Candle Cove

Candle Cove is a television show of dubious existence that originated in a 2009 creepypasta written by Kris Straub and originally published onto ichorfalls.com before the website went defunct. The story is written in the style of online forum comments posted to a site called NetNostalgia. Straub has confirmed that Candle Cove aired on Local 58, referenced in the original story as "channel 58." He has even stated that the station's call sign of WCLV is an abbreviation of Candle Cove.

Synopsis

According to those who reportedly saw the show as children, Candle Cove was a low-budget children's puppet show about pirates that aired for only a few months on local access channels in the Huntington-Ashland metropolitan area in the early 1970s. These viewers recall that the show was quite unsettling, not just because of the cheap designs of the characters, but also because of disturbing elements like a skeletal villain called the Skin-Taker and a plotless episode that consisted only of the characters screaming and flailing.

The final post in the forum suggests that the show only existed in its viewers' minds as some form of mass hypnosis, as a commenter reveals that his mother recalled that whenever he'd say he was going to watch Candle Cove as a child, he'd tune into TV static and watch it for 30 minutes straight as though a program was really airing.

Channel Zero Adaptation

The story was loosely adapted as the first season of the Syfy channel's 2016 horror anthology series, Channel Zero. The six episodes comprising the season focus on the Candle Cove show's connection to a string of decades-old child murders in Ohio that were committed around the time the show originally aired. Scenes from Candle Cove itself are shown only briefly throughout the season, but they do retain certain elements of Straub's original story, including most of the puppet characters (with the Skin-Taker being referred to instead as "Jawbone") and the screaming episode.

Straub has stated that his involvement in the series was minimal, only giving his input to the show's producers about what the vibe of the show was. He was offered the chance to direct one of the segments with the puppets, but he wasn't able to work it into his schedule. When asked about his thoughts on the Syfy adaptation, Straub stated that Candle Cove is maybe his least favorite of the four seasons of Channel Zero, but that his opinion was more rooted in how strange it was for him to watch it than a perceived lack of quality. He has praised series writer and creator Nick Antosca as being the best choice to adapt the story and expressed his love for Channel Zero as a whole. Although Straub can no longer adapt the Candle Cove story himself, he has stated his contentment that the Syfy adaptation "did what it needed to do."

Trivia

• Kris Straub has cited a 2000 satirical article from The Onion called "Area 36-Year-Old Still Has Occasional Lidsville Nightmare," in which a man has recurring nightmares about the early-70s children show Lidsville, as an inspiration for Candle Cove.
• While Straub still maintains the publishing rights to the original Candle Cove story, he had to sell away the film adaptation rights for the story to NBC/Universal so that it could be used in Channel Zero.
  • Straub has stated that the Local 58 series was born out of his desire to do more projects like Candle Cove without being able to use the Candle Cove story itself.