Beware! 10 Internet Horror Projects Too Scary to Ignore

The horror genre is one of the most versatile and enduring forms of storytelling, capable of taking countless shapes and forms. Whether it’s a big-budget Hollywood blockbuster or a low-budget indie film, horror has a way of reinventing itself, constantly surprising audiences with fresh ideas and chilling twists. But in recent years, one platform has become a hotbed for innovative horror content: the internet. Specifically, YouTube has emerged as a playground for aspiring creators to share their original, homegrown horror projects. These aren’t your typical jump-scare fests—they’re often experimental, deeply unsettling, and sometimes even interactive.

From short films to found-footage series, internet horror has carved out its own niche, offering a space for creators to push boundaries and explore new ways to terrify viewers. Some of these projects have gone viral, leaving audiences with sleepless nights and a lingering sense of dread. What makes internet horror so compelling is its raw, unfiltered nature. Without the constraints of traditional media, creators can take risks and tell stories that might never make it to the big screen. The result? A treasure trove of spine-tingling content that proves you don’t need a Hollywood budget to deliver a good scare.

If you’re a horror fan looking for something fresh and unexpected, the internet is the place to be. It’s a reminder that fear is universal—and sometimes, the most terrifying stories come from the most unexpected places. Whether you’re watching alone at midnight or with friends for moral support, these online horror gems are guaranteed to leave you with chills, thrills, and maybe a few nightmares.

10.This House Has People In It

Let’s start with something truly bizarre, even by the standards of internet horror. Enter This House Has People In It, a surreal short film brought to life by the creative minds at Adult Swim. Known for their off-the-wall late-night programming—ranging from trippy animations to absurd comedy—Adult Swim has a knack for making viewers question reality. This 2016 project, created by Alan Resnick, is no exception. It aired unexpectedly one night, leaving audiences both confused and captivated.

The film, as best as anyone can describe it, follows a deeply strange family grappling with an even stranger problem. Told through the lens of security camera footage, we watch as the family tries to deal with their teenage daughter’s peculiar “issues.” What are these issues, you ask? Well, she’s slowly sinking face-first into the kitchen floor—and eventually, the basement. This unfortunate situation puts a damper on her little brother’s birthday party, which has to be postponed. But that’s just the beginning. The house becomes a stage for increasingly unsettling events, including the appearance of a creepy pink figure emerging from the basement. The actors’ deadpan delivery only adds to the film’s eerie, dreamlike quality.

After its release on YouTube, This House Has People In It quickly became a cult phenomenon. Fans dove deep into analyzing its cryptic narrative, creating entire videos dissecting its meaning. Some even discovered a fictional security company website tied to the film, which offered a treasure trove of additional content to explore. If you’re a fan of horror that bends the rules of storytelling and leaves you questioning what you just watched, this is a rabbit hole worth jumping into. It’s weird, unsettling, and utterly unforgettable—a perfect example of how internet horror can push boundaries in ways traditional media rarely does.

9.Local58

One of the most fascinating trends in internet horror is the use of analog formats—think VHS tapes, grainy security footage, or even old video game recordings. These retro styles add a layer of nostalgia and unease, making the horror feel more real, more tangible. Among the many projects in this genre, Kris Straub’s Local58 stands out as a masterpiece. Straub, who first gained fame with the creepypasta Candle Cove, hit the jackpot with this series, blending analog aesthetics with cosmic horror in a way that’s both chilling and mesmerizing.

If you’ve ever flipped through late-night local TV channels, you’ll recognize the familiar elements: station IDs, weather updates, and public service announcements. Local58 takes these mundane moments and twists them into something deeply unsettling. Glitchy visuals, cryptic messages, and eerie sound design create an atmosphere that feels like you’ve stumbled onto something you weren’t meant to see. It’s the kind of horror that lingers, tapping into that universal fear of finding something wrong in the ordinary.

What makes Local58 so effective is its ambiguity. The series never spells out exactly what’s happening, leaving viewers to piece together the mystery. Is it an alien invasion? A government experiment gone wrong? The lack of clear answers only adds to the tension, making every frame feel like a puzzle waiting to be solved. The analog format amplifies this, creating a sense of authenticity that’s hard to shake.

For fans of signal hijacking, cosmic horror, or just the eerie charm of analog media, Local58 is a must-watch. It’s a reminder that sometimes, the scariest things are the ones we can’t fully understand—and that the static on your TV screen might be hiding something far more sinister than you ever imagined.

8.The Walten Files

In the wake of Five Nights at Freddy’s and its runaway success, the online horror community has fully embraced the trend of mascot horror. From homebrewed games to fan-made art, people have been on a hot streak of transforming typically kid-friendly visuals into impressively disturbing nightmares-made flesh.

