Spooktober – Days 13 & 14

I’m doing a thing with some people to do 31 horror story concepts within October…

 

SPOOKTOBER DAY #13 — Doppelgangers

TITLE:  Mitosis

PREMISE:  Street pharmacist Xylofon finds Dr. Jekyll’s original formula and comes up with her own variant for a designer drug.  When she tests it on herself, she starts undergoing a horrible transformation whenever she has a darksided urge.  She hustles into a hiding place and her body divides into two identical versions of itself.  The one most like original Xylo passes out from pain, while the other – whose most overwhelming desire is the sinful motive du jour – runs free into an unsuspecting world.

She has to hunt down the extra Xylos to prevent them from doing crimes.  But not all urges are created equal.  Some are unlimited in scope – like hurting everyone in the world – and others are one-off deals.  She gets an urge to kill one specific annoying dog, while genuinely not feeling animosity toward any other dog in the world.  Clone Xylo gets away with the act – and then calms down.

Original flavor Xylo rolls up to kill her.  Calmed dogkiller Xylo cries no, she’s reformed, she’ll never kill a dog again, but original Xylo can’t stop herself.  Was her clone killing about covering her tracks, or was it an uncontrollable evil urge of her own?

HORROR ELEMENT:  She attacks, but dogkiller Xylo kills her in self-defense.  She takes over original flavor’s life and considers the circumstances.  As a clone, will she have the same affliction as original Xylo?  Will she also sprout darksided clones?  Will she have an overpowering urge to kill them?  She doesn’t know.

 

SPOOKTOBER DAY #14 — Cryptids

TITLE:  Barrens

PREMISE:  Nobody else took the Jersey Devil, OK it’s me.  There’s a theory that the sighting that inspired the Jersey Devil legend was of a sandhill crane.  I’m running with that.  In the tradition of The Bear, the story follows a main character that is an animal.  Our crane loses track of its kind, finds itself alone in an environment where it would normally never dare to tread.  A creature of open land, it is confused by the tree cover, and feels too scared and stressed out to fly away.  It wanders the woods suffering, subsisting on small rodents and becoming increasingly ill.

HORROR ELEMENT:  Life’s pretty freaky when you don’t understand anything, and you hit a bad patch of luck.  Weird monkeys spot the crane and spread rumors of a devil.  Adventurers stalk the woods.  At the end, one kills our hero for food, and says to a friend, “good snack for our day out.  Hope we find that devil.”

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Spooktober – Days 11 & 12

I’m doing a thing with some people to do 31 horror story concepts within October…

 

SPOOKTOBER DAY #11 — Cyber’d Punkes

TITLE:  Laserboys

PREMISE:  Do you remember the plot of Max Headroom?  I sort of barely remember it.  There was some kind of special new TV broadcast that was very stimulating to viewers but occasionally made their heads explode.  When a reporter is about to find out he hits a “maximum headroom” sign on his motorcycle.  Yadda yadda, his brain is uploaded and turns cartoon, he wakes up and hijinks ensue.  Anyway, cyberpunk.  It’s punk, but also cyber.

I think… Laserboys. Laserboys ride around on cool motorcycles like that guy in Akira, do cyber drugs, and get into dust-ups with rival gang the SeedyRoms, and also the cops.  Everything is copacetic, in a sort of nihilistic way, until Shiny Torso gets abducted for medical experiments.  The gang’s lieutenant Jackson Smackson realizes he does believe in one thing in life – love.  He’s gotta rescue his boy.

This is too similar to Akira so far, now that I think about it.  So…  The medical experiment gives Shiny a new laserplague.  When the gang bails him out, he starts to get symptoms – and infect other people.  His fever is hot enough to melt steel, he’s barfing up boiling photons, setting the world on fire.  The Laserboys can’t help but cause destruction everywhere they go.  They fight their way back into medical facility to look for a cure.

Only Jackson and Shiny get the cure, the other guys all dying in dramatic ways.  By the time they get out of the facility, other laserplague victims are blowing up the city.  Can true love survive the laserpocalypse?

HORROR ELEMENT:  Where does the flesh end and the laser begin?  All matter must become energy once more.

 

SPOOKTOBER DAY #12 — Cult

TITLE:  The Passion of Adonis

PREMISE:  A medium sexy guy with no scruples and a knack for getting his way starts a sex cult.  It begins with a MLM about juice cleanses or something, but he realizes by fronting like he’s some kind of perfect specimen of humanity, he can get all his followers to sexually service him for magic points.

