Spooktober is a 31 day event of coming up with original horror ideas based on prompts my writing group argues over.  These are my entries.  Also don’t miss my big catch-up post for missed days.

SPOOKTOBER DAY #22 — Southern Gothic

TITLE:  Charleston Sweat

PREMISE:  In 1960s Charleston, racial disparity was still egregious, and violence against protesters had already been going on for years.  Lazy rich rock and roll boys Dusty and Jim took drugs and drifted between the yacht club scene of Dusty’s parents and the black night club scene, where they sometimes played in rock bands slightly hipper than the Sparkletones.

They met Paula at a yachting to-do, and she begged them to show the world outside her sheltered upbringing.  Love triangle ensues, with Paula favoring the less sexy, more soulful and sad-eyed Jim.  Dusty can’t be cruel to her about it, but does find himself tempted to murder his BFF.  Meanwhile, Paula gets into drugs and such.

HORROR ELEMENT:  A background radiation of the horrific violence of racist oppression creeps around the edges of otherwise limpid and bright places.  There’s blood on the decks, matey.  The foreground white people realize on some level that they’re in a fantasy world build on enslaved flesh, but the hard work of doing anything meaningful about it is unimaginable.  The poison gets to them.

Poster by AI, modified with photoshop.

Spooktober is a 31 day event of coming up with original horror ideas based on prompts my writing group argues over.  These are my entries.

SPOOKTOBER DAY #18 — Revenant

TITLE:  Len Ross

PREMISE:  My parents were messed up people with an out of control life and three kids to haul around.  To get by they sometimes had to rely on help from parents that they did not love.  When we moved from California to Washington when I was very young, that meant switching from the paternal grandparents to the maternal set.

My sister’s birthday came around shortly after we got to this state.  Grandparents got her a gift – a cabbage patch kid, as was the thing at the time.  This was upsetting to my brother and I, then something like five and seven years old.  Why does she get something and we don’t?  We had been getting gifts at xmas, but all we got at b’days was cake.  We didn’t know birthday gifts were a thing.

To settle the acrimony, at some point my brother and I got cabbage patch kids.  Mine had hair made of little peach yarn loops similar to the color of his skin, and was named Len Ross.  I don’t recall how we played with those dolls, but we did.

But my brother and I grew into angry young men, in the usual way.  We blamed our childhood strife on our father’s drug use and, despite being into grunge, were very prejudiced against drug users.  When playing our Alice in Chains tape, we’d pause shortly after “Rooster” began and flip it, so the B side would start after “Junkhead” was over.  (Unrelated note, I now find the latter song darkly hilarious and never skip it.)

Len Ross, forgotten, lost, dead.  From the mist of time he emerges, now a twisted image of everything I once despised.  I’m back, father.  Can you spare me twenty-five dollars?  I need it for a greyhound ticket.  Just this one thing, man.

HORROR ELEMENT:  Honest art from me is bound to be scary lol.

Posters by AI, modified with photoshop.

 

SPOOKTOBER DAY #19 — Clown / Circus

TITLE:  Big Top Poppy

PREMISE:  Poppy the Clown is queen of the Van Klavert Big Top Travelling Circus.  She’s got all the clown chops, but dresses more like a showgirl, which turned out to be a crowd-pleasing combo.  While everybody does like her, behind the scenes some villainy is afoot.  Ringmaster Grooseus Van Klavert is a closeted clown chaser who takes out his inner strife on the young lady.

He uses his tyrannical control over the performers to get away with escalating public acts of sadism against Poppy for various imaginary offenses.  Sometimes these involve being locked inside the boxes or glass cages of escape artists and stage magicians.  This escalates from hours to whole nights at a time, when she isn’t needed for performance.

One day Poppy disappears and Grooseus is suspiciously mum about the reason why.  On the assumption he finally killed her, knife thrower Janice the Blade snaps.  She organizes the entire circus to dress up in her costume and haunt him, before hunting him down and killing him.  A lady performer with dwarfism and a soft spot for the vicious ringmaster finds Poppy alive in a chest in his private trailer and goes to prevent the mob justice, but is too late.

HORROR ELEMENT:  Psychosexual drama, oppression, violence, and murder.

 

SPOOKTOBER DAY #20 — Nautical / Underwater

TITLE:  A Typhoon

PREMISE:  A young businessman, his wife, and her best friend are touring Southeast Asia, combining his business with their pleasure.  He works for a shitty US agricultural concern, cutting exploitative deals with local governments and businesses willing to fuck their own people to death – though he seldom sees the fruit of those efforts, and has no imagination for how dire the realities are.

