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 #21 — HAUNTED HOUSE
(× Home Invasion or Dark Secrets or Toys & Dolls)

TITLE:  Get Them Girls

PREMISE:  Some lil native girls were in a terrible catholic boarding school for abducted children (Dark Secrets), when in a strange inversion of history, all the adults died of disease, leaving the lil girls alone.  What spirits wrought this havoc?  One of them brought a corn-silk doll (Toys & Dolls) with her and accidentally invested it with real sorcery.  Kids these days.

HORROR ELEMENT:  Spirits can be vengeful whether they deserve to be or not.  The shitbird colonizers got theirs fair and square, but they still came back as angry ghosts to kill the girls (Haunted House).  It’s spirit vs. spirit, making the house unlivable, however… the girls still want to live there.  They don’t know if, or don’t believe, that they have parents to return to, and are more afraid of being taken again (Home Invasion).

When the feds come to get them girls (roll credits), it’s emotional and supernatural 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.

SPOOKTOBER DAY #20 — HISTORICAL
(× Party or Rumors & Scandal or Body Snatcher)

TITLE:  The Body of Christ

PREMISE:  So many political agendas derived from Young Jeezy, this and that interpretation of his historicity (Historical) and importance, what he said and what it meant.  It was inevitable that time travelers would try to throw shit in the game (Rumors & Scandal).  But they couldn’t go back in person.  They had to send clone avatars (Body Snatchers).  The tech works best when you send a clone that doesn’t look like anyone in particular, but if you aim for a given guy’s likeness and persona, you end up with a lot of corrupt copies.  They send the everyman clones to manipulate public opinion, to shill for their preferred beliefs, and they send the attempted jesi to attend The Last Supper (Party).

HORROR ELEMENT:  You are the son of man and about to get betrayed with a kiss from your home boy Judas, but Judas doesn’t know who to kiss, because there are about twenty of you on the scene, at least four of which are close enough to bewitch the mind.  What the hell is going on here?

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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 #19 — BODY HORROR
(× Beach or YouTube/Streaming or Lovecraftian)

TITLE:  Live From Necropolis Beach

PREMISE:  Linda Fong gets her big break as a correspondent, live reporting (Streaming) from Party Beach (Beach) on local news.  But the beach used to be a city of the dead, in the time before time, and the stars are right for the return of the ancients (Lovecraftian) – just in time for spring break!

HORROR ELEMENT:  Evil Dead basically, in broad daylight.  The demonic entities that claim living bodies of beach revelers don’t seem to have much respect for the flesh they’re in, and all sorts of vile mutilation is had by all (Body Horror).  How will Linda survive, and what will be left of her?

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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 #18 — REVENANT
(× 1950s or Lynchian or Lost Media)

TITLE:  The Last Record of Johnny Fire

PREMISE:  Johnny Fire is just utterly unknown.  Only some antiquarians and centenarians remember his rock ‘n’ roll career in the early ’50s (1950s), but among those, nobody can lay claim to a copy of his last record (Lost Media), Skippin’ Town.  Just how did those songs go anyway?  One creepy old KKK dude can remember a few of those songs well enough, because he murdered the young man, and took a perverse joy in learning about his victim after the fact.

Racist old Virgil is in for a treat.  He finds the record one day in his collection, as if it had never been missing in the first place.  Funny, the cover doesn’t look like he remembered it.  Some songs are the same as he recalled, but others?  Were they always that morbid?

HORROR ELEMENT:  One night Johnny (Revenant) comes dancing across the disc, tiny as a mouse (Lynchian), and flies off the edge into the magic moonlight.  It’s time to murder a guy, but how is it fair for the fucker to have lived an entire-ass life consequence free?  No, every single moment he’s ever had must be taken away.  Just as Johnny’s record was magically there like it had never been lost, so the history of Virgil’s life must be rewritten – and replaced, with that of an aging and healthy Johnny.  And what will be the last thing Virgil experiences before he ceases to be?  Beaten, burned on a cross, drowned?  So many possibilities.

