SPOOKTOBER 2024!

Spooktober is a 31 day event of coming up with original horror ideas based on prompts my writing group voted on.  Carrying forward from last year we’re having optional sub-themes and I’m trying to do them all like Debbie do Dallas.  Book covers made with midjourney and photopea.

SPOOKTOBER DAY #31 — PLAYER’S CHOICE
(× Alien/Space or Anime or Backwoods or Clones/Doppelgangers or Competition or Creepy Kid or Creepypasta/Urban Legend or Cursed Object or Cyberpunk or Darkweb/Technology or Holiday or J-Horror or Killer Animal or Killer Toys or Lost Media or Lovecraftian or Mad Scientist or Spoopy/Pumpkincore or Stephen King Style)

TITLE:  Hallowar

PREMISE:  It’s ON.  In the cyberpunk dystopia (Cyberpunk) there are haves and have-nots.  The well-to-do have a pristine network of MMOs where everybody dwells in beauty and light, the poor have a grotty gore-filled indie basement (Darkweb) called Halloween Online 2.0 (Pumpkincore).  The most influential character there has a child-like avatar (Creepy Kid) but everybody assumes they must be older, right?  That character declares a PvP event (Competition) called Hallowar (roll credits) (Holiday).

The PvP area resembles the US Northeast in fall colors (Stephen King Style), with rows of classic homes on shadowy leaf-strewn lanes.  All the NPCs have been turned into killer ghosts (J-Horror) that sometimes possess dolls (Killer Toys), but is it safer in the craggy tree-covered hills (Backwoods) inspired by The Colour Out of Space (Lovecraftian)?  No, those are full of mutated animals that hate life and love death (Killer Animal).

The timing of the event is such that the tactic of “kill all other players then take time with the puzzle” is not tenable, so all the players are both racing to investigate the mysteries, and fighting each other, with short-term alliances and much treachery.  The mystery plot is about an anime (Anime) that has gone out of print (Lost Media), but if you find a copy (Cursed Object) and watch it, you’ll die (Creepypasta).  Three copies quickly turn up, and players stop taking each other out with shovels and croquet mallets, instead tricking each other into watching the tapes.

But just how many lives do you get in this game?  Nobody said anything about multiple lives, but some players are coming back for another round, even after being killed (Clones/Doppelgangers).  They’re accused of hacking, but there’s something wrong with these avatars, and that suspicion is replaced with worse ones.

HORROR ELEMENT:  The answer to the mystery, when revealed, has to do with a mad scientist (Mad Scientist) who tried to contact aliens (Aliens) and brought their murder-ghosts down to earth in the form of killer EVP and such.  All you have to do to win is be the first to take out the scientist, right?  But in parallel to the events of the game, participants have been acting creepy IRL, and it’s becoming clear they’ve all been the victims of some kind of mad science.  The child avatar emcee appears from inside the lab coat, to offer the last survivors some kind of explanation – or perhaps just to gloat.  Your souls belong to the game now.  Happy Halloween.

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SPOOKTOBER 2024!

Spooktober is a 31 day event of coming up with original horror ideas based on prompts my writing group voted on.  Carrying forward from last year we’re having optional sub-themes and I’m trying to do them all like Debbie do Dallas.  Book covers made with midjourney and photopea.

SPOOKTOBER DAY #30 — UNDEAD
(× Reptiles or Stranded/Desert Island or Extreme Weather)

TITLE:  Charles Darwin vs the Imps of Darkness

PREMISE:  Guess who’s back?  It’s ya boy Chaz, and he survived the mutated brain-sucking finches.  With all the finches back to normal or wiped out with shotgun blasts, they’ve left Darwin alone on San Cristóbal (Stranded) with the bodies of the rest of the Beagle‘s crew, all hollowed out skulls and drifts of down.  In his sorrow he talks with the dead, moving among them to scavenge supplies.  A mysterious fog descends, so thick nothing can be seen (Extreme Weather), and he falls into a tide pool sobbing.

