King Washington
Semi-Depressed Lurker
- Location
- Indiana
An interesting setting by B_Munro that has pretty much every horror film sense Psycho actually happen. Found here.
In this world, Alfred Hitchcock is known as a writer of black comedies, Steven King wrote detective stories, and Wes Craven sold real estate.
The first, unrecognized signs of something rotten took place in the summer of 1960, when sensational murders at a small motel splashed headlines across the nation. As readers lingered over the details of the bodies sunk in the swamp and the mummified mother, some alienists lingered over their studies of the incarcerated Mr. Bates, now submerged in his alternate "mother" personality. Although the press had labeled him a psychopath, there was some disagreement as to the diagnosis: Norman Bates was too disconnected from reality to be a psychopathic, and was generally assessed as a psychotic with occasional psychopathic episodes. And yet, between murders, he had generally been able to interact with motel visitors, merchants, bank officials, etc. without any of them noticing anything too "squirrely" about him. One psychologist suggested he behaved more like a Hollywood version of a psychopath than anything else, which led to various hearty guffaws around the hospital watercooler.
The real terror would begin in September, when the so-called "Plant Horror" took place in Los Angeles, leaving baffled police and government officials with thousand pound mass of dying, shriveling plant tissue with a huge fly-trap like mouth lined with razor-edged wooden "teeth" and "blossoms" that had reportedly looked almost identical to human faces – and had even been able to speak – but which were quickly shrinking into masses of black stinking corruption. Multiple people were dead, and science pronounced itself baffled. In spite of rapid use of various preserving chemicals, little survived in a condition allowing for close study, although a few pieces frozen by quick thinking biologists eventually would reveal a cellular structure oddly mixing and matching elements of the fungal, plant, and animal kingdoms as they were then known.
Opinions were mostly divided between "aliens did it", 'Satan did it", and "the Commies did it": it was in any case more than a nine days wonder, and would have been more than a ninety-nine days wonder, if it had not been driven from the headlines by the news of a giant ape running amok in London before being gunned down by the British army. The aftermath was even more baffling than the events in Los Angeles: in a blatant violation of the laws of conservation of mass, the dead monster shrank down to a normal-sized dead chimpanzee, the same taking place, as they died, with the giant mutated plants in the laboratory of the "mad scientist" responsible. The serum he had invented proved impossible to duplicate, although increasingly small doses of the remainder were used on increasingly small plants and animals as a part of futile studies for years to come.
Things got worse. In 1962 came the first rumored reports from a northeast college about home brew magic going astray: this would become the first non-self contained phenomenon, as old wives and grannies from the Old Country, crusty peasants, shamans and witch doctors and would be leaders of cults found a new effectiveness to the old spells and rituals (and spells and rituals which nobody had ever heard of before) not only in New England but across the continent, and within a few years overseas: the witch hunts would begin not long after.
Given the initial centering of the Terror in the US, only slowly spreading to other countries (most notably Japan, Great Britain, and Italy) the Cold War advantage to some extent passed to the Soviet Union, which variously attributed the odd reports from abroad as either some US Capitalist Elites plot to establish a dictatorship through manufactured terror or some sort of strange insanity caused by capitalism: the US was at least initially too busy trying to deal with a national panic to do much in the way of overseas adventures, and Vietnam was unified under Red rule by 1967. (On the other hand, increased US paranoia and suspicion that the USSR might be tied somehow to the Terror meant that the risk of actual atomic confrontation was actually higher than OTL post a Cuban Missile crisis which went somewhat similarly to ours.) However, by the end of 1963 the Soviets were having increased difficulty denying something weird was going on: there was the Slime invasion of California, and even at home reports of outbreaks of sorcery in various regions of Siberia and the Caucuses multiplied: Russian psychic investigators began to report actual duplicable results, and a Russian scientists efforts with severed heads succeeded far beyond rational expectations. And then the dead arose.
After the outbreak of zombeism in a vast swathe from the Mississippi to the Vistula, the Terror went global, although the US remained the epicenter of weirdness. A certain pattern was noted: "precedents" in the US were later mirrored abroad, with instances of magic and psychic powers and diabolism in the US being followed by intermittent but slowly increasing similar instances world-wide. Certain nations retained local peculiarities from early on, with Italy plagued by remarkably grotesque and colorful slasher killings, while Japan suffered from horrifically powerful ghosts.
The descent of the US into paranoid and increasingly theocratic police state was slow but for a long time almost unstoppable, with a massive bump after the Night of the Living Dead. Satanism, witchcraft, use of magic without government supervision, all became illegal: Wicca was wiped from existence, although more through voluntary desertion than through violence either state or extrajudicial. Ouija boards were banned. 1986, with outbreaks of murderous machines in hundreds of locations around the globe (ended when a Soviet military satellite x-ray lasered a UFO), on top of the usual nonsense, was particularly bad, and was followed by the Bad Years, a stretch of explosions of religious fanaticism, mass suicides, anti-technological mania, and general panic that continued into the 90s. (The discovery that a sizable part of the US economic elite had been infiltrated by blobby shape-shifting aliens who literally ate poor people didn't help at all, and helped shape the Democratic Party's evolution into a (genuinely, on economic issues) populist-fascist movement.)
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In 2012, things remain…tense.
On the positive side, non-supernatural murders are down, and indeed fairly less frequent than the OTL US: this is partly due to the police adopting supernatural investigation methods, and also due to the possibility of vengeful MurderGhosts, which while statistically unlikely (only about a couple dozen cases per year in the US) has a substantial psychological impact on public perceptions. (There are also less lethal ghosts which just inform on you, but they're almost as rare and less scary). Similarly, states have been much more reluctant to impose the death penalty: electrocuted mass murderers have returned as Murder Ghosts, but so far there have been no repeat performances from prisoners which died senile and incontinent from old age.
Japan is the Very Worst when it comes to MurderGhosts: angry Japanese ghosts tend to be murderously indiscriminate assholes which sometimes seem to be out to kill everyone but the one responsible for their initial tragedy.
Being "eccentric" or a "loner" or simply a person that values their privacy is not strictly illegal (well, in most countries), but it is strongly discouraged, and the Supernatural Investigations Bureau can force their way into your house and dig up your basement and check your walls for secret passages and evil altars on very little evidence: being ostentatiously normal and/or religious and opening your doors to sharp-eyed neighbors is a highly rational strategy.
