SPOOKTOBER DAY 3 – GHOSTS
OPTIONAL CHALLENGES: FOREST, TIME CAPSULE, FEAR OF HEIGHTS
TAROT INFLUENCE: KING OF WANDS, UPRIGHT, AND THE HIGH PRIESTESS, UPRIGHT
TITLE: FRESH FRUIT FOR ROTTING VEGETABLES
Premise: Ancient priests of eldritch gods used to cast strange blessings on their peoples, or curses on their enemies. One tribe was always known for returning as ghosts (GHOSTS) and avenging themselves against any who would kill them, by the power of their high priest. A rival tribe from the mountains, knowing this, took them prisoner without killing them, and threw them from a great height (FEAR OF HEIGHTS) into a crevasse – en masse. Using a power bestowed by their high priest, they shot enchanted arrows at the bodies, which in turn grew into trees, whose roots tied their ghosts down in the soil (TIME CAPSULE).
Sellouts in the fascist-capitalist regime have given all the farmland to corporations in exchange for gold-plated cocaine, telling the girls to just farm the rocky mountainside. When the girls find the forested (FOREST) crevasse, they figure the lagomorphs and mountain cats need to take one for the team, and clear the trees to grow potatoes.
The Villain: Him What Hath The Gnarliest Club (KING OF WANDS) is the god of the mountain people. They went extinct, but he woke up and found colonizers to his liking, vicariously consuming their gold-plated cocaine from the astral plane. He’s a mile long snake with a jaguar at each end and hummingbird heads sprouting along the serpentispiece like flower buds. Don’t worry about it.
Horror Element: The potatoes grow spectacularly into a rotting mass, which fertilizes huge, bizarre, sweet fruits. Ectoplasm is not recommended fertilizer. Alima takes a test bite and doesn’t die, so they take them thangs down the mountain to sell. They hatch like eggs into monsters which grow in size by eating rich white people. Once they’ve reached full size, they turn into confused people from a long-lost tribe, and have to get jobs at Ualmarto. Alima is possessed by the priest (HIGH PRIESTESS) of the lost tribe and tries to get the band back together. Maybe she’ll have to become a shift manager.
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This year I’m using AI tools from goog and openai plus photopea to make my covers. This is gemini’s chance to shine, in its own goofy way, as it was more successful than openai’s biz at translating my abominable skench.
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‘fresh fruit for rotten greens’?
In Spanish, it implies a trade/exchange.
(What I see is ‘Tiger Tiger’, but for leopards in one’s face)
The Colour Out of Space meets The Army of Darkness, all you need is to throw in a Lucha-masked wrestler and you would add Jesus Christ: Vampire Slayer. That’s one of my wife’s favorite movies. Jesus returns to modern-day Toronto to fight lesbian vampires with a Lucha wrestler sidekick, and it’s a musical. If you don’t know it, look it up. I suspect it would be right in your line.
I can see this one played for gross laughs, as serious horror I think there are too many horrific elements to really focus on one. I feel that too many horror elements in one production can dilute the horror. If there are multiple baddies (the original tribe which curses their own people to come back as ghosts, the second tribe which defeats the ghosts but ties them to the land, the evil corporation wanting to till a forbidden/cursed valley, and a market selling cursed food), they might all make sense but the reader/viewer might find it difficult to be properly horrified by one when there are so many steps of horror in the chain. In a comedy a chain of coincidences can make it funnier. That’s a form of humor the author Tom Sharpe tends to use. I’m not personally very fond of his books, but I’m not really the intended audience for them which makes the comedy slightly off target for me.
“Alima picked the first potato she dug up. It’s golden skin shining in the sun, wholesome and tasty looking. A quick squeeze to check on its ripeness ruptured that dream. It’s skin burst like an over-filled condom, covering her hand with thick, white, slightly rotten potato pulp, dripping to the ground.”
jm – that’s no accident. goog translate said “para” but i’d always read that dk album name as an exchange – we’ve replaced your fresh fruit with rotting vegetables – so i looked it up to see which spanish “for” is used in those situations.
flex – spot on. i hadn’t given thought to how it would actually play out, but having read your post, lean toward comedy action / survival horror.
since the monsters want revenge and their murderers are long dead, they go after their god’s new tribe – cocaine whites. i think alima goes zuul and leads the monsters on a rampage, and her sisters try to save the white people, with boomsticks and foolery.
in the end the surviving monsters turn into innocent people and the sisters feel a little bad about how many they exploded. maybe possessed alima sees the ghosts of the non-reincarnated people and leads them to the afterworld.
I’m a tad disappointed the left leopard doesn’t have the tongue out, as in your sketch.
i was too! but i didn’t feel up to the effort of making it work right then, plus i am using free versions and may have been close to running out.