HORROR ELEMENT:  Marine Iguana druids (Reptiles) come to land when the fog is thick, and behold the mournful man.  He wants to see his friends live.  Undead is close enough, right?  They raise the crew as horrid zombies (Undead) that shamble and do strange things with what’s left of their bodies.  Darwin is even more traumatized, and goes to war against the “Imps of Darkness.”  Will he defeat his reptilian would-be benefactors?  Well, IRL Darwin is dead and marine iguanas aren’t extinct yet, so…

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SPOOKTOBER 2024!

Spooktober is a 31 day event of coming up with original horror ideas based on prompts my writing group voted on.  Carrying forward from last year we’re having optional sub-themes and I’m trying to do them all like Debbie do Dallas.  Book covers made with midjourney and photopea.

SPOOKTOBER DAY #29 — SMALL CREATURES
(× Victorian or Forest or Holiday)

TITLE:  ¡Feliz Navidad, Buenos Aires!

PREMISE:  Nadine and Paola are sheisty teenagers who just don’t give a fig.  When they come across a cursed antique (Victorian) set of toy soldiers (Small Creatures), they give them to conservative tio Sarmiento as an early Navidad (Holiday) present, and his ass puts ’em on the tree, it’s gonna be a cursed little christmas.

HORROR ELEMENT:  Sarmiento is forgetful and while he realizes there is a ridiculous bounty of soldiers in the chest, he doesn’t remember how many he’s pulled out – and that it is frankly an impossible amount.  He gives them to everybody – they even find their way onto a big tree at the mall.  When they come to life, it’s a forest (Forest) of wooden demons, in Gremlins-styled mayhem.

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SPOOKTOBER 2024!

Spooktober is a 31 day event of coming up with original horror ideas based on prompts my writing group voted on.  Carrying forward from last year we’re having optional sub-themes and I’m trying to do them all like Debbie do Dallas.  Book covers made with midjourney and photopea.

🎃 HAPPY HALLOWEEN! 🎃  By now I have finished all 31, but I’m posting these all queued a few days behind, to get bloge content out of it.

SPOOKTOBER DAY #28 — GOTHIC
(× Geezer Teaser/Psycho Biddy or Silence or Insects)

TITLE:  House of Flies

PREMISE:  Seema fled from a cruel home life that almost killed her.  Unwilling to return, starving, lost, she took a job caring for an old woman of British descent who lived in a foreboding mansion at the top of the hill (Gothic).  The job wasn’t too weird at first, aside from being required to stay silent (Silence) at all times, so she can hear distant cries for assistance at the top of the stairs.

She became hypervigilant, attuned to all the noises of the creaky old house, but still had trouble distinguishing between the sounds of Georgina, the hum of electricity, and whatever these buzzing insects (Insects) were.  But in the moments when she got to leave the house for groceries, she met a nice dude and began a courtship.  Life could be worse.

HORROR ELEMENT:  Life got worse.  Georgina formed a presence in Seema’s mind that seemed to transcend the physical.  Was Seema going paranoid, losing her sense of decency and empathy toward a disabled old gal, or was the haunting buzz real?  Georgina (Psycho Biddy) figured out that Seema was seeing a dude and messed with their relationship, and messed with Seema’s head until things went all Edgar Allan Poe.

 

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SPOOKTOBER 2024!

Spooktober is a 31 day event of coming up with original horror ideas based on prompts my writing group voted on.  Carrying forward from last year we’re having optional sub-themes and I’m trying to do them all like Debbie do Dallas.  Book covers made with midjourney and photopea.

SPOOKTOBER DAY #27 — COSMIC HORROR
(× Chaos or Virtual Reality or Virus)

TITLE:  Welcome to the Disease

PREMISE:  In da Future, we are all jacked in, on that virtual reality tip (Virtual Reality).  It’s 100% secure, like, internet security is no longer an issue for some reason.  Come inside, we’ve got a paradise to help you forget your incipient decrepitude.  Enjoy the pleasuredomes.

But how was this achieved?  The quantum woo is real.  Quantum computers managed to access the platonic realm of Forms, the for-real real, to which all of our teacups and pink flamingos and biological existences are pale imitations.  But humans were not meant to intrude into that heady air, representing an incursion of entropy (Chaos) into that previously inviolate realm of perfection.