Religiosity is very prevalent, both sincerely and as a defense mechanism against suspicious neighbors, but the various religious bodies remain divided as ever. Although a deeply authoritarian security state, the US is one of several nations that have come right up to the edge of theocracy and looked into the Abyss: the US barely pulled back, partly due to disagreements as to which version of holy writ to obey at a time when to many it seems getting it right seems vitally important, and partly due to directions of a newly empowered demon-hunting Catholic Church that it wasn't standing for any theocracy outside the Church nonsense and discouraging Catholic voters from supporting Protestant theocrats.
The US failure of the theocrats is also related to the deep theological confusion resulting from the apparent existence of multiple hells – and apparently multiple heavens. With multiple pantheons of demons with often contradictory attributes running about (There have been multiple mutually incompatible attempts to bring about the Apocalypse, and at one point there were no less than four Antichrists running around loose), and horrors from a dozen non-Christian mythologies popping up, notably in Asia, along with ones from fictional mythologies, not to mention aliens, figuring out what is the absolute, soul-saving Truth with a capital T is more confusing than ever. New religions have arisen claiming all religions are true, or that the evil spirits and demons are created by humanity's evil psychic impulses, or it's all the work of evil aliens (Scientology exists in this world, but its mythology is quite different). And then there who say it's all a glitch in the Matrix.
Angels from at least two different heavens, one in a state of civil war, have also shown up, and both angels and demons seem genuinely confused on what's going on themselves at times. (Well, those you can talk to. Quite a few demons are perfectly happy with killing and torturing without worrying about existential issues). Holy water, crosses, etc. sometimes work very well against supernatural beings, other times less so (similar experiences are becoming more common in non-Christian countries, as the effects of the Terror spread slowly from its epicenters in Britain, Italy, Japan and the US. Hindu deities seem rather potent, at least if you can get your evil witch or wizard into a temple of Vishnu, Shiva or Brahma. The success record of Shinto priests in Japan has been spotty, so far).
(Sheer nihilism is also on the rise, as are new and more exotic forms of insanity, not helped by the fact that phobias which are seen as irrational in our world – fear of mirrors, fear of the dark – have legitimacy in this world. Some people have developed a rather useful form of madness, simply ignoring the existence of the Terror, to the point of simply blanking out whenever the latest horrors show up on television, while others find a form of control in a descent into solipsism, insisting that the Terror – and everyone else – only exists in their heads).
The nature of the afterlife remains contentious: there are many plausible reported cases of reincarnation (from Asia, mostly), and plausible reports of spirits Going Into the Light or A Better Place, people with stigmata giving (usually disputed) New Gospels, and of course all those goddamn ghosts. The trouble is that the evidence is spotty and contradictory: most people's deaths don't lead to any ghosts or spirits that psychics or magicians can detect, attempts to contact the afterlife remain inconclusive or just horrible, and a lot of ghosts really don't seem to be happy at all with the afterlife (notably a lot of Japanese ghosts). There is therefore a good deal of reason to distrust promises of a happy afterlife, with the most clearly apprehended afterlife apparently being hell, or more exactly, multiple hells.
Under the circumstances, a lot of people have a strong incentive to avoid dying, even through highly unconventional means. Although illegal in most countries and strongly discouraged by almost all religions, an increasing number of people are becoming vampires of the more benign varieties (those which can live off synthetic blood and still apparently have their souls). Other aging people are paying to have their souls transferred into animated puppets or manikins, which although not as widely illegal loses them their civil rights in every country save Denmark and the Netherlands. Others with money and no desire to get in legal trouble go in for fairly extreme cyborgization. And then there are those who go in for seriously illegal methods, from cannibalism to making pacts with demons, large scale ritual blood transfusions, and worse: the fact that many of these things often seem to only work for some people or in some locations just complicates things further. Meanwhile, the public, or at least that part of it not comfortably sure of a heavenly afterlife or reincarnation as something better than a woman or an untouchable, is increasingly annoyed that governments and (presumably) Big Business is "keeping" immortality from them. If vampires and wizards can live for centuries, why can't they?
The Netherlands is also notable for being the home of several Cenobites which have decided to move to our world, where they get to meet new people more often: they claim to be refugees persecuted for their alternative lifestyle, and that those people who join them for lives of unimaginably horrible pain/pleasure are doing so voluntarily. So far skeptical relatives have been unable to prove otherwise, and multiple efforts to assassinate them by various fanatical anti-supernatural and religious groups have failed, while their application to become permanent residents slowly grinds its way through the courts: several angels from a discount heaven getting US citizenship provides an unavoidable precedent.
Technological progress is odd and uneven, due to safety priorities and fears meeting the products of Mad Science. Everyone has a cell phone, but they're universally issued by governments and with very limited networking capacity, and are meant to allow citizens to issue and receive alerts in real time and help build the anti-horror panopticon security officials dream of: a dream deferred in this world due to the rather limited nature of its information/internet system. Given universal access, who knows what people might download or upload, or what might come crawling out of your monitor?
On the other hand, cyborgs and battle robots (of the Mobile Suit variety: nobody trusts AI) exist, and since the 80s both the US and USSR (and more recently Europe and Japan) have maintained orbital military resources armed with giant lasers and other fun stuff: in cases where one has to make sure, nuking from orbit is readily available. In spite of some unfortunate early experiments in which some people returned from being frozen and without their souls, cryonics has since been perfected to a high degree, and freezing people for reasons varying from waiting for a cure to skipping the boring part of waiting for a rich relative to die to stowing political rivals out of the way. (And of course some are taking the Freezer Trip in hopes that the ongoing Terror will have come to an end by the time they emerge.) Limb and even head transplants are now easily performed, although organ donors are carefully vetted to make sure they lack strong antisocial impulses. (There have been several scandals with illegal Chinese organ exports landing someone with a murderous arm or kidney). Limbs and organs can be kept alive almost indefinitely, as can living human heads, as enemies of various totalitarian regimes have found to their extreme discomfort.
Are there such things as mad scientists? Many inventions are the result of individual scientists making discoveries and creating things that would have seemed impossible for one person to do before the Terror began: further, in some cases these discoveries seem to operate by no rational rules, and are impossible to duplicate. On the other hand, most of them are "one-shot" wonders, failing to accomplish anything beyond normal capacities either before or after their particular breakthrough, as if some unknown force or agency had temporarily taken control of them to bring some new anomaly into the world and then departed, often leaving them insane in the process. A very few seem capable of making multiple breakthroughs: if this is combined with duplicability, they are considered extraordinarily valuable by governments, and will have guaranteed employment (and perpetual 24-hour monitoring) for the rest of their lives, no matter what horrors they might have inflicted before being recruited.
