Creepypasta and “the Fabrègues Affair”: Imitation and aggression in a recent case of youth violence

“TERROR,” exclaimed the front cover of Le Nouveau Détective on 23 March 2022: “These girls are 13 years old and they go sowing death in order to obey ‘Slender man’” (Fourquet, 2022). ¹ The magazine, which is descended from Joseph and Georges Kessel's infamous weekly revue à scandales, was not the only publication to report on the gruesome crime that had taken place ten days earlier in the sleepy town of Fabrègues in southern France. “‘The stairs were covered in blood’” read a headline quoting a policewoman on LeFigaro.fr (Daguin, 2022); “A 13-year-old teen assassinates her father and severely wounds her mother” announced La Voix du Nord's website (F. P., 2022b); “Two adolescent girls fascinated with horror stories assassinate the father of one of them” reported the online magazine, NEON (Posadinu, 2022). Marianne.fr also published a story on “the crime of two teens ‘inspired’ [inspirées] by imaginary monsters” (Borrel, 2022).

The monsters in question, in a murder case I propose to call “the Fabrègues Affair,” were the protagonists of “creepypasta.” The term is a play on “copypasta,” which refers to copied and pasted text used on social media platforms, either as a meme, or for the purposes of trolling. Creepypasta, similarly, refers to stock stories and characters created by the users of online fora and passed around on the Internet in the form of photos, text, videos, games, and sound files (Blank and McNeill, 2018: 6; Chess and Newsom, 2015: 102). The genre is similar to fan fiction, except that in the case of creepypasta, the “original” story is often essentially absent. The narratives are decentered, the characters are often orphans, and canon is always up for debate (Bimo, 2023: 82).

Creepypasta gained significantly in prominence in 2014 when two pre-teen girls, Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier, conspired to stab their friend to death after reading stories on spooky websites about a mythic monster named Slenderman, a fictional child abductor who forces his victims to commit acts of violence, and who lives in a mansion in the forest surrounded by other malevolent, fantastical creatures. After a sleepover with their future victim, they carried out their attack in a suburban wooded area in Waukesha, Wisconsin. In the end, the girls’ victim survived—barely (see Brodski, 2016). In 2022, in southern France, two young girls once again imitated the horrific behaviors they read about, invoking Slenderman and other creepypastas to explain a stabbing, which, this time, had deadly consequences. But the incident in France sparked a very different public discourse about the Internet, youth mental health, and gender and sexuality.

In recent years, violent viral posts on social media have produced previously unimaginable moral panics in the sense that Stanley Cohen (1972) understands the term in his seminal work on the Mods and Rockers in 1960s London: ² parents and educators have responded with horror to online crazes from the Blue Whale Challenge of 2016 (see Adeane, 2019) and the Momo hoax of 2018 (see Vogt, 2019), in which young people on the Internet were, supposedly, encouraged to self-harm, to the recent “Devious Lick” trend, which has resulted in certain American teachers being terrorized by students inspired by TikTok videos (see Foley and Goldman, 2021). To many, these acts of aggression modeled on Internet culture feel frighteningly unprecedented, and we can already begin to see the ways in which large language models like Chat GPT are accelerating the dissemination of unsavory Internet content, from recent racist “deepfakes” to Taylor Swift's phony nudes. ³

“The Fabrègues Affair,” in which two young girls carried out a deadly parricide and blamed their crime on the stories they read on their tablets, represents the first time in France that youth violence apparently motivated by creepypasta has made headlines. It is one of the most recent examples of how new technologies and the new forms of cultural content they create are shaping the ways in which young people act out, or, at least, the ways in which adults perceive their acts of aggression and violence. And yet, in “the Fabrègues Affair,” the conceptual basis for understanding the incident is anything but new. The most widely published theory of the case in French newspapers depends, rather, on the persistence of a certain strain of twentieth-century psychoanalytic theory in French psychiatric discourse and in the media. Thinkers like Jacques Lacan have at no point been mentioned directly in press coverage of “the Fabrègues Affair,” and yet, I show, a reliance on the theoretical frameworks that Lacan developed in the 1930s and 1940s has played a vital role since the spring of 2022 in shaping conventional wisdom in France regarding “creepypasta addictions,” the term used in the French press to describe the deadly fascination with Internet horror fiction which supposedly inspired the Slenderman stabbings in the United States, and which has led to a moral panic that, due to the Fabrègues stabbings, has now arrived in France.

