Clive Barker’s Creepy Pasta and the Haunted Legend of “Ben Drowned”

on October 22, 2025 at 8:34 pm

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Hello friends, today we are talking about the Machinima/Barker announced collaboration that never happened, and take a look into what Creepy Pasta might have been. Come with me!

Every so often, we stumble across a project from Clive Barker’s long and winding career that makes us pause and think, “Wait, how did this never happen?” Today’s entry takes us back to the distant, far past of 2015, when Clive Barker briefly partnered with the now-defunct streaming network Machinima to curate a live-action horror anthology series called Clive Barker’s Creepy Pasta.

With me so far? Good. The concept was simple: take some of the most famous internet horror stories—those viral, digital-age campfire tales known as “creepypastas”—and adapt them into short films with Clive Barker acting as curator and producer. These weren’t to be animated or game-engine shorts like Machinima was originally known for, but live-action, blood-curdling short films, distributed primarily through Machinima’s massive YouTube channel, with possible expansion to other digital platforms.

As usual, having Clive Barker’s name associated with it brought a lot more mainstream interest towards what was originally something more popular with people who were on the internet a lot. Imagine a digital-age Night Gallery or Twilight Zone, told through the lens of viral internet myths like Slender Man, Jeff the Killer, and, most intriguingly, Ben Drowned. Fans of both online horror and Clive quickly took notice.

Machinima’s 2015 Digital Content NewFronts presentation was first announced on Variety in April, and unveiled publicly May 4th, during the presentation, where they unveiled a slate of new webseries & short-film projects alongside other ambitious projects like DC Comics adaptations and a new Robocop series. The show was billed as a showcase of twisted short films, each one based on a different creepypasta legend such as Slender Man, Jeff the Killer, and, most intriguingly, Ben Drowned.

You can still read the original announcement here on Clive Barker’s official site, and there’s a detailed write-up of Machinima’s full slate over at Tubefilter. At the time, it felt like a bold step for Clive, who had once said mentioned about the digital culture “You probably know more about the Internet response than I do. Because I don’t have a computer, I don’t access any of that stuff. So I don’t know what the fans are saying out there.“, but then of course became more familiar over the years, for example when he joined Twitter abnd created his “Twitter Tree”, for years. But this was a challenge, bringing his flair for nightmare visuals to the wild west of online horror folklore.

And then nothing. No trailer, no press images, not even a leaked still frame. Machinima itself went through major upheavals, eventually ceasing operations in 2019. Creepy Pasta quietly faded into the background, becoming one more fascinating “what ifs” in his catalog of uncompleted projects, much like earlier unmade films such as The Mummy or Zombies vs. Gladiators (another project based on someone else’s 2010 open submission for Amazon Studios, to be rewritten by Clive).

Among the stories Barker planned to adapt, Ben Drowned stands out as one of the most legendary creepypastas of all time. Created in 2010 by writer Alex Hall, a.k.a. Jadusable, Ben Drowned began as a series of forum posts and YouTube videos chronicling a supposedly haunted copy of The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask for the Nintendo 64.

The narrator, playing under increasingly bizarre and terrifying circumstances, discovers that the cartridge is possessed by the ghost of a boy named Ben. As the haunting escalates, the game glitches become deeply unsettling, the music warps into something otherworldly, and cryptic messages like “You shouldn’t have done that” appear both in-game and… real life.

What made Ben Drowned so powerful was its transmedia storytelling: the narrator’s blog posts documented the descent into paranoia, taking us on a dark journey, along with the YouTube clips, of “actual footage” of the haunted game, that spread like wildfire as a material proof that it happened. You got in that ride and were taken along as witness. Later updates evolved it into a sprawling ARG, with hidden codes and puzzles that engaged the audience directly, into participating in the mystery, if not to solve it, at least see where it led.

You can read more about the tale on the Creepypasta Wiki or the Wikipedia entry.

Now, the Slender Man (born in a paranormal art thread on SomethingAwful.com) may be more well known and popular enough to inspire dread into young internet denizens, or Jeff the Killer, but I think they’ve been played out and already explored in other media including movies. I’ve always been more interested in the Ben Drowned story.

At the heart of Ben Drowned lies a simple but profoundly unsettling premise: a used copy of The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, bought at a yard sale, its worn label bearing a single word written in black marker: BEN. When the story’s narrator boots up the game, he finds a save file already there, and soon discovers that something is deeply wrong. Characters behave unnaturally, cryptic messages like “You shouldn’t have done that” flash on screen, and haunting, reversed music underscores the feeling that this is no ordinary glitch. By grounding its terror in something as familiar as a secondhand cartridge, the tale immediately connects with every gamer’s lived experience.

What made this story legendary wasn’t just its premise, but the way it used the eerie atmosphere of Majora’s Mask itself. Already one of Nintendo’s darkest titles, the game’s themes of death, masks, and looping time perfectly complemented the haunting. The falling moon hanging over the land of Termina became a metaphor for looming dread. Through carefully staged “glitched” footage, creator Alex Hall (Jadusable) wove a narrative where the ghost of a boy named BEN manipulated both the game world and the real world, blurring the line between player and victim. Fans didn’t just read the story — they watched it unfold, thanks to Hall’s cleverly hacked videos uploaded to YouTube. This multimedia approach turned Ben Drowned into a full-fledged digital urban legend. For many fans, watching the corrupted gameplay clips felt like witnessing actual evidence of a haunting. But BEN didn’t merely haunt the game; he inhabited it, turning Majora’s Mask into a door between his spirit and the physical world. The cartridge itself becomes a cursed object, much like the Lament Configuration in Hellraiser, a small, unassuming artifact that opens the door to something far darker.