Teleportation of the transmitter-to-receiver type has been around since the 80s, but certain Fly-related accidents have prevented it from catching on save for emergency military uses, sending valuable non-living items that absolutely, positively, have to be there in thirty seconds, and for sending stuff (including aggressive stuff) into space. The British have ha superior form of teleportation which operates by the switching of masses between two points and only requires equipment on one end: this is kept a state secret due to fears of what foreign powers might do with it if they had access.
Space travel has moved ahead by leaps and bounds, and there are now bases on Mars, where a few ancient ruins have been found but as yet no sign of dangers either monstrous or ghostly, and no zombies either: there is a strong push to develop off-Earth colonies to guarantee human survival if the next zombie apocalypse spins out of control or the Anti-God comes back. The Moon is mostly left to automated probes and crawlers since the Apollo 18 tragedy.
Research into interdimensional travel has been cut way back since the few dimensions that have been successfully accessed all seem to be rather horrible, and there was that unfortunate bit with the leakage and the mist and the monsters and oy.
Radios and TVs which actually use rabbit ears (most are landline cable, and satellite TV is largely unheard of) are designed to receive only legally registered frequencies, to prevent people from tuning in on Evil Broadcasts: almost every country have dedicated government agencies with the job of checking up and down the radio spectrum for illegal broadcasts. (The whole "videodrome" incident made tight government control of any and all EM broadcasts seem an almost existential necessity). Small scale radio and local TV stations have suffered badly, and perpetrators of "pirate radio" are treated about as gently as actual seagoing pirates.
Mutation of animals by toxic waste and radiation continues to be a problem, in part due to it being so unpredictable. Most of the time exposure to toxins and radioactive material causes merely death and uselessly destructive mutations, as OTL: but ever now and then an inexplicable change will take place and some form of grotesque, physics-defying change will take place and animals will change radically, most frequently through gigantism but also on occasion reproducing in insane new ways, developing insect-like characteristics, sprouting tentacles, etc. And at least 50% of the time it's not normal toxins or nuclear waste that does the job: some new corporation or nuclear site will start producing waste of types never seen before, and in a spasm of idiocy the higher ups will have the weird glowing, fuming, oozing substances disposed in the most absurdly casual fashion rather than having government agencies come in and shut them down.
Such things have impacted badly on the biotech industry: in this world, a goat which has been genetically engineered to produce milk from which spider silk can be manufactured can pretty much be guaranteed to sprout an extra four legs and develop a taste for human flesh at some point. Even the most benevolent efforts tend to backfire. Bio research is now done in highly isolated locations, usually with a remotely detonable atomic bomb under the floor, and is increasingly being done in space: there are those who vehemently call for elimination with any tampering with life, but advanced biotech is simply too vital in combating the various zombie and worse viruses that tend to keep cropping up.
A pop-eyed, remarkably muppet-like monster has been popping up now and then in the Caribbean since the 1960s. For some reason it only eats criminals, general purpose assholes, and fat people with obnoxious attitudes, so the local population looks on it with something close to affection.
The legal system has some odd twists compared to OTL. Supernaturally obtained evidence is only acceptable in court under certain conditions: for instance, evidence obtained with the aid of evil spirits or demons is considered automatically tainted, and evidence through mind-reading requires the mind-reader to be confirmed by two other psychics with no personal or professional contacts in common. Knowingly building on a burial ground from which all bodies have not been removed and the ground checked for magical dangers carries the death penalty in fifteen US states and all of China. The US and pretty much all countries have an index of Banned Books, starting with the Necronomicon, The Grand Grimoire, and the Sumerian Book of the Dead as items "you will not only be shot for owning, but cut into small pieces, burned to ashes, mixed with salt, and thrown into the sea for owning."
At Storage Facility 17-B, odd noises are often heard. Such as an automotive engine constantly gunning and tires shrieking inside a massive steel crate too small for a car to actually move. Or the constant moans of "brains" from the sealed TRIOXIN CONTAMINATION vault. Then there's the disarticulated skeleton embedded in a massive block of plastic: if you turn off the lights, you can see the dim blue flames dance in the eye sockets. Sixty-two pieces of a shattered monkey statue are also embedded in plastic, each piece widely separated from the others. And the formless pink thing in the deepest sub-basement is packed in so many layers of ice and sawdust that even if someone cut the power to the refrigeration, it would take a couple months to thaw out.
In the early 2000s, the US government reached a point of crisis when it became simply impossible to stop a rising public hysteria and rage over the fact that government secrecy had led for decades the flourishing of many, many secret agencies run by lunatics and mad scientists of various sorts, either creating insanely dangerous weapons biological or otherwise, and sometimes doing insane things without even knowing they were doing it, such as in the notorious "Cube" case. President Ashley James Williams dark-horse presidential win in 2008 saw the beginning of the opening up of the US security state: as a man with impeccable monster-fighting credentials, President Williams had the credit to "Go to China" and do what many claimed would gravely weaken US security, wielding the by now almost dictatorial powers of the US president to investigate and break up multiple demented government organizations, create the open-to-everyone and decentralized "citizens task force" with essentially carte blanche carry out surprise visits and investigations ("Ash's Inquisition", his critics called them), and survived no less than seventeen assassination attempts by secret government and evil corporate types, foiled in part by his addition of more supernatural/mad science produced individuals to the Secret Service than ever before (something, again, only Ash Williams, the only candidate to campaign with a chainsaw hand, could have gotten away with).
A world-wide Meteor Watch keeps a close eye out for any meteor falls, since ever now and then one will be found with alien hitchhikers. Cell phone photography of the impact site and immediate emailing of image and location are SOP (modern phones pretty much always send your GPS coordinates with the message, in case it's some sort of emergency), as are getting the hell out there if the meteor is slimy, glowing, encrusted with something organic-looking, or is hollow and already split open.
Djinn are rare, but terribly dangerous. The US Supernatural Investigations Bureau maintains on retainer expensive lawyers, clever mathematicians, and top Internet trolls to develop Djinn-go-away wishes which are entirely unambiguous and monkey's paw proof.
