This is a classic creepypasta in addition to being a personal favorite of mine. I’ve actually reviewed it twice before, once on Tumblr and then again on LiveJournal; this is a repost of the latter review.
Content warnings: death, gore, and some sexual content (as the title might suggest). There is also a brief reference to animal abuse, which the Creepypasta Wiki version linked below redacted in order to comply with Wikia policy; however, it being part of the original tale, I will mention it when it comes up.
“Normal Porn for Normal People”
Plot Summary
The narrator tells us, that, like most people who've been using the internet for a while, they've seen some weird shit, but a site that sticks in their memory is "normalpornfornormalpeople.com." They received a spam email about the site, were intrigued by its name, and (after ensuring their antivirus software was working) clicked on the link.
The homepage was a long, mostly unintelligible ramble written by someone with a poor grasp of English, and the website overall looked pretty shoddy, but the concept of "normal porn" was still intriguing to the narrator (what do "normal" people get off to?), especially since the site's tagline was "Dedicated to the Eradication of Abnormal Sexuality," which raises a hell of a lot of questions as to what exactly the creator or creators of this website were intending. At first glance, the homepage didn't seem to have any links to other content, but then the narrator realized that every word in the rant was a hyperlink. Clicking one of those links would bring you to another page full of hyperlinks, none of them with descriptive titles, and clicking one of those links brought up yet more hyperlinks, although these turned out to be downloadable video files. The narrator watched one of these videos, titled "peanut.avi," which depicted a man, woman, and dog in a kitchen. The woman was making peanut butter sandwiches, and the man handed each sandwich to the dog to eat. This went on for thirty minutes, with clear breaks in the filming where the cameraman had to wait for the dog to be hungry again. Nothing else happened in the video.
At this point, the narrator headed to an online forum to discuss the website, and saw that someone else had already made a thread about it. Various users were already at work digging through the site and trying to make sense of its content. Of the two dozen or so videos the narrator ended up watching, almost none had any sexual content whatsoever, and most were just someone talking to the cameraman in a room with barely any furnishings (typically just a desk and chair). The subjects of these interviews were by and large pretty good-looking folks, but the conversations they had on video didn't pertain to porn or to the website's mission of "eradicating abnormal sexuality" in any discernible way — they were just random anecdotes about past jobs or embarrassing memories from childhood.
Some of the videos were notably odd and/or contained content that might be considered sexual, though definitely not what the narrator was expecting in terms of "normal porn." I'll just list off those videos using bullet points, for brevity's sake:
lickedclean.avi: A repairman works on a washing machine for the first two minutes. He then speaks to the homeowner briefly before leaving, after which the homeowner begins thoroughly licking the washing machine's surface for the remainder of the video. (10 minutes)
jimbo.avi: An overweight mime performing his act, which the narrator describes as being very funny, particularly one bit where he pretends to sit on a stool which breaks under his weight. The final thirty seconds of the video cut to the mime sobbing quietly, still in full makeup and costume. (5 minutes)
dianna.avi: A woman being interviewed, although not in the sterile interview environment common to the other videos; it looks like it's just a room in her house. The woman, presumably Dianna, talks about her violin playing and also does a bit of actual playing, although she seems to be distracted by something. It's easy to miss, but the reflection of a mirror in the background of the shot shows a man masturbating while wearing a chicken mask. (4 minutes)
jessica.avi: Another interview video, but this one is outdoors. Jessica and the cameraman talk about canoe rides, and the camera occasionally zooms out to show the city streets behind them. No one on the forum where normalpornfornormalpeople.com was being discussed could figure out what city this video was filmed in, although enough of it was shown that you'd think someone would be able to figure it out. (4 minutes)
tonguetied.avi: The first half of the video shows an elderly woman making out with a mannequin; after that, the sound cuts out and the scene cuts to a group of mannequins huddled around the camera with the lighting dimmed. (10 minutes)
stumps.avi: A man with no legs is attempting to breakdance on a DDR mat in what appears to be the kitchen from peanut.avi, although it's much dirtier. Music is playing in the background, but it eventually cuts out and the man collapses in exhaustion, pleading with someone offscreen to let him rest. Whoever he's talking to becomes violently angry and screams at him to continue, which he does. This person can be heard still screaming as the video ends. (5 minutes)
privacy.avi: Dianna, the violinist from a previous video, is lying on a mattress set up in the sterile "interview room" used in some other videos, masturbating. The man from stumps.avi is there too, wearing a goblin mask and walking around on his hands. The door to the room is open, and, though the hallway outside is dark, at one point some sort of animal can be seen running past the doorway. (video length not stated)
And then, the forum came across another unusual video, though it stood out for much more sinister reasons:
useless.avi: A blonde woman, recognizable from a previous interview video, is tied down to a mattress in the "interview room" with her mouth taped shut. She's conscious and struggling, but can't free herself. After seven minutes of this, the door to the room is opened by a man wearing a dark suit and a mask, and the animal from privacy.avi runs in — it's a chimpanzee, fur completely shaved off and its skin painted red. The chimp, which is emaciated and showing signs of abuse, quickly begins attacking the woman, mauling her to death over the course of the next several minutes, then eating her corpse until the film cuts out. (18 minutes)
As one would expect, the forum absolutely exploded with activity following this find, with discussions carrying on for hours. The next day, when the narrator attempted to check the thread, they found it had been deleted. They tried starting a new one, but got banned for doing so, and appealing to the mods didn't work.
