Reminds me of the Poop Demon from Dogma
Unusual Horror Settings
- Thread starter ArlequineLunaire
- Start date
- Discussion Horror
- Location
- SV's Only Complete Persona Quest
- Pronouns
- She/Her
There's also Stephen King's Dreamcatcher, where the creatures are like Alien but they come out of your arse instead of your chest. Yeah, sounds just like a South Park plot, they even call the aliens 'shitweasels' in-text.
- Location
- United Kingdom
Some good horror stuff is Gurps.
You obviously have Gurps Horror, which is easily added to Gurps Cabal, Gurps Atomic Horror and Gurps Illuminati, with the obvious pick up here of Gurps Infinite Worlds.
Cabal has preternatural beings accessing and wanting to take over the multiverse, with a large supernatural cosmology - which in many ways has some Mage the Awakening elements.
Horror naturally gives horror from various angles and points of view.
Atomic Horror has various aliens that are trying to take over the world (one type are a little like MCU Asgardians), which neatly switches into Illuminati as one of the aliens is trying to control the Earth - as well as those in the Cabal. As that involves the multiverse again, Infinite Worlds is all about methods of travelling to other worlds, and time travel.
You obviously have Gurps Horror, which is easily added to Gurps Cabal, Gurps Atomic Horror and Gurps Illuminati, with the obvious pick up here of Gurps Infinite Worlds.
Cabal has preternatural beings accessing and wanting to take over the multiverse, with a large supernatural cosmology - which in many ways has some Mage the Awakening elements.
Horror naturally gives horror from various angles and points of view.
Atomic Horror has various aliens that are trying to take over the world (one type are a little like MCU Asgardians), which neatly switches into Illuminati as one of the aliens is trying to control the Earth - as well as those in the Cabal. As that involves the multiverse again, Infinite Worlds is all about methods of travelling to other worlds, and time travel.
I found a very insightful blog post on Elemental Horror
violentmediarpg.blogspot.com
It also gave me ideas for some other -Mancers.
Haemomancers
To become a Haemonancer requires one to either become a vampire or to endure an agonizing death that ultimately is a mix of Hydromancers and Aeromancers: Slowly exsanguiated and drowned in their own blood. Great care must be taken what the heart keeps beating until the lungs are filled, requiring compex machinery or assistance. Their bodies appear bloodless and bloodshot at the same time, with pale skin and protruding black veins.
Temperament wise they are between Hydromancers and Aeromancers, leaning towards the latter. The last moments of their lives were defined by a desperate thirst for power, even as what they drank killed them, for one does not become a Haemomancer by accident - unless one comes across an unusually sadistic and unlucky executioner. As such Haemomancers crave control above all else, and often make blood do unsual things just to show that they can. The only thing that interests them more is making the living do what the Haemomancer wants, which is usually what the living fears most, just for the Haemomancer to revel in the feeling of control.
They can easily manipulate a person's mood and state of awareness by maniplating the blood flow of their brain, and likewise easily kill them with brain haemhorrage - doing so requires a lot of concentration, though. Then there is of course the usual trick of bursting surface veins and arteries and utilizing the flowing blood as floating weapons. Some haemomancers also like to "spice it up" with some blood-borne contagions and poisons, often extracted by bursting the organs of one victim and then injecting the contaminated blood into the next.
On the other hand they cannot easily summon their element in the wild, only from willing and unwilling donors (including corpses) and their own bodies.
So long as they remain conscious, they can summon all blood back into their body, and are not harmed by diseases or poisons, and can even use blood constructs to replace other tissues like muscle and bone (albeit that requires a lot of blood) or create and empower armor (which requires even more).
This does not make their original bodies any more durable, tough, and temperature extremes can easily render their blood usuable by freezing or baking it.
They are the easiest to kill if you get the drop on them, even if they sense your blood within a certain distance (which can get circumvented by wards, golems and ranged weapons).
Aeromancers are the hardest to sneak up on, as they sense both your surrounding air, and its sudden absence. You would need intangibility.
Biomancers
To gain elemental command of the flesh means to be devoured by it, be it by means of plagues, parasites or digestion.
A large beast (or creative surgery) is required to only die from the digestion and not the previous biting and chewing.
As such Biomancers take three distinct physical forms - the Slime, the Swarm and the Beast.
To become a sapient plague is the easiest path, if one has the endurace to stay conscious to the end - they have no mind one needs to subjugate.
