We haven’t stopped creating fairy tales and folklore—we just do it online now.
For Aeon magazine, Will Wiles has a splendid longread about “creepypasta,” the phenomenon of writing and disseminating scary stories on the Internet.
Their subject matter—horrific lost episodes of TV shows, malicious computer code that causes seizures—reveal how the loci of our anxieties have shifted to more technological horrors. (Though the infamous Slenderman certainly harkens back to primeval boogeymen.)