HORROR ELEMENT:  The condition is spread by some unknown means, like The Ring (Virus), but everybody is racing to figure out what the rules are.  When you’ve caught it, some Joel Cairo-looking emeff appears to you and says, “Welcome to the Disease” (roll credits), and then your VR experience is corrupted.  You behold what it looks like when perfect order meets perfect chaos (Cosmic Horror), and like, lose all your sanity points or something.

 

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SPOOKTOBER 2024!

Spooktober is a 31 day event of coming up with original horror ideas based on prompts my writing group voted on.  Carrying forward from last year we’re having optional sub-themes and I’m trying to do them all like Debbie do Dallas.  Book covers made with midjourney and photopea.

SPOOKTOBER DAY #26 — GHOSTS
(× Curses or Punk/Gothic or Time-Loop/Alt-Chronology)

TITLE:  Ghost Lightning

PREMISE:  The streets of LA are haunted by bad weather.  As late summer fades to fall, lightning storms break out, but this lightning be cursed (Curses) by the ghosts (Ghosts) of some terrible crime.  The worst part?  The crime didn’t even happen in this reality, but we’re still paying the price.  In an alternate timeline (Alt-Chronology) the government developed time travel and used it to do a genocide, creating time ghosts that rip through the boundaries between dimensions and torment indiscriminately.

HORROR ELEMENT:  The time ghosts manifest as bolts of lightning, and in their wake leave holes where you can see through to another world.  Somehow, it’s always a world where people are alive who in your world are dead, or vice versa, and you get the horror of losing them again, or being lost to them again, when the opening closes.  Also possibly getting lightning bolted to death.  Zzap.

Our heroines are punky (Punk/Gothic) trans lesbian Martika Martinez and her cis girlfriend Ariel Nunn, who are also haunted by alternate versions of themselves that are not in love, or not out of the closet.  Weird times, yo.

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SPOOKTOBER 2024!

Spooktober is a 31 day event of coming up with original horror ideas based on prompts my writing group voted on.  Carrying forward from last year we’re having optional sub-themes and I’m trying to do them all like Debbie do Dallas.  Book covers made with midjourney and photopea.

SPOOKTOBER DAY #25 — SUMMER CAMP/CABIN
(× Survival Horror or Disaster or Trees)

TITLE:  Happy Campers (apologies to whichever fifty people first used this title ironically)

PREMISE:  Camp counselors (Summer Camp) are very insistent that you have a happy time, the best time of your life.  Macrame or get burned with a lighter.  Toast the marshmallow but if it catches fire you catch these hands.  What’s wrong with them?  And is it contagious?  Other kids start to get with the creepy agenda, leaving the radicals and non-joiners increasingly desperate for the freedom to slouch in their own independent ways.  And not get murdered with hand-crafted natural weapons, like god intended (Survival Horror).

HORROR ELEMENT:  It’s a natural disaster (Disaster) because some kind of exotic mold in the trees (Trees) has grown far in excess of its usual amounts, due to its natural predator the jackanory weevil being gobbled up en masse by invasive spotted balinese assassin bugs.  When the wind kicks up and the pollen rains down, humans catch something like ergotism.  All suffer erratic adrenaline spikes and altered behavior, but the most socially conformist become prone to violent rage and sadistic oppression.

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SPOOKTOBER 2024!

Spooktober is a 31 day event of coming up with original horror ideas based on prompts my writing group voted on.  Carrying forward from last year we’re having optional sub-themes and I’m trying to do them all like Debbie do Dallas.  Book covers made with midjourney and photopea.

SPOOKTOBER DAY #24 — FOLK HORROR
(× Mountain or Odd Couple or Dark Magic)

TITLE:  The Alpine’s Bumpin’

PREMISE:  I’m gettin’ good grip from the fifty series tires; the alpine’s bumpin’ but I need the volume higher…  So quoth Sir Mixalot.  I know folk horror is usually about a summery rural cult torturing some squares to death but I don’t love the genre so I’m going with the idea this category could include faerie tales.  So.

