THE SYNTHETIC UNCANNY:

Abstract

Internet horror mythoi such as Slender Man, the SCP Foundation and the Backrooms are not works but infrastructures for further work, open to extension by contributors who did not begin them. Commercial AI text generators now produce horror at volume, and the communities maintaining these archives have responded with unusually severe prohibitions. This article asks what those prohibitions are defending. Drawing on Bakhtin's account of finalisation and on the folkloristic literature on ostension, it argues that continuability is a textual property consisting in minimum finalisation together with ostensive availability, and derives four diagnostics from that account. These are applied to an archived image board thread coded in full, in which the Backrooms seed and its unsuccessful contemporaries survive side by side, and to a corpus of outputs from self-declaring generators elicited under a published prompt protocol. The finding is not that generated horror lacks the relevant properties, since generators supply them when asked. It is rather that continuability tracks specification: the properties that folkloric seeds possess as residues of the situations producing them can be delivered to a generator as a brief, and a specification can be met where a solicitation cannot be faked.