Draft:Smile Dog

Plot

The narrator, "Mr. L", is an amateur writer looking for information on the image smile.jpg. It depicts a monstrous "dog-like" creature and a "beckoning" hand in the background. According to internet legend, people who view it experience onset temporal lobe epilepsy and acute anxiety and are eventually driven insane. Because little information is known about smile.jpg and alleged copies do not have any effects, it is often dismissed as a hoax or a rumor.

In the summer of 2007, the narrator attempts to interview alleged victim "Mary E." Despite initially agreeing to the interview, Mary changes her mind and locks herself in her room. A year later, Mary sends an apologetic email to Mr. L. Haunted by the image in her dreams, Mary recounts her struggle to resist its demands to "spread the word" by showing it to others. A week after she first saw it in 1992, Mary received a disk containing it in an unmarked envelope — unwilling to curse people she knew, Mary planned to pass it on to the narrator during the interview but had a sudden change of heart. Mr. L. learns from her husband that she committed suicide after the email. He burns the disk, which emitted an animalistic "hiss" as it melted.

A year after Mary's death, the narrator receives an email from an anonymous sender, elzahir82, claiming to have seen smile.jpg and attaches the image to the email. The narrator opens the file. He asks himself whether, if it was real, he would give into its demands. The creepypasta ends with: "Yes, yes I could." An image representing smile.jpg is shown to the readers afterwards.

Sources

• Asimos, Vivian (2021). Digital Mythology and the Internet's Monster: The Slender Man. Bloomsbury. ISBN 9781350181441.
• Crawford, Joseph (2019). "Gothic Digital Technologies". In Aldana Reyes, Xavier; Wester, Maisha L. (eds.). Twenty-First-Century Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion. Edinburgh University Press. pp. 72–86. doi:10.1515/9781474440943-007. ISBN 978-1-4744-4094-3. OCLC 1124782430.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
• Henrikson, Line (2018). ""Spread the Word": Creepypasta, Hauntology, and an Ethics of the Curse". University of Toronto Quarterly. 87 (1). University of Toronto Press: 266–280. doi:10.3138/utq.87.1.266.
• Krotoski, Aleks (October 30, 2023). "Cursed". The Digital Human. Series 30. Episode 3. BBC Radio 4. Retrieved December 11, 2023.
• Peters, Lucia (January 17, 2016). "Is The "Smile Dog" Creepypasta Real?". Bustle. Retrieved December 7, 2023.
• Saarinen, Toni (2023). "Creepypasta ja digitaalisten yhteisöjen hirviöt" [Creepypasta and the monsters of digital communities]. In Koski, Kaarina; Hovi, Tuomas (eds.). Kansanperinne 2.0: Sukelluksia 2000-luvun vernakulaariin kulttuuriin [Folklore 2.0: Diving into 21st century vernacular culture] (in Finnish). Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura. pp. 263–298. ISBN 9789518586046.
• Taylor, Tosha R. (2020). "Horror Memes and Digital Culture". In Bloom, Clive (ed.). The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic. Springer. pp. 985–1004. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-33136-8_58. ISBN 978-3-030-33135-1. S2CID 226618766.