Don't Walk Home Alone After Dark
is a series of animated short horror stories and vignettes, created by Andy Coyle (also known for his work directing Hilda) on YouTube. The full-length videos are all standalone horror tales, with the vignettes being short horror-themed clips that hint at larger stories.
Full-length videos:
- The Pine Creepers: A man recalls a terrifying childhood experience that occurred while camping with his friends.
- The Worm: A therapist attempts to treat a troubled teenage girl hiding a dark secret, but his quest for answers causes his own mental health to deteriorate.
Shorts:
- "The Girl In The Mirror"
- "Dead End"
- "I Think My Step-Dad's A Werewolf"
- "Don't Look Up"
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General tropes
- Antagonist Title: Applies to both The Pine Creepers and The Worm, with the titles referring to the Big Bads of each respective story. It also applies to the malevolent mirror entity in '"The Girl In The Mirror" short.
- Mirror Monster: In "The Girl In The Mirror", a girl is brushing her teeth in front of the bathroom mirror when she leans down to spit in the sink. Her reflection doesn't move with her, before its eyes roll back and it grows an abnormally large mouth with More Teeth than the Osmond Family, preparing to strike...
- Nothing Is Scarier:
- We never find out what happens to the people the Pine Creepers take, including the narrator’s friend Jordy, who simply vanishes with no trace of what might’ve happened to him.
- We never find out what the Worm really is or where it came from; it's implied it might be impossible for humans to fully comprehend it.
- Our Werewolves Are Different: The werewolf in "I Think My Step-Dad's A Werewolf" is depicted with a humanoid body and wolf-like head, with a large mane, broader upper-body and glowing yellow eyes; it walks on all fours, though its hunched stance and hand-like front paws suggests it's a facultative biped (capable of walking on two legs).
- Spiders Are Scary: They are if there are heaps of them sliding down their webs towards the street, as depicted in "Don't Look Up"; these spiders also look unusually large. One nearly lands on an unsuspecting woman's head, only scuttling off when she abruptly stretches her arm.
- Spider Swarm: In "Don't Look Up", dozens of spiders can be seen slowly making their way down from who knows where, while a woman on the ground is obliviously scrolling on her phone.
- Wicked Stepfather: Played with regarding the boy's stepfather in "I Think My Step-Dad's A Werewolf"; the boy is shown hiding in terror while his werewolf stepfather stalks past his room, but it's left ambiguous if he's the kind of werewolf who’s only dangerous after they transform (and therefore potentially non-malicious to his stepson in human form).
Tropes found in The Pine Creepers
- The '90s: The story takes place in the summer of 1995. Notably, no one in the protagonists' rural town thinks much of letting three 13-year-olds go camping by themselves in the woods overnight, whereas these days parents would likely be much warier about doing so.
- Don't Go in the Woods: The narrator and his friends like to go camping in a clearing in the pine woods surrounding their town, though the narrator is unsettled when Jordy brings up a story his dad told him about people seeing strange creatures – known as Pine Creepers – in the woods, round about the same time people started going missing. The narrator tried to dismiss it as a story, but later that very night he finds out the hard way that it's true.
- Foregone Conclusion: We know from the start the narrator will survive his encounter with the Pine Creepers, as he's telling the story decades later as an adult. His friend Jordy isn't so fortunate.
- Harmful to Minors: The narrator and his friends are only 13 during their horrifying encounter with the Pine Creepers, which ends with the Creepers taking and presumably doing something horrible to Jordy.
- Held Back in School: It’s mentioned that Pike Lister was two grades ahead of the narrator and he "probably failed a couple on top of that"; it’s implied he had a tendency to be disruptive and unengaged in class, as he frequently got detention.
- Humanoid Abomination: The Pine Creepers are pale humanoid creatures with long, spindly limbs, sharp teeth, glowing eyes and ape-like faces. They live in the woods surrounding the narrator's hometown and are reportedly responsible for several people going missing over the decades.
- It's All My Fault: From the way the narrator talks about Jordy's disappearance, it's implied he blames himself for what happened because he never tried to help or warn Jordy despite knowing the Pine Creepers were out there, instead hiding in his tent and trying not to draw attention to himself out of fear. Under the circumstances, there probably wasn't anything the narrator could've done and he'd have likely further endangered himself had he tried to intervene.
- Missing Child:
- A local teenage boy named Pike Lister disappeared while walking home from after-school detention the previous year, never to be seen or heard from again. There are a few theories as to what happened to him, though Jordy Baker is convinced he was taken by the Pine Creepers.
- 13-year-old Jordy himself is discovered to be missing the night after the narrator's encounter with the Pine Creepers and despite the whole town searching, he's never found. 27 years later, no one knows what happened to Jordy save for the narrator, who is aware the Pine Creepers are involved but probably wouldn't be believed.
- Never a Runaway: Some people believed Pike Lister, a trouble-making teenager who went missing in November of 1994, just took off by himself. However, others thought he might've drowned in the lake, while Jordy and his dad are convinced the Pine Creepers "got him", especially as something similar occurred back in The '70s. It’s implied that Jordy and his dad were right.
- The Quiet One: Subverted with Auggie; the narrator says he was a quiet kid except when he was alone with his friends, where he tended to be much louder and let rip with his high-pitched laugh (which resulted in the friends getting kicked out of the narrator's backyard, because Auggie's loud laughing was keeping the narrator's dad awake).
- Tragic Bromance: The narrator will "never forget the summer of '95" because it' the year his childhood best friend Jordy disappeared, taken by the Pine Creepers; the narrator knew the Pine Creepers were out there but hid in the tent while Jordy was sleeping in an abandoned car, too scared to do anything (there realistically wasn't much he could've done against the Creepers, but he feels guilty nevertheless). When morning came Jordy was gone, never to be seen again, and only the narrator has an inkling of what really happened.
