Creepypasta 2: Disturbing Smiles & Lidless Eyes

to it. But the basic premise was, uh if creepy pastas are short horror stories that are kind of memes written for the Internet or just based on images for the Internet, right, and we took I think three of them that were very science e oriented. It turns out a couple of these things are are basically like such and such thing happens in a mad laboratory, Chaos and sues, crazy, experience gets out of hand, people pull their skin off,

people can't sleep, that sort of thing. And we used it as a springboard to talk about actual science that not so much the science behind the creepy pasta, but the science that can still if you follow the tracks of the science from the Creepy Pasta, then you can get to some some really cool studies and whatnot. Yeah, so we took a look at three of them and then there was a really positive response to that episode.

So we have been recommended over. You know, actually this is a good opportunity to plug the ways to contact us. People have contacted us on Facebook, on Twitter, on tumbler, and then have emailed us directly asking us, hey do more creepy pastas. Uh, and specifically they wanted us to cover something called Jeff the Killer. And I was totally

unfamiliar with this until it was sent to us. Uh and uh, I gotta I gotta be honest, It's not exactly, uh my favorite of the creepypostas I've read, but I can see why it's compelling, especially it's largely based off of just like a single image that looks like a photoshop kind of creepy joker thing. Yeah, and the image itself. I was sort of following the the leads. They're like,

where did it come from? And it's one of these things where you know, somebody on some message board manipulated an image someone else manipulated it, and then there's there's some creepy tales about what the underlying image was. So some of that is kind of compelling in the sort of weird, creepy pasta Where did it come from? Let's touch on that just a little bit further. So Aneline Knew It's over at I O nine has an article the uh that is basically like the expose of of

potentially where the image came from. And apparently some folks over at four chan did some detective work and they found out that the image that Jeff the Killer is based on is a photoshopped image of a girl who was being bullied. Uh. Was she being bullied on the internet or in real life allegedly anyway, I don't know to what extent that all, and and killed herself due

to the bullying. This is the again another story. There's been no evidence to bring this up other than that that there seems to be some connection and they they brought up the photo and yet does it looks like it's the original photo that this was photoshopped off? So even the origin story of this image, this manipulated images kind of kind of goes into like the creepier arthor side of the Internet, which I think adds to its it's appeal. Yeah, um, yeah, I get it. I mean

I don't know that it's necessarily true or not. I'm like pretty sure Jeff the Killer itself is not true, and we are not going to if you want to read it, you know, stop the podcast, Google Jeff the Killer. It's on the Creepy Pasta site. But the gist. You want me to just throw the summary out there right now?

Uh yeah, I will. I do want to mention that that this is one that, like some of the creepy pastas out there, it's gotten to the point where authors will step forward or authors or saying I wrote this from the very beginning. This is one that does not seem to have an attributed author. If I'm wrong on that, let us know and we we'll give you know, proper credit where it to do. But this one seems to this is an older one. It seems to just they're different versions of it. Most of them are not not

not not not the most well crafted bits of fiction. Yeah, as with most creepy apastas, the the idea I think is interesting with the prose execution kind of falls apart a little bit. And I think that's part it, right, because it's like, this is something it must be true. It's written so poorly, right, it's like the Wikipedia stories. Yeah. Yeah, it feels like it was written by five or six different people who have come in and kind of punched up certain sections drop And that is kind of the

magic of the true creepypasta. You know, it shouldn't read like, um, you know, a beginning horror rider is just dumping his his whole draft on the internet. Yeah, that's true. Um So, okay, this is the premise of Jeff the Killer. Uh So, there's this character named Jeff uh and he's a teenager and he uh is like subject to leeing. He and his brother. There's there's some implication in the version that I read that there's like a switch that goes off in his brain that kind of like unleashes his dark

primal side or something like that during this bullying. Uh And there are multiple incidents in which, like he confronts the bullies and basically beats the living hell out of them, and then they show up at like a party or something. There's another incident where they hold him at gunpoint in front of his parents and other people. Uh and and and basically torture him and it causes his face to

be burned. And so following this he goes insane and joker style from the dark Knight cuts a smile into his cheeks so he has a permanent smile, and then he burns off his own eyelids so that he can always see this smile. Uh. And then he subsequently you know, this is the like an origin story myth of a serial killer who goes from house to house. Uh and before he kills his victims, he says, go to sleep.

I should also add no relation to killer Mike. Yeah, none, none that I know of, though Jeff the Killer is the supporter of Bernie Sanders. It turns out okay, but no. Um. The funny thing is is that so the story sort of starts off as like a from the perspective of somebody who's about to be killed by Jeff the Killer, and then it kind of flings backwards and reveals the origin of Jeff the Killer. Um. And it so you're

probably listening to this and going, where's the science? What would possibly be about those of you out there who are like these guys have gone a little bit over the deep end with the monster horror stuff. We we actually did a little bit of digging, and it turns out uh not Jeff the Killer wise. But there's three topics that we want to touch on here. Uh. One, people giving themselves permanent smiles and the science of fake

smiling and how our minds react to it. To the idea of eyelid replacement surgery, which is apparently much bigger of a thing than I thought it would be. Yeah, I mean it's a it's a rather complex procedure and an important one in terms of reconstructive of plastic surgery. And then the third one is that there's there is a strong reality of acid attacks out there. Uh. And it's it's largely common in countries uh in like Afghanistan, Cambodia,

I believe, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. All of these countries have like pretty high incidents and I was shocked to find out how often this happens. So well, we'll touch on that briefly. Yeah, and that is that's going to be you know, some dark, real life stuff there at the end, but I encourage you to stick with it. We actually had a discussion about whether we should actually discuss that, Like, is it is it right to start a podcast off with something kind of light and stupid and end up

in a dark and serious place. But I think so. I think it's It's a topic that's worth if you're not familiar with it, it's worth becoming familiar with this topic. And this is probably one of the better opportunities for us to discuss it, because it's not the kind of thing we would do an entire episode on for this show. Yeah,

