurine that turns up in unexpected places. Most of the action takes place around 3 a.m. for that woozy middle-of-the-night liminal feeling so common to creepypasta<\/a>. And for the added sense of reality that creepyposters love, the supernatural creature behind at least some of the movie\u2019s darker moments is based on pre-existing ancient mythology.<\/p>\n

\u201cI would say it’s a creepypasta movie,\u201d Undertone writer-director Ian Tuason tells Polygon. The viral VR filmmaker<\/a> was recently tapped to reboot the Paranormal Activity series<\/a>. \u201cTheir 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

The early 2010s saw a wave of independently made, barely distributed movies<\/a> 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<\/a>. When studios started joining in with films like 2018\u2019s Slender Man<\/a>, they were immediately derided as stealing ideas from viral internet threads without understanding the unique vibes that make those threads scary and addictive.<\/p>\n

Just a few years later, though, films like Jane Schoenbrun\u2019s We\u2019re All Going to the World\u2019s Fair<\/a> and Kyle Edward Ball\u2019s Skinamarink<\/a> 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\u2019s Iron Lung<\/a> to A24\u2019s upcoming Backrooms<\/a>. Undertone sits squarely in the middle of the movement.<\/p>\n

\"Evy
\n Photo:\u00a0Dustin Rabin\/A24<\/p>\n

\u201cI wasn’t consciously deciding to hop on any wave,\u201d Tuason says. \u201cI was influenced by film in general, just wanting to make the best film I could make. Didn’t matter which genre I was in \u2014 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

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<\/a>, 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<\/a>. He eventually rewrote the book and published it as Everyone and No One<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wrote that like a creepypasta,\u201d Tuason says. \u201cPeople were starting to read it, and then the comments \u2014 it’s kind of like YouTube for books, so people would comment on each chapter, sometimes each line. And they would be like, \u2018Is this real? Is this real?\u2019 So that was my foray into creating creepypasta content.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Evy
\n Image: A24<\/p>\n

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\u2019s increasingly clear they\u2019ve been lured into opening a door to something dangerous.<\/p>\n

At the same time, Evy is serving as caregiver for her comatose, terminally ill mother \u2014 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<\/a> 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 \u2014 \u201cWhat if she started talking in a different voice? How scary would that be?\u201d \u2014 became the seed for Undertone.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was caregiving my parents for two and a half years, same scenario as Evy, in that house,\u201d he says. \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Director
\n Photo:\u00a0Dustin Rabin\/A24<\/p>\n

He turned to creepypasta influences for Undertone because it\u2019s the only kind of horror he still finds frightening.<\/p>\n

\u201cI like the thrill of watching a horror movie, or going through some haunted house experience, except that it’s very hard to scare me,\u201d Tuason says. \u201cMovies 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Why is creepypasta scarier than other forms of horror? For Tuason, and in Undertone in particular, it\u2019s because of the way it ties mundane real-world events like the classic \u201cbump in the night\u201d<\/a> to horrific supernatural entities, making them more plausible.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnything could actually happen to you out of the blue when you wake up in the middle of the night,\u201d he says. \u201c[Even if you weren\u2019t] worried about anything else before, if you hear a couple of loud bangs in your house [\u2026] that could be explained. But it doesn’t really matter, because once you hear that bang, your mind starts imagining the worst.\u201d<\/p>\n

Undertone opens in theaters on March 13.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A24\u2019s latest horror movie, Undertone, will feel familiar to anyone who grew up scouring or contributing to creepypasta…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":471880,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[96,2839,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-471879","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471879","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=471879"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471879\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/471880"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=471879"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=471879"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=471879"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}