However, one creator who has gone above and beyond in terms of quality is Chilean animator Martin Walls, the creator of The Walten Files. Rather than just copy FNAF beat-for-beat, the fully animated series goes in a very unique direction, telling a story of, not only the supernatural, but loss as well. The story focuses on the now-defunct Bunny Smiles company and the missing employees of the Bon’s Burgers restaurant. From the disappearance of the company’s co-founder, Jack Walten, to the supernatural fallout involving the restaurant’s resident animatronics, the series is full of intriguing elements. The series’ biggest assets are its unique and unsettling visuals, as well as its horrific sound design and voice acting. Many analog horror series utilize the format well but The Walten Files truly takes advantage of every trick the format offers.

Every subsequent episode has only shown Walls’ development as an artist, with each one developing further and further in overall quality. The series has already amassed a sizable following, helped in part by various analysis videos on YouTube attempting to solve the mystery ahead of the series’ conclusion. The series has yet to falter in its execution, so if you’ve yet to give it a peek, definitely do so, it’ll send more than a few chills down your spine.

7.Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared

Every so often, a series comes along that escapes from its little corner of the World Wide Web and takes on an audience of gargantuan size. A prime example is Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared, created by Becky Sloan and Joe Pelling, which first debuted on YouTube in 2011 and lasted until 2016.

The series is immediately familiar to anyone who grew up with the likes of Sesame Street, a felt puppet show aimed to teach you some simple life lessons. These lessons are usually taught to a trio of puppets – a tall red guy, a green duck, and a yellow puppet with blue hair. However, as is the case with every episode, the intended lesson quickly devolves into a twisted blend of body horror, screaming, and other unhinged visuals. For example, a lesson about time results in the three lead puppets aging and rotting away, with various body parts falling off in explicit detail.

Every available episode has amassed millions of views, indicative of the series’ widespread appeal, even spawning fan art and other bits of homegrown content. Not only that, but the online series proved popular enough to spawn a full television series, also helmed by Becky & Joe, that aired on the United Kingdom’s Channel 4 in late 2022. The series takes what the web series started and goes even further with it, aided largely by the comparatively larger television budget.

6.Hi I’m Mary Mary

Regarding internet projects that can instill fear, but can also make you feel, look no further than Hi I’m Mary Mary. Crafted by a creator known only as K, the series takes the found footage and ARG formats and uses them to tell an emotionally rich narrative. For context, an ARG stands for Alternate Reality Game, a story where the viewer or reader can interact with the fictional characters. This is usually attained via the use of social media apps like Tumblr, Instagram, and X (formerly Twitter) with each one providing a different spin on the format.

In the case of HIMM, the eponymous Mary is directly addressing the people watching the YouTube videos she’s posting during her supernatural experiences. These experiences included having awoken in an unfamiliar home she cannot leave without remembering how she got there. She must also contend with various supernatural entities that prowl the house’s dark halls at night in search of her. These horrors all serve a narrative far richer than just jump scares and digital distortions, it’s also a story of mental health and self-image. If you want a horror web series that pushes the envelope in terms of emotional resonance, definitely give HIMM a shot.

5.Petscop

Video games and horror have always been a match made in heaven, and the internet has taken this pairing to new heights. From MyHouse.WAD to Shipwrecked 64, creators have crafted games with pixel-perfect retro graphics and sound effects to tell stories that are as unsettling as they are unforgettable. But if there’s one series that stands head and shoulders above the rest, it’s Petscop. Developed by Tony Domenico, this faux video game walkthrough is a masterclass in blending nostalgia with bone-chilling mystery.

At first glance, Petscop grabs you with its spot-on recreation of 1990s PlayStation aesthetics. The blocky graphics, the quirky sound effects, the clunky dialogue boxes—it’s all there, perfectly capturing the look and feel of a game you might’ve rented from a video store decades ago. But Petscop isn’t just a nostalgia trip. Beneath its colorful, seemingly innocent surface lies a story that’s equal parts fascinating and deeply unnerving.

The series follows Paul, a player who stumbles upon this mysterious game and begins documenting his journey. As he explores the world and solves its puzzles, he uncovers something far darker than he ever expected. Hidden within the game’s cheerful visuals is a haunting tale about a man named Marvin and the disappearance of his childhood friend, Lina. The deeper Paul digs, the more twisted and surreal the story becomes, leaving viewers on the edge of their seats.

What makes Petscop so compelling is how it uses its format to tell a story that couldn’t work in any other medium. The game-within-a-game structure creates layers of mystery, blurring the line between reality and fiction. It’s a slow burn, but every detail—from the cryptic clues to the eerie atmosphere—builds toward something truly unforgettable. If you’re a fan of horror that messes with your mind and leaves you questioning what’s real, Petscop is a must-watch. It’s proof that sometimes, the scariest stories are the ones that feel like they’ve been hiding in plain sight all along.