Slashers are in general driven by murderous psychoses largely outside the bounds of normal psychiatry, and usually have an utter lack of empathy for their victims, but they are usually divided into two main classes: Probability Warpers and Inhumans. The categories overlap in that some Inhumans are also Probability Warpers, but the prototypical Warper is physically if not mentally baseline human, while having what non-ironically could be described as the "luck of the devil", carrying out multiple often elaborate killings without ever been seen by the wrong people, never being shot by someone having a gun they didn't know about, never suffering Costume Fail, never getting lost in the woods while chasing after a victim, and never leaving obvious clues for the police in spite of insanity, mental retardation, etc. If a Slasher is suspected, regular guidelines call from roughly ten times the effort and manpower a regular murderer would require, guarding potential victims with at least four armed officers maintaining adequate lines of sight to each other and their ward at all times, heavy use of hound dogs, and psychics whenever possible, while abnormal outbreaks of stupid among both policemen and potential victims having to be taken into account. And that's just for baseline human Warpers: Inhumans are considerably more dangerous, possessed of strength and resistance to damage far beyond normal humans, and often resistance to supernatural forces as well. General procedure in cases where a cleanup or capture crew is not available is to not merely double-tap, but keep shooting until either your run out of bullets or the Slasher is quite out of head: once a Slasher is down, never turn your back on them and simply continue doing as much damage as possible until help arrives.
An Inhuman must never be assumed to be 100% dead, even if it is in pieces. Indeed, even if an Inhuman is reduced to ashes, they may return at some point: in one notorious case keeping an Inhuman locked up didn't do the job, since an identical masked killer showed up anyway.
Inhumans which are also Probability Warpers are goddamn scary.
Animal attacks remain more frequent than in our world, either due to giant monster versions of regular animals popping up, or occasional mass attacks in which "normal" animals (usually a limited subclass of them, such as birds, worms, or bees, although one rare occasions showing inter-class solidarity) seem to declare war on mankind. The latter events are usually highly irregular, and do not continue for more than a few days, but it has led to the continuation of an old-fashioned "kill the vermin" attitude towards undomesticated animal life which has driven a number of species to extinction and made wild animal appearances in urban places of the sort we know almost unknown. Killing sprees directed at seagulls and pigeons are common ("they were gathering and looking at me in a threatening manner! I was concerned for my safety!") and people taking their pets out after dark are in danger of running into an urban vigilante who forgets that it's not just demonic animals whose eyes can glow. Although giant monster sharks continue to occasionally pop up, the Great White has largely been driven to extinction over most of the globe.
Sororities as an institution have almost died out, due to their tendency to attract serial killers and Satanist cults. Slumber parties have also suffered. Beach parties are less effected, sea monster attacks near shore being rare enough and at least rarely involve things just coming right out of the water. Camping and hiking in the woods, due to the frequent appearance of giant mutant bears, backwoods cannibals and hillbilly mutants, have taken a big hit, and those with a deep need to experience the Great Outdoors usually go well armed. (Deep Greens are actually a bit pleased by this, since a less disturbed wilderness in their opinion is a healthier wilderness, and MurderBillies don't generally go much for slash and burn agriculture). It's hard to run a wax museum, because invariably some visitor will try to crack open one of your best exhibits to make sure there isn't a dead body inside. Indoor sports arenas and climbing surfaces have increased in popularity.
Worldwide people go out less after dark, and houses tend to go heavily in for bars on the windows and reinforced doors, and in more developed countries, advanced security systems (although not too advanced, lest they turn out to be sentient and turn on the house's inhabitants). Inside there are usually protective crosses, garlic, cold, iron, etc., and also more elaborate magical protections often enough, although these are often kept hidden, lest the neighbors mistake it for dark magic. It is no longer considered polite to ask to come in: one just steps right into someone else's house, to prove you don't need to be invited in. Democracies now follow the US example of allowing private citizens to own as much firepower as they can afford, (The NRA is entirely mainstream in the US) although most as yet do not imitate the Texan practice of allowing RPGs and bazookas for home defense. In dictatorial countries whose regimes still refuse to arm the common population, people simply always stay in crowds, and agriculture has suffered from people fleeing lightly settled and therefore vulnerable countryside to the big city.
The real estate market has suffered from the fact that even a rumor of supernatural phenomena or murder in a house makes it unsalable, but new house construction had benefitted from the desire of buyers for new, sinister past-free houses, as long as they aren't built on a former graveyard. (Some cynical US humorists have noted that pretty much every part of the US has had dead Indians buried under it at some point). Demolition services also prosper as questionable mental health clinics or old houses where those kids mysteriously vanished in sixty-two are not merely demolished, but the very foundations dug up, exorcised, and dumped in the sea. Countless scam "ghost proof" housing designs appear on the market every year where it isn't outright illegal.
Everyone wears small face masks Japanese-style to prevent the spread of germs and viruses, which might kill you or turn you into a zombie: an almost universal use of gloves has spread for the same reason.
In advanced countries, hospitals usually have elaborate lockdown procedures and emergency airtight remotely closable (and not easily opened) doors in case of an outbreak of…something. The sick and dying are often handcuffed or otherwise chained to their beds just in case some random zombiefication event breaks out: fear of corpses is at all time high, and anatomy classes tend to have corpses which have had their limbs and teeth removed already. Most corpses of course don't rise and attack before they're safely disposed of, but the fact that they can is always on people's minds. There's quite a lot of NIMBY about graveyards. Funerals have changed: most people now go for cremation, or if their religious beliefs make that impossible, make sure that their deceased relative is buried beneath a thick, zombie-proof layer of concrete.
Popular culture has been greatly impacted, of course. There are what we would call horror movies, but locally are action movies, with rather more emphasis on the defeat of manifestations of the Terror than on the scary nature of the situation, and with the Army or Air force often saving the day in a rather ra-ra-rah manner reminiscent of OTL 1950s movies. Indeed, many countries have severe censorship in what is allowed to be shown in theatres, and even the US has laws against films "damaging to national morale" or "objectively pro-Satanist." Goofy, get-your-mind-off-things comedies are popular. Some countries, including the US, are fairly free in giving the population access to drugs that relieve fear and allow relaxation: the use of drugs which suppress dreaming is quite widespread, both to eliminate exhausting nightmares and for reasons the government doesn't want anyone talking about. The gloomier and more despairing types of music tend to be frowned on by governments as well, although certain forms of furiously angry Rock and Roll are tolerated, anger being considered a positive emotion, and of course Christian Rock gets a pass. (There was some talk of banning Rock and Roll entirely as "the devils music", but the number of bands which have been proven to have sold their souls for success is actually pretty small, and some members of the rock community have been active devil-fighters. The history of what we might call Heavy Metal has of course been completely butterflied: no record label would ever put out your average Iron Maiden album cover).
There are very few jobs for clowns anymore.