Jakeem and Bernard are an odd couple (Odd Couple), wherein Jakeem is the low-key nerd, and Bernard is the vision-questing Jim Morrisonesque tripping man.  He must drag his personal Ray Manzarek (Jakeem) to the ends of the earth, and this time it’s up a mountain (Mountain).  They went to a ski resort with the idea they’d meet some cool people and learn how to snowboard, but the resort is all but abandoned.  The weather report said skiing too dangerous, slopes closed, but the resort itself was still technically open, which is how they ended up with tickets while everybody else was staying home.

The skeleton crew of a staff warns them to stay inside, enjoy the cocoa by the fireplace, take in the view from the grand lodge, whatever.  But Bernard ensorcels Jakeem to follow him off a cliff, in his usual way.  The dudes end up high literally and figuratively in snowy dangerous places.  The mountain paths rely on consensus reality to stay moored in the mortal realm.  Without two hundred snowbunnies thinking it’s just a ski slope, it becomes a path to the impossible.  The guys find themselves in an ice castle, subject to palace intrigue between some talking ravens, dwarven servants, and a wicked ice witch (Folk Horror).

HORROR ELEMENT:  At first it’s all fun and games.  Jakeem teaches the ravens to smoke weed, Bernard wheedles the witch about the nature of reality, maaan.  But things take a turn for the real when the witch bites back with vindictive curses and spells (Dark Magic), leading to grim shit like raven cannibalism and horrible transformations.  All psyche stripped to the bone, what’s left of our gentlemen?  Will they ever get back to college?

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SPOOKTOBER 2024!

Spooktober is a 31 day event of coming up with original horror ideas based on prompts my writing group voted on.  Carrying forward from last year we’re having optional sub-themes and I’m trying to do them all like Debbie do Dallas.  Book covers made with midjourney and photopea.

SPOOKTOBER DAY #23 — MUTANTS
(× Beauty or Rococo or Vice & Sin)

TITLE:  Ecstasies

PREMISE:  Lisette Selys is the most beautiful girl in the world (Beauty), and what makes her ever more appealing is religious fervor.  She is prone to ecstasies in which all the saints in the statuary come to life and dance around her.  Or she’s a mutant (Mutants, also, not the preferred nomenclature dude) with a chromosomal abnormality, in a time (Rococo) before anyone knew what chromosomes were, trying to feel out their intersex condition.  And maybe epilepsy.  Some would say it’s a sin (Vice & Sin) to throw your expensive wig on the floor and make your mom cry, or to eschew god’s preferred use for those of your genital configuration, but that’s what god’s telling them to do.

HORROR ELEMENT:  God isn’t real of course, so the ecstasies reflect their mental state, and as pressure to become an adult woman increases, the visions take a dark turn.  The saints mutate (Mutants, i knew i could come up with a less offensive way to justify this) into shrieking devils, and carry Lisette where no one can touch them.

 

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SPOOKTOBER 2024!

Spooktober is a 31 day event of coming up with original horror ideas based on prompts my writing group voted on.  Carrying forward from last year we’re having optional sub-themes and I’m trying to do them all like Debbie do Dallas.  Book covers made with midjourney and photopea.

SPOOKTOBER DAY #22 — CRYPTID
(× Spoopy/Pumpkincore or Slime or Metamorphosis)

TITLE:  Check Out My Drip

PREMISE:  Lilibel is into the goth version of Tiger Beat magazine (Pumpkincore), but her favorite hot boy was last seen on a desert highway where somebody picked up him up while hitchhiking and they drove him home to a haunted house (Spoopy) but then they called to ask where he was and found out he died seven years ago or something idk (Cryptid).  Well, she did a baby witch ritual to summon him from the magazine pages, and he appeared!  Not ideal, actually.

HORROR ELEMENT:  Stavros Lugosi III emerges from a giant jack-o-lantern like it was an egg, bringing ectoplasm (Slime) like a trailing yolk that can cover the world.  If Lilibel doesn’t wanna get turned into a slime (Metamorphosis) like whatever Drake was talking about in that one song, she’ll have to undo the evil that she done.

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