I agree. I mean I wasn't. Um. I was familiar that this was a thing that happened occasionally, like that I would hear about in the news, But when we did the research for this episode, I was shocked to find out how frequent it is. And uh, yeah, I think it deserves, you know, some time on this episode and for people to learn a little bit more about it. I'm glad that I learned a little bit more about it doing the research. So let's uh, let's let's start

off with the smiling thing. Okay, So this is a recurring motive in our fiction, the idea of a sort of creepy smile, right, um uh, it comes up over and over again. Obviously, The thing most people think about is the Joker for the Batman Villa and the Joker, which varying depictions either like the dark nightyas the Glassgow smile yeah, the Glassgow grind where it's been cut in other times as a frozen grin ye, and what he's wearing a like a face. Recently, I haven't really been

keeping up. Yeah, I think I haven't read that storyline either, but my understanding is, yeah, he had his own face cut off and then sewed it back on in a

smile it. But then I think they've already read contact, so he's like that was just like for a year or two or something, they but they basically wanted to like up the gross out horror factor with a Joker, and I think they've scaled back from that, probably because they have that Suicide Squad movie coming out later this summer with Jared Leto as the like punk rock uh kid rock version version of the Joker. Yeah, and the creepy fake smile. We you know, we encounter that throughout

our myth cycles. One of the one of the ones that I really have been impressed with. And this is a recent phenomenon dating back to around nineteen seventy nine and Japan's uh Nagasaki prefecture. Uh. This is uh the the urban legend of the slit mouthed woman or Kuchasaki Ona and uh basically the urban legend is that this this woman was mutilated by her husband. Um. She he

like slits her the corners of her mouth. So she has this slit uh slit face and her ghost wanders around, comes up with people and ask do you think I'm beautiful? And it's apparently like a whole program of how you respond, uh, like if you say yes, she'll kill you one way, if you say no, she'll kill you another. Um. But you know, it's very well versed in this sort of grotesque fake smile. Yeah. Yeah, so this seems to have

particular resonance in Asian cultures. Um. So there's that myth I think of Ichi the Killer that MK a movie, UM, which I guess is probably part of the inspiration for where that Christopher Nolan Joker came from the idea of the Glasgow We should probably explain what a Glasgow smile is. Obviously the idea of the street gangs in Glasgow would slice your face, uh, but give you a fake it was sort of like their way to mark you. Uh, and I was surprised. I think the actor, I think

his name is Tommy Flanaganda from Sons of Anarchy. Yeah, yeah, he actually has like somebody did that to him. Yeah, I had no idea he was I think a DJ back in the day because assaulted leaving the club. Wow. Yeah, well yeah, so that's a real thing. Um yeah, each of the killer And then we're gonna find as we're talking about it, like there's a big plastic surgery movement in South Korea that's connected to this sort of enhanced

fake smile as well. Yeah, And of course if you want to see a fake smile, you don't have to turn to ghost stories and other cultures because they're everywhere, right the politician, the car salesman, um me. Yeah. So like you know, I try my best and I guess our stuff to believe in my promotion with those, but I'm terrible. I'm one of those people that's just terrible

at smiling and photographs. And my wife teases me about it all the time that I'm like that I look even creepier when I'm trying to smile, and it's that it's that thing where I'm smiling with my mouth but not with my eyes. Yeah, it's because the smile, as it turns out, is far more complex than just that fake smile, and we can tell when somebody's fake smiling. And I mean, it gets complicated, but it basically comes down the way I always think about facial expressions is

your face is a communication array. You know, it's not just about voice, it's not just about body and movements. It it's it's about you know, where your eyes are looking, what you'r what, all the expressions and micro spressions, how they're coming together to communicate with another. Uh, facial communication array. Yeah.

In nonverbal communications studies, Uh, outside of just body language, like the broad study of body language, facial communication is huge, and it adds a ton to how we communicate with one another outside of you know, our our verbal communications. Right, Like, think about when you're talking on the phone, It's it's much more limited compared to when you're talking to someone face to face and you can actually see the different

ways they're communicating. I'm like waving in my face right now. Yea. And of course these are the problems inherent in both podcasting and email communication, especially So essentially though, there are two types of smiles then you can think of as the fake and the genuine smile. So first you have

the doucheen smile. And this is named for French physician Gillama Duchen, who in eighteen sixty two conducted a slew of experiments essentially electrocuting people's facial muscles into outrageous grins. See like, we didn't really have to go too far from Jeff the Killer through science to get to something just as creepy electrocuting people's faces into smiles. Yeah, science

is inherently weird. So in these cases, the electrical current activates contractions in two muscles, the voluntary zygomatic major, which raises the corners of the mouth, and the involuntary orbicularious oculi, which raises the cheeks and spreads crowth's feet across around the eyes. And that's really that's the that's the part that jin generates the idea of the real smile, right at the crow's feet and the cheeks raising up um.