Drawing on a substantial corpus of online news articles about the Fabrègues teens and their crime (which is, to my knowledge, exhaustive to date ⁴ ), I offer an incident analysis ⁵ of “the Fabrègues Affair,” investigating the event through the press coverage it attracted—press coverage which, as is often the case with scandalous cultural incidents, opens a window onto mentalities of the moment. I aim in this article to theorize the relationship between imitation and aggression as it appears in cases like “the Fabrègues Affair”; to examine closely the role that certain (mis)applications of early Lacanian ideas have played in press coverage of what began as a tragic fait divers; and, guided by the recent work of Barbara Creed and other feminist critics, to consider alternative models for reckoning with the sociological phenomenon of violent acts committed by young women who seem to identify with fictional monsters.

The mimetic force of violence

The basic facts of the Fabrègues case recall in many ways the Wisconsin crime: both incidents began with a sleepover and ended with a stabbing (and, unsurprisingly, the American attack has often been referenced in coverage of the French one, in a classic example of “deviancy amplification,” whereby legally or morally divergent acts tend, in the media, to enjoy outsized attention when repeated [Cohen, 1972: 226–27 and passim]). On a Sunday afternoon in March, two girls in a small town near Montpellier, whom I will refer to as Léa and Amélie (the pseudonyms given to them by the regional paper, Midi Libre) attempted to slaughter Léa's entire family.

Léa and Amélie had been planning the massacre ever since they became close two years earlier. When Léa's mother made some trivial comment about her daughter's chores, the small offense was enough to trigger the passage à l’acte. The girls donned plastic gloves so as not to leave any fingerprints and proceeded to attack one of Léa's sisters and both of her parents with a knife and a pair a scissors.

The young attackers were arrested three hours later at Amélie's parents’ home in Sommières, a forty-minute drive from Fabrègues. Following the stabbings, they had run out into the rain in their socks and begged a truck driver to take them to Amélie's house, explaining that the blood on their clothes was the result of a beating they had received at the hands of Léa's parents. This was, of course, a fiction created on the fly that turned the aggressors into victims and vice versa.

Early news coverage of the Fabrègues stabbings focused primarily on the Internet fiction that, supposedly, inspired the crime. A dozen or so pieces published on the Web in the days and weeks following the crime featured images of the spooky protagonists of crowdsourced horror, or mentioned creepypasta in their titles. ⁶ The dominant narrative was that the young killer “and her friend […] were submerged in the dark world of ‘Creepy pasta’” (Zarrouk, 2022a). For a few months, in the media, Léa and Amélie were the source of a moral panic in France: news coverage alluded to their black clothes and colorful hair, emphasized the widespread appeal of creepypasta among adolescents, and insisted on parents’ lack of awareness of what their children were doing on their tablets (see, notably, Barrère, 2022a). They were new folk devils, like the ones discussed by Cohen (1972)—“visible reminders of what [society tells us] we should not be” (p. 2). ⁷ The implication was clear: anyone's little goth could be the next victim of Internet horror and a future perpetrator of violence, a copycat killer inspired by fiction.

There is nothing inherently new about the idea that the written word might inspire violence, or even murder, through imitation. Certainly not in France, where “literary murders” are something of a national tradition. In 1881, for example, a now-infamous man named Lucien Morisset fired a revolver into a crowd of people; his judge determined that the young clerk, in doing so, had succumbed to “literary intoxication [alcoolisation littéraire]” (Lyon-Caen, 2018). He had imitated his literary hero, Pierre François Lacenaire, whose own acts of aggression half a century earlier had, it was thought, also been inspired by literature (Demartini, 2001). A century after Lacenaire was guillotined for his crimes, a sales representative named Edmond Rougé strangled his mistress in a Montparnasse hotel room, leaving behind Boris Vian's J’irai cracher sur vos tombes, a sexually and violently explicit novel that contains a graphic description of a femicide by strangulation. The response in the press to the ensuing scandal, which has become something of a national treasure (France Culture, 2020), echoed Morisset's judge: one journalist summed up public opinion when he speculated that Rougé had been “influenced [impressionné]” by “a too suggestive scene” in Vian's book (qtd. in Arnaud, 1974: 62).

