Creepypasta Review: "Mr. Widemouth"

 I’m not going to bother with a long introduction this time, I’m just going to get right into it. This is my review of the creepypasta, “Mr. Widemouth”.

Written in first person, “Mr. Widemouth” stars an unnamed narrator recalling a series of bizarre experiences from his early childhood. His family was constantly moving at the time and didn’t settle into a place until he was eight. These are the set of memories that are the clearest to him.

He recalls living in a large house that was much too big for his small family of three when he was five. He was only here for a few months, and he came down with a bad fever during his stay. While he had this fever, and was constantly bedridden and bored, he befriended a strange, small creature who called himself Mr. Widemouth (due to his, well, wide mouth). The narrator describes him as looking kind of like a furby. Mr. Widemouth hid under his bed and never appeared when his parents were present. The narrator never told his parents about Mr. Widemouth, and is at times skeptical he was even real, but knows deep down he was.

This was another fairly popular creepypasta back about a decade ago, and much like “1999”, I don’t find it to be particularly good or scary. However, I would say that its overall quality is different from “1999” in a few ways. For starters, at least “Mr. Widemouth” doesn’t overstay its welcome, it’s a pretty short story. Unfortunately, while “1999” has all the right elements that could create a good horror story if the execution and structure was improved, “Mr. Widemouth” is almost dead on arrival.

The concept of “Mr. Widemouth” is that the titular character Mr. Widemouth wants to kill the narrator, but instead of doing it himself, tries to trick the narrator into killing himself. I’m not saying this idea can’t work as a good horror story, but the execution is pretty botched.

For starters, the way it’s written makes it play out like a Looney Tunes cartoon, where Mr. Widemouth is Wile E Coyote and the narrator is Roadrunner. Mr. Widemouth is so weak and pathetic as an antagonist. He never feels like a real threat. He can never actively hurt the narrator, nor even try a different approach to tricking him into killing himself. In the two weeks they’re friends with each other, he uses the exact same tactics every time. Trying to trick him into jumping out the window of a two story building, saying “you’ll bounce back like it’s a trampoline”, or telling him to juggle with knives. The narrator declines each time, causing Mr. Widemouth to become frustrated and annoyed (which is why I said the story feels like a Wile E Coyote and Roadrunner cartoon). The most he does to change things up is say he put a real trampoline under the window (which doesn't work, obviously)

If the narrator dying is dependent on him falling for really obvious death traps, and he doesn’t, then there’s no tension. He’s never in any danger in this story, which is especially apparent as it is told as a retelling of memories when he’s an adult! What’s the point of writing a story where the main source of tension comes from the narrator possibly dying, when we know he won’t the entire time!

I do think some neat things are done with this story being told as a retelling of past memories, like, again, the narrator briefly wondering if Mr. Widemouth was even real or just a hallucination induced by his heavy fever. There’s also the fact that he doesn’t quite remember how he first met Mr. Widemouth, but says his first memory is asking him if he had a name.

But still, I think this story shot itself in the foot in so many ways. If Mr. Widemouth was more clever in the ways he was trying to trick the narrator, then maybe something good could’ve come out of this. As it stands, he’s probably the most pathetic creepypasta antagonist out there. I mean, even Jeff the Killer and Sonic.exe, as dumb as they were, WERE threats.

Toward the end of the story, the narrator’s family gets ready to move away, and suspecting that Mr. Widemouth doesn’t have the best intentions, the narrator keeps this a secret. Their last interaction is the narrator seeing Mr. Widemouth’s silhouette in his old bedroom window, holding a steak knife, waving pitifully at him. The narrator does not wave back.

I will admit the ending gives the story a few more points in my book. Mr. Widemouth was holding a steak knife. What exactly was he planning to do with that? Was he actually going to kill the narrator himself? Does he have more power than he’s letting on? What if the narrator’s family wasn’t about to move away? A real threat is being created here. 

Unfortunately, it’s too little too late to save the story fully.

Before the narrator moves out, he has an important scene with Mr. Widemouth, which involves being taken down a deer trail (this is when the narrator’s fever is improved enough for him to go outside). I just want to point out that in this scene, Mr. Widemouth has to specify to the narrator “it’s safe, I promise” before leading him down the trail. I don’t know if he realizes it, but he literally just gave away the game there. What he was trying to get the narrator to do before is now explicitly NOT safe.

Nice going, dumbass.

Anyway, Mr. Widemouth walks him down the trail, before stopping and saying that he’s had a lot of friends around the narrator’s age, and that he’s led them all down this special path when they were ready, but the narrator isn’t ready yet. The narrator wonders what’s at the end of the trail. And he… never walks to the end of it? There’s nothing stopping him, surely being a child he’d just walk to the end despite what Mr. Widemouth said, right? 

Whatever, that small plot hole is the least of this story’s problems.

Anyway, the last scene of the story involves the narrator returning to that place where he met Mr. Widemouth as an adult. The house has long since burnt down, leading him to deduce that Mr. Widemouth no longer exists. He feels Mr. Widemouth was tied to that house, and now that it’s gone, he’s gone.

He finally follows that trail Mr. Widemouth led him down all those years, seeing where it ends. It’s a cemetery, which isn’t very surprising. But regardless, I do like how the last few lines of the story are written.

The trail ended at the New Vineyard Memorial Cemetary.

I noticed that many of the tombstones belonged to children.

I think too many creepypastas make themselves too dependent on the “ending zinger”, and that this can easily backfire. For instance, in “1999”, the ending zinger was not nearly as shocking or scary as the story seemed to think, which made a lot of the build up feel pointless. But in the case of “Mr. Widemouth”, even though the fact that the titular character had killed children in the past isn’t exactly a shock, there’s something about how that last line is written that I really like. It doesn’t directly say he killed anyone, it just lets the narrator’s observations do the work for it. It’s a chilling line, and it does make the story a little better. And hell, considering that Mr. Widemouth was holding a steak knife the last time the narrator saw him, who’s to say he didn’t actively kill some of those children? It’s a nice bit of fridge horror.

But it’s not enough.

I don’t think this one holds up well. It may have some good concepts in it somewhere, but the way it plays out makes it too stupid to be scary. At the end of the day, all Mr. Widemouth is really doing is telling the narrator to do something, which the narrator doesn’t do. Plus, he’s just a small furry “furby” like creature that not even the 5 year old MC is scared to be around. There’s never anything at stake. It has some good moments that keep it from being a complete failure, but overall it’s not a story I would recommend.

Rating: 5/10

Thank you for reading this review and see you in the next blogpost! Whatever that will be.