A descendant of Spanish colonists, proud to have no local ancestry, has a fairy-tale European-styled hacienda on a small island in the Philippines.  Businessboy and his ladies take shelter there as a typhoon approaches.  The master of the house is very genial with them, but as they catch glimpses of his atrocities, the relationship sours.  They realize they are in a place where nobody checks the authority of a brutal patriarch, and nobody will know what happened to them if they never leave.

HORROR ELEMENT:  Wet wetness.  The violence of the elements and the violence of mans.  You don’t wanna know what happens to ladies in the Mermaid Room.

 

SPOOKTOBER DAY #21 — Surreal Horror

TITLE:  Heaven Within Hell

PREMISE:  The Woman in the Red Dress lives in an abandoned, stripped-out church building.  Every day she wakes up there are masses of severed hands growing out of a well-like structure where the altar used to be.  She ferries them to an incinerator in the basement to get rid of them, shows a great distaste for them.  But she is getting more thin and ill, showing signs of starvation.  The hands look tempting – still disgusting, but tempting.  When her stomach growls, a demonic red face can be seen on it for a moment.  When her mind is contemplating something terrible, the face appears in her hair.

HORROR ELEMENT:  She starts eating the hands.  At first she’s careful to cook and season them just so, and still gags as she tries to force the meat down.  But eventually she just mashes them up and slurps them down raw.  Time passes and the demon face is no longer a phantom, but a physical growth across her chest and abdomen, like a parasitic twin.  She eats through that maw while her head lolls as if dead.  The end.

The other horror element is that the name makes no sense.  Have a nice day!

–

Spooktober is a 31 day event of coming up with original horror ideas based on prompts my writing group argues over.  These are my entries.

SPOOKTOBER DAY #17 — Monkey’s Paw

TITLE:  Poppies Will Make Us Sleep

PREMISE:  This genre is supposed to be scenarios where something desirable comes with a horrible twist.  I don’t think I did a great job of that, but at least I did it fast.

Youths at the gothiest private school in NYC aren’t feeling the future and are tempted by escape.  They are found with a flower in hand and flowers growing all around their bodies, whether found on soil, concrete, or a basketball court.  They’re asleep and they won’t wake up.  Seemingly unrelated incident – a new band starts up and they take new student Isaid as the vocalist.  “Les Amis de Dorothée” hypnotize the crowds and take the city by storm, despite their youth.  Will Isaid’s parents allow this extracurricular activity?  What will be the price of this fame?

HORROR ELEMENT:  Oblivion’s cold allure.

Poster by AI, modified with photoshop.

 

 

Spooktober is a 31 day event of coming up with original horror ideas based on prompts my writing group argues over.  These are my entries.

SPOOKTOBER DAY #16 — Dark Fantasy

TITLE:  Blades of Blasphemia

PREMISE:  The Ascetic Order of the Scourge Dragon wants everybody to wear concealing clothes and toil unto death for the reptilian savior.  Ximura starts a revolution against them, assuming the name of Blasphemia.

Incidentally, this image was generated by the same prompt as the “Josefina’s Descent” cover, this one shading more Frazetta than the other.  Also, anyone who knows about AI knows I photoshopped that hand in, haha.  First row of google results for “hand gripping knife.”

HORROR ELEMENT:  The AOSD priests are low-key cenobites but less fun.  How can she hope to win against the only government anyone has ever known?

Poster by AI, modified with photoshop.

 

Hey whatcha think, sisters?  Maybe I should write something about these two, if it’s not too ‘sploitive.

 

 

Spooktober is a 31 day event of coming up with original horror ideas based on prompts my writing group argues over.  These are my entries.

SPOOKTOBER DAY #15 — Found Footage or Epistolary

TITLE:  The Oriental

PREMISE:  A mysterious woman joins a circle of upper class Parisian layabouts.  She claims to be from Turkey but eventually it’s revealed by the knowledgeable that her accent is all wrong.  Scheherezade-style, she’s full of stories.  It takes a while but people realize the stories are cursed mirrors of their own lives, leading them into doom.  Told with a mix of the woman’s stories and the letters and journals of victims.

HORROR ELEMENT:  You know, the exotical Orient is full of scary barbarians that mean to destroy christendom and stuff, right?  Foreigners so scary.

Poster by AI, modified with photoshop.

Spooktober is a 31 day event of coming up with original horror ideas based on prompts my writing group argues over.  These are my entries.