Léa's and Amélie's act was also interpreted as a case of imitation. Certainly, they had plenty of examples to follow in the creepypasta they read: Slenderman stories often center on children who are compelled to commit violent acts against other children, and who are rewarded when they are welcomed into his mansion in the woods. Another character, whose image allegedly served as a profile picture on one of the girls’ social media accounts (Zarrouk, 2022a), seems to have been an even more explicit role model: Jeff the Killer, so goes his origin story, is a thirteen-year-old who loses his sanity and stabs his parents and brother to death after bullies disfigure him, turning his face into a monstrous mask. Like the fictional Jeff, Léa and Amélie were mocked by other children—children who, apparently, derided the girls’ goth aesthetic and sexual orientation: Léa and Amélie are lesbians and were in fact dating at the time of the crime (Aubert, 2022). And, it seemed, they took their revenge out on family members. They resembled so closely the marginalized and misunderstood protagonists of the stories they read, ⁸ and they committed a crime fit for creepypasta.

When examining the ways in which cases of literary contagion are theorized, Émile Durkheim's (1897) definition of “imitation” is particularly instructive. In his seminal sociological study, Suicide, Durkheim considers the process whereby, say, “the thought of homicide” (the example par excellence of imitation for Durkheim) “passes from one to another consciousness” (p. 125). Durkheim's concern is not imitation that is socially motivated (as in cases of crowd behaviors and respect for customs and morals, which are defined by social relationships to others), but rather behaviors that “repeat automatically what others have done,” where “the new act is a mere echo of the original” and where the imitative action does not merely repeat, “but [where] this repetition has no cause for existence outside itself” (p. 129). Imitation can be understood as causal, concludes Durkheim, only in cases where “all that takes place results from imitative contagion” (p. 130), that is, as in biological pathology where a disease “rises wholly or mainly from the development of a germ introduced into the organism from outside,” when an idea or an action originates from without and “automatically and of itself [becomes] active” (p. 128).

According to this definition, Morisset's act was not one of true imitation, but falls rather into the category of social “[a]cts imitated because of the moral or intellectual prestige of the original actor” (Durkheim, 1897: 129 n. 8), namely, the poet Lacenaire, Morisset's hero. “[Morisset] did not want […] to be considered a vulgar criminal” his judge concluded; “he preferred to become illustrious and wanted a resounding trial around his name” (qtd. in Lyon-Caen, 2018). In contrast, Rougé's crime was understood in the press coverage to be an act of imitation: he simply acted out a scene in a book he had read. In Durkheim's terms, the impression came from without as by contagion and germinated in Rougé, the literary representation of one act engendering another, real one.

Durkheim's reflections on imitation are useful in assessing how commentators of crime have, across various historical periods, considered the mimetic force of representations of violence. In the case of Léa and Amélie, nearly everyone conceived of their act as a form of true imitative contagion in the Durkheimian sense: the girls, like Rougé, simply fell prey to the power of suggestion. Unlike the violent act that Morisset devoted to Lacenaire, the crime seemed to have nothing to do with social considerations as Durkheim defines them. I will return to Durkheim's theories in order to call into question certain suppositions in the press coverage of the case. First, however, I consider the dominant theory of why, exactly, the girls were so susceptible to reproduce the behaviors that featured in the online content they consumed.

Creepypasta and “the imaginary”

In the press, the most widely cited explanations for the Fabrègues stabbings were fundamentally subjective and psychological, rather than intersubjective and sociological in nature, and owe their prominence to Dr Claude Aiguevives, a psychiatric expert who works in the court system in Montpellier. Aiguevives was interviewed by Midi Libre two days after the crime was committed (Barrère, 2022b). A self-proclaimed expert on “creepypasta addictions” (his words), he set the tone and defined the terms of the national debate about Internet horror fiction that followed. ⁹

In the interview he gave, he revealed his orientation to be largely psychoanalytic in the most traditional—even caricatural—sense, ¹⁰ highlighting, for example, the “Oedipal conflict of the beginning of adolescence” that is at the basis, he suggested, of the stories of Jeff the Killer. (Jeff comes to the aid of suffering children and helps them carry out the parricide or matricide that he himself committed. ¹¹ ) Aiguevives's belief in the dangerous potential of screens, in particular, bears the stamp of twentieth-century psychoanalytic theory. When, in his interview, he describes creepypasta characters as “double[s] of the self” for Léa and Amélie, or when he considers that the girls were “caught up in images” (Barrère, 2022b), his concern for “the Imaginary” recalls Lacan's writings from the mid-twentieth-century.

