Smile Dog
One of the first internet horror stories built around a file rather than a text. It appeared around 2008: a journalist visits a woman to ask about a picture called smile.jpg that drives mad everyone who sees it; the woman refuses to talk and eventually sends the file. The trick is that the file does not exist — every "original" circulating online appeared after the story did. The reader has to imagine the image, and imagination does the job better than any drawing.
Siren Head
A forty-foot figure of rusted metal with two loudspeakers where a head should be. The Canadian illustrator Trevor Henderson posted the first drawing in August 2018 and nothing happened for a year and a half — by his own account it got a couple of likes and was forgotten. It went off in the spring of 2020, when a clip of the thing towering over a city spread everywhere, and within four months it was the most recognisable monster on the internet. Its voice is playback: air-raid sirens, fragments of other people's conversations, calls for help.
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