The Minotaur–Maze Problem in Collaborative Digital Horror Storytelling

This article examines a creative tension at the heart of collaborative horror storytelling on the Internet. Story-worlds like the Backrooms, Slender Man, and the SCP Foundation tend to originate as what I describe as ‘maze horror’: fragmented, largely plotless, and built on isolation, liminality, and subtle unease. But as the story-world grows, contributors introduce their own ‘minotaurs’ to the maze, imbuing the story-world with conflict, backstory, plot, and active antagonists. I describe this shift as ‘minotaurization’, and argue that in the decentralized, asynchronous, and tacit collaborative structures typical of digital horror folklore, minotaurization is essentially inevitable. This article aims to add to our understanding of how digital horror folklore evolves over time, as well as to illuminate one way in which different modes of storytelling—collective versus single-authored, delimited versus limitless, temporally defined versus asynchronous—can shape the kinds of stories it is possible to tell.