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 #5 — CULT
(× 1990s or Game Show or Shyamalan Twist)

TITLE:  Kill the Lights

PREMISE:  In the late ’80s, Piper Herdez had the worst of both worlds – being exploited by a ruthless cult, then going through one of the more ethically dubious deconversions – abducted and bound, verbally abused like it was an exorcism.  But it took; now she recognizes what she was going through on the inside, and can never look at The Illumination Center (Cult) with the same eyes she used to.

Even so, she hates Gabriel Gundren -the deconversion guy her family hired- with a passion.  Her family came to see it her way as well, and are OK with her trying to snake some of his business.  She uses a variety of subtler methods to give cult members the perspective they need to escape, and targets people he was hired to snatch.

Gabriel starts to figure it out, but doesn’t have a chance to do much until, in 1992 (1990s), things come to a head.  Piper finds out he’s going after a man she knows from The Illumination Center, and she figures it’s time to use her inside knowledge to get close first.  Both of them hit on the same scheme:  infiltrating the set of the cult’s game show (Game Show), Kill the Lights.

HORROR ELEMENT:  The Illumination Center’s game show revolves around a $cientologyesque personality quiz, but played for prizes.  It’s also treated as a sort of humanist getting-to-know-yourself thing, where the studio audience awws at sympathetic moments of revelation.  Somehow this works for normies well enough that the show is a good moneymaker for the creeps.  Still, that money has to buy the cult leader’s tenth lambo, so the production is cheap.  Instead of pulling back tinsel curtains for big reveals, they turn off the studio lights, change things around, then turn them back on.

So horror:  The cloying atmosphere of a cult, the danger of being pulled back in or running afoul of the cultists, and what all can happen in that moment of dark?  Piper and Gabriel got jobs on the catering crew to get into the place.  Gabe was just going to snatch the boy and run, but he sees what Piper is up to and starts a cat-and-mouse situation with her.

The cult catches both of the infiltrators and forces them to play as contestants, bound to chairs like Gabe always used to do.  The twist (Shyamalan Twist): when the lights go out their souls are laid bare, and when the light comes on, they are Illuminated.  It’s always that the cult is right, isn’t it?

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