There's have also been research There has also been research done that patients with damage to their motor cortex and their brains left hemisphere. They can only smile asymmetrically, with the right side not moving the way it should uh. And here's the trick, though, if they laugh spontaneously they smile normally, they they'll do one of the douchen uh

smiles without asymmetry. So likewise, when a patient with damage to their anterior singulate, which is part of the limbic system UH in your brain, when they try to smile, there's no asymmetry. It's symmetrical. Uh. This whole thing leads to the hypothesis that the fake smile, what is sometimes referred to as the say, cheese smile, is controlled by the mos or cortex, where the duchene smile is actually controlled by the limbic system, which is the actual emotional

center of the brain. So it's two different parts of the brain interacting. And not only does our brain generate the smiles differently, but it responds to other people's versions of these smiles differently. But of course this is because so essentially we've we've outlined here that there is the genuine smile, there's the fake smile. But of course can we tell the difference are creepy smiles creepy because we

can see through the con well. A two thousand thirteen study from the University of La Laguna, Spain investigated and they found it on first glance test, subjects had a very hard time recognizing that fake smile, which surprised me because there are fake smiles out there that you you look at it, and maybe it's more a matter of projecting on that person, like this politician is smiling, it must be fake. That's funny than you said, politician, because

that's where I immediately go to as well. Yeah, the dead smile of certain politicians. But yeah, there's another study that was done out of North Eastern University in Boston that found that two thirds of individuals can fake a deucene smile well in a way that people can't distinguished, They can't tell whether they're fake smiling or real smiling. I'm not one of those two. I'm know I'm the one third that can't do it because whenever I do it, it looks like, you know, I'm dead inside, like I

look like Jeff the Killer. Well, then there's also this I feel like there's this feeling daily interactions. Um, not me, any of it, just everyone is that fake smiles are kind of uh expected fake smiles, fake laughter. So sometimes you're you're chatting with somebody and there ha ha, they're laughing, they're smiling, and on some level I know that this interaction is either maybe not completely fake but at least

punched up. Uh, And it feels okay because I expect that. Yeah, it is sort of the motions of every day like human beings just trying to get it along, right. And then there's sometimes maybe this says something more about me, Like every the audience is gonna learn today that I can't actually fake a smile and that I get irritated

by people who do fake smiles. But like I'll be sitting there and overhearing kind of those you know, those conversations where I know one person is angry at the other person, but they're they're faking their way through it. They're smiling, they're doing the kind of fake laughter that to just kind of make their way through the conversation and get get away from conflict, right, avoid conflict. That drives me crazy. I'm conflict oriented, I guess, But yeah,

it is it's it's it's every day. It's every day for human beings. Um, and it's there's tons of studies into this. Like when we dove into this, I thought, oh, well that you know the Jeff the killer smile things. Sure there's gonna be a little bit of research into the fake smiles. But it was like a sea of research.

I think we only script the top of it here. Yeah, now to to return to that that Spanish when study I was mentioning just a second ago, they found that the longer they looked at the individual, the longer the longer one person looked at the other person, uh, taking in all the details of the expression, the more they saw through uh the ruse. However, in the cases, test subjects ultimately classified ambiguous smiles as happy, since their eyes were drawn more to the smile than to the eyes.

And that probably has something to do, I would imagine. With these were both done in Western societies. There's an aversion to looking at people's eyes too long in Western culture.

In facial communication as well. I used to talk about this with my students when I would I was teaching communication classes that like, if you you know, obviously you're expected to maintain eye contact for a certain amount of times so that you can convey your interests, right, But if you just stare directly into a person's eyes while you're communicating and don't unlock. It becomes very uncomfortable pretty quickly, right Uh, And so I wonder if that has something

to do with it as well. But also like the crow's feet thing, right, Like that's a detail that becomes more obvious the longer that you're staring at somebody too. Yeah, maybe I didn't stop staring at you this whole time. Yeah he didn't. He held he kept committed to the bit, and I was the only one who got to stick to it. I find myself in certain situations, Uh feel I feel like I'm playing a game of like staring chicken with someone, and I'll become super conscious, am I

staring too long? It? Should I be breaking my eyes away? How uncomfortable am I? And then sometimes I think, should I just keep staring to maintain to like wine? And well, that's there's something to that as well, and we'll talk about in a second. Uh. But the whole thing is super confusing to our brains too, right, Like, think about our poor brains, Like it's trying to process generating these smells, but then it's trying to also process like interpreting whether

these smells are genuine or not? Right, Uh, and U c l a scientist named Marco I A. Caboni, I believe it's how it's pronounced. Uh. He noted that our brains are actually, you know, wired for sociability. That makes sense. We're social animals, and if we observe another person smile, it mirrors the neurons in that person's brain. They will light up in our own brains as if we are

smiling ourselves. Right, So there's that idea too, that like the smile is contagious, and then which we're we're going to talk about as well today, that the smile itself, whether it's genuine or not, generates happiness. Yeah. So yeah, the the issue is is not as cut and dry. Now that being said, if the smile fake smile is cut into the person's face, yeah, you're probably gonna catch up. Yeah,

your brain will probably figure that one out. For the rest of us though, dealing with just normal fake smiles, Um, you're probably wondering, how can you consciously detect one? Well, we already mentioned that it's a little problematic, but according to body language expert Nicholas Freed, it you look at the crow's feet. Okay, look to look for their bottom teeth. If you can't see them, might be a fake smile. Yeah,

what that makes sense? Like, I guess when I think of like really emphasizing the fake smile to the point of like making it creepy on purpose, that's when you like you really like bite down on the teeth and uh, demonstrate your your your lower teeth. Yeah, I could see that, but then like you've got to keep those those eyes dead. No crow's feet. I wonder if people who know who you know, naturally through aging or whatever, just have more crow's feet are better at the faking thing. I don't

know that. I'm sure there's somewhere that we missed on that. Yeah. So yeah, basically, the the involuntary movements of the orbicularious oculi or key here. This can cause the eyes to close, while fake smilers often keep their their upper face very still, and that doesn't work. It might He's a media lab has developed an algorithm that allows machines to pinpoint fake happiness and frustration as well, which leads to a whole bunch of uh, you know, potential applications in our our

cybernetic future. Right, you can have some sort of app in your your eyeball or your glasses that can cue you into fake. Yeah. It's it shows like the RoboCup display, Like it shows the basis face and then like a little thing comes up in It's like this person is faking. Uh. Well, let's get into the faking part. Uh. There's some actual science to the fake it till you make it. Uh,

you know idea of making yourself happy. Yeah. A two thousand twelve study from the University of Kansas studied how smiling influences are recovery from stressful activities, and they found that a genuine smile resulted in faster recovery time and a more relaxed state. But even a fake smile can force your emotional state to follow suit. Yeah. I think this is the same study. I read a couple of different studies, but I think this this is the one

you're talking about. The title has Grin and Barrett the influence of manipulated positive facial expression on the Stress Response, which is a pretty hilarious title of a Tara Craft and Sarah Pressman. Uh and they is this the one where they use chopsticks? Yeah? Okay, so they use chopsticks to manipulate the facial muscles of a hundred and sixty nine different participants, and from my understanding, they did it

in a couple of different ways. I'd I didn't get to see any like images, and I'm assuming they must have taken pictures of video or something that went along with this. But some of them they bit down on the chopsticks. Others they like put the chopsticks in their mouths horizontally, so it was pushing uh, their their cheeks up, I think, um. But the general idea here was that they had three different positions that they put their faces in.

