Trevor Henderson’s Nightmarish “Man With The Upside-Down Face” Explained

Here’s the story behind horror artist Trevor Henderson’s terrifying creepypasta character “The Man With The Upside-Down Face.” The term creepypasta refers to horror-themed short stories and images shared via the internet – sort of like urban legends for the digital age. The creepypasta community is responsible for characters like Jeff The Killer or Smile Dog and scary stories like The Russian Sleep Experiment and Dathan Auerbach’s Penpal series. In recent years, creepypasta has gone mainstream with characters like Slender Man or tales like Candle Cove getting film and TV adaptations.

Trevor Henderson is a Canadian horror artist whose found footage-style works are famous within the creepypasta community. Alongside re-imagining classic creepypasta villains like Slender Man and Eyeless Jack, Henderson also creates original characters complete with backstories like his Cartoon Cat and Bridge Worm cryptids. Henderson’s best-known creation is Siren Head – a freakishly tall, skeleton-like creature with two megaphones for a head that has featured in a few indie video games and made an appearance in the Fallout 4 mod Whispering Hills.

The Man With The Upside-Down Face is another of Trevor Henderson’s creations and while he’s not quite as famous as Siren Head, he’s just as menacing. Inspired by scary short stories including Ray Bradbury’s “The Crowd” or Al Sarrantonio’s “The Cult Of The Nose”, Henderson debuted The Man With The Upside-Down Face on Twitter in January 2020 via a series of old photographs. In each image, a man with an upside-down face can be seen lurking in the background of crowds gathered at the scene of fatal accidents like car wrecks, fires and train crashes. Of course, it’s just clever photo-shopping but Henderson’s character is undeniably creepy and trying to locate exactly where he’s lurking in the photographs is kind of like a horror version of Where’s Waldo.

As with his other creepy horror character creations, Henderson gave The Man With The Upside-Down Face a chilling backstory. Although he’s never seen by bystanders at the scene of accidents, the character has been captured in numerous photographs of tragedies that took place between the 1910s and 1960s. According to Henderson, The Man With The Upside-Down Face feeds off the negative emotions tragic events bring about and in one tweet the artist described him as “the patron saint of car wrecks, natural disasters, misery and bloody pavement.”

Any horror fans out there thinking The Man With The Upside-Down Face would make a fantastic horror villain aren’t alone. Several followers of Henderson’s work have expressed the same sentiment and judging by the fact the artist has a film and TV agent listed in his Twitter bio, it would seem a movie based on the monster isn’t impossible. In the meantime, Henderson followers can look forward to another of his creations – The Long Lady – in the upcoming full-motion video game Ghost, which is the brainchild of Host director Jed Shepherd and scheduled for an early 2022 release.