In two early essays, “The Mirror Stage” (1949) and “Aggression in Psychoanalysis” (1948), which emerged in response to the tenets of “ego psychology,” the mainstream of mid-twentieth-century psychoanalysis in France, Lacan considers the aggression that results from the precarious and alienating series of ambivalent misidentifications and misrecognitions on which the ego is built. In the more widely-read of these, “The Mirror Stage,” Lacan describes the child who first sees themself as a whole, rather than as a fragmented series of limbs, in a mirror image: in and as an other. The experience is thrilling for the helpless infant whose image of wholeness allows them to anticipate future autonomy, but the fact remains that this “I” (this sense of self, we might say) which emerges at last in all its apparent sovereignty is only given to the child in the form of an other. In “Aggression in Psychoanalysis” (1948: 118), Lacan summarizes the situation by repeating Arthur Rimbaud's famous quip: “Je est un autre,” “I is an other.”

In order to understand Aiguevives's theoretical basis, it is important to emphasize that this “Imaginary” rapport with the specular other is, for the mid-century Lacan, largely unmediated by language, culture, and other “Symbolic” structures. Instead, the (mis)identification in question seems to concern the very being and body of the individual. Because “I” depend for my sense of coherence and identity on an other, these things are fundamentally precarious, Lacan insists. The other's presence is a constant reminder, so to speak, of my fragility and my lack of autonomy. For the early Lacan, the specular other gives me an illusion of coherence, but, in doing so, seems also to possess the power to reduce me to my primordial state of fragmentation, to some smorgasbord of scattered organs as in a painting by Hieronymus Bosch (Lacan, 1948: 85; Lacan, 1949: 78). This threat to bodily integrity which characterizes the Imaginary relation at this moment in Lacan's teaching, and the aggressive impulses that result from such a precarious identification, are of fundamental importance to Aiguevives's analysis of creepypasta addiction, and to his focus on the relationship between the adolescent and the screen.

In the interview Aigueveves gave to Midi Libre (Barrère, 2022b), the vocabulary related to Lacan's first articulation of the notion of the Imaginary is striking. ¹² In the 800-word piece, the word “image” and its derivatives (including imaginary [imaginaire]) appear eight times and there are five separate references to time spent in front of screens. We also find an entire lexical field of terms that relate to the ego and the alienating Imaginary relation: “avatar,” “double of the self,” “derealization,” “hallucinate [délirer],” “vulnerability,” “identification,” “loss of identity,” “alien[ation]” (in two places), “influence [emprise]” (in five places, not counting the article's title). The psychiatrist's theory of the case is fundamentally a specular one, centered on the notion of misidentification.

And, Aiguevives's reliance on the notion of the Imaginary register as inherently alienating and violent in nature is integral to his theory of the Fabrègues case. ¹³ The psychiatrist explains that creepypasta addictions occur when children—girls more often than boys, he emphasizes—become “caught up in images, and fall under the spell of a virtual character.” The doctor alludes to the timelessness of scary stories, but insists that, with creepypasta, unlike in the past when children were exposed to frightening tales by their parents, “the children are alone in front of the screen.” The screen, for Aiguevives, is as, if not more important than the fact of the children's solitude: alone with their tablets, “they scare themselves with entities who come at night, threatening characters, stories of corpses hidden under the mattress, an entire frightening imaginary. These are adolescents who are vulnerable, most often due to language disorders, or who are emotionally neglected. Because they do not master written language, they become caught up in images” (my emphasis). As in Lacan's early work on the Imaginary (read in the most straightforward way) we find here in Aiguevives's theory of creepypasta addiction a neat distinction between the social and the linguistic, on the one hand (the Symbolic), and images and identifications on the other (the Imaginary). And, for Aiguevives, images take on incredible power in the absence of social contact and symbols, that is, for children who lack meaningful emotional connections with others and, especially, who have language disorders.

