The Creepypasta Cookoff
is an annual event hosted by Bogleech, encouraging readers of the site to create and submit their own works of short horror fiction in various formats. Winning works are published at the top of the archive with a short commentary from Jonathan Wojcik, but all works are published in the yearly archives, which stretch back to 2012. Most works are prose fiction, but some other submissions include poetry, comics, short video and more.
This website provides examples of:
- Ant Assault: In a story from 2013 by William Robinson, ants go from attacking each other to launching an all-out war on humanity.
- Ant War: In "Ants" by William Robinson, ants use tools against a rival colony. Before long, they start attacking humans too.
- Author Appeal: As the stories are all written by members of the Bogleech fandom, they tend to cover the same sorts of themes covered on the rest of his site, such as parasitism and sympathetic attitudes toward monsters.
- Christmas Carolers: Played for Horror in "A Christmas Peril" by Vague1. A group of Victorian looking carolers are Humanoid Abominations that attack the protagonist.
- Clap Your Hands If You Believe: In "Big Betty" and its spinoff "I Hate Snowmen", inanimate objects are granted sapience simply by humans giving them names and personifying them.
- Creepy Crows: A flock of intelligent, and apparently religious, crows are the focus of A Murder Of Crows.
- Eldritch Abomination: Played straight and subverted multiple times every year. In 2016, one winning example was They Don't Have Tentacles, about an artist specializing in illustrations of a Cthulhu Expy who finally sees her in his dreams, learns how her author failed to convey her, and becomes a new vessel for bringing her worship to our world.
- Evil Is Deathly Cold: In "The Amundsen-Scott Incident", the temperature constantly drops lower and lower as things get worse.
- Hellish Horse: The subject of "An Equine Question" is creature resembling a horse, but it has hair thick enough to be used as rope, can talk like a human, and will apparently survive decapitation.
- Santabomination: The inflatable Santa in a story by C. Lonnquist. It has a disturbing Slasher Smile and kills a cat to eat it.
- Slasher Smile: The Santabomination in Inflatable has one described as "a death mask strapped to an innocuous face".
- Sliding Scale of Comedy and Horror: Some of the funniest works also manage to be the spookiest.
- Sliding Scale of Undead Regeneration: It'll be hard to imagine a form of undead regeneration not depicted in one of these works.