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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 #17 — PSYCHIC
(× Lifetime/Mom Movie or Lighthouse or Amnesia)

TITLE:  Olivier

PREMISE:  Thérèse works and lives in the lighthouse (Lighthouse) with her special little child, a working single mom (Mom Movie).  Little Olivier is barely able to move, perhaps muscular dystrophy?  Hard to know; she doesn’t get to hospitals.  Too busy.  She doesn’t know why she doesn’t have a second adult in the building to trade shifts with.  She doesn’t remember giving birth to Olivier and doesn’t remember his father (Amnesia).  She just knows that her little guy is precious and weak and will just die if she doesn’t help him in every little way.

HORROR ELEMENT:  Olivier isn’t an immaculate conception.  He was just born with a spiritual mutation that crippled his body and expanded his mental powers.  He is psychic (Psychic), and having underdeveloped empathy and ability to care for others, has used those powers selfishly.  Anything that might keep maman away has been suppressed or erased.  The memories were easy.  But what did Olivier do with the other lighthouse keeper?

If I did this one, I’d emphasize that Thérèse’s love is not forced; it is real.  And Olivier will grow up to be capable of unselfish love as well.  There is room in the world for creepy kid stories but it’s not my preference.  I think there’s still room for a lot of terrible horror content while still retaining kiddo’s humanity.

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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 #16 — WITCH/WIZARD
(× Psychedelic/Stoner or Rural/Backwoods or Monkey’s Paw)

TITLE:  Abuela Desastra

PREMISE:  Stoners in Sierra Blanca know that if you partake of peyote (Psychedelic) when your heart is broken, she’ll appear out of the desert (Rural) – an old lady in a hat and poncho, who will grant you a single wish.  Of course, that doesn’t go well (Monkey’s Paw), and the wishes of the broken-hearted tend to follow a certain theme.  For a little place in the middle of nowhere, Sierra Blanca has a lot of drama going on.

HORROR ELEMENT:  Is she a nagual?  A hallucination?  A bruja (Witch)?  Is she even an abuela?  What does she have to do with the corruption of love?  Fiction has us all accustomed to spooky ideas, not easily spooked, but this would be creepy if real.

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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 #14 — VAMPIRES
(× Baroque or Teeth or Ice & Snow)

TITLE:  Miasma Dracula

PREMISE:  Park Yoon-Joon is a creepy dude obsessed with draculae and horror.  Around christmas time (Ice & Snow) at a haunted antique store in Seoul, he finds a rococo (Baroque) vase which contains Vlad Țepeș in mist form.  Good times for Yoon-Joon, bad times for Dracula.  The old vampire, being in mist form, was barely sentient, and his identity and the memory of what he once was became corrupted over the centuries.

HORROR ELEMENT:  Yoon-Joon immediately turns himself into a vampire (Vampire), but finds when he tries to make more vampires, they just disintegrate in his hands.  However, they become part of a blood-sucking mist that he can control, which manifests fangs (Teeth) or vampire faces to attack its victims.  Is there a modern Van Helsing in Korea that can stop him before he takes over the world?

 

SPOOKTOBER DAY #15 — MUMMY
(× Gothic or Asylum/Prison or Conspiracy)

TITLE:  Keep it Together

PREMISE:  Holden Poulat was in a gang of cosmopolitan ne’er-do-wells, thieves, and homosexuals, until a very intricate caper (Conspiracy) in Egypt involving seductions and palace intrigue (Gothic) failed disastrously, leading to most of the crew being summarily executed and the rest being consigned to a terrifying desert prison (Prison).  The commandant Entwhistle was a British Egyptologist, allowed to hold this position by the breakaway Turkish sultanate because his methods were amusingly grisly.

Holden wakes up to find he’s become a mummy (Mummy).  All of his organs have been stolen and placed in canopic jars who knows where.  The commandant didn’t do such a great job of stitching him up, and Holden has to keep what’s left of his innards in place by improvising mummy wraps out of tarpaulin, rags, and pitch.

HORROR ELEMENT:  Body horror, of course.  Holden is in denial about being dead, convinced if he can get all his organs back, he’ll be fine.  One of the only other survivors of the gang, Montfort, is in the prison with him, and tells Holden he’s become a stereotypical monster of lore – the vengeful mummy out for grisly trophies.  But Holden says no, and bullies Montfort into helping with his campaign of organ-snatching.

