Cry Baby Lane

## Cry Baby Lane by unknown author

In 1999, I was 22. I had just graduated from Emerson university in downtown Boston, majoring in screenwriting - specifically in cartoons and children’s programming. My debt was pretty bad, so when Nickelodeon Studios offered me an internship at the studio in California, I accepted immediately. I jumped at the chance to get away from my dead-end job as a Benjamin Franklin tour guide.

Many of you ask to see Cry Baby Lane. Even if you want to see the original film, you never will - yes, even if Nickelodeon somehow consents to releasing it to you. You won’t be seeing what was shown on TV and you sure as fuck won’t be seeing the unaltered original.

I don’t even think Nickelodeon HAS the original cut of the movie anymore. If they do, it’s only in back-up copies. If those even exist, they must be locked away in some vault, along with all the deleted episodes of Ren and Stimpy and the never-before-mentioned episodes of Spongebob Squarepants. I’m pretty sure the director, Peter Lauer, has the original copy, though. It’s probably on his mantle next to his snuff films, the creepy-ass fuck.

Anyway, I was hired in 1999 and immediately put on a creative production team for the movie Cry Baby Lane. It would be almost a year before the movie was due to be broadcast. All in all, it was a pretty low-effort kind of thing; there were only four people on the creative team. I was the only steady one, as Lauer would replace the others on a whim. He said it was to keep it fresh. I thought it was because he was hiding something…and I was probably right.

We had a little over a year to make a made-for-TV movie - not just to write it and cast it, but to film it and get it edited. Lauer didn’t work fast at all, though. After the first three weeks, we only had the ideas for the first 15 minutes of an 85-minute movie.

Even at this point, Lauer was a weirdo. He was tall and lanky, and carried himself awkwardly. He stuttered when he talked and, sometimes, when you were hunched over a piece of paper during those endless brainstorming sessions, you’d look up and catch him staring at you, smiling. He’d look away when you caught his eye, and I guess that was the creepiest part; he always looked like he had something to hide.

The brainstorm sessions, at first, were alright. We got the premise of it down pat: two brothers unleash a demon and get into mischief trying to get everything back to normal. Not exactly daytime Emmy stuff but, you know, it was an alright start. I thought the movie should be goofy and spooky, kind of like a Courage the Cowardly Dog sort of deal. However, from the very beginning, Lauer made it clear that he wanted the film to be as scary as possible. He didn’t want any cheap thrills with a good wholesome ending. He wanted to push it farther than Are You Afraid of the Dark? ever dreamed of…and I guess he did.

It was about three weeks into production when I first noticed something: Lauer had the absolute power of persuasion over everyone else in the creative production team. No one fought him and, by the third week, he was already suggesting some morbid things. I remember he said he wanted the little brother to die halfway through the movie, getting hit by a dump truck. I immediately shot it down. I was the only one who ever said anything, and it stayed that way until I left the studio entirely and never came back.

At first, cannibalism and other fucked up shit was kept to jokes and tasteless comments but, as time went on, it became more and more overt. I’d give him an idea (which, most of the time, he would end up using) like “How about the movie starts with a morbid undertaker who reads them stories,” to whic he’d reply “Yeah…and then he can cut them up into little pieces and force-feed them to his dog!” He made those jokes a few times in the early stages. Then he got serious.

He’d stand up like he was Jesus or something, clear his throat loudly, and proclaim his idea. I’d be the only one to shoot it down. Every. Fucking. Time. One day, near the end of our brainstorming sessions, Lauer cleared his voice and stood up. We all fell silent and looked at him, like we normally would. He began to speak.

“Gentlemen and females, I have an idea.”

I remember what he did: he paused and looked right at me, saying, “The story will revolve around the legend of a pair of Siamese twins. Have you ever heard of the Donner party?” Everyone nodded, except for me. I didn’t like where the conversation was going. “They ate themselves when it got cold. They ate each other.”

Everyone nodded again. I closed my eyes.

“What would Siamese twins do if they had nothing to eat? Would one wait until the other twin dies, then consume her own sister’s flesh? Would they claw out each other’s eyes until one of them died, then dine upon them like a vulture tearing at the skin of a dead deer? I do not know. It is interesting indeed.”

I didn’t know what the fuck I was hearing. I opened my eyes and looked around the room; no one was fucking moving. Everyone’s eyes were on Lauer except for mine. When I looked at him, he was still staring at me.

“Children like violence. They revel in it. Children like to be scared. So we’ll scare them, won’t we, Jonny?” He leaned over the table, getting pretty damn close to my face. His breath smelled like decaying shit. I stared back at him.