Following this, the narrator has tried to start discussions about normalpornfornormalpeople.com on various websites, but it generally seems to be a bannable offense. The website itself was taken down shortly after useless.avi was discovered, presumably because someone contacted the authorities. The narrator has noticed that, while some videos from the site were saved and reuploaded elsewhere — particularly useless.avi, which found its way onto gore sites — these videos tend to be removed without explanation after being uploaded.
Closing Thoughts
This story isn't perfect, and I can see why someone else might not like it — after all, the horror aspect doesn't really come into play until the very end of the tale, and parts of the story read as humorous rather than ominous. That aside, though, I'm here to talk about why I like it so much.
Horror stories in general, and creepypasta in particular, tend to suffer from unbelievable narration. Often, the narrator's actions aren't sympathetic or even understandable, which can ruin even the best ideas — how many horror stories have you read where the narrator conducts themself like a total moron for the sake of the plot, or where their motivations are questionable at best despite readers not being expected to question them? This narrator, while barely a character in their own right, seems like a typical internet user whose main motivator is simple curiosity, but not to the point of outright foolishness. They receive an email about a website with a URL that's just too damn weird not to investigate, so they investigate it, while making sure that their computer is safe and seeking the assistance of other internet users to help them cover more ground. I can honestly say that in their position I'd probably do the exact same thing, and I can hardly ever say that about creepypasta protagonists.
As for the story itself, this does read like something you might find on some weird corner of the web. The implications of hundreds of hyperlinks leading to hundreds more hyperlinks that lead to an untold number of short video clips speak to the scale of whatever normalpornfornormalpeople.com was supposed to be, and if the site had been explored thoroughly perhaps narrative coherence would have emerged. There are recurring participants and settings, it's implied that these people are being selected for their looks if nothing else, and the site itself has a mission statement. All of it gives the impression that, if only the site had been explored more before it was taken down, someone could have put the puzzle pieces together. The chimpanzee video is the only gory one the forum came across, but they didn't get to see all the videos by a long shot, and surely they didn't just stumble across the worst thing the site had to offer by random chance. With horror stories, I'm a strong believer that less is more, and this pulls that off excellently.
I'll actually argue in favor of the tone staying relatively light throughout most of this story; I've seen too many "I found a strange website / video game / etc." pastas that keep the tone so dark throughout that they lose plausibility, or at the very least make you wonder "holy shit, if this is supposed to be real why isn't everybody talking about it?" Shock value is something to be used sparingly, and it should never be the ultimate horror. Furthermore, if your story is about finding an entire website full of snuff videos, you're just describing a shock horror site, and thus have to compete with the many stories about real sites full of gore clips. Normalpornfornormalpeople.com isn't simply a gore site, it's a site with an agenda (that no one can figure out) and tons of benign videos (that are related to the horrifying stuff in ways no one save the creators understands).
The weakest part of this one is the implication near the end of some sort of internet-wide cover-up. Still, this story has enough going for it that one false note doesn't detract from it much.
I've read most of the creepypasta "classics," and most of them are either bad or didn't age too well. This one, though, has sticking power.