Spooktober is a 31 day event of coming up with original horror ideas based on prompts my writing group argues over.  These are my entries.

SPOOKTOBER DAY #15 — Found Footage or Epistolary

TITLE:  The Oriental

PREMISE:  A mysterious woman joins a circle of upper class Parisian layabouts.  She claims to be from Turkey but eventually it’s revealed by the knowledgeable that her accent is all wrong.  Scheherezade-style, she’s full of stories.  It takes a while but people realize the stories are cursed mirrors of their own lives, leading them into doom.  Told with a mix of the woman’s stories and the letters and journals of victims.

HORROR ELEMENT:  You know, the exotical Orient is full of scary barbarians that mean to destroy christendom and stuff, right?  Foreigners so scary.

Poster by AI, modified with photoshop.

Spooktober is a 31 day event of coming up with original horror ideas based on prompts my writing group argues over.  These are my entries.

SPOOKTOBER DAY #14 — Subterranean

TITLE:  Josefina’s Descent

PREMISE:  For the image I used prompts involving a celebrity latina I find lovely and chose the result that looked the least like her, and the unusual figure is a result of using the style of Bougereau.  I thought the results were pleasing, though her skimpy clothing were much more bizarre before I photoshopped them.  Anyway…

Josefina was at the club and ate a funny pill.  Suddenly nothing in the world made sense.  When she tried to get away by going outside, getting some air, it was even worse.  Pawing at the walls, waving off interested demons as they offer help, she discovers things make more sense the farther she goes down – first into the basement, then the sub-basement, then the labyrinth.  The demons that tagged along start to look like her friends, the walls start to look less like a roiling maelstrom of rubber halloween masks and exotic desserts, but where exactly has she led them?

HORROR ELEMENT:  First up, freaky hallucinations, stranger danger in tha cloughb.  Second, what does it mean to be nowhere?  Are you dead?  Can you ever come back?

Poster by AI, modified with photoshop.

Spooktober is a 31 day event of coming up with original horror ideas based on prompts my writing group argues over.  These are my entries.

SPOOKTOBER DAY #13 — Folk Horror

TITLE:  See to Thy Soul

PREMISE:  Colette is on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and her wealthy family is only good for one thing – giving her enough money to run away from time to time.  She’s wondering if she’s missed something in spurning christianity and reads a travel story about an isolated English village that has adopted radical christian beliefs.  They talk about caring for the soul as if it was a distinct creature within you, that can be coaxed out, talked with, groomed for heaven.  She gives it a go.

At first she is shocked by the visions, the ability to see a soul as if it’s physically present in their rituals.  When she doesn’t feel any closer to god over the experiences, she begins to wonder what the ghostly manifestations are.  They look like the person they are attached to, but somewhat liquid, not at all transparent or glowing.

HORROR ELEMENT:  The village sits over a deposit of oil-like mineral containing many alien entities.  They can extrude the oil like ectoplasm to take a human-like form, as long as they remain near the human.  The aliens want different things – have personal agendas – but are generally allied to each other, realizing they’re alone in the world.  Through enough of the cultist rites, they can ultimately enter the bodies of said cultists or tourists, and spread beyond the oil pit as a slimy conspiracy.  Will Colette survive?

Poster by AI, modified with photoshop.

Spooktober is a 31 day event of coming up with original horror ideas based on prompts my writing group argues over.  These are my entries.

At about this time last year, 2021, in my boyfriend’s Spooktober entries..

SPOOKTOBER DAY ELEVEN — CYBERPUNK — “The Green Eye”

Premise:  The MC is a little girl, born blind in a desolate, futuristic city.  There are great advances in medical technology, but very few can afford it.  People are regularly murdered for their medical implants, and scavengers pick over bodies to steal precious metals to sell.  The little girl’s father is a talented inventor, and spends years developing a cybernetic implant that can cure her blindness.  He creates a prototype, giving her sight in one eye for the first time in her life.  Before he can release the plans for the implant into the world, the father is assassinated by a powerful medical mega-corp who want to patent the device for themselves.  The plans were lost, so now they need the prototype in the little girl’s skull…

Horror Element:  The little girl is hounded by cyberpunk hitmen and creeps.

SUDDENLY, SEYMOUR…

SPOOKTOBER 2022 DAY #10 — Cyber’d Punke

TITLE:  The Green Eye 2: Cyber Snatcher

PREMISE:  A filmmaking acolyte of Luc Besson loved the sexy young lady who played one of the half-blind girl’s oppressors and immediately got her a deal to reprise the role.  In Cyber Snatcher, Zeroine is inexplicably reframed as a hero.  She only snatches implants non-lethally, figuring the marks can always scrounge up for a new one or go without.  But when BioSynth Medicorp comes for her gf’s liver, it’s time to switch to live ammo in her shotgun.