“I think you’re fucked up, to be honest.”

He smiled and backed away. “Oh, I’m fucked up alright. You have to be fucked up to survive in this cutthroat world!” His grin expanded. “Literally. Right now, I’m going to show you some pictures that will spark some of your imaginations.” He got up and locked the door from the inside.

I stood up and said “What the fuck are you doing?”

“Let’s not make any…errors in judgement, Jonathan. Sit down.”

“No-”

“Sit.”

For some reason, I did. Lauer pulled out one of those shitty overhead projectors. He turned on the switch and speak-shouted in an unusually high and semi-frantic voice, “This is the fucking MUSE we NEED to CONTINUE with THIS PRO-FUCKING-DUCTION! THIS IS WHAT EVERY CHILD SHOULD SEE!”

His eyes bulged in his head. He put the image down on the glass surface of the overhead. It was silent.

The image was in black and white, but it was grainy. I could vaguely make out a boy lying on a brick floor, his arms cut off and his bloody little nubs black dots. The only thing that was clear was his face. He was bleeding from the mouth. Lauer almost threw the paper off the overhead, slamming down another one.

It was a zoomed-in shot of the boy’s face. It was in color. The blood trickled from his open mouth onto the brick floor, his eyes shut, grimy blood underneath his eyebrows and eyelashes. Then…his eyes open. I screamed. No one else in the fucking room did. It died in infancy, the shrillness ringing in the air.

The pupils were completely black. The rest of the eye was normal. The longer I stared, the more the eyes opened…widening and widening until it looked like the skin above his eyebrows and eye sockets was going to rip in half. Then they started to bleed. Blood started as a trickle and I swear to god I could hear it. More - now it was like a full-blown stream. More. More, until the brick on the floor was a lake of blood. I could hear it like I was hiking and came across a stream, and now I could smell the kid. I could fucking smell his rot.

I leaned underneath the table and vomited. When I rose back up, the images wee gone. Everyone else in the room was expressionless. Lauer turned on the lights. “You may go,” he said, unlocking the door.

I walked through those fucking doors and never returned.

This happened near the end of the brainstorming process. By the time I left, the casting was done and the script was almost fully-written. They were desperately behind schedule; I think Lauer planned it that way so there wouldn’t be time for proper editing. I never watched the real thing when it aired, but I heard from a friend who was working at the editing department that they had to cut a good 15-20 minutes of “disturbing” footage from the film before it was fit to be released, and it was just barely fit to be released. They didn’t have enough time to check the footage frame by frame.

I guess he got his wish, unless they cut every single scene that had the pictures in them. Every child watching Cry Baby Lane has an unconscious memory of those pictures and I weep for them, I really do. They fucked me up and, as I write this to you, it will be the last thing I’ll ever write before I slit my throat and before blood spatters all over this fucking computer screen.

There’s something I should tell you first, though.

Early on, Lauer posed an idea of the two brothers capturing a squirrel, putting said squirrel in a jar, and slowly drowning it before filling the jar with sand and dropping it to the bottom of a pond. Soon after this was suggested, Sandy Cheeks appeared in the Spongebob Squarepants episode “Tea at the Treedome.”

Lauer also suggested, for one scene of the movie, a man with a “squid-like nose” take off his pants in front of the two boys and rape them off-camera, but heavily implied. Squidward Tentacles soon began to appear as a major character in Spongebob Squarepants.

It was suggested that the two main characters be step-brothers, forced to live in the same house after the one’s mom was found dead in a shallow grave, her body heavily cannibalized by her own husband, a local weatherman. A show with a vaguely-similar premise, Drake and Josh, started in 2004. The step-father in the show is a weatherman.

Lauer also suggested the younger brother have a doghouse in which he keeps several animal fetuses encased in acid that he regularly uses to poison his mother to have sex with his abusive step-father. As Told by Ginger debuted soon after. The main character’s little brother has a doghouse where he keeps similar things.

A man who captures the souls of children in a vacuum cleaner and sends them to Hades? Danny Phantom.

A robot who goes insane in the two brothers, kills one of them, wears his skin, and pretends to be the dead brother at their high school? My Life as a Teenage Robot. There are even a couple of episodes where the robot gets the chance to look and pretend to be human.

The list goes on and on. Nickelodeon knows and they’re continuing the legacy of Lauer - sometimes subtly and sometimes overtly. There’s nothing you or I can do about it, either.

That creepy-ass fuck.

 Several years after this creepypasta came out the lost movie "Cry Baby Lane" was not only found but re-aired on television. Here is a YouTube upload of the full movie.