To suborn the many insects devouring one's flesh (and the insects that eat them, and descendants of their bloodline) requires both a strong mind an great concentration, keeping the will to live alive in the pieces of flesh one loses - the will to be complete again.
To suborn a single bestial mind even as you lose your body requires the strongest will and mind (drugging them helps with the entrace but makes reaching apotheosis more difficult), but as your flesh becomes theirs you gain a unique capability to reshape their body and, by extension, their brain and mind.
Indeed, each Biomancer can reshape the organisms that have taken their form, allowing rapid directed evolution and mutation.
Slimes can create gravity-defying pseudopods and squeeze themselves through any entrace a singe piece of them can pass, and regrow from a single bacterium.
They are the easiest to best in battle and the hardest to actually kill, except with fire, electricity and elemental (stealing of) air and water.
They can easily infect others through sheer osmotic pressure, and invest that pressure and will into every drop they shed.
As the flesh sloughs from the bone it falls under control of the slime, quickly devouring the host from within. They often leave the bones and skin intact,
creating a puppet that looks almost alive by adding some glass eyes. It only needs to get close enough to projectile vomit its contents.
Slimes can also easily enslave people by giving them a simple ear infection to remotely give commands, and the massive threat of worse to come.
Some rare slimes relearn to control the nervous system, given that they had one in their previous life, allowing them to create almost indetetable hosts
by only devouring part of the brain, then extending roots and tendrils into the rest. These hosts inevitably suffer mental damage from the inital incursion,
and sometimes enough of their will remains to briefly regain control (they can do so only very briefly indeed before it alerts the Slime and it commands the infection to eat more of their brain). More often they have an irrational and isatiable hunger for brains, the easier for the Slime to spread its infection.
The more hosts a Slime controls, the less refined its control becomes, though their soul gains increased ability to multitask over the centuries.
As such, lucid enough hosts can break free if there are enough of them, or the Slime is too distracted by resurgence of its own transformative trauma or things like an ongoing battle. Brainless hosts can do little more than shamble if the Slime is too distracted.
While most Slimes are the result of bacteria, some also are devoured by fungi, resulting in Mycoids.
This makes them easier to kill and makes it harder for them to infect others at range, but their more coherent minds and bodies make them a fusion of Slime and Beast, albeit they are severly lacking in mobility until they have servants to carry them. Controlled agitation by fungus roots can inspire monstrous growth but it takes a very skilled fungal Biomancer to greate fully functional giant organisms. Their specialty is to turn every engagement into a minefield of buried fungis structrues, pregnant with spores and poisons.
Swarms suffer from the same multitasking issues as Slimes, but eusocial insects carry most of their own cognitive weight.
And the Swarm Biomancer can make them eusocial. Indeed, with enough skill, Swarms can create entire kingdoms, and insects big enough to crush a man under their feet, but doing so takes centuries to millennia of growth, last but not least remodeling the very inefficient breathin appratus of most insects.
Where Slimes and most Mycoids are purely predatory, many Swarms often develop eusocial aspects in their own personality, even if they are as tribalist as warring ant hives. But like the rare ant hives that work together, some Swarms can even play "nice" with others - if you do not cross their borders, and feed them enough. They have a harder time controlling unwilling hosts, until they learn to assimilate neural mites and brain worms.
Beasts are the origin of most lycanthrope stories, and can indeed spread their transformation to others - albeit unless they become a biomancer, the other cannot control it. They have the greatest inital freedom when it comes to reshaping flesh (albeit Swarms can learn in time, if they get their hive mind to focus) and some even take their old human form (if they remember it) or simply one they find desirable (often colored by their new bestial instincts, resulting in half-human hybrids). Since the animal of their inital transformation most often are carnivores, they also develop a taste for flesh of their inital sapient species. They can restrain themselves most of the time, but everyone around them smells and looks delicious.
Enslaving hosts requires reshaping their brain, which requires a lot of practive to retain sanity and intelligence, or even the host's inital memories. Usually they instead rely on a mix of pheromones and displays of dominance, combined with giving their unwilling followers a form with which they cannot return to their original society without getting hunted down. Of course there are also those who intentionally seek out Beast Biomancers for a bit of a makeover or becoming the species they feel they truly are inside.
