Spooktober is a 31 day event of coming up with original horror ideas based on prompts my writing group argues over. Not quite my last entry on the topic for this year, but this is the last of the official prompts.
SPOOKTOBER DAY #30 — Historical
TITLE: Drifting Bar Mitzvah
PREMISE: In 1993 it happened. Young Saul’s Bar Mitvah disappeared from this reality. Was it related to his uncle Ira’s experiments with physics? Probably. The old lady who rented the brownstone afterward would occasionally find her VHS copies of Falcon Crest partially over-taped with images of an especially lost tribe of Israelites.
HORROR ELEMENT: Saul’s family and friends are on some Lost in Space shit, but will they ever shift home? What if they shift into a toxic environment or the vacuum of space?
Posters by AI, modified with photoshop.
SPOOKTOBER DAY #31 — Small Creatures
TITLE: Cathemeral
PREMISE: OK, I know cats are not cathemeral, they’re crepuscular, but cathemeral has cat in the name. It means something like “active or dormant at any time of day or night.” Veronica’s sleep cycle is thrown to hell for unknown reasons, and she starts to hallucinate little movements out of the corner of her eyes. Those ultimately turn into little cat-like abominations.
HORROR ELEMENT: Unreality. Maybe the cats do messed up shit and she’s blamed for it.
SPOOKTOBER DAY #32? — Admin Choice, Retro Slasher & Giallo
TITLE: The Prom Theme is Red
PREMISE: Kids have a prom. There’s a weird girl that managed to join the prom committee despite zero popularity. Nobody likes her ideas and they ignore her. But she won’t let them get away with it!
HORROR ELEMENT: Blood, guts, a real horrorshow.
Many thanks for all the posts – great stuff, and lots of interesting ideas!
The Cathemeral entry reminds me a bit of the Small Gods entry “Obsidious, the Small god of Occluding Cats”, over on smallgodseries dot com. If you get a chance, and haven’t already, I’d suggest reading the whole thing, but just as a flavour:
“the cat is in the way because it is the nature of cats to be in the way. If the cat were not in the way, something much more terrible than the cat might rise in its absence. The cat occupies space to ensure that the space is occupied, because the space will be occupied, whether it is by the cat or by something far more terrible.”
Definitely getting those sorts of vibes here – very nice work 🙂
thanks, cutty! those cat-things were not all in the same AI image, i had to cobble them together and iron out the anatomical weirdness. tho i tried to leave some of that weirdness intact. like the one on her chest is basically a frog-cat. no idea how the AI decided that should be a thing, but I kept it froggy, heh.