Spooktober is a 31 day event of coming up with original horror ideas based on prompts my writing group argues over.  The arguing used to be fun but people are acting so weird about it this year.  Sigh.  These are my entries.

SPOOKTOBER DAY #6 — Clones

TITLE:  Doctor Philliplier

PREMISE:  It’s an early ’90s straight-to-cable midnight creepshow, now a moldy VHS retrieved from the ruins of a trailer in rural Arkansas.  You pop it in the old VHS player and it whirs to disgusting life, some intersection of Michael Keaton’s “Multiplicity” and Jeff Fahey’s “Body Parts.”

Dr. Phillips is a plastic surgeon and legit science genius, out of his mind on cocaine and narcissism.  He dabbles in womanizing on the LA punk scene, and stand-up comedy.  One night his experimental rejuvenation process goes out of control, reducing him to a pile of deformed limbs and a screaming head.  He buds clones that are much more well-formed and tries to boss them into helping out, but they are aberrant in the head.

Despite not really looking quite like him, everyone is somehow fooled.  The silver-haired one takes over his stand-up, veering the act into surreal voices and weird noises.  The lanky Lux Interior-looking one takes over the drugging and womanizing, despite only being able to mumble nonsense in an Elvis impression.

HORROR ELEMENT:  Will he ever get his body and his life back?  Good help is so hard to get.

Poster by AI, modified with photoshop.

 

SPOOKTOBER DAY #7 — Cabins

TITLE:  The Cabin of The Cyclops

PREMISE:  Dr. Jarecky is suave and beautiful, despite having lost an eye in youth.  Together with his assistant Helmut, he runs a mental health asylum in 1950s Oregon.  But all is not well.  He has a cabin retreat where he takes “special cases” – beautiful young women – for “intensive therapy.”  The girls are getting wise, and Helmut has realized that in his hubris, Dr. Jarecky has brought too many to the cabin.  The bad men are decidedly outnumbered, and these girls were locked up for reasons…

HORROR ELEMENT:  Corrupt care professionals are the real horror.  Well, at the beginning.  Later on the horror is justice.

Poster by AI, modified with photoshop.

 

SPOOKTOBER DAY #8 — Cryptids

TITLE:  Flatwoods

PREMISE:  Before she was a ghostly cryptid terrorizing modern people, Honora Knecht was an occultist in 1880s Sutton, West Virginia.  She wasn’t much of a showman, but had some fame by merit of being seven feet tall.  Sinope Locke was a daughter of power, adrift in a life not her own.  On a lark her fiancé paid for Honora to entertain at one of their parties, and Sinope fell in love.

Is it love or witchcraft?  Honora’s eyes glow red, her long fingers look like talons in lace gloves, her witch hat like the minaret of a Turkish mosque.

HORROR ELEMENT:  I could tell stable diffusion AI knew what the Flatwoods Monster was, but it refused to make a sensible result.  The horror is trying to cheap out on making art but still having to work for it lol.

Poster by AI, modified with photoshop.

 

SPOOKTOBER DAY #8 — Cryptids… ALTERNATE

TITLE:  Come With Me, Baby, to LoveLand

PREMISE:  While coming up with ideas for cryptid stories, I played with romance novel covers involving the Loveland Frog.  The fake author name is to obscure the torso, helping me spend less time making sense of that in photoshop.

HORROR ELEMENT:  Accidentally swallow a tadpole while swimming in Loveland, Ohio.  Go ahead.  Don’t be surprised if you turn into a frog.  Don’t be surprised when your lady loves you even more.  Don’t be surprised when she gives birth to horrendous amounts of tadpoles.  And don’t be surprised that it never ends.

Poster by AI, modified with photoshop.

 

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EDIT TO ADD:  In case you were curious what these look like before I try to fix them, enjoy this collage.  This will have no alt description, except to say imagine what I described above, but with varying degrees of mangling and mutation.  AI seldom gets me something I’d use unmodified, don’t know how Marcus does it.

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 — Gothic Horror

TITLE:  The Immolation of The Thornbloods

PREMISE:  Again, too much fucking around with images, not enough the spirit of writing, which is the whole point of this event.  Nonetheless, I love these subtly corrupt AI weirdos.

Kent and Mabel are the only survivors of the Thornblood dynasty – captains of industry who were largely incinerated in a suspicious tragedy at the Met Gala.  They’ve inherited fabulous wealth and evenly split control over the vast Thornblood holdings.  But the flames that consumed their parents, grandparents, siblings, and cousins are a chill breeze compared to the fire in their hearts.

Patricia Coltheart is a mysterious socialite who walks the halls of power, fidgeting with a riding crop for mysterious reasons.  I mean, mysterious if you have never heard of sadomasochism, but whatever.  This equestrienne sets her sights on the sibling steeds and rides them for all they’re worth.  Wait, this was supposed to be a horror, not a porno.  Um…

She’s actually really innocent at heart, despite her sexual playfulness, and doesn’t know what fate she’s tempting in playing these two against each other.  Does she love one or the other or both?  But then, what if they kill each other?  Things come to a head during a weekend retreat at a gloomy cavernous estate overlooking a lake.  A summer storm.  Secret trysts.  Violence ‘n’ stuff.

