Spooktober – Days 5 & 6

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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Spooktober – Days 3 & 4

I’m doing a thing with some people to do 31 horror story concepts within October…

SPOOKTOBER DAY #3 — Western

TITLE:  Draw Down

PREMISE:  Korean and Japanese gangsters are both looking to take over a financially vulnerable casino in Las Vegas.  The mob bosses know a shootout in the city is a bad look, and strike a weird gentleman’s agreement.  They rent a touristy “Wild West” town for a weekend and take all their men there.  Then they hole up in a bulletproof lounge with a view of the streets and order their men to gunfight to the death.

HORROR ELEMENT: The violence is hyper and suffering real. No medical help for the fallen. The survivors decide their bosses gotta die for putting them thru that, team up to kill ’em nasty.

SPOOKTOBER DAY #4 — Cabin

TITLE:  Bear Trap

PREMISE:  A trapper tries to build a cabin.  The setup can be for a historical/educational look at how cabins are built.  Until…  One disaster after another holds up his progress.  He’s left in the rain, barely surviving, too weak to finish the job properly.  That’s when bears get interested in eating him.  He has to convert the unfinished cabin into an elaborate bear trap.

HORROR ELEMENT:  It’s Saw for bears.  Time to repent that they didn’t cherish pic-a-nic baskets when they had the chance.
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Spooktober – 31 Horror Concepts

Content Warning:  Horror Content.

I’m doing a thing where we vote for a horror sub-genre each day of October, then come up with a concept for it.  I’ve been turning in my entries at the last minute, so I’ve resorted to gritty reboots as a creative shortcut.  My concepts thus far:

DAY ONE: DARKWEB OR TECHNOLOGY

TITLE:  The Turbo Teen

Premise:  Gritty reboot of that 90s cartoon where a teenager transforms into a hot rod.  He comes home one night unable to remember where he’s been, clothes kinda ripped up.  He lays off the booze but his friends are all peeeer pressure.  Then he starts to have random attacks where parts of his body violently transform into machinery.  An older woman at a bar he used a fake ID to get into seduces him and while they’re about to do it, her pelvic area turns into a motor that tries to rip off his junk.  (She’s the “Scarlet Woman” from The Cult’s song “Love Removal Machine.”)
He hops away and she’s like awooo and turns into a car.  Then he turns into a car to fight her and she realizes he’s the victim of her hit and run on the last full moon.  She takes him under her wing and teaches him how to be a horrible werecar.  But he rebels because he wants to be a good werecar instead, and they fight.  All the while his personal regular life is falling apart because of body horror hijinx.

Horror Element:  turn into machines plz


DAY TWO: TOYS

TITLE:  VELVETEEN

PREMISE:  Gritty reboot of The Velveteen Rabbit, which is already pretty effin gritty, bear with me.  All the other toys that had to get burned because the kid had Generic Victorian SIckness?  Back from the dead, and Velveteen has to fight them.  This would be staged as a play with dancing, singing, and wirework kung fu.

HORROR ELEMENT:  The burned toys will be played by actors in black clothes with gritty chunks of toy stuck to their extremities.  They’ll dance fight with Velveteen, who will be played by a bunny-eared actress in Milla Jovovich from Resident Evil mode, and at the end she’ll realize she was meant to die as well.  She’ll do a big song/dance number with them and fall into their arms.  The closing curtain will be black velvet.
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A Fun Video Less Problematic?

Content Warnings:  Bloody Movie Violence, Swears, Noisy Audio, Spoilers for John Woo’s Hard-Boiled.  Even the thumbnail for the video is a bit bloody, placed under fold.

One time when I was a young ‘un I chanced across a Hong Kong action movie on cable, first time I ever saw one.  I was instantly thrilled by the action, everybody leaping around guns blazing, blood spewing out of guys like juice from ripe fruit.  The best part, however, was when the action died down for a moment, and the hilarious English dub voices began.  “Oh well done.  You’re such an asset.  Give the guy a gun and he’s Superman, give him two and he’s God!”