There's the neutral expression, a standard smile, and the Duchen smile uh. And then they subjected them when they've got these chopsticks in their face, they subjected them to stress inducing multitasking activities uh. And obviously this is more difficult when you've got chopsticks shoved in your mouth. Uh. And the results were basically that those who were instructed to smile recovered from the stressful activity with a lower heart

rate than those with the neutral expressions. So the Deuchen smile is the one that makes you the most relaxed. That's kind of weird. Um, regardless of how you're actually feeling, it will generate that relaxing feeling in you. And so there's lots of other studies that seem to indicate that the just smiling thing can produce a happy feeling. Uh. And from our own home based site how stuff works

dot com, there's a article about the smiling happiness thing. UH. It says that in nine nine Robert Zajenck I believe I don't know how to pronounce that name z A j O n c q uh sounds Eastern European to me. Um, So sorry Robert. Uh. But he published a study where he had his subjects repeat vowel sounds over and over again, forcing their faces into various expressions. This is kind of like I guess like isometric exercises, um, and so to mimic a smile, they made an E sound to stretch

the corners of their mouth outward. Then they also tested a long you sound, which is kind of like I guess you, which forced the mouth into about And then they reported their feelings after this, and of course, after doing the E for a long time, they felt good, and after doing the U sound for a long time they felt bad. Now, his research proposes that there's a physiological connection going on here between the facial changes and the brain activities that are associated with happiness. And he

goes deep here. He says, Uh, the internal carotid artery. This is the pipe that's kind of like above your mouth. It delivers the majority of blood to the human brain. It flows through an opening in our heads called the cavernous sinus. And this contains a lot of our facial veins, right. So the idea is that when we're smiling, those veins are constricted and that cuts down on the flow of blood to our brain. Uh. And this makes the temperature in our brain drop, the blood of or at least

the blood drop. The idea here is that the cooler your brain is, the better your emotions are going to be. They're going to be good emotions, according to research, whereas a war mer brain produces negative emotions. Interest. That's pretty wild. Yeah, so um. His theory was basically that the reverse is also true, that that when your muscles are frowning, that increases the blood flow, which makes your brain warmer, which makes it more difficult to be happy, which is interesting.

You know, I guess I think about like the temperature uh differences of various areas of the world where people live. There must be some kind of studies on like whether people who live in the Arctic, for instance, are uh, you know, more likely to be happy than I guess

like people who live near the equator. Yeah, but yeah, I don't know to what extent they look to this area that we're discussing here, which is essentially the like the temperature constraints on the physical mechanisms of of facial happiness. I believe that that's the same mechanism that causes brain freeze to like when you're having like ice cream or

popsicle or something like that. I think it. Uh. We've done research on this for an episode of brain Stuff, the video show that Joe and I write on uh, And I believe that that artery is what causes brain freeze that like the at least I think that is. You know, when you say that you and Joe have done research on this, I'm imagining you guys going out front, the two of us just eating ice cream until it hurts so much and then like putting our heads in m r I machines. Uh, if only, if only, but

so it gets even crazier. Okay, so we've got chopsticks shoved in the face. We're talking about ice cream, right. What about botox injections? Oh yeah, So if you inject botox into your face, there's been research that shows that it dampens your emotional responses, specifically the ones that paralyze the small wrinkle causing muscles around the eyes, the crows feet. Yeah, because you are interfering with the physical communication of emotion, but in this week weird sense, it's also affecting how

you feel. Like we tend to think like here's the puppet master and here's the puppet and we think that everything's going on with the puppet Master is authentic and everything on the outside is just it's shadow, it's expression. But it's like the mind body connection. If everything is is is hooked together, everything is connected here. Yeah, definitely, to the point that it not only reduces your happiness,

it also reduces your depression as well. Um. So basically what they did was they showed people who had had botox injects and injections quote happy videos. So I'm imagining this is like cats or something like yeah, uh, and they recorded their emotional response to these things, and they found that, yeah, both their depression rate and their happiness

rate were lowered. The effects were minder though, So I don't want to like paint the idea here that people turn into like emotionless robots when they get botox injections. But they also did a study on the botox thing at the University of Cardiff, and they found that the people would smile injections, so that this is different from the crow's feed injections. Uh, they're happier on average than

people who can frown with a botox uh. Scientists at the Technical University of Munich also found that when they scanned botox recipients with f m ri I machines while those people were mimicking angry faces, they found that they had much lower activity in their brain circuits involved with emotional processing than those people who had not received botox treatment. So it is possible that maybe we would feel less

pain if we weren't physically able to express it. So that's kind of an interesting turn of events on the whole botox Yeah. Yeah, you think it goes one way and then it flips the other here and then we should of course mentioned that all of this goes back to like the The granddaddy who who postulated a lot of this was Charles Darwin, and he proposed way back in eighteen seventy two that facial expressions don't just reflect emotions,

but they caused them as well. Uh And he actually is quoted as saying the free expression by outward signs of an emotion intensive is it? And he observed this in babies, and he said that babies that are born blind smile the same as babies that are cited. And the reason why, he thought was because at five weeks old, babies start learning to smile. And the reason why is that we learned that crying gets the attention of an adult,

but smiling keeps them there. So whether you can see or not, you're able to um realize that that that has some kind of a cause and effect. Alright, one more thing I briefly mentioned this. So there's a connection between people who fight, uh and sort of like dominance in men specifically, and smiling as well. Research has been done that shows that fighters who smile authentically at another fighter before match are more likely to lose that match.

