Hollywood is betting big on a longtime internet classic: the creepypasta.
Warner Bros. has won the rights to a film starring Sydney Sweeney based on a 4-year-old Reddit story posted to the r/nosleep community, The Hollywood Reporter first reported.
The r/nosleep community on Reddit is a place where users share scary first-person stories. The community encourages users to maintain “immersion” by behaving as if the stories are real.
The term “creepypasta” describes stories from the subreddit and is a play on the term “copypasta” — blocks of text that are so memorable they are reposted and repurposed across social media, becoming a meme.
The film will be based on one of the community’s most popular stories titled, “I pretended to be a missing girl so I could rob her family.”
The story follows a girl who pretends to be a daughter missing for several years so she can steal from a family. The plot is similar to the 2009 horror movie “Orphan,” which follows a 33-year-old Russian woman pretending to be a young girl so that an unsuspecting family will adopt her.
Sweeney has signed on to star in and produce the project, and according to the report, Academy Award-winning “Forest Gump” writer Eric Roth will write the script.
Joe Cote, an English teacher from Massachusetts, posted the story on Reddit. Cote told The Daily Mail that his first thought when Hollywood talent managers reached out about the film last year was, “Holy crap. What is happening?’”
Cote did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
Hollywood has tried to bring other popular internet stories to the big screen before, banking on their already-established popularity.
In 2018, Ryan Reynolds agreed to produce a film based on a post on the r/nosleep subreddit called “The Patient Who Nearly Drove Me Out Of Medicine.” The film was never released.
Maybe the most notable “creepypasta” to hit the big screen was the 2018 film “Slender Man,” which is based on the Slenderman character that rose to fame through creepy stories on an internet forum called Something Awful.
In 2021, A24 also released “Zola,” which was based on a popular Twitter thread in 2015 posted by A’Ziah King. It recounted her trip to Florida to become a stripper.
Reddit and the moderators of r/nosleep did not immediately return requests for comment from Business Insider. Warner Bros. also did not immediately return a request for comment.
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