HORROR ELEMENT:  Zeroine’s day job before her goody turn is body horrors-ish.  Also the ostensibly empowered lady character is filmed luridly in a way that makes lady audience members feel uncomfortably self-aware.

Poster by AI, modified with photoshop.

 

 

 

Spooktober is a 31 day event of coming up with original horror ideas based on prompts my writing group argues over.  These are my entries.

SPOOKTOBER DAY #5 — Lovecraft, Ian

TITLE:  Brute Fetish

PREMISE:  A trans fella is attempting to reconcile his religious feelings with his lived reality, in the hardest way possible.  He’s becoming a priest, at a vaguely liberal church that’s not quite 100% on him.  His girlfriend is cool with it because Jesus got her off the heroins.  His mom is instead reconciling her own religious feelings, with the help of a stone fetish of an obscure aeon, a fang-grinned undead face over a mass of tentacles.  If a community of Christ can’t bring her daughter into accord with nature, than an older god will suffice.

HORROR ELEMENT:  Transphobias, lovecraft nonsense, you know the drill.

Poster by AI, modified with photoshop.

 

 

 

Spooktober is a 31 day event of coming up with original horror ideas based on prompts my writing group argues over.  The arguing used to be fun but people are acting so weird about it this year.  Sigh.  These are my entries.

SPOOKTOBER DAY #6 — Clones

TITLE:  Doctor Philliplier

PREMISE:  It’s an early ’90s straight-to-cable midnight creepshow, now a moldy VHS retrieved from the ruins of a trailer in rural Arkansas.  You pop it in the old VHS player and it whirs to disgusting life, some intersection of Michael Keaton’s “Multiplicity” and Jeff Fahey’s “Body Parts.”

Dr. Phillips is a plastic surgeon and legit science genius, out of his mind on cocaine and narcissism.  He dabbles in womanizing on the LA punk scene, and stand-up comedy.  One night his experimental rejuvenation process goes out of control, reducing him to a pile of deformed limbs and a screaming head.  He buds clones that are much more well-formed and tries to boss them into helping out, but they are aberrant in the head.

Despite not really looking quite like him, everyone is somehow fooled.  The silver-haired one takes over his stand-up, veering the act into surreal voices and weird noises.  The lanky Lux Interior-looking one takes over the drugging and womanizing, despite only being able to mumble nonsense in an Elvis impression.

HORROR ELEMENT:  Will he ever get his body and his life back?  Good help is so hard to get.

Poster by AI, modified with photoshop.

 

SPOOKTOBER DAY #7 — Cabins

TITLE:  The Cabin of The Cyclops

PREMISE:  Dr. Jarecky is suave and beautiful, despite having lost an eye in youth.  Together with his assistant Helmut, he runs a mental health asylum in 1950s Oregon.  But all is not well.  He has a cabin retreat where he takes “special cases” – beautiful young women – for “intensive therapy.”  The girls are getting wise, and Helmut has realized that in his hubris, Dr. Jarecky has brought too many to the cabin.  The bad men are decidedly outnumbered, and these girls were locked up for reasons…

HORROR ELEMENT:  Corrupt care professionals are the real horror.  Well, at the beginning.  Later on the horror is justice.

Poster by AI, modified with photoshop.

 

SPOOKTOBER DAY #8 — Cryptids

TITLE:  Flatwoods

PREMISE:  Before she was a ghostly cryptid terrorizing modern people, Honora Knecht was an occultist in 1880s Sutton, West Virginia.  She wasn’t much of a showman, but had some fame by merit of being seven feet tall.  Sinope Locke was a daughter of power, adrift in a life not her own.  On a lark her fiancé paid for Honora to entertain at one of their parties, and Sinope fell in love.

Is it love or witchcraft?  Honora’s eyes glow red, her long fingers look like talons in lace gloves, her witch hat like the minaret of a Turkish mosque.

HORROR ELEMENT:  I could tell stable diffusion AI knew what the Flatwoods Monster was, but it refused to make a sensible result.  The horror is trying to cheap out on making art but still having to work for it lol.

Poster by AI, modified with photoshop.

 

SPOOKTOBER DAY #8 — Cryptids… ALTERNATE

TITLE:  Come With Me, Baby, to LoveLand

PREMISE:  While coming up with ideas for cryptid stories, I played with romance novel covers involving the Loveland Frog.  The fake author name is to obscure the torso, helping me spend less time making sense of that in photoshop.