Beast Biomancers usually quickly gather a pack of their transformative animal - on contrarily hunt all of them down, depending on which insticts prevail and whether the transformation was deliberate. A pack is soon turned into uplifts (while producing some vegetables) and eventually a new sapient species (while producing some vegetables) - and it often does not stop at one as the Beast Biomancer begins to interbreed with different species (their transformation often leaves their mating instincts omnidirectional). That new sapient species then might soon decide to displace the original sapient populations to steal their infrastructure, or simply eat them all. Sometimes they offer them the "mercy" of conversion. A few new sapient species peacefully integrate, but usually only decades or centuries after their creation, when their culture is no longer as tinted with the Beast Biomancer's transformation trauma. A few also integrate earlier, usually only when the Beast Biomancer themselves wants to return to sapient society.
Beast Biomancers need to learn biological immortality, which can easily kill them, and have a harder time reincarnating through their descendants than Swarms or especially Slimes, since their soul is hosted in a single body. Some turn to macro-mitosis or pathenogenesis to give themselves multiple bodies first.
Biomancers are in their own way as insane as Elementarists, but since it usually are the insanities of evolutionary organic life, they appear more "normal",
as their vices, derangements and obsessions are more widespread.
Spatiomancers
How does one die from the contortions of space? Only through elaborate torture. A desire to be whole again, even as the body is pulled until torn, a desire to be right again even as one's form is twisted until joints dislocate and bones break. In some ways, Spatiomancers suffer the most physical damage for their gains.
What remains of their bodies is usually cripped, broken and torn beyond repair - and undead, which makes Healing difficult.
They are little more than a contorted mummy, or flesh in a coffin - and unless someone wanted to deliberately create a spatiomancer, they usually even do not survive that long. They need to be packed in salt so they do not rot, leaving their remaining flesh blackened and hard as stone.
A Spatiomancer craves for security. Passages will be too small to pass, walls and ceilings will crush any intruders, and the Spatiomancer themselves will inexplicably be too far away. The more they lose of their arms and legs, last but not least to rot and sepsis, the more they eventually learn to replace with sheer willpower, gaining telekinesis and levitation. But this is a long an painful process.
Even Aeromancers die in days, while the process creating a spaciomancer can easily take months, even years. They often lose their sanity way before their apotheosis, and the latter driven equal parts by hate, pain and the will to survive. As a result Spationancers are infinitely spiteful, and seek to mangle and break the bodies and minds of those that oppose them even worse than their own. Due to their origins, they are also extremely vengeful, and those that have undergone these tortures willingly and deliberately are in some ways worse. A broken torso that deems itself a god, believing all the pain it has endured gives it the right to command everyone that has suffered less, and that transformative pain is the best promotion. They no longer seek sekurity nor comfort, for they have deliberately given it up, they only seek dominance, and seeing others bowing an twisted before them. Some tribes make it the Requirement to be a King.
Temporamancers
How does one die to time, except by old age? By starving to death. If they are lucky it takes three weeks, but some, with careful feeding, have extended it to three months. Usually all of their old self is lost to hunger, and their hunger to numbness. Usually the first they lose is the perception of time.
Even less durable than Aeromancers due to their weakened constitution, they can make others experience weeks of subjective time in seconds, or slow their perception of reality to a crawl. They cannot directly control time (dying to time travel requires time travel in the first place) but have a unique effect on others' minds and even souls - and convincing the body it died kills it as well as any sword or spear.
Their deragement is an apathy beyond even Geomancers, combined with the spitefulness of Spatiomancers - which in result is very reminiscent of Hydromancers, only with much more bitterness. Some few manage to cross beyond that, having become bored of sadness and even structure.
They are in temperament closer to Aeromancers. They are the most dangerous. They Proselytize.
Elemental Horror
Elementalism harrows and takes toll beyond the price of any other path to power. To earn power over stone, one must be fully subsumed in ...
violentmediarpg.blogspot.com
It also gave me ideas for some other -Mancers.
Haemomancers
To become a Haemonancer requires one to either become a vampire or to endure an agonizing death that ultimately is a mix of Hydromancers and Aeromancers: Slowly exsanguiated and drowned in their own blood. Great care must be taken what the heart keeps beating until the lungs are filled, requiring compex machinery or assistance. Their bodies appear bloodless and bloodshot at the same time, with pale skin and protruding black veins.