There of course is a Dark Underground which does things like make documentaries of actual slashers at work, or run secret hostels where people can indulge their Inner Slasher. Such things are ruthlessly stamped out whenever they are discovered, but for those who know where to go there are places that indulge the darkest fantasies, from cannibalism to sex with zombies. (Make sure to bring protection!) All sorts of unregulated drugs are available for those with more money than sense, some of which can provide amazing new experiences, at least until your brain melts and runs out of your nose. You can even buy The Stuff (which may lead to all of you turning to goo and running out your mouth). If you're into Japanese girls and are completely fucking insane, you can now get your own Tomie. (They're easily grown given a bit of frozen blood and a human body to incubate in).
Zoos are enlivened by specimens of the less horrific forms of Terror-generated life, from giant snakes to dinosaurs to humanoid octopi to walking, acid-secreting plants from Antarctica, and some of the smaller invasive species from the Mist dimension. The importing of Abnormal Life Forms is of course heavily regulated: nothing capable of breeding at Prodigious Rates is to be let into the country, for instance.
Cats are as popular as ever, in spite of their association with witches: they will attack some of the smaller Unnatural nasties, and can often detect Unnatural things before humans can (unfortunately, it's hard to tell a cat which is actually seeing an unhappy or dangerous spirit from one which is just staring randomly into space).
The problem with vampires is not so much their very existence is that there are so many different types, each with their own problems and challenges to deal with. Some can be cured by blood transfusions (or even a diet of French food) others can live as regular people as long as they have access to synthetic blood or, if all else fails, a blood bank which allows withdrawals, some are soulless monster mockeries of their former human selves, some are controlled by unearthly parasites, yet others eat life instead of blood. Some vampires can be returned to normal by killing their vampire master. Some are incapable of sex, some actually spread vampirism with it. On the positive side, unifying the many breeds against humanity would be a true exercise in cat-herding.
Several different fathers/mothers of all vampires have shown up over time. Like Satanists and their multiple antichrists, Vampires disagree quite forcefully on their bona fides.
Werewolves are also variable. Some are just mindless monsters in their transformed state, others have societies and traditions. Were-Panthers have one hell of a problem with sex. Most of them think "Lycans" is a silly name, while "The Wolfen" are a bunch of arrogant pricks whose pretentions to superiority to mankind have become less vocal since the US government unleashed killer robots, golems, and Umbrella Corporation's top model Pursuers on their furry, "you are our prey animal" asses. Silver prices are up.
Zombies are the most commonly encountered manifestation of the Terror, given their tendency to multiply. Everyone knows to shoot for the head and double tap, and if that doesn't work, cut them into small pieces. (Chainsaw-handling classes are popular). In well off countries, everyone has a set of heavy protective clothes with attached helmet, along the lines of suits used by attack dog trainers, to protect them from bites, ready to be donned immediately the anti-zombie alarms go off. Emergency shelters are available in every city for those caught away from home without a suit (most companies provide spare protective garments to their employees), usually with a barred window with a sharpshooter on the other side in case any of the people in the shelter show signs of being infected. In poorer countries the disadvantaged economically construct protective outfits as best they can, from metal scrap and plastic, woven grass and wood and animal hides.
Some zombies can be used. Trioxin zombies, as long as they're fairly fresh, are almost human as long as they get a steady supply of brain tissue. Other less intelligent types can be controlled by pulling out their teeth and fingernails and directing them with shock collars and brain implants: non-infectious and low-infectivity zombies actually do a fair amount of unskilled labor, most notoriously in China, which has been accused of converting executed political prisoners to zombie labor (after selling the more valuable internal organs), although a majority of countries ban the practice. (The Catholic Church is very much opposed). Fast and agile non-sentient zombies are considered too dangerous, and nobody has found a use for Rage Virus victims.
So far the PontyPool virus appears to be unique as a "conceptual" virus infecting sounds, although global anti-Terror security forces monitor radio and phone signals carefully for any signs of new outbreaks, and local law enforcement agencies again and again find themselves rounding up street people to make sure their babblings are of a normal sort, while earplug sellers have made a killing. [2]
If zombies are the most common threat, Satanists are perhaps the most existentially alarming, given the potential for world-ending inherent in their occupation. The OTL US Satanist panic started a decade early and never ended, because, you know, real warlocks and witches, and soon spread abroad, particularly in India, Europe, the Philippines, and Latin America. In Africa, of course, witch hunting never stopped, and many talented witch-sniffers go on to have lucrative (if dangerous) jobs abroad. Using black magic to kill or harm carries the death penalty in the US and most nations.
The Tall Man is, aside from actual Antichrists, the highest ranked being on the Supernatural Most Wanted list.
The US western states now conduct annual Bigfoot hunts with werewolf and psychic trackers and heavy assault weapons to keep the population down. No gentle giants: the only Bigfoot/Wendigo this world has ever known are brutal killers. Somehow they never seem to go entirely extinct.
Many governments employ supernatural entities and products of Mad Science (some times secretly in case of extreme public hostility) for security and military purposes, and to combat other supernatural entities. The US, simply due to being the nation most plagued with Incidents, has the largest number of Weird Things working for the government.
Animated puppets ("Toulon's children") from finger-size to larger than human size are common, now that brain tissue can be cloned in large amounts for potion-making purposes: one trouble is that puppets often develop distinctive and unpredictable personalities, and are difficult to control (although not treating them like a dick helps). Werewolves with good control over their furry selves also have steady employment (Los Angeles tried to put together a werewolf police squad as early as 1993), while with vampires, as discussed earlier, it depends very much on what kind of vampire one is dealing with. Blade and several other "civilized" or half-vampires work with the government to suppress the more dangerous types, as does Vampirella in Europe and Saya in Japan, while Barnabas Collins, not being the "running around swinging huge pointy things" type, works for the UK in a largely advisory role. Less agreeable types of vampires and skin-changers can be kept under control with explosive neck collars and such, suicide squad style, as long as they can't, say, turn into mist: of course, that leads to motivational problems. Then there are a rich variety of cyborgs and machine men, or cyborgized animals: due to the almost universal limitations on AI and the equally universal tendency of robots to go Destroy All Humans after a while, pure machine killers are rare. Japan generally is considered to lead the world in the sophistication and reliability of its combat cyborgs, although for some odd reason their best human subjects are usually teenage girls.