Uh And and it's somehow linked smiling is somehow linked to testosterone, Like our thought of how much testosterone you have is linked to how authentic you're smiling. Uh. And so I gotta wonder, like what does that do to the whole fake smile system? Right? Does it indicate strengthen or not? Uh? And smiling also can sometimes indicate dominance, right, Like, if you're in a position of power, you may be

smiling authentically the other person because you can, right. Yeah, Like I'm thinking, I'm instantly thinking of say brock Lesner smiling, and if it's a fake smile or a real smile, either one is terrifying if I'm in the wrong scenario with brock les Yeah. They even found that the chimps have two different kinds of smiles. They have a submission face, So this is maybe a more interesting way for us to think about our smiles. The submission face where their

lips are retracted and their lips are exposed. So this is sort of like the equivalent of a dog like laying down on its back right exposing it's it's belly. Uh. And they have a playface where their lower jaws dropped in the corners of their mouth are pulled back. But so they have a whole dominance thing going on as well with their smiles. So it's yeah, it's interesting you

bring this all back to Jeff the Killer. Uh. If Jeff the Killer's smile is fake because he's cut it into his own face, then the fake smile won't necessary. I guess that does necessarily indicate that he's more dominant, right, because the real smile would be submissive, and maybe he's happier. I don't know, he might be. Yeah, yeah, all right, we're gonna take a quick breaking when we come back,

we're going to discuss some more smile science. We're gonna discuss some some reconstructive surgery, and uh, eventually get to this episode's more dark real world world conclusion. Hey, everybody, you know how it is. You've got to have a professional looking website. That's just how we represent ourselves in this day and age. That's how you present yourself on the Internet. The thing is, not all of us have

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that website you've been dreaming of. So head on over to square space and use our promo code mind blown to get ten percent off your first purchase and a free domain name. So head on out there, build that website with square Space. All right, we're back. We're talking about killer Jeff. I mean, we're sort of talking about Jeff. We're talking about scientific topics that that stem from contemplation of this particular creepy pasta. Yeah, and we've hit a

lot of the smile science. But of course, you know, some of you out there are wondering, is there any science behind carving a smile into your own face? Is there joker science? Because most depictions of it are it's pretty crude, right, it's and it's the horror of like, oh, facial mutilation. And this isn't a real smile at all. This is like the worst, right I even think, like I read like there's like one rumor that the photoshopped image of Jeff the Killer like uses like parts of

a wolf's mouth. Maybe it's just a dog, but in order to make the rictus look a little bit creepier. But hey, it turns out that lots of people are doing this, not like in their own bathroom with like a carving knife or anything, but there is a whole culture surrounding the plastic surgery of giving yourself a permanent smile. Yeah, it just sounds familiar. It is because in August The Atlantic reported on a growing surgical trend in South Korea.

Valentine angulo plastic also known as valentine mouth rejuvenation or a corner of the mouth lift. And so it's apparently called this because of the heart shape that it makes when the muscle tissues are removed at your lips edges um. If those of you out there, you know, like the cupid's bow part of the mouth that I I know this just from like drawing classes and like learning anatomy

and how to draw mouth and stuff. Cupid's bow is sort of like the middle of your mouth, I guess, like that area is sort of highlighted because of the removal of the areas at the edges of the lips. Each one of these procedures costs two thousand dollars, which I don't know anything about plastic surgery, but to me, I was like, that's cheap. That's I don't know. Yeah, is it cheap? I don't I don't know. Maybe maybe

plastic surgery is less than I thought it was. I don't think I would I would be able to really know. Is that is that Korean? Or I think that's the Korean procedure? Yeah, see, I see, I don't know. I can't really frame that in the reference of of Korean surgical costs, but over there I feel like that would be cheap. It seems like it. Yeah, um, okay, So this brings us back to that Glasgow grin Glasgow's smile

we were talking about earlier. Yeah, it's a it's a little reminiscent of that, except you know, go ahead and cast away any of the more grotesque ideas here, because yeah, we are talking very slow light augmentation. Yeah, this isn't This isn't Heath Ledger's joker like, like, how do you think I got these scars? Kind of thing, like you

can barely tell from the photos that I saw. Yeah. Now, of course, one of the things that that comes to came to mind when I was reading about it is that it's easy for these when you have a report coming out of something that is supposedly a trend in a foreign country, sometimes things get a little blown out of proportion. For instance, I always always come back to the bagel head thing. This was where which we have an awesome post about on stuff about dot Com. Yeah,

it's a it's a fun one. But this was in Japan where a few individuals, like a handful of people have had silicone and injected into their head and to make a forehead forehead to make a bowl. Yeah, just under the skin and then they pressed their finger in

it and it kind of makes a bagel. Um. And very few people have done this, but some of the initial reporting, granted not The Atlantic but other other places reported, oh says everyone is doing this, as if all the teens in Japan are going out and having so any time I read about a surgical procedure in another country that if they trend, uh, you know, I always sort of put my warning lights on a yeah, And I do have to note, like none of the pieces I read for this I don't think they gave numbers on

how many people were getting this done, but they did say that it's very popular with people who work in customer service. Yeah, like you know, flight attendants, secretary. I mean, you can imagine any situation where that that facial communication array interface with a client or a customer is vital. And these are largely people in their twenties and thirties too.