Temperament wise they are between Hydromancers and Aeromancers, leaning towards the latter. The last moments of their lives were defined by a desperate thirst for power, even as what they drank killed them, for one does not become a Haemomancer by accident - unless one comes across an unusually sadistic and unlucky executioner. As such Haemomancers crave control above all else, and often make blood do unsual things just to show that they can. The only thing that interests them more is making the living do what the Haemomancer wants, which is usually what the living fears most, just for the Haemomancer to revel in the feeling of control.
They can easily manipulate a person's mood and state of awareness by maniplating the blood flow of their brain, and likewise easily kill them with brain haemhorrage - doing so requires a lot of concentration, though. Then there is of course the usual trick of bursting surface veins and arteries and utilizing the flowing blood as floating weapons. Some haemomancers also like to "spice it up" with some blood-borne contagions and poisons, often extracted by bursting the organs of one victim and then injecting the contaminated blood into the next.
On the other hand they cannot easily summon their element in the wild, only from willing and unwilling donors (including corpses) and their own bodies.
So long as they remain conscious, they can summon all blood back into their body, and are not harmed by diseases or poisons, and can even use blood constructs to replace other tissues like muscle and bone (albeit that requires a lot of blood) or create and empower armor (which requires even more).
This does not make their original bodies any more durable, tough, and temperature extremes can easily render their blood usuable by freezing or baking it.
They are the easiest to kill if you get the drop on them, even if they sense your blood within a certain distance (which can get circumvented by wards, golems and ranged weapons).
Aeromancers are the hardest to sneak up on, as they sense both your surrounding air, and its sudden absence. You would need intangibility.
Biomancers
To gain elemental command of the flesh means to be devoured by it, be it by means of plagues, parasites or digestion.
A large beast (or creative surgery) is required to only die from the digestion and not the previous biting and chewing.
As such Biomancers take three distinct physical forms - the Slime, the Swarm and the Beast.
To become a sapient plague is the easiest path, if one has the endurace to stay conscious to the end - they have no mind one needs to subjugate.
To suborn the many insects devouring one's flesh (and the insects that eat them, and descendants of their bloodline) requires both a strong mind an great concentration, keeping the will to live alive in the pieces of flesh one loses - the will to be complete again.
To suborn a single bestial mind even as you lose your body requires the strongest will and mind (drugging them helps with the entrace but makes reaching apotheosis more difficult), but as your flesh becomes theirs you gain a unique capability to reshape their body and, by extension, their brain and mind.
Indeed, each Biomancer can reshape the organisms that have taken their form, allowing rapid directed evolution and mutation.
Slimes can create gravity-defying pseudopods and squeeze themselves through any entrace a singe piece of them can pass, and regrow from a single bacterium.
They are the easiest to best in battle and the hardest to actually kill, except with fire, electricity and elemental (stealing of) air and water.
They can easily infect others through sheer osmotic pressure, and invest that pressure and will into every drop they shed.
As the flesh sloughs from the bone it falls under control of the slime, quickly devouring the host from within. They often leave the bones and skin intact,
creating a puppet that looks almost alive by adding some glass eyes. It only needs to get close enough to projectile vomit its contents.
Slimes can also easily enslave people by giving them a simple ear infection to remotely give commands, and the massive threat of worse to come.
Some rare slimes relearn to control the nervous system, given that they had one in their previous life, allowing them to create almost indetetable hosts
by only devouring part of the brain, then extending roots and tendrils into the rest. These hosts inevitably suffer mental damage from the inital incursion,
and sometimes enough of their will remains to briefly regain control (they can do so only very briefly indeed before it alerts the Slime and it commands the infection to eat more of their brain). More often they have an irrational and isatiable hunger for brains, the easier for the Slime to spread its infection.
The more hosts a Slime controls, the less refined its control becomes, though their soul gains increased ability to multitask over the centuries.
As such, lucid enough hosts can break free if there are enough of them, or the Slime is too distracted by resurgence of its own transformative trauma or things like an ongoing battle. Brainless hosts can do little more than shamble if the Slime is too distracted.
While most Slimes are the result of bacteria, some also are devoured by fungi, resulting in Mycoids.
This makes them easier to kill and makes it harder for them to infect others at range, but their more coherent minds and bodies make them a fusion of Slime and Beast, albeit they are severly lacking in mobility until they have servants to carry them. Controlled agitation by fungus roots can inspire monstrous growth but it takes a very skilled fungal Biomancer to greate fully functional giant organisms. Their specialty is to turn every engagement into a minefield of buried fungis structrues, pregnant with spores and poisons.
Swarms suffer from the same multitasking issues as Slimes, but eusocial insects carry most of their own cognitive weight.