Psychics are numerous, although the weaker ones seem to exist mainly to note something bad is going on at the start of a Terror Incident and then to get killed. With government recruitment and training there had emerged a professional class of psychics which are useful, especially in identifying serial killers and Slashers and houses that need to be burned to the ground, stat. Northern New England for some reason has a high incidence of psychics, especially pre-adolescent ones. Faking being a psychic for money-making services is illegal in the US and a number of other countries: in the Soviet Union, all psychics are automatically state employees working for the extensive anti-Terror organizations. The more powerful psychics – telekinetics, pyrokinetics, etc. are classed more as heavy weapons than support services and tend to be closely controlled and monitored by governments where they are not simply executed on discovery. This does not prevent a certain amount of secret government experimentation to create more powerful psychics as weapons against the Terror, but reliable and replicable results remain rate.
Some psychics can foresee the future. Sometimes it can't be changed, and attempts to do so fail in often ironic ways. Sometimes the future can be changed, and you can save people's lives. But be warned that in a minority of cases they'll die soon anyway, usually in absurdly contrived manners. Most psychics who can foresee the future aren't happy people.
Some groups of Hippies have actually developed Flower Power evil-warding and repelling powers, but there have been few new cases since the 70s, and the aging Psychic Hippie population is a limited resource.
Helpful ghosts are rare: even the more noble Revenge Ghosts tend to skedaddle off to the afterlife once they have taken care of Unfinished Business. Although magico-technological methods for trapping ghosts exists, controlling them "in the field" is almost impossible: there are witches and wizards which can control ghosts, but finding magicians both powerful enough and not EEEEVIL to do the job is difficult, outside of east Asia, where a traditional of spirit-summoning exists. Slashers are also rather poor subjects for weaponization: the human ones occasionally can be brainwashed and retrained as very effective assassins, but the undead/monstrous ones aren't really safely controllable no matter how many wires you stick in their shrunken, rubbery brains. As mentioned before, with liquefied cloned brain tissue gently bubbling through implanted feeder tubes, fresh Trioxin zombies can be kept happy, and are sentient, but care must be taken to make sure your zombie field agents aren't of the 10% or so of Trioxin zombies that are contagious through bites; the international laws against that are so frightfully strict that even the US is quick to execute any officials responsible for "incidents."
(Then there are Frankensteins, dead people – or several dead people stitched together – revived by Dubious Science and lacking either infectiousness or a desire to eat human brains. The main problem with using Frankensteins as Special Forces that for them to have functional minds so far requires very fresh brains – which leads to problems in materials sourcing. Fresh bodies are in short supply as it is with so many people choosing to dispose of their dead in a thorough manner.)
Haunted death-ships sailing the seas are a solved problem, more or less: if any more show up they will be quickly spotted by the orbiting swarm of spy satellites and slammed with enough orbital military hardware to reduce them to metallic gas, even the most potent marine MurderGhosts and satanic entities being unable to reconstruct a vaporized ship.
Although Earth has suffered from multiple alien invasions, mostly by various murderous but rather stupid predatory species, official contact with aliens remains relatively rare. Those aliens we do have some non-murderous interactions with claim to know nothing of most of the invaders, and generally avoid Earth and its deep weirdness. The Ovoids maintain a limited diplomatic presence: they were apologetic about their first contact (sterilizing a town and its surroundings to prevent the escape of a kind of corpse-animating slug), which is understandable since they were somewhat responsible for them in the first place. The Hooded Ones have helped Earth on several occasions against meteor-transmitted zombeism, apparently being some sort of interstellar health service (and as many government officials, rather callous when it comes to telling human victims what is actually going on or what they're trying to do), but claim to be unqualified to deal with other types of zombie breakouts.
Several alien beings have settled on Earth and become local citizens, with a few of them working for Earth governments. Brick Bardo, 13 inch tall space cop with a handgun as powerful as a tank's main cannon and as strong as a full-grown human, currently is employed by the US government. Several Yautja mercenaries based in Antarctica are available for hire at very reasonable rates, being enthusiastic hunters of monsters of all types: a Yautja scientist has reportedly developed a means of turning at least some sorts of ghosts into trophies, a process which unfortunately terrestrial technology is not up to duplicate at present.
Taking out the Cloverfield Entity before it could wreck too much of New York without vaporizing half of New York in the process was their biggest job yet. New Yorkers aren't entirely happy, since after taking the head they failed to do anything about the rest of the corpse: it took months to dispose of, and the stink could be smelled in Staten Island. (To be fair, their saucer was barely large enough to carry off the head as a trophy, let alone the rest of it).
The Slime People under Los Angeles and surrounding counties have largely died out, human vengeance for their invasion having been compounded by something nasty caught from a pet shop Iguana. Much of their extensive cave system has been annexed by the City of Los Angeles and converted into cheap housing for the poor and claustrophilic.
Thailand has its own team of sword-swinging superheroes, which showed up to fight zombies and stuck around, being unable to remember where they came from.
Witches, wizards, and warlocks are employed by most governments: the preponderance of eeevil types means that a lot of them are kept off the books, so to speak. "Natural" witches whose powers are innate are useful and often quite powerful, but rare. The US preferentially hires native medicine men and traditional healers/priests, which are relatively unlikely to be in cahoots with demons or evil spirits: still, the power of Satan is too tempting for most government to not employ Black Magicians, if only unofficially and on a "contractor" basis. (Different cults and covens generally hate eachother, and often claim the devil the other group is worshipping isn't the "real" thing, so Black Magicians can often be employed to attack other Black Magicians without Evil Solidarity being a problem). India is fairly rich in useful "good" magicians, but the government generally doesn't allow them to move abroad, given their necessity in dealing with local witches, vampires, and evil spirits.
At least one version of Hell and its Satan actively cooperates with human governments in putting down cultists: that version of Satan finds most devil-worshippers downright embarrassing. Most Satans, however, usually want to End the World, usually breeding an AntiChrist. Hunting down and eliminating these world-enders is a major obsession of most governments, and playing "spot the antichrist" is always a popular game with the general population. If in our world you can't run for President and be an Atheist, in this one any candidate for a job above village dogcatcher has to be seen in Church, usually not only in the local mainstream Protestant Church, but in a Catholic Church as well (Catholics and Protestants each suspect the Antichrist would have no trouble coming into the other guy's church) and sometimes the local Jewish temple and maybe the Presbyterians and Mormons houses of worship too? (In Japan Buddhist and Shinto temples and shrines are added to the list). Of course, while the world always seems to be ending, it somehow never does: as mentioned before, it helps a lot that the various different satanic cults and Antichrists hate eachother, and tend to sabotage each other's efforts, most notably the time when internationalist billionaire philanthropist Damien Thorn was attacked while on stage at a fundraiser, a wild-eyed bearded man in a rumpled suit stepping up behind him and somehow yanked his skull and spinal column out through his back, and then crowed "WHO'S THE ANTICHRIST NOW, BEEATCH???" to the writhing and somehow still alive skull-with-brain-in and spinal column before both vanished in a puff of sulfurous smoke.