HORROR ELEMENT:  Accidentally swallow a tadpole while swimming in Loveland, Ohio.  Go ahead.  Don’t be surprised if you turn into a frog.  Don’t be surprised when your lady loves you even more.  Don’t be surprised when she gives birth to horrendous amounts of tadpoles.  And don’t be surprised that it never ends.

Poster by AI, modified with photoshop.

 

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EDIT TO ADD:  In case you were curious what these look like before I try to fix them, enjoy this collage.  This will have no alt description, except to say imagine what I described above, but with varying degrees of mangling and mutation.  AI seldom gets me something I’d use unmodified, don’t know how Marcus does it.

Spooktober is a 31 day event of coming up with original horror ideas based on prompts my writing group argues over.  These are my entries.

SPOOKTOBER DAY #5 — Gothic Horror

TITLE:  The Immolation of The Thornbloods

PREMISE:  Again, too much fucking around with images, not enough the spirit of writing, which is the whole point of this event.  Nonetheless, I love these subtly corrupt AI weirdos.

Kent and Mabel are the only survivors of the Thornblood dynasty – captains of industry who were largely incinerated in a suspicious tragedy at the Met Gala.  They’ve inherited fabulous wealth and evenly split control over the vast Thornblood holdings.  But the flames that consumed their parents, grandparents, siblings, and cousins are a chill breeze compared to the fire in their hearts.

Patricia Coltheart is a mysterious socialite who walks the halls of power, fidgeting with a riding crop for mysterious reasons.  I mean, mysterious if you have never heard of sadomasochism, but whatever.  This equestrienne sets her sights on the sibling steeds and rides them for all they’re worth.  Wait, this was supposed to be a horror, not a porno.  Um…

She’s actually really innocent at heart, despite her sexual playfulness, and doesn’t know what fate she’s tempting in playing these two against each other.  Does she love one or the other or both?  But then, what if they kill each other?  Things come to a head during a weekend retreat at a gloomy cavernous estate overlooking a lake.  A summer storm.  Secret trysts.  Violence ‘n’ stuff.

Patricia looks at the sky, rain and tears on her face.  Is she dying?  I’d have to decide if I wrote it, lol.

HORROR ELEMENT:  It’s not easy having a good time.  How do you decide where to stop?  What if it’s too late?  Is this the same as I said yesterday?  Yes it is.  Frightening.

Poster by AI, modified with photoshop.

 

 

 

 

Spooktober is a 31 day event of coming up with original horror ideas based on prompts my writing group argues over.  These are my entries.

SPOOKTOBER DAY #4 — Alternate Dimensions

TITLE:  The Choking Game

PREMISE:  I admit, I come up with a prompt for the AI that vaguely fits the idea, then come up with the story to match.  Lotte and Calvin are middle school kids that get into the classic kid’s dare of choking yourself or your friends unconscious.  Yeah, bad idea kids.  But the world seems to change when they’re out of breath, and as they share what they saw, they realize they’re seeing the same thing.  Are they getting access to a different realm of existence?  Anything is better than where they live, right?

Lotte starts to see a golden-eyed man in a bowtie, who never looks at her, just looks to the sky and rambles endlessly in some broken version of the Book of Psalms.  What does it all mean, Lotte?  Keep looking, keep listening.  Never mind what your hands are doing to Calvin’s throat.

HORROR ELEMENT:  It’s not easy having a good time.  How do you decide where to stop?  What if it’s too late?

Poster by AI, modified with photoshop.

 

Spooktober is a 31 day event of coming up with original horror ideas based on prompts my writing group argues over.  These are my entries.

SPOOKTOBER DAY #3 — Undead

TITLE:  Veinous Venus

PREMISE:  The title of the story is surreal foolery culled from the shape of the nonsense letters in the original AI image.  Three young lovers in the 1960s realize their love really works – no jealousy, no pain, pure ecstasy.  And yet youth must someday pass them by.  They cannot bear the loss of that golden moment, and resort to weird occult studies.

Caroline is the center of their relationship, the main object of physical affection, but they’re otherwise fairly mutual.  Renee has a more care-giving role, Arthur the pointy head and intellectualizer of their crimes.  They achieve a kind of immortality through undeath, using an unsavory ritual to mortify themselves.  But they just traded one kind of decline for another.  Instead of the usual signs of aging, they are becoming exaggerations of decay.  Eyes discolor and hollow, limbs draw taut, verminous lines writhe below Caroline’s flesh.  They’re fading slower than with natural age, but must wonder if it was worth it, and what the grim future holds.

HORROR ELEMENT:  Mild body horror of spooky ghouls fading away, existential melancholy in the face of inevitability.

Poster by AI, modified with photoshop.