Modern Unknowns Part II: The Dark Web

There was a critical point in the mass adoption of the Internet where computers became less scary. It used to be that the general public ignorance surrounding Information Technology allowed for writers and creators of entertainment media to fill in the gaps with magic, but now that we are firmly in the age of Internet 2.0—with our Google and smartphones and personal websites—it is only with a great deal of irony that a TV show or film can get away with the haunted computer or ghost hacker scenario. What was once a cultural blind spot has become familiar, and the Internet just isn’t mysterious anymore.

This is problem for horror. Instead of a dark place of ignorance, the Internet has become a tool that we carry around in our pockets. It has become a trope of the genre, in fact, to disconnect protagonists so that the mystery of whatever encounters they have remains such, at least in places of paranormal activity. Storytellers need to artificially create shadowy corners for our nightmares to breed. Or, at least they did until we got the second Internet.

That's right: there is another Internet; a darker Internet; an Internet that has once again sparked the imaginations of horror practitioners. The Deep Web or Dark Web, depending on your taste in nomenclature (I prefer the latter), is a part of the information superhighway that you can’t find on maps. In order to access it you need to use a special software, called Tor, because the websites aren’t indexed by your average browser. While not evil in and of itself, promising the utmost privacy and anonymity to users, its reputation is one of a place for hackers and hitmen, drug trades and human trafficking, BitCoin and even the rumoured live snuff film. Instead of .com domains, places on the Dark Web use the suffix .onion. Chances are, you (like me) only know a little bit about it.

The Dark Web is rich and full of mystery, which is why the best modern horror is using it to deepen contemporary stories. The two best examples of this new trend in terror are Marisha Pessl's haunting 2013 novel Night Film, and the delightfully spooky Tanis podcast from Pacific Northwest Stories. Both of these media take the form of investigation horror, and each leans heavily on the occult nature of the Dark Web.

In Night Film, investigative journalist Scott McGrath embarks on a twisted journey to expose a legendary horror director named Stanislas Cordova. A famous recluse, Cordova has been linked to a number of deaths, including that of his own daughter, and McGrath sets out to find the mysterious auteur and expose him for reasons linked to revenge (Cordova ruined McGrath’s marriage and career when Scott last attempted to expose him).

Pessl’s great accomplishment with Night Film is her ability to build a massive amount of tension and fear without evoking the paranormal. Instead, she uses the occult to build a world that is alien yet familiar to the reader. Secret societies and underground film screenings make you question the world around McGrath in his search for Cordova, but nothing quite does this like how the author handles the Internet.

When McGrath takes his search to the Dark Web, the book switches to black pages. Reading them—presented as screen caps of hidden web pages that Scott visits—therefore has a weird physical sensation. With all of her real world action printed black on white, Pessl manages to make the Dark Web seem shadowy simply by virtue of framing it as shadow-like. The pages are literally dark, and that makes them feel hidden, as if they are in fact underneath the rest of the novel’s text.

Tanis uses the Dark Web in a similar fashion. One of the characters on the Lovecraftian radio show is a hacker who goes by the handle Meerkatnip, sometimes abbreviated to M.K. She serves a special role in the podcast’s narrative: she has the ability to navigate and understand the Dark Web, where a lot of the key information on the ancient and mysterious Tanis can be uncovered.

Just like Night Film, Tanis uses the Dark Web as a place filled with powerful occulted information, but rather than illustrating that by oppressing the audience through the application of darkness, the podcast shows that the horror-net is special through Meerkatnip. M.K. is a modern day dark sorceress. She is capable of IT miracles, especially when compared to the show’s other characters, and she is hyper-aware of certain types of creepypasta-ish spooky Internet lore. The connection is clear: by associating the most enlightened and useful character in a horror story to the dark web, an author implies that the places you can find on via Tor contain arcane knowledge.

Time may inevitably shed the light of common knowledge onto the Deep Dark Web, taking away its mysteries and therefore its power to birth fear. Already you can find news reporting online about Dark Web fueled misdeeds and, in a way, every horror story that uses a Tor browser as a spellbook depletes our collective reserve of ignorance on the topic. One day, everything we don't know now will be overused, cliche and familiar to the point of comfort. But for now the Dark Web is a blessing because popular ignorance  is a border, beyond which there are monsters.

TANIS Podcast Review

The audio horror geniuses at Pacific Northwest Stories and Minnow Beats Whale have once again made something special. It’s called TANIS and it expands the universe of the extra popular podcast The Black Tapes, bringing the new wave of weird fiction to the Internet audioscape.

TANIS is the radio drama that H.P. Lovecraft never made. If The Black Tapes Podcast is The X-Files for your iPod, TANIS is Call of Cthulhu by way of Stamps.com (not a confirmed sponsor of TANIS). A serialized fictional investigation into a myth of an undefinable ancient thing called Tanis, the podcast follows PNWS producer Nic Silver as he navigates the missing pages of history and the obscure corridors of the dark web. His sleuthing unites him with an anonymous hacker who goes by the handle Meerkatnip, and eventually sets him in the sights of a seemingly malevolent interest that, at this point in the series, remains faceless.

The narrative in TANIS is more focused than The Black Tapes. While the latter mirrors the paranormal investigator procedural format, pitting its protagonists against new phenomena each week, Nic Silver’s podcast solely deals with information on its eponymous entity-place. Much of the show deals with found texts and old interviews, revisionist history, and a sci-fi story from an old magazine, all of it serving to give Tanis substance and atmosphere without definition. Combine that well crafted historical revisionism with some grade-A creepypasta – like a ritual you can do in an elevator to access another dimension or a House of Leaves style cabin with uncanny measurements – and what you have is genuinely spooky weird fiction.

The name Tanis is simply one of many labels that has been given to Silver’s professional obsession over its thousands of years of alleged existence. Sometimes it’s a place, sometimes it’s a state of mind, but like the Great Old Ones of Lovecraft, or the celestial god terrors of William Hope Hodgson, we can only know Tanis through the humans who obsess over it. It moves and transforms, it inspires, and like a certain tentacled dreaming menace it builds a following.

As Nic chases down leads, researching, interviewing and connecting the dots, Tanis begins to gain atmospheric substance. We know Tanis through him. That’s why it’s so exciting when something inevitably starts to reach back from all the anecdotal evidence and historical blindspots.

The Lovecraftian horror tradition is largely built on the concept of alternate history built out of unknowable bits of past. As such, weird fiction can sometimes run the risk of being over expository and dry. If world events we normally take for granted are different in a story than in real life, it’s difficult to get that point across without lengthy explanation. Thankfully, TANIS dodges this pitfall by having fun with its research segments.

There are points in the show when Silver acknowledges the process of having other people reading text or compelling them to speak their experience out loud for dramatic effect. Such moments of self awareness help ground the presentation of contextual information in the present. The podcast format also helps turn the exposition into a tool for suspense, allowing Silver to frame the more chilling and active story points happening in the moment with relevant factoids from out of time. It allows for tension to build in the present day timeline while making sure relevant aspects of the dense mythology are ready at hand for when they are most needed in the story. Most importantly, it keeps the sense of discovery fresh.

TANIS is a strange story, well told. Tonally distinct from its sister podcast, The Back Tapes, Nic Silver's podcast shares one key similarity: it feels as real as I want it to be. The conspiracy at the show’s core is more interesting than mundane reality and the deadpan presentation is such a good imitation of NPR that some gullible first time listeners might mistake it for journalism. Tanis may be an undefinable entity out of time and space, but TANIS is a world I want to live in.