I thought, probably because they're in that customer service sector, they're being told like, you're not happy enough for for the for the job or whatever, and so they get this procedure done so they can make a career out of it. Of course, there's a horrible thing to be told I'm sorry, not happy enough for this job, but the worst Like I kept thinking about that too, because that's I don't know about you, but like as a kid, I always got that like you don't smile enough kind

of thing, like why don't you smile more? That sort of thing from teachers and stuff. And I know that that's uh even worse for women, Like it's such a gendered thing like, oh, you should smile more, you know. Um, So I imagine that this probably plays into the angle of plastic Yeah, so, um would definitely with the twenty and thirty year olds. You're talking about people with with naturally downturned mouth corners, and they're essentially just getting things

perked up a little bit. But also this surgery has applications for aging people where you have downtrent turned corners of the mouth and sort of downturned up lines in general due to just facial aging. And so one of the things that I read, I think it was a Wall Street Journal blog post about this kind of surgery. They stated that this has actually been around for over fifty years in medical circles, and it was done here in the West, but apparently very few plastic surgeons over

here performaive anymore. So that's curious to me. I wonder, um, why not? I wonder. I wonder what it is about Korean culture versus you know, Western culture that makes it acceptable or not acceptable. I'm sure we have listeners who are coming in or of a Korean descent who might be able to give their own two Yeah, I would love to hear more about it. And you know, um, maybe somebody out there's got one of these. I don't know,

but I'm just curious about the whole thing it. I have to say, like, I'm overall usually kind of dismissive of the idea of plastic surgery, but in this case, I can see, like I sort of well, I mean plastic surgery and the cosmetic this is an easy This is an easy thing to to to to fall in that line on because because I feel like in our culture, plastic surgery is often just the go to word for

unnecessarily plastics. But as we're as we're discussing this episode, there's of course a larger plastic surgery that deals with with with either you know, either correcting birth defects of varying degrees or are dealing with injuries of varying degrees. But again, pla surgery in the headline sense, it seems like it always ends up referring to something that is

purely um, you know, purely cosmetic. But the but anyway, the the idea of this particular surgery, Uh, it's really interesting because on one hand, it's easy to look at it and say, well, hey, you're getting a fake smile, you're manipulating the natural facial expression of emotion. But the counter argument is that, especially with age related negative lines like those are warping your natural facial expressions. Those are messing with your ability to convey your emotions through and

and communicate through your facial communication array. Yeah, and and also how it's received to right, Like, So, like we were talking earlier before the break about how people see smiles and perceive them in uh, the kind of happiness that that generates, or even like the kind of happiness

that just smiling on its own generates. So I'd be curious to see a study on Valentine angled plasty and the level of happiness amongst the people who have received it versus I guess you know, they would have to use like a h control group of people who don't

have it. All right, so we we've talked about smiles already, But of course that's not the only, um, the only aspect of Jeff the Killer here, right, So raises aren't The story goes that in order to I guess see how lovely his face is all the time, Uh, he burns off or cuts off his eyelids. Um, And that's not something that you normally see uh people do to themselves. However, there are lots of occasions in which eyelids either need

to be replaced or fixed through surgery. This is a good example of what we're just talking about with corrective surgery, or people have been in like really horrible accidents and need to have grafts put on because eyelids are an important thing. Yeah, I have to admit that this is an area that's it's fascinated fascinated me since I read

Larry McMurtry's novel Comanche Moon. So this isn't I'm not familiar with this, all right, Well, it's it's ano same series, the Lonesome Dove series, So there with those characters like they they are in this book. It's like it I think it comes before. It definitely comes before. But if you if you haven't read it, you've probably maybe you've seen it a bookstore and it just looks like a big dick Western novel, right, But I have to tell

you it is. This is a weird book in respects if he's just a lot of Comanche horse mysticism, and there's a whole lot of torture and flaying, and in particular there's a an already weird Texas Ranger character named Captain Innish Skull. He winds up captured by a band at warlord and then his tortures. Um there, you know, they busied himself deciding just how much skin they're going to remove from their various captives, and they finally decide, well,

we're just gonna take his eyelids. So they cut off his eyelids so he can't turn his head away from the horrors of the sun. But he eventually escapes in the book, and he crafts a special set of glasses with a system of varying shades to click through in order to regulate the amount of light entering his eyes. So it's it's really almost a kind of crazy, almost steampunk notion. That is not what I would expect from a lonesome dove book. Yeah it is, though it is

a weird, great a great book. I've tremendously enjoyed it. Well, So eyelids themselves, though, you know, they do more than filter light, right, So, I mean that is one of the important features. Though, I mean you can't squint, you can't you can't adjust to the lighting. It's always just

wide open all the time. Huh. So I'm guessing, I guess what I'm trying to wrap my head around in both of these fictional examples, is what what that would do to the eyeball, Well, you would It definitely plays into some of the other key reasons to have eyelids, to begin with, moistening the eyeball via blinking, spreading to your across the surface of the eyes, especially the moist cornea. So like maybe as goggles need to like have a little bit of i don't know, like a moisture trapped

inside of them. Yeah, yeah, like some sort of like little clockwork orange squeezies on the side. So you know that this is what Jeff would need in order to turn his life around. Also, your eyelids protect your protected just stuff from getting in there, all sense of debris that's gonna blow around in the wind and help they help keep perspiration out of the eyes as well. So the key risk here is exposure care atopathy, which is

excessive dryness due to revealed eye especially during sleep. So and and this is interesting as well, we'll discuss there are surgical methods to either replace eyelids or to correct eyelids that have either there's a birth effect or it's an agent related to symptom. But without going into those surgeries, the best you could do is to apply at nightly dressing to the eyes, like with using bubble patches or

swim goggles, even to ensure that the eyes stay moist. Right, Yeah, So you gotta wonder about this Jeff the killer myth then that like, uh, you know, he's already kind of a crazy serial killer who has done all this terrible stuff to his face. But like, uh, he'd have like some real eye problems unless he'd like put some swim goggles on and dressed his eyes every night, I guess every day, because he's probably a serial killer at night when h and of course, and I don't know if

