SPOOKTOBER DAY 6 – CREEPY KID
OPTIONAL CHALLENGES: LONG LOST RELATIVE. SLEEP PARALYSIS, ACCIDENT
TAROT INFLUENCE: THE DEVIL, UPRIGHT
TITLE: THE FISH ARE JUMPIN’
Premise: This premise is pretty much all descended from Turn of the Screw, right? In that the kids were intermediaries for evil ghosts. In others of this genre, the kid is the true creep. What should I do? Hm…
Callie goes with her husband Hank to a family reunion, on a vacay where they have more time than plans, being spontaneous. They meet some weird turbohillbillied cousins (LONG LOST RELATIVE) and he reminisces that he had spend a fun weekend at their cabin in the backwoods once, as a child. They invite him to do it again and he accepts, dragging her with.
The Villain: Environmental lead or something. These people just ain’t right. There’s a boating accident (ACCIDENT) and she wakes up in bed. They tell her he had to be airlifted to the city hospital but they wouldn’t do the same for her, and they’ll let her go just as soon as she’s fit to drive. They insist on keeping her in bed. Water in the lungs y’know, caused some pneumonia, just a little longer.
Horror Element: Is husband actually dead? Supposedly the family don’t have phones and Callie’s and Hank’s were lost in the lake. How did they get the airlift? Shortwave radio out in the shed, but you ain’t fit to get to it, not now. She wakes in the night with creepy kid sitting on her chest (SLEEP PARALYSIS). He’s just trying to pump the water out of her lungs is all.
There’s a couple ways this would play out in a movie. Yes, Hank dead, and edgiest option he was in soup they were feeding to her. Or Hank not dead but in league with these devils, tormenting her for fun. Hm… I like to subvert the expectation a wee bit. Hank dead, kid saves Callie, helping her escape in an inner tube on a river. The folks give pursuit (THE DEVIL) and get splattered or drowned in rapids.
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This year I’m using AI tools from goog and openai plus photopea to make my covers. The tech feels close but still has some maddening irritations to it. Didn’t have time to make the art for the basis of this one, or fuss over this at all. Not intolerable for a single revision. And yes, I used Fuseli in the prompt.
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i gotta say, and this is probably because i’m pretty sleep-deprived at the moment, some of these aren’t feeling very creative. they feel like i’m just doing whatever’s obvious based on the prompts. all the undecided stuff is emblematic of that lack of enthusiasm. i need to recover my sense of fun here … tonight’s another chance.
man off topic but at my job i am reminded so often of how much of racist nazi pukes white people are – absolutely including white women in that number. fuck you, racists, a lot.
“illegals” pfft. i wish i could slap the fuck out of you.
Summmertiiiime, and the living is sleazy.
I wrote a long comment for the last one, then decided not to post. That one hit home, but for reasons others are probably not interested in. It was therapeutic to write a long comment though, it gave a feeling of catharsis.
Okay, to start with Callie and Hank are going to a family reunion already, so meeting the relatives was planned? If you are heading for creepy, the couple should be eating at a diner in a small town on their road trip when Callie notices a man who looks almost exactly like Hank. Introductions occur, and a conversation starts up, and it turns out that Hank and this stranger share a grand-father (great-grandfather? From Innsmouth?). The purely oral establishment of the relationship would allow the writer, and the couple, to wonder at times if there really is a relationship or it’s a coincidence and clever trap. Hank may even remember that he spent a weekend at relatives somewhere in this part of the country as a child, but as he was less then ten years old at the time the details are fuzzy.
All the creepy stuff at the cabin still follows. It could be that the relatives don’t often use the cabin themselves, so it’s a holiday for them too. It could be that they offer the use of the cabin to Hank and Callie, but live a couple miles away (within walking/boating distance but not on site). There teenage son of the relatives is a little off, and there is mention of something happening to Uncle Wilber, but nothing clear. Depending on the type of horror you are going for the boating accident could leave Callie in bed while Hank takes care of her, or Hank is missing. If Hank is still around, he might be acting differently. Is that really Hank, or was Hank replaced by the doppelganger they originally met in the diner?
Working the sleep paralysis in could be tricky. You’d have to write at least part of the novel from Callie’s point of view because sleep paralysis is really only horrifying to the one experiencing it. The boy sitting on her chest while she is paralyzed is good, there has to be something creepy going on while she is aware but can’t move. It might be more horrifying if the paralysis starts happening every day, and seems to get longer each day. Hank (?) could be told about it, and he might either laugh it off or not care at all. Is the paralysis a natural phenomenon? Is there something in her food, or are there insects which have infected her with some disease which causes temporary paralysis? Over a period of days various creepy things could first be heard while she is paralyzed. Things like talking close by, but at too low a volume to distinguish words. Or sounds from the kitchen, like a garbage disposal, but there isn’t one in the kitchen. Or the sharpening of knives. Or, when she wakes up in the middle of the night with sleep paralysis the sound of distant chainsaws, or the cutting of vegetables in the kitchen. A lot can be done with sounds.
Something could be done with smells as well during the sleep paralysis. She might smell Hank’s cologne, or at least the cologne he used when he went to work, but he didn’t bring any on vacation, at least she doesn’t think he did.
Or someone could be tickling her toes, but she doesn’t know who and can’t move to find out.
There is a lot of scope for horror here, and the ending could be as horrific as finding out that Hank was in on the trap all along. Or as benign as finding Hank is back, everything is fine, the relatives are really nice people after all, and she’ll just have nightmares the rest of her life (and her feet are missing the little toes).
lol, that is a trip. i think it’s fun to post a thinly sketched idea, then get taken into a vision of what it could look like in practice. thanks.
& i was thinking perspective stays with callie, kid stays creepy even when he’s saving her, like he’s doing it on a whim, totally feral.
Heh. As you say, ideas are cheap. It’s the execution which is difficult.
At our last party my son pulled out a game which was similar to some games I’ve played before. I didn’t actually play this game, but it was similar to Apples-to-Apples and The Big Idea where one player had to judge the imagination of the other players. The active player pulled a card from a deck which described a situation where the player would be killed. Each of the other players would use cards from their hands describing how they would save them. The cards were largely silly, and not necessarily describing real things, like a freeze ray and bubble gum. The active player, or victim, selects the rescue which they felt was best (most likely to work, silliest, least likely to work, their choice). Then the next person around the table gets to be the victim.
It struck me that it could be fun to play the game such that everyone has the same two tools, like 40 cats and a toothpick, and everyone gets five minutes to figure out a narrative using these two tools in some way. I don’t think you could require that only the tools can be used to effect the rescue, but you could require that they be mentioned. E.g. after pulling the victim from the bathtub full of ice, they were dried off by rubbing them with 40 cats. Same situation, same tools, but I am certain you would get widely varying results.
No, I don’t recall the name of the game. I was preparing the taco bar at the time and just listening to them play. Sounded fun.