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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 #12 — ALTERNATE DIMENSIONS
(× Stephen King Style or Scary Room or Medical)

TITLE:  The God in the Alcove (it’s a Bauhaus lyric)

PREMISE:  Joshua Creighton is a psychic youth with an innate connection to other mediums, and a sense of obligation to resolve ghostly issues in the world.  He assembles a team of quirky white people (Stephen King Style) to understand and exorcise the deceased victims of an oppressive catholic hospital (Medical) where anesthesia was scorned.

HORROR ELEMENT:  There’s one room all the ghosts and ghouls avoid (Scary Room), where the Worst Thing Ever resides.  Joshua assumes it’s the priest / doctor who presided over their suffering, but the room is a portal to an alternate universe of pure evil (Alternate Dimensions).  The god-like creature that occasionally visits the threshold can, in those moments, send out psychic waves that fuck up all ghosts and mediums in the building.  What will happen if it comes all the way out of the alcove?

 

SPOOKTOBER DAY #13 — WERECREATURES
(× 1980s or Creepy Kid or Mascot Horror)

TITLE:  Funny Animals

PREMISE:  Shawn Voltkamp is a cartoon maniac (Creepy Kid) in 1987 (1980s) Champlain, Illinois.  Oh, thinks he, that this too solid flesh could not melt, thaw, and resolve itself into a painting on celluloid.  To be a funny animal is to be immortal, an undying jester who may tweak the nose of any and all, however one sees fit (Mascot Horror).

HORROR ELEMENT:  idk he’s bitten by a bugs bunny or some shit.  No, no, don’t do that.  Let’s say Shawn was part of a lineage of shape-shifting monsters from the Black Forest of Germany – most manifesting as werewolves (Werecreatures), but all having the possibility of choosing a different alternate form.  Shawn’s TV-demented psyche makes him into a hellish shadow chipmunk.  Howwible.

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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.

Today I’m getting married (this was queued), so it’s a good time to break my comment policies, if you don’t mind getting banned when I return.

SPOOKTOBER DAY #11 — GIANT MONSTER
(× 1920s or Women’s Lit/Chick-Flick or Office)

TITLE:  One Leggy Dame!!

PREMISE:  In a sorta 1920s-ish (1920s) alternate world (maybe the same retrofuture metropolis as Mutant Reign?), the fashion magazine editor Astél Bartók has two young ladies working for her as interns (Office), Zina Hassman and Flora Leiter.  It’s some Devil Wears Prada business (Chick-Flick), until evil girlboss Astél becomes a giant monster (Giant Monster).

HORROR ELEMENT:  How did this happen?  Flora is aware her best friend Zina has psychic powers and is not mentally well.  Zina develops a masochistic crush on Astél, and reality comes to reflect the outsized place the boss has in Zina’s imagination – the “step on me mommy” fantasies of web weirdos come to life.

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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 #10 — RETRO SLASHER
(× Art & Artists or Religion or Birds)

TITLE:  Nailing You to the Spanish Mystic (it’s a christian death lyric)

PREMISE:  Austria 1976, a bevy of young lady art students (Artists) become gripped by the observation that they can get admitted to the school but they can never get the praise and opportunities of the men.  Why are they even allowed in the door?  Just to give the boys somebody to lay with, they surmise, and their leader Valéria Keresztes calls their group the Harem-turned-Convent (Religion).  They take a vow of chastity and to make art that is powerfully unsexy.  Valéria in particular has a medieval flagellant’s attitude toward the body and the spirit.

HORROR ELEMENT:  Yeah, this is a giallo (Retro Slasher), so you know it’ll actually have very dubious intersection of sex and murder.  Girls and boys start dying gruesomely, but especially with the girls, there is some question – was this homicide, or a suicide borne of religious zealotry?  Nobody can pin it on Valéria, despite her being obvious suspect number one.  It’s a mystery, but maybe there’s a clue in the way the killer always stages things so that crows (Birds) can start eating the victims, messing with other evidence.

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