4.Welcome Home

We shift from the world of old-school video games to vintage television, specifically, shows revolving around felt puppets. From Sesame Street to The Muppets, puppet-based television has always resulted in colorful characters and incredibly unique comedy. This is the media that Welcome Home has seen fit to pay tribute to, especially through its visuals and increasingly impressive catalog of content. The project is the brainchild of a creator known as Clown, an artist with a penchant for artwork based around old-school felt puppets.

Welcome Home is a unique outlier, even amongst the other entries on this list, as it’s not an episodic series. Instead, the narrative is dished out through a website run by a restoration society looking to preserve any content related to Welcome Home, a fictitious puppet television show from the ’70s. The show centers around a neighborhood of quirky and colorful puppets all learning various life lessons through their silly adventures. From cereal boxes to picture books to vinyl records, the project utilizes a wide range of formats to tell its story.

The story blurs the lines between fantasy and reality, with the in-universe show itself possessing a form of malevolent energy. The more sinister and offputting moments are centered around the show’s lead puppet, Wally Darling who seems to be harboring a dark secret. So far the project has had several big content drops, often related to major holidays like Halloween and Christmas, resulting in stellar content and narrative revelations.

3.The Monument Mythos

The Monument Mythos takes analog horror in a very unique direction amidst a sub-genre of web horror that can sadly get a bit repetitive. In the wake of The Mandela Catalogue, many have seen fit to coast off of cheap jumpscares and visual distortions instead of any legitimate narrative hooks. This is where The Monument Mythos truly shines, combining analog horror with a dark look into alternative world history. Created by Alex Casanas AKA Mister Manticore, the series shows a fictitious alternate reality where James Dean was elected president and personal computers were banned in the late 20th century.

Not only that but, as the videos reveal, famous monuments and landmarks hold some truly sinister secrets.

This includes the likes of the episode titled LINCOLNLOOKER which shows that the Lincoln Memorial is housing a monstrous entity. There’s also RUSHMOREREVENGE where video footage reveals strange anomalies occurring at Mount Rushmore with the faces disappearing and shifting. If you have a penchant for bizarre historical conspiracy theories, then this series will surely scratch that itch. Casanas has since moved on to other projects but Monument Mythos still stands as his best-known, gardening ample coverage from online commentators.

2.The Backrooms

It’s often funny just seeing what happens to an idea once the internet gets a hold of it, often taking it far beyond its humble origins. Before there was The Backrooms there was the concept of liminal spaces – images of empty rooms and locations that evoke bizarre emotions in the viewer. Whether the location stirs up nostalgia or just an unsettling feeling of familiarity depends on how you perceive it.

This trend gave way to the Backrooms, a liminal space resembling an office building without any furniture or people. Soon images of these Backrooms began popping up all over the web, resulting in an impressive crop of content. Eventually, this idea led to a young filmmaker named Kane Pixels crafting his own short film based on the concept.

The Backrooms builds off all the established online lore, starting with the key detail of someone clipping through a wall or floor to travel there. Additionally, the short film’s protagonist soon finds himself pursued by a mysterious entity resembling a creature made of metal and wires. The short film is nothing short of a technical marvel, utilizing its CGI perfectly, resulting in something you might confuse for legitimate video footage.

1.Marble Hornets

If there were a Mount Rushmore for online horror, Marble Hornets would absolutely deserve a spot. In fact, it’s hard to imagine many of the iconic horror web projects we know today without Marble Hornets paving the way. This groundbreaking series, which ran from 2009 to 2014, didn’t just tell a story—it created an entire experience that redefined internet horror.

The series follows Jay Merrick as he investigates the strange happenings surrounding Marble Hornets, a student film project by his friend Alex Kralie. While reviewing the raw footage, Jay starts noticing bizarre and unsettling events, the most chilling of which involves a faceless, otherworldly figure known as The Operator—better known as Slender Man. As Jay digs deeper, he becomes entangled in a nightmarish web of forgotten memories, cryptic clues, and encounters with entities that defy explanation.

What made Marble Hornets so addictive was its use of alternate reality game (ARG) elements. Fans weren’t just passive viewers—they could interact with Jay (and later Tim) on social media, helping them solve puzzles and piece together the mystery. This level of engagement, combined with expertly timed jump scares, minimalist yet effective digital effects, and surprisingly strong acting, made the series a web horror classic. It captured the same raw, immersive feel that made The Blair Witch Project so groundbreaking, but with a modern, internet-driven twist.

Marble Hornets wasn’t just a series; it was a phenomenon. It proved that horror could thrive online, blending storytelling, audience interaction, and a sense of realism that kept viewers hooked. If you’ve never experienced the eerie world of Marble Hornets, it’s a must-watch—a reminder of how simple yet terrifying a good story can be when told the right way.