“They [Elles] are fascinated,” Aiguevives continues, “by an imaginary character, who is first an avatar, then who becomes a double of the self, then who acts in the place of the minor, without there being any longer any capacity for self-criticism” (my emphasis). The process the psychiatrist describes recalls Durkheim's imitative contagion. And the girls, in Aiguevives's understanding of their addiction, are the spitting image of the infant in the mirror stage: like the little “specular I [who must become] the social I” (Lacan, 1949: 79), but who, for now, is “caught up in the lure of spatial identification” (Lacan, 1949: 78), these teenaged girls who, supposedly, have language disorders and lack social ties, become fascinated with a specular other, an avatar, a double, an alter-ego. In this inchoate state of Symbolic insufficiency, the girls, like the infant, confuse themselves with the other. This is a state of “alienation” (a word Aiguevives uses twice), with predictable aggressive consequences, according to the theory being applied: in the case of Léa, this moment of fundamental misidentification with an image, which Lacan (1949: 77) calls a moment of “primordial jealousy” ends with a deadly reckoning first with her siblings, and then with her father. It's as if she is playing out in one afternoon, in the most violent way, all the “social tensions” (Lacan, 1933: 396) that characterize childhood, from Oedipal jealousy to sibling rivalry. There is no question that Aiguevives, who, recall, did not hesitate to characterize crimes like Léa's as “Oedipal” in nature, viewed the girls through a very specific theoretical lens.

There is undeniably a logic at work here, but the speculation is unconvincing, relying, as it does, on a rather naïve Freudo-Lacanianism, ¹⁴ and lacking, as it does, any specificity with respect to the case at hand. Moreover, in the months since Aiguevives wrote his article, it has become clear that his theory of creepypasta addictions, in this case, was simply wrong. Most notably, we have learned that Léa's favorite subject at school was French, that she herself wrote fiction (Mollet, 2022), and that she was an avid reader of Stephen King novels (Barrère, 2022f); according to her lawyer, she is highly proficient in English (Philipponnat, 2022). So, the idea that it was a language disorder that led her to be susceptible to images is highly dubious. The psychiatric experts assigned to Léa's case—the ones who, unlike Aiguevives, actually evaluated her—have concluded that the girl has schizophrenia (see Barrère, 2022g; Barrère, 2024; Mollet, 2022), and, just like Morgan Geyser, was suffering from delusions of persecution at the time of the crime. (Recently, Léa was judged penally irresponsible for her actions due to her mental illness: see Barrère, 2024.) It is difficult to accept Aiguevives's proposition that the fictional Jeff the Killer, with his “Oedipal” vendetta, is to blame for Léa's act and that, by extension, other young female readers of creepypasta in France are susceptible to imitate Léa and Amélie. The conclusions Aiguevives drew were incorrect, and yet they garnered far more attention in public discourse than did Léa's psychiatric exam, which concluded that “Creepy Pasta were not the triggering factor in her mental illness” (Barrère, 2022f). The notion that imaginary monsters were to blame, it seems, was more interesting than a sad case of mental illness.

When the girl looks

For Aiguevives, “the Fabrègues Affair” is clearly a story of imitative contagion, to return to Durkheim's term: “We are looking,” the psychiatrist explained, “at the relationship between the presentation of very traumatic images and the brains of our fragile adolescents. […] It's the same impact as the beheading images broadcasted by terrorists, which one day will lead a teenager on the other side of the world to walk into a police station and stab someone” (Barrère, 2022b). The imitation, in his analysis, is essentially meaningless. The behavior, inspired by images on the Internet, driven by alienation, replicates itself inevitably, for seemingly no socially explainable reason. The violence, once witnessed, will one day engender violence. Léa and Amélie are, for Aiguevives, like Edmond Rougé as he was understood in the French papers in the 1940s.

But one does not need to have met Léa and Amélie to see that their crime was social (in the Durkheimian sense ¹⁵ ), and Aiguevives's inability to take account of the social nature of their act is, I would argue, what is most deficient in his analysis. As tragic and misguided as their act was, it was grounded in their shared interest in creepypasta—one of the defining features of their relationship, a relationship characterized, certainly, by feelings of affection and care. They committed the crime together, after spending a weekend together. In the end, Léa and Amélie don’t match Aiguevives's description of girls with language disorders who watch videos alone on their screens. Reading accounts of Léa's psychiatric exam (see Mollet, 2022) leaves us with no doubt that she experienced social isolation: “I was lonely [isolée]” she told her examiner. But she also talked about Amélie. They were “inseparable” at school, and every evening, when they could not be together physically, hung out together on a Discord channel (Mollet, 2022). The Internet—the written word on the Internet—brought them closer together.