There is a great deal of prejudice, against certain religions (Haitian Voodoo most notably, which is illegal in a number of countries, while the Celtic pagan revival was shut down hard after some unfortunate wicker and bee related incidents), and against the disabled and physically disfigured (always suspected of planning gruesome death against anyone responsible), and the malformed by genetics are suspected of weird powers as well as vengeful attitudes. There are no Goths (any form of "witchy" dress is suspect) and while there are nihilist gloom and doom types, they generally go for a grey and colorless look. Hillbilly types have an even worse reputation than OTL, which just makes the vast majority which aren't inbred cannibals all the more defensive and suspicious of outsiders. Feminism hasn't been helped by the tendency of Slashers to target people with sex lives, or the predominance of women among East Asian MurderGhosts. Gypsies are suspected of inflicting evil curses (some horrid pogroms have taken place in Eastern Europe) in spite of community leaders insisting that there is no "gypsy secret magic" capable of giving hay fever, and those gypsies which do inflict curses must be in league with demons. The mentally ill, of course, are all under suspicion of being dangerous killers, most people have trouble distinguishing between OCD and raving psychosis, and nobody self-identifies as having mental issues to excuse being a dick. Mental health workers struggle to educate the public and get across the notion that the madness of slashers and such is about as much like normal mental problems as zombiesm is like psoriasis. On the positive side, Muslims, given their virtual non-involvement in any satanic cults and their ruthless elimination of anything unnatural in their territories, have a rather better reputation than OTL (a lack of 9/11 helps, of course).
The Monsters Rights movement, led by the more civil sorts of vampires and werewolves and the Nightbreed, supported by those grotesquely mutated types which embrace their horribleness, and backed by the Sapient Animal Defense League (dogs and some apes, currently) faces an uphill battle, to say the least.
Various biker groups, notably the Hell's Angels, have preemptively moved to protect their reputation by developing a rep as monster and Slasher fighters, and Hell's Angels gangs are notorious for stomping to death any "satanic" or "cult" bikers that might give bikers a bad name – sometimes, unfortunately, making some serious identification errors.
An indestructible golem stands on the abyssal Atlantic plain, waiting for new commands no human being has the power to make.
Internationally, the Soviet Union is still around, with the world-wide spread of the Terror and such global events as the Machine Revolt and multiple outbreaks of Zombieism (not to mention a terrific Slasher problem: the USSR was ill prepared to deal with even normal serial killers) leading to a increase in hard-line repression reinforced by perception that magic users were conspiring against the government (correctly, although mostly in the sense of "individual persons with new access to magic decides to settle some scores). There was no Gorbachev or Glasnost, and with repression supported by state co-option of mad science and black magic the USSR staggered on into the 1990s in spite of its flagging economy. A breakdown eventually took place, caused by a near takeover of the State by aliens and vampires combined with "shooting food rioters in the streets" level of shortages combined with multiple cases of Mad Science Fail requiring nuclear sterilization, [-1] but the military were able to restore control over most of the area, although the breakaway of Eastern Europe was unavoidable. Although still theoretically a Communist state, the current regime is in essence a Russian nationalist military regime and economically pragmatic: the Orthodox Church has regained much power as a symbol of resistance to the Forces of Darkness, and Moscow loudly proclaims its total hostility to any meddling in black magic and demonology, although various foreign intelligence agencies suspect they continue to work in secret with such forces (summoned demons certainly say they do, but then demons lie all the time).
Japan's boom years were brought to an early end by several Tokyo-centric disasters , the rampages of the Iron Men in 1989 and 1992 (along with the rather grossly disproportionate response of US orbital assets in putting a stop to them), and several zombie outbreaks. The helplessness of Japan in handling its own menaces (and the indifferent brutality of foreign help) led to a sense of national shame and anger, something reinforced by the failure of local supernatural assets to stop the computer ghost attacks of 2001, which killed thousands, and the revenge-ghost outbreak of 2002 (the Grudge ended up killing several hundred people all on its own before finally being contained by a massive program of quarantine and potential victim isolation), and the need to call in foreign heavy hitters (that many foreign heavy hitters gave their lives to finally eliminate Japan's most deadly MurderGhosts didn't help). Japan has turned angrily ultra-nationalistic and increasingly militarized, and developed a massive new anti-Terror organization importing foreign expertise and skills in a new "Meiji Renovation" (which many foreign observers complain involves the use of very questionable resources, human and …other.)
Without Cambodia being drawn into the Vietnam conflict the Khmer Rouge failed to take over (having to battle another, Vietnam-supported Red revolutionary group further complicated things), but continued to terrorize the countryside for three decades longer: there are current reports of murderous Rouge Zombies in the deep jungle.
China, with an initially fairly low rate of Terror-related incidents (mostly of the Murder Ghost variety, with some hopping vampires later for flavor) and a totalitarian control of information weathered the last half century fairly well: currently it is worrysome for its rather large-scale use of the supernatural in ways frowned by the rest of the world. Although they are careful to show themselves in bright sunlight on a regular basis, the current leadership has been alive for an abnormally long time, and foreign governments certainly aren't fully buying the bit about their longevity being the result of ancient herbal medicine learned from Chinese ghosts.
The European Project failed to get very far, open movement of goods and people seeming less desirable when some of those people were Slashers and demon-worshippers or possibly infected with some sort of Zombiefication of virus, and was eventually replaced by a more modest Franco-German project, both countries having remained fairly democratic due to a relatively low Incident rate, while Italy swung back towards Fascism, and after certain objections were raised, pursued concurrently in different geographic locations Fascist and Communist forms of For Everyones' Good totalitarianism. Greece went Clerical-Fascist, Franco's Spain not only never reformed but eventually developed its own atomic weapons on a just in case basis, and Britain turned to isolationist panopticon dystopia multiple decades ahead of schedule. (To be fair, that whole "alien spaceship turns hundreds of thousands of Londoners into life vampires before being nuked, killing several hundred thousand more Londoners) probably was a bit of a breaking point).
Italy (both of them) finds its reputation as the home country of bizarre and gory murder plans rather embarrassing, and tries to emphasize their problems with witches and zombies instead.