It’s all cool for him, until his high priestess starts making prophesies that he did not conceive – ones that involve him making some kind of supreme sacrifice.  It stirs up the followers so he runs with it at first, but as the hour of his crucifixion nears, he’s like… nuh.

HORROR ELEMENT:  Get thee on the cross, beautiful man.

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Spooktober – Days 9 & 10

Content Warning: Transphobic Murder in Day #9.

I’m doing a thing with some people to do 31 horror story concepts within October…

Just as a way to make it easier to not read the triggery content, I’m putting it below the fold, and below this meme I made for tumblr that NOBODY REBLOGGED.  ;_;

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Spooktober – Days 7 & 8

I’m doing a thing with some people to do 31 horror story concepts within October…

SPOOKTOBER DAY #7 — Killer Animals

TITLE:  Knife Goat

PREMISE:  In honor of a certain absurd piece of Silent Hill concept art that never made it into a final game and is rather hard to dig up on internets at this point, I make a story concept about a goat walking on hind legs, holding a knife.  A modern small city is having modern problems.  Sex scandals, murders, drug issues, whatever.  Suddenly a knife goat appears and publicly murders somebody.  Everything goes berserk, everybody scrambling for explanations, conflicts spill over.

But sense prevails – nobody believes in that kind of stuff these days.  A theory takes hold – it was this or that person in disguise.  Things get back to normal.  Then knife goat appears even more publicly and kills somebody else even more inexplicably.  Conflicts and fury last a bit longer this time, but still sense must be maintained.  People collect their wits, blame somebody specific and do a good job convincing themselves.

Then knife goat appears again, killing multiple people on live TV in broad daylight.  Chaos engulfs the city and it quickly destroys itself.  Knife goat wins.  I’m sure there’s some fun way to depict that triumphal moment of reflection but it escapes me at the moment.

HORROR ELEMENT:  Knife goat kills.

Concept Art for Silent Hill 4

Concept Art for Silent Hill 4

SPOOKTOBER DAY #8 — Holiday Horror

TITLE:  Nach Weihnachten

PREMISE: In honor of the song “Kling, Glöckchen” which invloves Baby Jesus acting like the floaty kid outside the window in Salem’s Lot, this tale would feature das Christkind floating outside people’s windows, begging them for an invitation.  The children have been told that Baby Jesus won’t give them presents if they try to catch a peek, but what should they do if he shows up and asks to be let in?  It would be rude to let him suffer in the cold.  But they soon discover you should never invite a supernatural being into your home, even if he’s the infant incarnation of your savior.

HORROR ELEMENT:  I don’t know, maybe he’s a vampire or something.  His victims have to go to Elf Practice.


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Spooktober – Days 5 & 6

I’m doing a thing with some people to do 31 horror story concepts within October…

SPOOKTOBER DAY #5 — Body Horror

TITLE:  Hot-Handed God of Beasts

PREMISE:  Body horror as a genre is about hitting us in the feels over our own frailty, shocking out sensibilities.  Like, oh snaps, that would suck to experience that.  But I think the genre can also be about the more abstract feelings underlying life, death, and injury.  What are bodies?  What is the soul?  What is the boundary between the living and non-living matter of the world?  Of course, if you’re going that way, it should still be violent or viscerally bitter.
I had this idea once for a sort of homage to John Woo’s movie Hard-boiled, as a series of paintings.  I’m going to appropriate that for this, turn it into a movie idea.  There’s fighting factions in a shabby-looking neighborhood of HongKong, visually evoking the teahouse shootout from the beginning of that movie.  But one side is bird-heads and the other side is rodent-heads.  Why are they shooting each other and hacking each other with machetes?  Nobody knows.

HORROR ELEMENT:  The emphasis will be on their pain and horror at their own deaths.  A body hits the floor and the camera lingers on it – a birdhead not quite dead, blood pouring out of his mouth like a pitcher, blooming into the spilled tea on the floor like ink in water.  A mousehead has eyes wide open and squeals in pain while he’s held down and his body cut up.

 

SPOOKTOBER DAY #6 — Mummy

TITLE:  Something is Mummy in the State of Denmark

PREMISE:  A shitty racist village in Denmark is temporary home to a British Indian anthropology student.  A bog mummy comes back from the dead to kill all descendants of the man who accused him of crimes he did not commit.  Problem – the way population genetics work, every last person in Denmark and many beyond are descended from the guy.  It looks like he’s killing indiscriminately, but he isn’t attacking Vishal.
Vishal figures out that if the guy could take direct revenge on his wrongdoer, his wrath can be allayed.  He saves the surviving racists by figuring out how to necromancy up the mummy’s foe and they have a huge battle of mummy fu.

