The internet has some cool and terrifying web specials for Halloween. Here are 5 independent original web productions worth taking a look at.

Marblehornets

youtube.com/user/marblehornets

youtube.com/user/totheark

twitter.com/marblehornets

When a student filmmaker cancels filming on a school project, he hands all his tapes over to a friend with one request. “Burn them.” Instead, he starts sharing them across the internet because he has never watched a horror film, and slowly gets dragged into a very nasty affair with murder, madness and a very thin man at the heart of it all.

Running since 2008, Marblehornets is one of the top Slender Man stories. The Slender Man is, take a guess, a tall thin manlike figure of vague powers and vaguer goals. There have been many Slender series since Marble Hornets, but very few have topped it. Roger Ebert described it as “remarkably well-done,” which is high praise indeed considering the budget is mostly the change they can find down the back of the couch. Travelling through woods, sewers, abandoned buildings and even an empty hotel, the settings and photography alone make Marblehornets worth watching.

Welcome to Night Vale

http://commonplacebooks.com/welcome-to-night-vale

http://feeds.feedburner.com/WelcomeToNightVale

It’s late, you’re driving, so you scan the different stations for something a little slower. Then you hear the smooth, calming voice of Cecil giving you the most recent news, what’s going on with the city council, what the Sheriff’s Secret Police are currently doing and which of the unmarked helicopters are on your side. Then he gives an update about the floating cat and how to avoid the wrath of the Glow Cloud.

Welcome to Night Vale.

A podcast that updates fortnightly, Welcome to Night Vale, written by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor with Cecil Baldwin as Cecil, is a series of bizarre and disturbing updates from the sleepy little town of Night Vale, “a patient, but resilient little city [with] big dreams— sometimes scary, unforgettable dreams that repeat on the same date every year and are shared by every person in town,” and they make those dreams come true.

By turns funny and creepy, Welcome to Night Vale is a surprising twist on the horror podcast, and totally worth checking out.