Urban Legends and Folie-à-deux with Cynthia Murphy, author of The Midnight Game

When I was younger, I loved all of the urban legends that were told on the playground. In fact, I specifically remember being the ringleader of these macabre story times, often scaring the other children with tales of babysitters getting creepy phone calls, being licked from beneath the bed (still the real reason why I, at 40 years of age, won’t stick my feet out of the covers) or visions of Bloody Mary in the bathroom mirrors. Something about these stories that we all knew, yet no one could prove really happened, stayed with me as I got older. That’s when I realised that there were still urban legends around, only now they lived on the internet and went under the term creepypasta.

I remember the day I got lost down that particular rabbit hole. There were so many stories, their origins hazy at best and all of the most thrilling ones happened to a friend of a friend, or someone’s cousin’s pen pal from a town far away. There were more than just stories though—there were also games, trials that people put themselves through in the name of thrill-seeking. I loved reading through all of the ‘first-hand’ accounts and internet threads, written by people who had supposedly played The Eleven Mile Game or Three Kings. People had filmed themselves and posted on YouTube or TikTok, sharing their heart-pounding experiences with the world. It was that perfect mixture of scary and exhilarating and I knew a book incorporating these elements would be really fun to write. One game in particular, about an entity called the Midnight Man who punished wrongdoers, stuck in my head and I started asking myself the questions that always come before I start to plan a book. This time they were along the lines of What would happen if a group of strangers met up and played The Midnight Game? How badly could it go? What could I add to the story to make it even worse? I had all the elements of a potential horror, but it was still missing something. . .

I needed more than just an urban legend. For me, the scariest books and movies have elements of reality in them and I often look to true crime cases when I’m researching a potential book.  This time, though, one case kept popping up in my initial search results, because it was linked to a creepypasta. It was a devasting attack back in 2014 that was associated with the character of Slender Man. For those who aren’t familiar, Slender Man is a humanoid entity who has no face. He lives in the woods, stalking and kidnapping teenagers whilst wearing a dapper black suit. Oh, and he has tentacles, because . . . why not. I became fascinated with the case, poring over articles and watching documentaries, wondering what would drive two young people to try and harm their friend. The perpetrators of the crime claimed they were doing it to keep Slender Man happy, to protect their own families from him and be allowed to live in his castle as a reward, but a psychological term kept cropping up to explain it instead: folie-a-deux, also known as the madness of two. Folie-a-deux is classed as a form of shared psychosis, where two people in a close relationship share the same delusions. This really piqued my interest. It’s frightening enough to think that one person might be capable of doing harm, but if they found a willing partner in crime? Doubly terrifying. Cases of folie-a-deux are scattered throughout true crime history; Bonnie and Clyde, Leopold and Loeb, Fred and Rosemary West . . . unfortunately the list goes on. I’d finally found the element that would work with my book idea, and my own characters with a shared murderous intent were born. I can’t go into too many details without spoiling the plot, but for me, The Midnight Game is the perfect blend of the fantastical and the scarily real. My own urban legend . . .

About The Midnight Game by Cynthia Murphy:

When a group of six strangers who have only ever spoken on a creepy Deddit thread decide to meet IRL, they have one plan in mind: they are going to play The Midnight Game and summon the Midnight Man.

Rules of the game are simple: Do not turn on the lights. Do not go to sleep. Do not leave the building.

And once you start the game, you must finish it—there’s no other way out…