HORROR ELEMENT:  It’s not genuinely scary, more of an Evil Dead 2 thing.  Still in genre.

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Spooktober – Days 3 & 4

I’m doing a thing with some people to do 31 horror story concepts within October…

SPOOKTOBER DAY #3 — Western

TITLE:  Draw Down

PREMISE:  Korean and Japanese gangsters are both looking to take over a financially vulnerable casino in Las Vegas.  The mob bosses know a shootout in the city is a bad look, and strike a weird gentleman’s agreement.  They rent a touristy “Wild West” town for a weekend and take all their men there.  Then they hole up in a bulletproof lounge with a view of the streets and order their men to gunfight to the death.

HORROR ELEMENT: The violence is hyper and suffering real. No medical help for the fallen. The survivors decide their bosses gotta die for putting them thru that, team up to kill ’em nasty.

SPOOKTOBER DAY #4 — Cabin

TITLE:  Bear Trap

PREMISE:  A trapper tries to build a cabin.  The setup can be for a historical/educational look at how cabins are built.  Until…  One disaster after another holds up his progress.  He’s left in the rain, barely surviving, too weak to finish the job properly.  That’s when bears get interested in eating him.  He has to convert the unfinished cabin into an elaborate bear trap.

HORROR ELEMENT:  It’s Saw for bears.  Time to repent that they didn’t cherish pic-a-nic baskets when they had the chance.
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Spooktober – 31 Horror Concepts

Content Warning:  Horror Content.

I’m doing a thing where we vote for a horror sub-genre each day of October, then come up with a concept for it.  I’ve been turning in my entries at the last minute, so I’ve resorted to gritty reboots as a creative shortcut.  My concepts thus far:

DAY ONE: DARKWEB OR TECHNOLOGY

TITLE:  The Turbo Teen

Premise:  Gritty reboot of that 90s cartoon where a teenager transforms into a hot rod.  He comes home one night unable to remember where he’s been, clothes kinda ripped up.  He lays off the booze but his friends are all peeeer pressure.  Then he starts to have random attacks where parts of his body violently transform into machinery.  An older woman at a bar he used a fake ID to get into seduces him and while they’re about to do it, her pelvic area turns into a motor that tries to rip off his junk.  (She’s the “Scarlet Woman” from The Cult’s song “Love Removal Machine.”)
He hops away and she’s like awooo and turns into a car.  Then he turns into a car to fight her and she realizes he’s the victim of her hit and run on the last full moon.  She takes him under her wing and teaches him how to be a horrible werecar.  But he rebels because he wants to be a good werecar instead, and they fight.  All the while his personal regular life is falling apart because of body horror hijinx.

Horror Element:  turn into machines plz


DAY TWO: TOYS

TITLE:  VELVETEEN

PREMISE:  Gritty reboot of The Velveteen Rabbit, which is already pretty effin gritty, bear with me.  All the other toys that had to get burned because the kid had Generic Victorian SIckness?  Back from the dead, and Velveteen has to fight them.  This would be staged as a play with dancing, singing, and wirework kung fu.

HORROR ELEMENT:  The burned toys will be played by actors in black clothes with gritty chunks of toy stuck to their extremities.  They’ll dance fight with Velveteen, who will be played by a bunny-eared actress in Milla Jovovich from Resident Evil mode, and at the end she’ll realize she was meant to die as well.  She’ll do a big song/dance number with them and fall into their arms.  The closing curtain will be black velvet.
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A Fun Video Less Problematic?

Content Warnings:  Bloody Movie Violence, Swears, Noisy Audio, Spoilers for John Woo’s Hard-Boiled.  Even the thumbnail for the video is a bit bloody, placed under fold.

One time when I was a young ‘un I chanced across a Hong Kong action movie on cable, first time I ever saw one.  I was instantly thrilled by the action, everybody leaping around guns blazing, blood spewing out of guys like juice from ripe fruit.  The best part, however, was when the action died down for a moment, and the hilarious English dub voices began.  “Oh well done.  You’re such an asset.  Give the guy a gun and he’s Superman, give him two and he’s God!”

I had to turn off the TV because my mom slept in the living room and it was her bedtime.  But I went straight to the TV guide to find the name of the movie and next time it was playing.  Somebody on yewchoob compiled some of the funniest moments from that dub.  Really, the movie is great fun in its non-sillyvoiced glory as well, but I have nostalgia and love for this foolery.  Enjoy.

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