Tag: hospital

Short and Sweet

Today I am writing to talk to you about the creepypasta Expressionless, it’s a very short creation, it’s not really a story, more a brief third-person account of a single event.  

Summary

The story opens with a mysterious woman arriving alone, covered in blood and on foot at a hospital. This woman is not a normal person by all accounts, she resembles a mannequin but moves like a human. On her arrival, she has a kitten clamped in her jaws.

While in the hospital she is calm but causes the people around her to suffer feelings of deep discomfort. She freaks out when they try to sedate her however revealing she basically has a shark’s mouth, aka lots and lots of very pointy sharp teeth. These teeth are basically spikes and most noticeably far too long for her mouth to close without damage.

Naturally, the hospital staff have questions, the most prominent being “what are you?” the woman claims to be god and then eats everyone save the doctor.

My thoughts

I think this works, in part, because of it’s length. It’s very short with minimal explanation offered. We don’t know who or even what the creature was (was it created or born), we don’t know its motivation, we don’t know why it attacked when it did as opposed to simply attacking outright at the start and we don’t know why it left the doctor alive.

All we know is that it was bloody odd. We know that although it looked artificial it was clearly alive, it killed before arriving at the hospital and then it killed when it was inside.

This story reminds me a little of The Keyhole, a creepy pasta I wrote about before, in that it’s short and to the point with not much in the way of explanation. It simply presents itself and then ends. Though The Keyhole did have a slightly larger amount of explanation than this, we knew the creature in the room was the ghost of a murdered woman for example.

This story taps into our universal fear of monsters, something we don’t know or understand, that massively overpowers us and seems to want nothing more than death. It plays into our primal fear of other large predators. It also puts me in mind of the creepy doll stories, stories that take something unthreatening and make it threatening. Though I must admit that mannequins are far more uncanny valley than most dolls.

Lastly, it also plays on our fears of deception, this creature, weird though it was, turned up at a place where we offer help, it looked like it needed help and played on our presumptions, deliberately not attacking until we’d brought it inside with the aim to offer aid.

The atmosphere of this brief encounter is definitely one of mystery, the desire to understand and uncover what the hell is going on with this creature.

Overall this is a nice example of the creature-feature type of creepypasta.