I’m doing a thing with some people to do 31 horror story concepts within October…
SPOOKTOBER DAY #5 — Body Horror
TITLE: Hot-Handed God of Beasts
PREMISE: Body horror as a genre is about hitting us in the feels over our own frailty, shocking out sensibilities. Like, oh snaps, that would suck to experience that. But I think the genre can also be about the more abstract feelings underlying life, death, and injury. What are bodies? What is the soul? What is the boundary between the living and non-living matter of the world? Of course, if you’re going that way, it should still be violent or viscerally bitter.
I had this idea once for a sort of homage to John Woo’s movie Hard-boiled, as a series of paintings. I’m going to appropriate that for this, turn it into a movie idea. There’s fighting factions in a shabby-looking neighborhood of HongKong, visually evoking the teahouse shootout from the beginning of that movie. But one side is bird-heads and the other side is rodent-heads. Why are they shooting each other and hacking each other with machetes? Nobody knows.
HORROR ELEMENT: The emphasis will be on their pain and horror at their own deaths. A body hits the floor and the camera lingers on it – a birdhead not quite dead, blood pouring out of his mouth like a pitcher, blooming into the spilled tea on the floor like ink in water. A mousehead has eyes wide open and squeals in pain while he’s held down and his body cut up.
SPOOKTOBER DAY #6 — Mummy
TITLE: Something is Mummy in the State of Denmark
PREMISE: A shitty racist village in Denmark is temporary home to a British Indian anthropology student. A bog mummy comes back from the dead to kill all descendants of the man who accused him of crimes he did not commit. Problem – the way population genetics work, every last person in Denmark and many beyond are descended from the guy. It looks like he’s killing indiscriminately, but he isn’t attacking Vishal.
Vishal figures out that if the guy could take direct revenge on his wrongdoer, his wrath can be allayed. He saves the surviving racists by figuring out how to necromancy up the mummy’s foe and they have a huge battle of mummy fu.
HORROR ELEMENT: It’s not genuinely scary, more of an Evil Dead 2 thing. Still in genre.
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Ooooh, both of these are good in different ways, but the bog mummy wins over all of them so far. I mean you had me at “bog mummy”, but I like the rest of the scenario too.
Thanks!