Just read SCP-2614 and now I’m thinking about the ways metafiction can be leveraged for horror. I feel like the most common manifestation of this is a generic knock-off of The Matrix, just a way of saying “wouldn’t it be fucked up if you weren’t real?”. It never gets into the weeds, it always stops there. The Matrix isn’t real, so they break out. The world you thought you knew was created and controlled by a higher power for their own nefarious purposes. I really hate it when people bring up “are we living in a simulation” in real life, because that’s barely even a question. It’s basically christian apologetics but for atheists. Just CTRL+F replace God with The Great Machine or something and it scans perfectly. SCP’s Pataphysics acknowledges that representations, symbols, models are made with a specific purpose in mind.

Straying from fiction a bit, imagine a model of our solar system, middle school science fair stuff. This is still a kind of “lower reality” in our eyes because we attribute things to it that don’t literally exist. For the sake of the model, we pretend the lightbulb is actually the sun, the styrofoam balls are actually planets and that the hinges linking them together aren’t really there. These kinds of lower realities would not exist had we not chosen to perceive them as such. Without conscious interpretation, it’s just an arbitrary arrangement of atoms. Words on a page, bits on a server, film in a camera. SCP-2614 explores what happens when you push that idea to the breaking point.

The story imagines a box set of the sopranos whose perspective can be controlled, and that can enter in-universe media by looking at a TV. Things are normal when going 2 layers deep, but things get weird when they try to enter a commercial for laundry detergent. After the segment is supposed to end, the characters freak out as a white wall of nothingness slowly crushes their world. When the fictional world is as shallow as an ad, it collapses pretty quick, but when they go deeper, things get a lot weirder. When they enter an in-universe soap opera called Sandman, things are mostly normal. The show got a lot of mentions in The Sopranos, so it’s fleshed out enough to support itself. But then they go deeper. In a sitcom referenced in Sandman, called Caroline, the city outside is nothing but black facades. Deeper into a slasher film playing in Caroline, called Snakebite, after a single scene of normalcy, every character the camera turns to becomes unresponsive. They follow the camera like zombies, as if they know subconsciously that being perceived by these higher beings is the only way to continue existing. In an unnamed romantic film from Snakebite, the lighting immediately turns blood-red. The stars go out and the only thing visible outside is a dark red glow on the horizon.

Finally, 6 layers deep, we enter static. It shouldn’t mean anything, we’re in the world of a background prop on a rom-com from a slasher from a sitcom from a soap opera from The Sopranos. How can anything exist so far from the form-giving eyes of the audience? From all the talk of “going deeper” I’m tempted to call it the ground floor of reality, but it’s the opposite, isn’t it? Our world served as the foundation for The Sopranos, it was built on top of our collective ideas about a mob boss named Tony Soprano and his journey through NYC’s seedy underbelly. Sandman was built on top of that. Both as a parallel story foreshadowing the events of The Sopranos and as a way to add character to Carmela Soprano. But if you try to use that as a foundation, to try and build a whole world on a background detail in a background detail, of course it falls apart. The horror only happens when it somehow keeps going.

The static eventually coalesces into a brightly lit hallway too long to see its end. The POV can only be moved forward as the image steadily becomes more saturated. Nothing should be able to exist here, but it’s somehow becoming more real. How is this possible? Not even the most dedicated fan of The Sopranos could have head-canon’d this far, there’s no way something this real could be built on 6 layers of increasingly unstable narratives. Under this interpretation of Pataphysics, there is only one conclusion to be drawn.

There’s something watching on the other side.

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