he would be more or less terrifying with swim goggles on. UM. In his case though, if he wanted surgery, he's going to happen because there are there are surgical techniques that can be used to just correct minor. You're not getting full coverage lots of academic articles about UM, different procedures

and methodologies for that kind of reconstructive surgery. And then I think there's also like grafting that can be done from other parts of your body, right right, yeah, now with but with Jeff or with Captain Skull here, nothing short of total upper and lower eyelid replacement. It's gonna actually take care of thing. And this is the complex

surgical procedure in a series of procedures. Even a two thousand two paper on this titled Treatment of bilateral severe eyelid Burns with skin Graphs colon an Odyssey, which should give you some idea if what we're dealing with here in this case five operations over the course of five years the individual. And then there's a two thousand eight paper total and upper eyelid replacement following thermal burn using

an A L T flap. Case of report this chronicle is the use of of free anterior lateral high that thigh that's a LT thigh flaps uh. In the skin graph procedure, cutting uh bits off of your own thigh and then using those to graft in new eyelids. Yeah, we're talking about a skin graphed here, and a rather rather detailed uh one as well. Uh So, Yeah, it's it's not it's not just as simple as just throwing some some tissue back up over the eye. You have to hook it into the the the existing muscles. Uh.

It's a complex procedure. But uh. In the case of total eyelid loss, you know, a necessity. So as far as our Jeff the Killer loose thread that we're following here, the fake smile thing, yeah, there's some plausibility to that, but it would be more like a Glasgow grin, I think, than like the Valentine angle of plasty that we were just talking about, unless he's really skilled with whatever whatever

blady he was using in his parents bathroom. Uh. And then as far as this eyelid thing goes, I mean, it sounds to me like you wouldn't get very far, very long without eyelids unless like you had. Yeah, you're constantly treating it yourself. I don't even know if the goggles would cut it. Now at this point we're gonna

get into a little darker realistic territory. But I think it's important because with with Jeff the Killer, we're essentially talking about, Oh, this an individual discarred by fire or or ask did and this and this makes them horrible somehow, this makes them a monster, which of course is it's

a ridiculous notion, um. But but we have this idea just throughout our horror culture, especially like you have just all of these burnt creatures, you know, they're and then they're they're awful and they're less human because of it, which is which is completely ridiculous. So it's it's really essential to I think, to to take that that that cultural trope and then actually discuss uh, some some rather depressing um facts about real life mutilation attacks that continue

to take place around the world. Yeah, I have to say, like we talked about this a little at the top, but I was just I was shocked at how prevalent this is, UM. But I'm glad that there's a lot of research being done on it. UM. In particular, there

were two sources that we we looked to here. One was a really great BBC magazine article that was just sort of about the general cultural problem of what are called acid attacks, uh, And then we we also looked at a thesis paper out of the University of North Carolina by a woman named Jane Welsh, and it's called it was Like Burning in Hell, a Comparative Exploration of Acid Attack Violence, and she looks at the whole gamut of acid attacks and like the last I think it's

like thirty years that this has become fairly prevalent UM and really kind of breaks down the statistics and what what can be done and what should be done about them. So let's start with how jeez, how prevalent they actually are. Okay, acid attacks skew heavily, as you would imagine, toward women and girls. Eighty percent of them are done to women. Uh. Thirty percent of those women are under the age of eighteen. Uh. You may have heard about it recently happened in Zanzibar

to two women who are tourists. There has been a couple of incidents in which there have been Western tourists in other countries where this is more acceptable, and you know, some somehow or another, it's they've offended someone and therefore like an acid attack is perpetrated against them, and these poor people, you know, have have to go back and uh have surgeries to correct this. There's there's a lot of literature on the surgeries themselves for this as well.

So this is some of the numbers that I was able to accumulate for this. Just in England alone, which is not one of the major countries that you read about when you hear about these ascid attacks. In the between eleven and twelve, there are a hundred and five hospital admissions for what we're referred to there as assault by corrosive substances. UH, so that covers more than acid, but it's the same premise essentially. UH. Every year there are more than fifteen hundred cases recorded. So those are

recorded ones. Other are the ones that are reported. UH. There's an uh an organization that tracks this called Asset Survivors Trust International. India has an increasing problem with this. UH that the group that tracks that says that a thousand of the incidents take place in India every year. UH. They're they're disproportionately common in South Asia India, as they just mentioned, they are also suspected to have very high

numbers in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Pakistan and UH Cambodia. Yeah, and so like many of the you know, every case is a little different. But then a lot of the ones that i've I've heard it entails, uh, you know, a male proposition as a woman or tries to initiate some sort of u uh sexual or romanic um relationship with them. They are rejected and then their response is I am

going to deface you. I'm going to try to ruin you by assaulting you with acid yeah, and so I don't know the details specifically on those Western tourists, but I suspect that that was probably the case. It's worth deeper diving. Um And like we said at the top, we didn't want to do a full episode on this, but we do think that it bears covering. Um. Yeah, it's it's about destroying someone's identity at the end of it, right,