And the Swarm Biomancer can make them eusocial. Indeed, with enough skill, Swarms can create entire kingdoms, and insects big enough to crush a man under their feet, but doing so takes centuries to millennia of growth, last but not least remodeling the very inefficient breathin appratus of most insects.
Where Slimes and most Mycoids are purely predatory, many Swarms often develop eusocial aspects in their own personality, even if they are as tribalist as warring ant hives. But like the rare ant hives that work together, some Swarms can even play "nice" with others - if you do not cross their borders, and feed them enough. They have a harder time controlling unwilling hosts, until they learn to assimilate neural mites and brain worms.
Beasts are the origin of most lycanthrope stories, and can indeed spread their transformation to others - albeit unless they become a biomancer, the other cannot control it. They have the greatest inital freedom when it comes to reshaping flesh (albeit Swarms can learn in time, if they get their hive mind to focus) and some even take their old human form (if they remember it) or simply one they find desirable (often colored by their new bestial instincts, resulting in half-human hybrids). Since the animal of their inital transformation most often are carnivores, they also develop a taste for flesh of their inital sapient species. They can restrain themselves most of the time, but everyone around them smells and looks delicious.
Enslaving hosts requires reshaping their brain, which requires a lot of practive to retain sanity and intelligence, or even the host's inital memories. Usually they instead rely on a mix of pheromones and displays of dominance, combined with giving their unwilling followers a form with which they cannot return to their original society without getting hunted down. Of course there are also those who intentionally seek out Beast Biomancers for a bit of a makeover or becoming the species they feel they truly are inside.
Beast Biomancers usually quickly gather a pack of their transformative animal - on contrarily hunt all of them down, depending on which insticts prevail and whether the transformation was deliberate. A pack is soon turned into uplifts (while producing some vegetables) and eventually a new sapient species (while producing some vegetables) - and it often does not stop at one as the Beast Biomancer begins to interbreed with different species (their transformation often leaves their mating instincts omnidirectional). That new sapient species then might soon decide to displace the original sapient populations to steal their infrastructure, or simply eat them all. Sometimes they offer them the "mercy" of conversion. A few new sapient species peacefully integrate, but usually only decades or centuries after their creation, when their culture is no longer as tinted with the Beast Biomancer's transformation trauma. A few also integrate earlier, usually only when the Beast Biomancer themselves wants to return to sapient society.
Beast Biomancers need to learn biological immortality, which can easily kill them, and have a harder time reincarnating through their descendants than Swarms or especially Slimes, since their soul is hosted in a single body. Some turn to macro-mitosis or pathenogenesis to give themselves multiple bodies first.
Biomancers are in their own way as insane as Elementarists, but since it usually are the insanities of evolutionary organic life, they appear more "normal",
as their vices, derangements and obsessions are more widespread.
Spatiomancers
How does one die from the contortions of space? Only through elaborate torture. A desire to be whole again, even as the body is pulled until torn, a desire to be right again even as one's form is twisted until joints dislocate and bones break. In some ways, Spatiomancers suffer the most physical damage for their gains.
What remains of their bodies is usually cripped, broken and torn beyond repair - and undead, which makes Healing difficult.
They are little more than a contorted mummy, or flesh in a coffin - and unless someone wanted to deliberately create a spatiomancer, they usually even do not survive that long. They need to be packed in salt so they do not rot, leaving their remaining flesh blackened and hard as stone.
A Spatiomancer craves for security. Passages will be too small to pass, walls and ceilings will crush any intruders, and the Spatiomancer themselves will inexplicably be too far away. The more they lose of their arms and legs, last but not least to rot and sepsis, the more they eventually learn to replace with sheer willpower, gaining telekinesis and levitation. But this is a long an painful process.
Even Aeromancers die in days, while the process creating a spaciomancer can easily take months, even years. They often lose their sanity way before their apotheosis, and the latter driven equal parts by hate, pain and the will to survive. As a result Spationancers are infinitely spiteful, and seek to mangle and break the bodies and minds of those that oppose them even worse than their own. Due to their origins, they are also extremely vengeful, and those that have undergone these tortures willingly and deliberately are in some ways worse. A broken torso that deems itself a god, believing all the pain it has endured gives it the right to command everyone that has suffered less, and that transformative pain is the best promotion. They no longer seek sekurity nor comfort, for they have deliberately given it up, they only seek dominance, and seeing others bowing an twisted before them. Some tribes make it the Requirement to be a King.