Sub-Saharan Africa actually has a relatively low level of large-scale Incidents, although given their lack of local military hardware and organizational sophistication they are dependent on foreign aid in case of, say, a large scale zombie outbreak. Since Africa spilling over with a billion zombies is in nobodies interest, multiple developed countries maintain dozens of large military bases across the continent to contain any such outbreaks: while South Africa is considered the nation best suited to handle such an outbreak on its own, it does maintain large British sites for old times' sake. Witch, shapeshifter, etc. hunting is a booming business, although foreign observers complain African "experts" tend to have a higher rate of false positives than almost anywhere on Earth, with the possible exception of North Korea.
Mexico, Canada, and the United states possess a unified military command system for maximum mutual support in the case of a major Incident in any one country. There are also plans to establish an impenetrable military cordon across the narrow "neck" of Southern Mexico if something overruns Central America: the fact they will be left out to dry somewhat annoys inhabitants of the Yucatan, who complain they can't do anything about their inconvenient geography.
South America has its own problems, with various urban Cristopathic or neo-Communist rebels against the mostly authoritarian regimes finding that the various measures enacted to block zombie access to streets and houses also slow down police and army forces pretty good. Brazil is accelerating its program of driving a military road through what seems every corner of the Amazon: the government has no desire whatsoever for some sort of horror to breed out of control in the deep jungle where nobody is looking or easily get to if something is detected. Peru and Bolivia, meanwhile, are following the example of the Swiss and setting charges and military outposts to destroy all road access into the high mountain country (it is a known fact that most types of zombies, in the absence of visible prey, tend to drift downhill).
The Middle East was, the occasional demonic possession aside, fairly quiet east of Egypt, although in a bust of dazzling stupidity the Soviet Union still ended invading and wrecking Afghanistan (but perhaps one is being too harsh: they did not, after all, have the example of Vietnam as a warning). The Taliban are currently in retreat, although the mysterious black-clad cultists who are rapidly taking over large swathes of the country, with their armies of fast, hard-to-kill zombies which they somehow control by rattling cans of rocks, don't seem to be an improvement. Egypt has seen an Islamicist takeover: visits to the Pyramids and tombs of the Pharaohs have been cancelled, with all such relics from the Age of Ignorance sealed shut with tons and tons of concrete: given some known events, this does not create the degree of anger it might in our world. Israel continues to bug its neighbors and has an absolutely zero-tolerance approach to the Satanists and Christians which keep on showing up in hopes of a swiftly arriving Apocalypse: and they have indeed put up a zombie-proof wall around their entire country.
The Simon Wiesenthal Brigade scours the world looking for surviving Nazi mad scientists, sorcerers, and zombies, and exterminates them with extreme prejudice.
Various Mysterious islands seem to have popped into existence over the years (although, confusingly, some of them turned out to have backstories). Matango Island has been annexed by Japan (which reportedly has been doing bioweapons experiments there), while Monster Island (with over a dozen species of giant monster) has been annexed by the USA. Giant Spider and Superfast Reproducing Tick Island, they just burned to ash.
That something was deliberately responsible for the Terror was strongly indicated from early on. For one thing, there were the literary parallels, noted when multiple vampires actually called Dracula started showing up, and was greatly reinforced when (crappy) versions of HP Lovecraft stories with the actual names of Lovecraft characters started happening, although it took a while for people to realize this. (In a world plagued with actual horrors, the OTL HP Lovecraft revival was rather delayed [1] and Herbert West managed to get through medical school loudly talking about overcoming death without anyone pointing out the appropriateness of his name). The rather strong parallels between the attack of the Blob (1988) and the 1958 movie, and between events in Antarctica and Who Goes There led to a close and nervous reexamination of fiction, specially that written before the 1960s, and comparison to ongoing incidents). The Judgement From God folks of course already knew it was deliberate, but the notion that God might be inspired in his Punishments by old pulp SF was a bit offensive. The "we're in the Matrix" crowd, on the other hand, considered this fairly strong evidence in their favor.
"Mad scientists" a plenty showed no usually inventing abilities before 1960 – and often inexplicably, even to themselves, changed their names after 1960 to something more appropriately melodramatic.
Then there was the manufactured past. As investigations into cults, curses, centers of fell evil multiplied, it became clear that many supposed ancient evils had no real existence before 1960: there were always books and records which supposedly were evidence, but close examination almost always found holes in the story: books published by imaginary publishers, or by real publishers with no record of having published them in the first place. Ancient cursed villages (such as Dunwich, Massachusetts) without any of the ages of accumulated rubbish that inevitably comes with them. Islands which if they had actually been visible by satellite or passing ship would have been visited long before the first visitors showed up to be attacked by monsters. People involved, especially in the earlier phases of the Terror, often seemed to have come out of nowhere – the oddest thing about the mutation of a Russian defector into a man-killing freak at Yucca Flats was that subsequent investigation strongly indicated that there never had been a Russian scientist named Javorsky to defect to the US in the first place. Famous scientists/thinkers/whatever which nobody could remember actually meeting before 1960. Cannibal tribes kept showing up in places where no such people had been reported before (oddly, they were mostly discovered by Italians). Some aliens and creatures did seem to have more concrete pasts, but they were definitely in the minority.
The true facts came out in 2012, when one of the surviving Antichrists showed up in Washington and turned himself into the Paranormal Investigations Bureau. Before killing himself with a pair of ancient flint knives he pulled out of thin air, muttering to himself about "not being real", he gave his captors a precise latitude and longitude in the Rockies, and a depth of two miles.
Extensive use of seismic tomography and data analysis showed what looked like a roughly humanoid figure curled up on its side. It was three miles long.
So far it's just been dreams. What will happen when it awakes will be much, much worse. And there isn't much time left to figure out how to either keep it asleep or destroy it. And it's not the only one…
[a] So far, various governments have set off over three dozen atomic weapons to deal with otherwise unmanageable aspects of the Terror. By a rare turn of good luck, in only one of those cases did the atomic explosions lead to an outbreak of mutant monsters.
[1] Contact with aliens eventually led to his rediscovery when it became clear there were some really Lovecraftian horrors out there in the universe. The reason for the relative shortage of alien radio signals is simply that being noticed is very undesirable.
[2] The spread of the Pontypool virus was limited by the Emergency Protocols set up in case of something like the Videodrome broadcasts of '83 or the "Independent Thinkers" broadcasts of '87 and '88, allowing the Canadian government to shut down all radio and TV and telephone transmissions, hard, and with (often violent) public cooperation. Since then, a variety of mnemonic and "mental self-coding" techniques have been developed to help people combat any further outbreaks, although in emergencies deliberately induced aphasia is 100% effective technique.
). Writing something like that is very, very difficult to do right and I'd like to avoid cringe if possible.