Patricia looks at the sky, rain and tears on her face.  Is she dying?  I’d have to decide if I wrote it, lol.

HORROR ELEMENT:  It’s not easy having a good time.  How do you decide where to stop?  What if it’s too late?  Is this the same as I said yesterday?  Yes it is.  Frightening.

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 #4 — Alternate Dimensions

TITLE:  The Choking Game

PREMISE:  I admit, I come up with a prompt for the AI that vaguely fits the idea, then come up with the story to match.  Lotte and Calvin are middle school kids that get into the classic kid’s dare of choking yourself or your friends unconscious.  Yeah, bad idea kids.  But the world seems to change when they’re out of breath, and as they share what they saw, they realize they’re seeing the same thing.  Are they getting access to a different realm of existence?  Anything is better than where they live, right?

Lotte starts to see a golden-eyed man in a bowtie, who never looks at her, just looks to the sky and rambles endlessly in some broken version of the Book of Psalms.  What does it all mean, Lotte?  Keep looking, keep listening.  Never mind what your hands are doing to Calvin’s throat.

HORROR ELEMENT:  It’s not easy having a good time.  How do you decide where to stop?  What if it’s too late?

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 #3 — Undead

TITLE:  Veinous Venus

PREMISE:  The title of the story is surreal foolery culled from the shape of the nonsense letters in the original AI image.  Three young lovers in the 1960s realize their love really works – no jealousy, no pain, pure ecstasy.  And yet youth must someday pass them by.  They cannot bear the loss of that golden moment, and resort to weird occult studies.

Caroline is the center of their relationship, the main object of physical affection, but they’re otherwise fairly mutual.  Renee has a more care-giving role, Arthur the pointy head and intellectualizer of their crimes.  They achieve a kind of immortality through undeath, using an unsavory ritual to mortify themselves.  But they just traded one kind of decline for another.  Instead of the usual signs of aging, they are becoming exaggerations of decay.  Eyes discolor and hollow, limbs draw taut, verminous lines writhe below Caroline’s flesh.  They’re fading slower than with natural age, but must wonder if it was worth it, and what the grim future holds.

HORROR ELEMENT:  Mild body horror of spooky ghouls fading away, existential melancholy in the face of inevitability.

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 #2 — Cursed Object

TITLE:  Sweden

PREMISE:  I had no idea for this one.  Fucked around with AI way too long to get some images to composite.  The title is just what I was able to tease out of some cool-looking gibberish characters.  But David Lynch once made a whole-ass movie with no script and less than half an idea, so…

“Great Count Acar appears in the likeness of a cicada, and upon taking human form, speaks with a raucous voice.  He is the prince of flies and locusts, and, should the summoner so desire, may confer upon him the power to bind cicadas and the like.  The summoner must fashion an image of him in bronze or another metal, to secure said power.  Acar rules love between men and women, gives true responses to questions of present, past, and future, and has twenty legions under his power.”

Roberta found this label on a yellowed parchment tucked within a strange artifact – a metal statuette of a cicada perched on a box with open faces, so encrusted with oxidation as to seem like a chunk of black stone.  It was embedded in the basement stones of her rented cottage in a small English suburb.  Occult antiquities could be valuable, but she was too busy with life to polish it up and make inquiries.

All around her, relationships were falling apart.  Her friends were getting divorces, or splitting up.  At last her own boyfriend said they should break up so he could take a job in Sweden.  Is there no love in this world?  No romance?  Must all passion fade before practical things?  As she pondered this, drunk on wine, the empty box of the artifact flickered to life with a golden ring of light.  Her eyes locked on the light and she knew she was understood.

Her friends all started getting back together.  Acar rules love between men and women.  But they were all too passionate, too freaky.  Worst, the more passionate they became, the more they were swarmed with all manner of insects.  Only Roberta could see them, not the lovers or any bystanders, but they alarmed her quite powerfully.

At last her own man returned from Sweden, in a grand romantic gesture.  There were no bugs around, but Roberta had a very bad feeling, could sense vibrations like a million insect wings in the air.  Still, he had her.  They began to disrobe right inside the front door of the cottage, barely letting the door shut.  Kiss, kiss, caress.  But when she touched his side it cracked apart like an eggshell.  Underneath pulsed the segmented flesh of a giant insect.

HORROR ELEMENT:  I hate any bug one inch or larger in size.  I tolerate them outdoors, but if I see them in a house, you can bet I’m flying across the room in a panic.  Y tu?

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.
(EDITED:  I wasn’t clear what the prompt was or how this met that criteria before.)

SPOOKTOBER DAY #1 — Competition

TITLE:  Stay Safe

PREMISE:  Markiplier was warned.  100 days, 100 nights of danger on the wicked streets of Los Angeles – two gangs were having a challenge to see who could kill the most people.  But the gangs were not going on the rumored rampage, and he felt safe.  Police cruisers patrolled orderly streets.  He didn’t realize the gangs about to initiate the killing spree were rolling those very same cruisers – hiding behind shiny badges, with murder in their blue hearts.

HORROR ELEMENT:  Markimoo is hunted by gangs within the LAPD, and only street gangs can ultimately save him.  A story ripped from the headlines, babey.

Poster by AI, modified with photoshop.