In her recent book, Slenderman: Online Obsession, Mental Illness, and the Violent Crime of Two Midwestern Girls, Kathleen Hale (2022) reopens the case of the Slenderman stabbings in Waukesha. The story she tells isn’t about “literary intoxication,” or imitative contagion, or the violence inherent in visual media. It's about mental health, and how much work remains to be done in the effort to understand young girls like Morgan Geyser. Back in 2014, an article by Rebecca Traister, which was surprisingly (and refreshingly) out of step with the national conversation at the time, proposed that the stabbing in Wisconsin showed that “[a]dolescent angst and violence are not the exclusive domain of boys.” “[W]hat's interesting about the case,” wrote Traister (2014),

is not that it's an example of a new and looming online threat. Rather, it appears to echo patterns of behavior — belief in culturally-supported fantasies, tightly-cathected bonds between young women, an intensity of connection that has occasionally led to violence — that have occurred repeatedly, in various forms, throughout history and around the world. And they happen outside the heterosexual framework we use to understand [misogynistic crimes]. This crime is one that reminds us of the central role that homosocial bonding plays in the lives of the many young women who spend their adolescent years battling, and occasionally “seeing,” their own demons.

Given Léa's mental illness, it is difficult to imagine that without psychiatric attention she might have achieved some form of healthy social integration, even in the absence of the online horror fiction to which she was exposed. But Amélie's case seems somewhat different: her psychiatric experts maintain that she is mentally well, and, as I write, the investigating magistrate in her case is demanding that she be tried for “complicity in murder [assassinat] and in attempted [murder]” (Barrère, 2024). ¹⁶ Assuming mental illness played no role in her willingness to participate in the attack on her girlfriend's family, as the experts involved in her case have concluded, we must entertain the possibility that, for her, the crime was fundamentally social in nature—not, that is, simply the result of brain chemistry. She was, it seems, attracted to the storylines over which she and Léa bonded for reasons that were not pathological in the traditional sense; she may have been attracted to Léa because of their affinity for horror, and found some kind of satisfaction in dating a person who shared her passion for the macabre.

Of course, it's impossible to say for sure where her motivations lay. Unlike in Léa's case, the more we learn about Amélie's involvement in the crime, the less her motives make sense. Her case is a mystery, and, as Greil Marcus (1989: 24) once put it, “[r]eal mysteries cannot be solved, but they can be made into better mysteries.” ¹⁷ Rather than attempt to explain her act, as Aiguevives does, I want to suggest that a different theoretical approach to the girls’ relationship to Internet horror might allow us to make of their story a better mystery, and offer a more complex set of reflections on the moral panic at hand.

In the news coverage of Léa's and Amélie's crime, attention was invariably drawn to their gender and sexuality, but this was generally only to add to the scandalous nature of their act. Headlines often emphasized the young age and gender of the murderers—violent crimes are shocking when they are committed by children, and, in general, even more sensational when those children are girls. Le Nouveau Détective went so far as to call the girls’ kissing in public a “provocation”; the magazine's explicit claim was that the girls’ displays of homosexuality was, like their dark clothes and colorful hair, a way of getting attention. The conventional wisdom, following Aiguevives's interview, was that, as girls, Léa and Amélie had been particularly susceptible to a monstrous imaginary; but no one considered that the girls’ gender and sexuality, as social identities, might have had anything to do with the reasons their crime took place. Given the centrality of the question of gender both in the media narrative and also to Aiguevives's ideas about language and images, it is tempting to consider what insights might be gained from a theoretical framework that foregrounds questions of sex and sexuality when discussing the relationship between femininity and horror.

Linda Williams’s (1984) seminal article, “When the Woman Looks” appeared four decades ago, but it resonates in striking ways with this recent French moral panic about impressionable young women. In her piece, Williams investigates the moments in horror film when female characters, and female spectators, do not turn away from images of monstrosity and violence, and she analyses the “surprising (and at times subversive) affinity [that can be observed] between monster and woman, in the sense in which her look at the monster recognizes their similar status within patriarchal structures of seeing” (p. 20). Williams argues that we find an identification between woman and monster: both are characterized by their otherness with respect to the male spectator by their nonphallic sexuality. In the classic monster film, where “the monster's power is one of sexual difference from the normal male,” the female character and, by extension, the female spectator, are able to identify with “the power and potency of the monster body” (p. 22).

