Creepypasta: Nightmare Fuel

93: Confession

Confession by C.S Jones

All the names – except J.J.'s – are changed, for reasons that should be obvious.

I grew up in Royal Oak, Michigan, about twenty minutes from downtown Detroit. It's one of those places where the people with money ran to after things in the city went shit-shaped.

I went to high school with this guy I'll call Nick. We had a TV Production class together, and we both decided that was the kind of thing we wanted to do for a living, so we ended up in a lot of the same film classes in college.

We weren't that close, and I didn't hang out with him that much outside of school, but a year after graduation, he contacted me about this show he wanted to make. He said he really liked my camera work, and I was better with editing and effects programs than most of the other students – I'd been playing with them as a hobby since tenth grade – and he said he could use my knowledge for the production values.

Nick was never that great at the technical side of things. Even after film school, his stuff always looked kind of cheap and Youtube-y. But he was charming, the kind of guy who could do great voiceovers, come up with impressive-sounding "artistic visions" (he was great at putting on airs and convincing stupid people his shitty-looking films were actually high art with all kinds of symbolic metaphorical ironic subtext or whatever) and pitch the hell out of any idea, no matter how stupid. So he thought we'd make a good team.

His idea was for this "Real Stories of Detroit" type of show. I mean, That wasn't what he called it, but it's a pretty good summary of the premise. His explanation was that people on the outside know this place sucks, but besides all those dilapidated building photos ("ruin porn, " they call it) and the crime reports no one cares about, they don't know enough about the very real horror that happens here on a daily basis. In other words, they didn't see us as human, man, just a big joke.

 I agreed with some of his points, I wasn't finding paying work at the time, and I wanted to help out an old sort-of-friend, so I agreed to do some camera work for him. If anything became of it, I'd get partial credit and we'd split the profits. 

During the planning phase, Nick was always going on about how the show would have both artistic merit and social relevance, exposing the darker side of humanity as well as the conditions we overlook right here in America, and hopefully, encourage the complacent masses to wake up and do something about our poverty and urban blight.

It took me about a week to realize that was all bullshit.

In the early days, the material that would make up the meat of our show was hard to find, so we spent hours every day combing through shock and gore sites for whatever we could find that might have come from around here in the last ten years. Over the next several months, my external drive filled up with camcorder videos of rotting corpses people stumbled across, security camera footage of cashiers getting shot in the face by robbers, leaked footage of blood-soaked crime scenes, and every type of forensic photo imaginable.

We called up and interviewed crack whores – the very few who had access to phones and could complete intelligible sentences, anyway – ex-cons, and people who'd confess to any depraved shit as long as we didn't show their faces.

The "real stories" were never positive, always just the worst shit we could dig up. We never talked to people reading storybooks to kids or tending community gardens or anything.

According to Nick, that was "feel-good fluff" and didn't "reflect the city's brutal reality."
According to Nick, what did "reflect the city's brutal reality" was a freak show of poverty, misery, and suffering.