Creepypasta stories

The Coraline Easter Egg

I've always been a fan of Easter eggs and weird goofs hidden in movies. Like any super mature guy, what gets me the most are those naughty secret images and things hidden in children's movies. You know, the priest's erection in The Little Mermaid, the topless woman on that one VHS edition of The Rescuers, SEX in the sky in The Lion King (although that one's legitimacy is debatable...)
Well, I heard from an Internet friend that there's one in Coraline. Now, Coraline isn't just a kid's movie. It's a pretty scary movie, and on top of the scariness there's even a little bit of risque material---the burlesque dancer neighbors come to mind. But my friend told me that there's a secret image hidden in the movie that was just some animator's idea of fun, nothing naughty or sexual. It's in the scene where Coraline's Other Mother is cracking an egg in the frying pan---if you zoom in on the egg yolk while it's suspended in midair, you can see Jack Skellington's head (Nightmare Before Christmas)...

Anyway, I pulled out my DVD and popped it in my 64 inch TV. I went to the scene and paused the movie, then zoomed.

There it was. The faint yet unmistakable head of Jack Skellingon suspended in the yellow yolk of an egg. I was about to eject the DVD when I noticed something right below Jack's head, right at the bottom of the yolk. It looked like a faint string of words, but I couldn't make them out... Maybe they weren't even words. The movie quality at this zoomed in point was way to fuzzy, and it could have been just a shadow or some kind of tiny imperfection in whatever material the egg was made from...

I mentioned it to my friend online.

"It COULD be words," he said. "Maybe it's a phone number or something."

Yeah, but I was thinking it was probably some kind of props note or label that didn't totally erase from the egg. My friend told me I should download an HD version anyway and maybe I could see more clearly if the fuzzy line was words or if it was nothing.

Well, I went ahead and torrented an HD version. (Sorry, Laika and Focus Features! I promise I bought the DVD legitimately...I just needed this version for scholarly research...) Again, I zoomed in as far as I could on my computer, and there was Jack Skellington's head, much clearer and defined this time. And below it, there WERE words.

But I still couldn't read them..I could make out the fuzzy shapes, but I couldn't zoom in any more. Well, now comes the good part about Internet friends. Whoever you talk to on the Internet could literally be anyone with all sorts of different connections, and my friend told me he knew a guy who worked at Laika and helped oversee the conversion from the original theatrical digital file to the various home entertainment files/mediums, and this guy could potentially have access to the original Coraline movie file, which would of course be the most HD version of the movie there was.

Well, my friend got back to me a few days later, and he said the guy he knew had a personal copy of the original file at his home in Oregon, and he'd show it to us if wanted to see it, but it was too big/copyrighted to send over the Internet. Now, I live in Washington state, which isn't too far away from Oregon, but did I really want to drive several hours just to sate my curiosity?

The answer, it turns out, is yes. The restaurant I work at got big time slammed by the health department and had to close for a week. Apparently the state doesn't like customers with 6 legs crawling around in the cooler...

So now I had a week of total free time with nothing to do, and the idea of meeting my online friend and watching his friend's copy of the original Coraline movie file sounded even more tantalizing. So we set a day to meet and a time that worked for my friend's friend to show us the movie, and I was off to Oregon.

My friend---his name's Kael---lives in Veneta, Oregon, a small town about three and a half hours from where I live in Washington. Was I a little nervous to meet him? After all, we'd only ever talked online on various movie and anime forums. Yes, I was a little nervous, but I had met people from the Internet before in real life and they'd been perfectly fine. There's just always that little bit of nervousness, because you have no idea who the human behind the screen name is. There are just so many possibilities.