Temporamancers
How does one die to time, except by old age? By starving to death. If they are lucky it takes three weeks, but some, with careful feeding, have extended it to three months. Usually all of their old self is lost to hunger, and their hunger to numbness. Usually the first they lose is the perception of time.
Even less durable than Aeromancers due to their weakened constitution, they can make others experience weeks of subjective time in seconds, or slow their perception of reality to a crawl. They cannot directly control time (dying to time travel requires time travel in the first place) but have a unique effect on others' minds and even souls - and convincing the body it died kills it as well as any sword or spear.
Their deragement is an apathy beyond even Geomancers, combined with the spitefulness of Spatiomancers - which in result is very reminiscent of Hydromancers, only with much more bitterness. Some few manage to cross beyond that, having become bored of sadness and even structure.
They are in temperament closer to Aeromancers. They are the most dangerous. They Proselytize.
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- Location
- Moscow, Russia
A feeble campfire won't scare the hungry beasts. The light won't save you, so nothing else will. This is why the daytime horror scares the most.
James Birdsong's idea of a beautiful spooky castle charms me. It's a fairytale turning into a nightmare. A castle lord won't welcome the guests. Something else cares about this place, and it won't like the intrusion. The cheerful and bright environment outlines the horror.
Maybe a GPS navigator can guide to this castle. Xa na xa provided a great example of its evil version. The modern technologies have long become a part of the horror.
Every CCTV camera must either not work or show odd things. The evil virus can infect the smartphone. What if the darkness corrupts the major datacenter?
James Birdsong's idea of a beautiful spooky castle charms me. It's a fairytale turning into a nightmare. A castle lord won't welcome the guests. Something else cares about this place, and it won't like the intrusion. The cheerful and bright environment outlines the horror.
Maybe a GPS navigator can guide to this castle. Xa na xa provided a great example of its evil version. The modern technologies have long become a part of the horror.
Every CCTV camera must either not work or show odd things. The evil virus can infect the smartphone. What if the darkness corrupts the major datacenter?
- Location
- Australia
- Pronouns
- He/They
- Location
- Attached to a wall
- Pronouns
- She/Her
There are a lot of scenario's where a car can be turned into a nightmare. There are a large number of ways to get trapped in one. I'm actually surprised that I don't hear more car related horror stories, where the car is the source of the horror especially as self driving features will be becoming more and more prevalent.
[Coast City] The emergency services found a upside down car with a German number plate had been found half submerged last night. After having emergency received a distress call that ended the sound of someone drowning. The wreckage contained three deceased two adults, one child and one unconscious survivor 13 year old survivor who has been taken to the hospital.
The car had landed after driving straight of a cliff side at a bend in the road in low tide. The passenger in the front seat was killed on impact, because of an airbag malfunction. The driver died an hour later from blood-loss because of a presumably rectangular object that had been pushed into his right eye by the airbag and had been removed at after the was deceased. As the tide rose had and the water had been streaming in through a partially open electronic window. This reduced the available air in the car until there was only barely room for one person. The older child had been been clutching a smartphone with traces of blood on it and a crack in the screen after having drowned. The survivor was found sitting on a large bag that held their head barely above the water by the time the emergency services found them.
The police officer pointed the reporter to a press release they made last month. Warning that it is still dangerous to take your eyes of the road, even if texting while driving may not be technically be illegal.
The car had landed after driving straight of a cliff side at a bend in the road in low tide. The passenger in the front seat was killed on impact, because of an airbag malfunction. The driver died an hour later from blood-loss because of a presumably rectangular object that had been pushed into his right eye by the airbag and had been removed at after the was deceased. As the tide rose had and the water had been streaming in through a partially open electronic window. This reduced the available air in the car until there was only barely room for one person. The older child had been been clutching a smartphone with traces of blood on it and a crack in the screen after having drowned. The survivor was found sitting on a large bag that held their head barely above the water by the time the emergency services found them.
The police officer pointed the reporter to a press release they made last month. Warning that it is still dangerous to take your eyes of the road, even if texting while driving may not be technically be illegal.
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It feels like Final Destination, maybe a bit The Ring if a cursed .gif was the cause. It feels more like an intro, the first incident of many.
That being said, you have that slowly building horror and the brain filling in the details down pat.
- Location
- New Zealand
"Among the sleep" does horror in a perfectly normal kids house.