Williams reads the rapport between (female) subject and image not as one of misrecognition and alienation, but rather as one of empowerment. The relationship is not defined, as it is for the early Lacan (whose ideas find echoes in Aiguevives's commentary) by fears of a return to a cut-up, fragmented body. Instead, inspired by the work of Susan Lurie, Williams understands castration anxiety as a self-serving male fantasy, a kind of wish fulfillment that sees “women [as] what men would be if they had no penises—bereft of sexuality, helpless, incapable” (qtd. in Williams, 1984: 25). What is truly frightening is not the threat of castration, according to this revised theory of the castration complex, but rather the idea that women are not in fact lacking. For Williams, the woman who looks at the monster in the classic horror film “recognizes the sense in which this freakishness is similar to her own difference. For she too has been constituted as an exhibitionist-object by the desiring look of the male. […] The strange sympathy and affinity that often develops between the monster and the girl may thus be less an expression of sexual desire (as in King Kong, Beauty and the Beast) and more a flash of sympathetic identification” (p. 23). Williams, in her analysis of the female gaze directed at the terrifying image, is the antithesis of Aiguevives. Where the latter sees alienation and passivity, the former sees affinity and empowerment. What did Amélie see? We will probably never know. But the mystery Williams's work allows us to develop has the advantage of considering with more specificity the case of a girl's attraction to horror, and, perhaps, of provoking ideas about girlhood and violence that do not simply reduce young women to deficient spectators.

Williams, forty years ago, provided a prescient framework for interrogating women's engagement with the male monsters that the Internet has since made so ubiquitous. More recent feminist work on horror—work as recent as “the Fabrègues Affair” itself—proves just as potentially thought-provoking: Barbara Creed's Return of the Monstrous-Feminine (2022) came out only a few months after Aiguevives provided Midi Libre with his theory of how young women engage with frightening images. The new book is a sequel to Creed's 1993 study, The Monstrous-Imaginary: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, ¹⁸ which was very much indebted to Williams's article on women, identification, and horror. Whereas Creed's first volume was primarily concerned with the woman as “abject,” “a misogynist fantasy,” “a construct of patriarchal ideology” (2022: 4), though, the new book focuses on the female filmmaker or character who, in an act of defiance, ventures into the realm of horror. Creed describes the characters of her corpus, who, in their stories, confront and respond to the evils of patriarchy, from rape and mutilation to homophobia and slavery:

Determined to discover their own identity and desires, the female characters embark on a journey into the dark night of abjection, where they engage with the underlying horrors of the patriarchal order. Their journey is feminist in that they have the courage to revolt and enter into that dark place in order to see for themselves the corruption at the heart of the symbolic order (p. 2).

Léa and Amélie, as they are represented in the news coverage their acts of violence inspired, remind us of the heroines of Creed's corpus. Their crime, as they described it, was both an act of vengeance—however misguided—and the opportunity to reinvent themselves, reincarnate themselves as creepypastas in Slenderman's mansion. The nonphallic identification between woman and monster described by Williams, becomes, in Creed's work, an active, sometimes monstrous revolt, an antipatriarchal creative and self-creating defiance. Léa's and Amélie's crime reflects this movement from identification to passage à l’acte. Unlike the protagonists in the films Creed studies, they may not have really experienced the acts of heterosexist violence that inspire the female characters’ violent acts. Although maybe they did. Both girls were bullied, they said, because of their sexual orientation. Léa, we know, heard “persecutory voices” (Barrère, 2022f) and experienced “hallucinatory injunctions” (Barrère, 2024). As for Amélie, it is, once again, impossible to know what led her to follow Léa into “that dark place.” Her actions show, though, that she took seriously whatever delusions of persecutions led Léa to act out a scene from a creepypasta story, and to play an active role in it.

“The Fabrègues Affair” allows us to take the temperature of a culture dealing with how youth violence intersects with concerns about the Internet and the potentially damaging effects of the violent, mimetic force of what young people read and view on the Web. Thus far, questions of gender, sexuality, and what we might call the sociology of middle-school have not played a prominent role in the theorization in public discourse of what happened in Fabrègues in 2022. But this crime presents an opportunity to revise current ways of conceptualizing girlhood and violence. While it is beyond the ambitions of the present article to prescribe strict guidelines for the commentators who drive media narratives like the ones the Waukesha stabbings and the “Fabrègues Affair” have spawned, I nevertheless hope to have provided an alternative model for grappling with the meaning of youth crimes which seem to be motivated by digital fictions. To Aiguevives's conceptualization of a violent Imaginary register could, as long as we are dealing with mysteries, be added a sensitivity to the intersubjective, social relationships and identities which inform our reading practices, and which may play a decisive role in the experiences of those who commit the most radical of human acts.