Like that is the real aggression here. Uh And and strangely, I guess that's kind of what Jeff the Killer is a about. You know, if you can like do some sort of thematic analysis of a creepy pasta like that, if you do a far more serious reheat of the pasta than it, yeah deserves the character Jeff starts off as just kind of a junior high kid, like everyday American kid who deals with like incessant bullying and his brother getting thrown in jail, and then he's assaulted terribly

and literally changes his identity, right it makes him go crazy. Well, I mean really, there are two main optacles here. I mean, one is just the cultural challenge of keeping this from happening, to to just you know, push this back into the past. But on the other hand too. It's it's about the

victims as well. How the various programs and and uh an outreach programs that are aimed at at helping these women reclaim their lives, you know, and and help them feel like like in a way, keeping their their attackers from winning, keeping their attackers from achieving this warped sense of victory they that they set out to accomplish. Yeah, absolutely, because it's more than just about like the physical surgeries involved to right, It's about the like psychological consequences of

losing your identity as such as it is. I don't think that a lot of these attackers articulated that way, but that's essentially what's going on. Yeah. The BBC piece that I was listening to, which dealt with a cafe that allows the place for these women to work and

also has support network for them. Like they mentioned that in some of these cases, UH, the victim is is it can no longer turn to their emily because there's like this level of of shame that is a that is applied to to their plight that they no longer have a home because this this person assaulted them. Yeah, and I think that that is largely UH cultural from

from the areas that these are committed into. Right, Like, I'd like to think, I don't know, maybe it's not the case, but I'd like to think in in our culture, at least here in America, Uh, in the house, stuff, work, studio, that that that you know, like that wouldn't happen. Well, And that's the I mean, that's one of the things, right is so much of us live with the privilege

of not having to know. You know, we can, we can, we we can think, we can't help, but think what would happen if this happened in my community, if this happened in my family? Uh, how would one respond? How does one react? And you know, luckily most of us don't have to know. Well. Jane Welsh's thesis, she really does a great job of breaking it down, and it's it's much longer. I mean, I'm I'm just going to summarize a few facts here. But she found that this

started somewhere around the nineteen sixties. So I was off when I said thirty years. But it's it's thought to have started in Cambodia as the earliest case of this kind of violence. Uh, And since that time, it's become an epidemic there. Uh. And in the late nineties through two thousand five, acid was a favored weapon of choice for women and men looking to disfigure their rivals and settle scores. Uh and so uh some of the activists that are involved in this, they say that at least

sixty people were attacked in one year alone. Well that's in the nineties. You know, we just read the stats for now and it's in thousand, um and and that it's both men and women who are doing the attacking, but you know more women are being attacked. Uh. And the reasons are listed as sexual jealousy, extramarital airs, land or business disputes, domestic violence, personal or family disputes, robbery

or hate and revenge. And then it's usually a premeditated act that involves sulfuric, nitric or hydrochloric acid thrown at another person. So uh, you know, I don't know that there's like much deeper that we can go than that, other than you know, if I guess if those of you out there want to hear more on this, we can maybe do a future episode where we dig deep into the science of the surgeries involved. But honestly, like I read a few of those getting ready for this episode,

and it was pretty deep diving. Like I think it was a dense medical material that I didn't necessarily understand. Yeah, I think probably the best we can do is will make sure that the landing page for this episode will include links out to UM to some of the sources here as well as some organizations that have involved as somatomacity organizations. UM. A positive BBC story that here that

alluded to already about the cafe. The title of that is the cafe helping to support acid attack victims in India. Believe it the dioplete peace Uh that I think I heard it on the radio initially. UM, that's worth checking out because it highlights not only the problem but also, uh, what's some of the efforts that are that are underway

to to help the victims. So all right, let's like wrap this up and and try not to end it on like a super bummer note with the acid attacks thing, but as such as like let's go back and look at the Jeff the killer, I guess myth and in the realities involved. Right, So acid attacks, Yes, that's a thing, unfortunately more of a thing than we'd like it to be so sure, a kid named Jeff could have been attacked in such a way his face would have been burned away and he would be able to go back

to his home. From when I was reading, there are no asset attack victims though, that go crazy and cut their mouths and cut their eyelids. That is that is purely a a fictional thing. Yeah. Um, the eyelid reconstructive surgery. Yes, that you can reconstruct lids. I suppose you could cut your own eyelid off, but I don't know necessarily that you would be a very functional serial killer without eyelids. And then when it comes down to the smile. Wow,

is there a lot of research on that. Uh. But you know, in the Jeff the Killer situation, I don't think he's doing like a cosmetic Valentine angle of plasty as much as like, you know, it's just kind of the Glasgow grin joker kind of thing, Eachi the killer type, you know, the generic I guess it's become a generic trope now, jeez of like a sort of homicidal maniac who cuts themselves. All right, Well, there you have it. We stood up to the challenge. We took you asked

for Jeff the killer. We gave got for him, We gave it to you. We explored some very fascinating science and cultural information. Uh. That, like I said, doesn't necessarily underlie that it's not like the the author and authors of that original Creepypops and inspired by these things. But in a sense, Jeff is composed is of all of these things. He's kind of like the cultural um, the cultural sludge kind of comes together and forms a figure

like this, uh in our myth making. Yeah, well, it's certainly. I mean, I think that the science and psychology behind fake smiles certainly play into at least the sort of general trope of of this type of creepy pasta. Alright, so hey, if we were to do a third Creepy Pasta episode, which one would you like for us to tackle? Which one would you like to us to try and

just dissect and and dig some slivers of science out. Yeah, you know, you can tell us about you first of all, tell us about other creepy pastas, even if they're not ones that you think we should cover, but you know, ideally we'd like to do them on the podcast. I was surprised at how many listeners popped up and we're like, yeah, check this one out and this one and this one. Like I think you know, even though you and I are big horror fans, uh, that like this is just

an area of the medium or the genre. I suppose that we're not highly familiar with. UM. So yeah, if there's stuff out there that we're missing, let us know about it. You can always get in touch with us on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumbler will blow the mind on all of those. Uh. We do periscope or Facebook live on Friday's Eastern Standard time around noon. Uh, And lately we've been kind of switching back and forth between those two things. But you know, we'll let our audience know

beforehand on on those platforms. Hey, this is what we're doing today before we we jump on one or the other. All right, if you want to get in touch with us via the old fashioned email, we can reach us at below the Mind. How to work dot com? Well more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it How stuff works dot Com? The f F four foot