SPOOKTOBER DAY #14 — Subterranean

TITLE:  Josefina’s Descent

PREMISE:  For the image I used prompts involving a celebrity latina I find lovely and chose the result that looked the least like her, and the unusual figure is a result of using the style of Bougereau.  I thought the results were pleasing, though her skimpy clothing were much more bizarre before I photoshopped them.  Anyway…

Josefina was at the club and ate a funny pill.  Suddenly nothing in the world made sense.  When she tried to get away by going outside, getting some air, it was even worse.  Pawing at the walls, waving off interested demons as they offer help, she discovers things make more sense the farther she goes down – first into the basement, then the sub-basement, then the labyrinth.  The demons that tagged along start to look like her friends, the walls start to look less like a roiling maelstrom of rubber halloween masks and exotic desserts, but where exactly has she led them?

HORROR ELEMENT:  First up, freaky hallucinations, stranger danger in tha cloughb.  Second, what does it mean to be nowhere?  Are you dead?  Can you ever come back?

Poster by AI, modified with photoshop.

Spooktober is a 31 day event of coming up with original horror ideas based on prompts my writing group argues over.  These are my entries.

SPOOKTOBER DAY #13 — Folk Horror

TITLE:  See to Thy Soul

PREMISE:  Colette is on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and her wealthy family is only good for one thing – giving her enough money to run away from time to time.  She’s wondering if she’s missed something in spurning christianity and reads a travel story about an isolated English village that has adopted radical christian beliefs.  They talk about caring for the soul as if it was a distinct creature within you, that can be coaxed out, talked with, groomed for heaven.  She gives it a go.

At first she is shocked by the visions, the ability to see a soul as if it’s physically present in their rituals.  When she doesn’t feel any closer to god over the experiences, she begins to wonder what the ghostly manifestations are.  They look like the person they are attached to, but somewhat liquid, not at all transparent or glowing.

HORROR ELEMENT:  The village sits over a deposit of oil-like mineral containing many alien entities.  They can extrude the oil like ectoplasm to take a human-like form, as long as they remain near the human.  The aliens want different things – have personal agendas – but are generally allied to each other, realizing they’re alone in the world.  Through enough of the cultist rites, they can ultimately enter the bodies of said cultists or tourists, and spread beyond the oil pit as a slimy conspiracy.  Will Colette survive?

Poster by AI, modified with photoshop.

Spooktober is a 31 day event of coming up with original horror ideas based on prompts my writing group argues over.  These are my entries.

At about this time last year, 2021, in my boyfriend’s Spooktober entries..

SPOOKTOBER DAY ELEVEN — CYBERPUNK — “The Green Eye”

Premise:  The MC is a little girl, born blind in a desolate, futuristic city.  There are great advances in medical technology, but very few can afford it.  People are regularly murdered for their medical implants, and scavengers pick over bodies to steal precious metals to sell.  The little girl’s father is a talented inventor, and spends years developing a cybernetic implant that can cure her blindness.  He creates a prototype, giving her sight in one eye for the first time in her life.  Before he can release the plans for the implant into the world, the father is assassinated by a powerful medical mega-corp who want to patent the device for themselves.  The plans were lost, so now they need the prototype in the little girl’s skull…

Horror Element:  The little girl is hounded by cyberpunk hitmen and creeps.

SUDDENLY, SEYMOUR…

SPOOKTOBER 2022 DAY #10 — Cyber’d Punke

TITLE:  The Green Eye 2: Cyber Snatcher

PREMISE:  A filmmaking acolyte of Luc Besson loved the sexy young lady who played one of the half-blind girl’s oppressors and immediately got her a deal to reprise the role.  In Cyber Snatcher, Zeroine is inexplicably reframed as a hero.  She only snatches implants non-lethally, figuring the marks can always scrounge up for a new one or go without.  But when BioSynth Medicorp comes for her gf’s liver, it’s time to switch to live ammo in her shotgun.

HORROR ELEMENT:  Zeroine’s day job before her goody turn is body horrors-ish.  Also the ostensibly empowered lady character is filmed luridly in a way that makes lady audience members feel uncomfortably self-aware.

Poster by AI, modified with photoshop.

 

 

 

Spooktober is a 31 day event of coming up with original horror ideas based on prompts my writing group argues over.  These are my entries.

SPOOKTOBER DAY #5 — Lovecraft, Ian

TITLE:  Brute Fetish

PREMISE:  A trans fella is attempting to reconcile his religious feelings with his lived reality, in the hardest way possible.  He’s becoming a priest, at a vaguely liberal church that’s not quite 100% on him.  His girlfriend is cool with it because Jesus got her off the heroins.  His mom is instead reconciling her own religious feelings, with the help of a stone fetish of an obscure aeon, a fang-grinned undead face over a mass of tentacles.  If a community of Christ can’t bring her daughter into accord with nature, than an older god will suffice.

HORROR ELEMENT:  Transphobias, lovecraft nonsense, you know the drill.

Poster by AI, modified with photoshop.