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 #10 — RETRO SLASHER
(× Art & Artists or Religion or Birds)

TITLE:  Nailing You to the Spanish Mystic (it’s a christian death lyric)

PREMISE:  Austria 1976, a bevy of young lady art students (Artists) become gripped by the observation that they can get admitted to the school but they can never get the praise and opportunities of the men.  Why are they even allowed in the door?  Just to give the boys somebody to lay with, they surmise, and their leader Valéria Keresztes calls their group the Harem-turned-Convent (Religion).  They take a vow of chastity and to make art that is powerfully unsexy.  Valéria in particular has a medieval flagellant’s attitude toward the body and the spirit.

HORROR ELEMENT:  Yeah, this is a giallo (Retro Slasher), so you know it’ll actually have very dubious intersection of sex and murder.  Girls and boys start dying gruesomely, but especially with the girls, there is some question – was this homicide, or a suicide borne of religious zealotry?  Nobody can pin it on Valéria, despite her being obvious suspect number one.  It’s a mystery, but maybe there’s a clue in the way the killer always stages things so that crows (Birds) can start eating the victims, messing with other evidence.

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