The article is devoted to the problem of the origin of such a variety of children's folklore as a "scarecrow". Under the name "scarecrows" or, in other terminology, "screaming horror stories" are combined, as a rule, texts based on the escalation of the doubled anaphoric epithet "black-black", which is interrupted by an unexpected exclamation from the narrator, designed to bring listeners out of a state of psychological balance. The article refutes the idea that the functional dominant of this subgenre is to achieve a comic effect clarifies the the nature of the relationship between "scarecrows", "horror stories" and "anti-horror stories". The author criticises the opinion that the compositional structure of "scarecrows" dates back to conspiracies. Instead, a hypothesis is put forward, according to which the origin of "scarecrows" ("screaming horror stories") can be found in the suggestive potential and rhetorical combinatorics that are embedded in the epithet as a special category of artistic thinking. Examples from fiction are given.
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