EDIT: blehk- sorry didn't mean to shove advertising in here... but the link is useful.
The horror being sort of... based on the small/powerless viewpoint. Everything is weird because you are small.
With that in mind... anywhere/anything that makes the reader/viewpoint character feel like an outsider. Hence like.... cultureshock/homesickness... any form of racism/systematic "Othering" could be used to do the trick.
As far as places....
A playground?
A scientific observatory (looking out into space... seeing something.. seeing nothing, whatever).
Actually... I'm going to go with a Radio show. ... and like... the sensation that the rest of the world is systematically disappearing.
Other options might be...a horror story from the POV of a dog. Like, just in a house, trying to understand what is going on. Realizing their owners smell different, and have been replaced. Things out of place.... the windows are two high....
In a park, with a creepy tree (possible link to lynchings if you want to go the haunting route)... and... maybe I don't want to think about that any more.... *shudders*
A perfectly happy beach. Not leaning in on the island part, just on the sort of... bounardy nature; the idea that there's water on one side, and forest on the other, and both of those places are BAD, and the only way to survive is to keep walking along the beach, and it feels like it goes on forever.
Inside someone elses skin/life (being john malkovich style)
A bakery.
Not even a creepy cannibal bakery that eats people, but instead... a bakery that grants wishes.... it just keeps giving the customers exactly what they ask for, until somehow they monkey paws themself into non-existedness.
....
A Wedding.
A wedding or a honeymoon.
I want to see a horror story set in a wedding.
Graduation ceremony is also a valid location.
EDIT: blehk- sorry didn't mean to shove advertising in here... but the link is useful.
The horror being sort of... based on the small/powerless viewpoint. Everything is weird because you are small.
With that in mind... anywhere/anything that makes the reader/viewpoint character feel like an outsider. Hence like.... cultureshock/homesickness... any form of racism/systematic "Othering" could be used to do the trick.
As far as places....
A playground?
A scientific observatory (looking out into space... seeing something.. seeing nothing, whatever).
Actually... I'm going to go with a Radio show. ... and like... the sensation that the rest of the world is systematically disappearing.
Other options might be...a horror story from the POV of a dog. Like, just in a house, trying to understand what is going on. Realizing their owners smell different, and have been replaced. Things out of place.... the windows are two high....
In a park, with a creepy tree (possible link to lynchings if you want to go the haunting route)... and... maybe I don't want to think about that any more.... *shudders*
A perfectly happy beach. Not leaning in on the island part, just on the sort of... bounardy nature; the idea that there's water on one side, and forest on the other, and both of those places are BAD, and the only way to survive is to keep walking along the beach, and it feels like it goes on forever.
Inside someone elses skin/life (being john malkovich style)
A bakery.
Not even a creepy cannibal bakery that eats people, but instead... a bakery that grants wishes.... it just keeps giving the customers exactly what they ask for, until somehow they monkey paws themself into non-existedness.
....
A Wedding.
A wedding or a honeymoon.
I want to see a horror story set in a wedding.
Graduation ceremony is also a valid location.
- Location
- USA East Coast
Rec3 did demon zombies upon a wedding, it was bloody good stuff. In Spanish with sub titles.
A wedding would be a very good framing device for a horror story told in flashbacks - and until the end of the story you do not know if the groom is the killer or not.
Graduation ceremony horror... the most obvious would be a deatmatch. Final Graduation.
But it also works very well as a closing scene for any School Horror.
- Location
- SV's Only Complete Persona Quest
- Pronouns
- She/Her
It's weird that I can't think of more Horror stories set in museums, given that they're places where dead or ancient things are preserved you'd think they'd be obvious horror locations. The only exceptions I can think of to this are wax museums, which show up in the more criminal/detective side of horror, and Egyptology museums if mummies are involved (which I mentioned earlier in the thread).
RoboRenee
Trans of gender
- Location
- FFXIV, probably
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I think it's probably that museums are generally brightly lit affairs, and experiences in them are centered around learning information. A lot of horror is that element of the unknown, of instability within the stability of normal life, and museums are not generally places people associate with that outside of specific contexts - like human but not uncanny valley wax peeps, and the mummy narrative which mummies bring to the museum with them.
- Location
- SV's Only Complete Persona Quest
- Pronouns
- She/Her
A thread was just posted over in Science & Technology about the Arecibo Observatory getting demolished, which instantly made me wonder, since space-themed horror is pretty common, how about a spooky tale set at an abandoned observatory?