We all know Clive’s used cursed objects in his stories (a box, a mural of tiles, a golem in a bathtub) and hidden realms— and I want to believe he might have transformed a seemingly innocent game cartridge into a modern relic, or conduit for darker forces. And it’s also a powerful reminder that horror thrives when the familiar turns treacherous, and even the most innocent relic of childhood can become a vessel for damnation. I never summoned any entities with my Rubik’s cube growing up though… that I know of.

It’s easy to see why Barker might have been drawn to this tale as part of the Creepy Pasta project: the haunted cartridge mirrors his fascination with gateways to other realms (The Imajica, The Fuge, Hell), while BEN’s viral spread across the internet mirrors the way myths and nightmares travel through culture — forever changing those who dare to delve deeper into the myth in search of the truth.

Clive Barker’s planned adaptation of Ben Drowned for Machinima had the potential to be a unique fusion of modern internet folklore and Clive’s signature brand of horror. I want to believe this idea could have evolved, given the chance, far beyond its origins.

The episodic nature of Machinima’s now defunct platform (their massive YouTube channel had millions of subscribers) would have lent itself perfectly to this concept. While the runtime for Clive Barker’s Creepy Pasta was never revealed, the press used language like “short films” and “short-form series”. Machinima were also pushing into Vessel, a subscription video service launched in 2015, and hinted at possible distribution via other digital streaming partners. NewFronts coverage in Adweek and Variety for example, mentioned all their 2015 shows as designed for digital-first, multi-platform distribution.

Each short episode could have blended live-action performances, found footage techniques, and corrupted gameplay visuals, gradually escalating from eerie glitches to full-blown physical manifestations of BEN’s haunting. Barker’s visual imagination could have brought to life a uniquely grotesque mythology surrounding BEN, expanding the character beyond the internet legend and exploring themes of technological obsession, childhood trauma, the fragile boundary between the digital and physical worlds and what happens when they somehow spill over.

Personally, I’ve always been a little hesitant when it comes to seeing Clive work with ideas that didn’t originate entirely from his own imagination. Barker’s worlds feel so distinct and deeply personal that it’s strange to picture him adapting a pre-existing internet myth. However, I have faith in his creative powers. Just as he once used Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue as a springboard to craft his own tale in The Books of Blood, Clive could have taken Ben Drowned and reshaped it into something completely his own, imbued with that unmistakable touch that transforms even borrowed concepts into original nightmares.

When you think about it, Clive Barker has always been fascinated by myth, ritual, and the way stories take on lives of their own (Candyman). From The Books of Blood (e.g. Skins of the Fathers episode – listen to it!) to Nightbreed, he explores how belief transforms into monstrous reality. Pairing him with Ben Drowned could have been a perfect combo: the haunted cartridge as a modern Pandora’s Box.

Imagine Barker’s aesthetic—his love of surreal, reinvented flesh imagery— brought to the eerie glitches of Majora’s Mask… NPCs with distorted, askew and monstrous designs, the sinister undercurrent of nostalgia and technology turned malevolent, and in strange aeons, even the digital realm itself can become haunted.

We can only speculate. The adaptation never materialized, and Ben Drowned returned to its original creator, who has since expanded the story into a multi-part saga called The Drowning. I looked around to see if this project ever had anyone else attached to it, but going through all the coverage I could find, no other writer, director, showrunner, or producer was named or attached to Creepy Pasta. If someone was quietly contacted, it didn’t make it into the public record.

Ultimately, the lack of updates was due to shifting priorities and mainly funding issues; Machinima’s collapse certainly played a role in that, and Clive himself was focusing on other ventures, like his plan to write a “very loose” reboot of Hellraiser and bring back Doug Bradley as Pinhead. For now, Clive Barker’s Creepy Pasta remains a fascinating footnote: a reminder that productions are fickle and fragile, and it remains unrealized and unproduced.

For now, Clive Barker’s Creepy Pasta remains a fascinating footnote: a reminder of what might have been, and a symbol of how fragile projects can be, almost like soap bubbles, beautiful ideas that pop and disappear as quickly as they arrive. While we never got to see Clive’s vision to bring this haunted legend to screen, the story endures—free to terrify and inspire in equal measure. The internet has a way of creating its own mythology, and Ben Drowned began as a niche experiment by one creator and became a cultural obsession. It continues to live on as an iconic piece of internet lore, still spreading across forums, YouTube playlists, and fan discussions — a haunting story forever trapped inside the glowing screen.

What do you think, friends? Would Ben Drowned have worked under Barker’s vision, or is it better left to the eerie corners of the web where it first emerged?
Share your thoughts in the comments below!

Thanks to Rob Ridenour for the inspiration for this feature.
Here are some research links used in this article: