I’m doing a thing with some people to do 31 horror story concepts within October…
SPOOKTOBER DAY #23 — Werewolf
TITLE: Touch Me I’m Sick
PREMISE: A teenager thinks they’re smoking a wolfsbane blunt, but it’s actually lupin buds. They catch the lycanthropy. Who cares?, he thinks. It’s cool to do drugs and get sick. But misery loves company so he tries to get all his friends werewolf’d by various means. It’s like a Larry Clark youthsploitation movie.
HORROR ELEMENT: Werewolfery manifests in many ways. Could be a sore opens up on your body shaped like a little wolf snout and you have to cover it with heavy bandages, could be your feet randomly turn into dog feet for a week and you can’t walk right or wear shoes. Could be you barf up a pile of claws and teeth, or howl at random in class. Teen Patient Zero gains enough control to make a snout come out of his palm and drool into people’s drinks and roofie them with lycanthropy.
SPOOKTOBER DAY #24 — Gothic
TITLE: Pumpkin Throwdown
PREMISE: To me the gothic genre is about a sensitive soul being oppressed by dark circumstances. I did that already for my Southern Gothic so I wanna do something different here. I choose to interpret the prompt as “goth,” and am flavoring that toward Nightmare Before Christmas type stuff.
Every year the big kids fuck up Halloween by going around in flannel shirts and cheap masks, pillowcases ready to get stuffed with loot beaten out of the lil kids. It’s time for lil kid revenge. Also there’s a battle of the bands or something. Big kid band is like, somewhere between Queens of the Stone Age and Monster Magnet. Lil kid band is like The Cure in carny mode.
It’ll start with the days leading up to Halloween, people picking costumes and stuff, big kid band sabotaging lil kid band and such. The lil kids will come up with a scheme to keep big kids from getting their candy. Main part of the action will be the battle of Halloween night, and the denouement will be battle of the bands, for a musical closer. I don’t know if the big kids learn their lesson and make nice, or if they remain mean and get defeated by the righteous, but it’s gotta be kid friendly.
HORROR ELEMENT: Less horror, more Halloween.
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I like all the body horror in 23. One of my teachers said that the entire werewolf genre is just a metaphor for puberty: “Where did all that hair come from all of a sudden? I’m turning into a monster!”
Same thing with Frankenstein’s monster: “I feel as if my body is put together wrong!”
i feel like of the concepts, i might do something with this one. i’m influenced by that weird US video for Rammstein’s Du Riechst So Gut and Neil Jordan’s In the Company of Wolves, or my dim recollections of them run thru a David Cronenberg filter. might change the milieu, but that version of werewolfism appeals to me.
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