I had to turn off the TV because my mom slept in the living room and it was her bedtime.  But I went straight to the TV guide to find the name of the movie and next time it was playing.  Somebody on yewchoob compiled some of the funniest moments from that dub.  Really, the movie is great fun in its non-sillyvoiced glory as well, but I have nostalgia and love for this foolery.  Enjoy.

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Skeptisuck – Harriet Hall Time

HJ doesn’t do comments at his blog, but his recent article about Harriet Hall – concluded with a simply told bit of news that makes the more well-loved end of the skeptisphere a lot less lovable – cries out for comment.  If you wanna rip on Harriet Hall, or her pals Steven Novella and David Gorski, or whatever, I invite you to make the comments on this post into your mosh pit.

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Renewing My Comment Policy

Once upon a time, some SJW types decided we should avoid using stupid and crazy and their synonyms in our discourse, because of splash damage to those with cognitive and mental disabilities.  This idea prevailed only in a few narrow places, never on FtB.  Gradually, it has faded altogether.  It doesn’t help that in the last few years the worst elements of society have been pushing ignorance and irrationality to virtually unprecedented depths.  The tumblr types I follow have actively rebuked this voluntary policing of our own language.  So should I enforce this in my own language and in my comments section?

Yeah, I’m going to keep doing it.  I’m going to respond to the arguments in my last post’s comment section here, paraphrasing for simplicity.  Might be that nobody said exactly any one of these – they are amalgamations and distillations.  I’m trying to boil this down to reduce redundancy, without leaving any one argument completely unaddressed.  Indeed, some of my commenters did less arguing than merely posing questions, and I don’t want the way I’ve set this up to make them think I think this is what they were saying… Whatever.  Here I go:

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I Need SJW Opinions, Help Me

Anybody remember the Ableism Challenge?  I’ve made it a matter of principle to never use crazy, stupid, and their synonyms on all my blog posts, the entire time I’ve been doing this.  I’ve also made it a comment policy.  The most recent violations of said policy are currently unaddressed, because I’m wondering what I should do at this point.

There was a minute when the prevailing feeling in the progressive internet parts was that we need to take ableism seriously in our language.  In culture at large we are quick to refer to anything we disagree with as stupid or insane.  People with psychological and cognitive disabilities exist and unquestionably do suffer from ableism.  Implicit in calling a conservative antivaxxer a “covidiot” is the idea that having such disabilities makes one a fair target of mockery.

FtB has never, on the whole, taken this type of ableism at all seriously, or had any staying power with efforts to reduce it.  How many of us are even trying?  I feel like I’m not 100% alone in this, but I’m not even sure who the others are.  This makes sense – the atheist and skeptic movements are founded on the hobby of making ourselves feel clever by mocking those who are not.

And I get it.  This isn’t a callout post for Mano, PZ, or 95% of the commentariat across the whole network.  We live in a world on the fast track to extinction and the cultists of a cheap and obvious con artist are spreading doubt about germ theory.  I wanna call Q shit stupid and crazy the same as you.  Who am I to tie your hands, to tell you not to call a spade a spade?

Furthermore, the SJWsphere seems to have moved on.  I never see people addressing ableist language anymore, and have seen a few prominent progressives actively rebuke these restraints.  The people who initially advocated for taking stupid and crazy off the table?  They’ve been quiet about this for years.  Some aren’t even blogging anymore.

I will continue to avoid stupid, crazy, and their synonyms in my posts.  It costs me nothing and I like to think this commitment offers some people a way to feel like they have some safe content on the internet, somewhere.  But how important is it?  Where’s the SJW pulse at, right now?  Should I hold my commenters to the same standard as myself?

When I say I want SJW opinions, I mean it.  If you’re just commenting to grouse from a centrist or liberal or crass point of view, fuck off.  The people whose opinions informed my original stance were the sensitive, the thoughtful, and those who are seriously committed to making the world a better place.  Social engineers.  Idealists.  Real social justice warriors.

I’m going to delete any comments that don’t meet that standard, even if I don’t ban anyone over it.  The comments on this post, assuming I get any, are for comrades only.

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