Observatories also tend to be fairly isolated places, in order to avoid light pollution, and some big names like the Mauna Kea telescope also have a lot of controversy surrounding theme due to being built on indigenous land.
Observatories also tend to be fairly isolated places, in order to avoid light pollution, and some big names like the Mauna Kea telescope also have a lot of controversy surrounding theme due to being built on indigenous land.
- Location
- The Land of Many Bregrets
- Pronouns
- They/Them
I mean, modern telescopes are very much 'gigantic block of technology pointed upwards' rather than the classical 'tower with a big spyglass you stick your eye to'. But it would be very well suited to Lovecraftian horror if its some light-transmitted horror emanated from a distant and long dead star, that only by physically looking at it in a telescope gets enough of it focused into your eyeball to become A Problem.
Or some kind of Schrodinger's Eldritch Abomination. The eldritch force or entity only becomes fully real if it is observed, and you looked.
- Location
- The Land of Many Bregrets
- Pronouns
- They/Them
...Has anyone seen a horror work set in a trash heap / scrapyard? All the stuff humanity has callously tossed away because woohoo consumerism now steeping in bitterness about their current lot in life.
Or to quote that Anatomy ending monologue:
"How does it regard those creatures who built it? Brought it into existence only to abandon it, when its usefulness no longer satisfies them? ...It may grow angry... as it asks itself through clenched teeth 'What did I do wrong?'"
Or to quote that Anatomy ending monologue:
"How does it regard those creatures who built it? Brought it into existence only to abandon it, when its usefulness no longer satisfies them? ...It may grow angry... as it asks itself through clenched teeth 'What did I do wrong?'"
SpiritFluid
Spooky, and Gay
- Location
- The Sun from which The Shadows Cast
- Pronouns
- She/Her/They/Them
Only loosely related in any relevant means, but here's a thought of a horror setting you don't usually see and which can be supremely unsettling.
A living thing.
Now, that's a very broad statement, I know, so let me unpack this a little.
Any good haunted house story has some metaphorical humanization to it, or even the opposite of such. Illustrating through text how alive somewhere abandoned can feel. Tree branches scratching at windows like claws,windows that stare out emptily so much like vacant and penetrating eyes, floors and walls settling in like a person acclimating to their surroundings or breathing, that deep dread that somehow in an empty building, there is something else there with you.
It seems only appropriate that the reverse angle be turned.
The few stories that do use some body of flesh for their horrifying world rely on just that for the horror. An entire planet of just a singular body horror, and leave it at that, letting that little kernel of implausible biology and maybe the sheer abstract horror of such a thing to exist like that, to be the Horror, and end it right there. A suggestion of cosmic horror, by absolute means of indifference, and which usually doesn't care at all for the actual biology, be it of their setting (aside from perhaps "Man, that poor fucked up whatever it was that became everything") or their themes. Unsurprisingly, the entire thing is impossible so understandably they don't dive into the deeper ideas for it, but even then, the idea and execution is usually surface level; not even skin deep, skin level.
And frankly that just feels like frustrating lost opportunity.
A story about the literal depths of the human soul as people survive amidst the titanic corpse of some forlorn God and do anything to hold onto such an existence, the obvious themes of mortality that come from residing in a world grander than you but, in many key ways, no more than you, and a trillion different takes on how one can interpret identity in conjunction to a story literally inside the existence of another—the Freudian Subtexts alone or metaphor for the world around us and socially constructed constraints, macro-scaled endosymbiosis, a world made of dysphoria.
There's a endless width of executions here, and frankly I wish that, as niche specific it may be, that more people dug into that sorta body horror and fleshed stuff out like that. A little more beyond the initial abstract and simplistic terror of "big".
A living thing.
Now, that's a very broad statement, I know, so let me unpack this a little.
Any good haunted house story has some metaphorical humanization to it, or even the opposite of such. Illustrating through text how alive somewhere abandoned can feel. Tree branches scratching at windows like claws,windows that stare out emptily so much like vacant and penetrating eyes, floors and walls settling in like a person acclimating to their surroundings or breathing, that deep dread that somehow in an empty building, there is something else there with you.
It seems only appropriate that the reverse angle be turned.
I mean, really? When you strip back the layers of cobwebs, aged wood, and peeling paint, a Haunted House is atypically as much a living thing as the person wandering through it. Sometimes one we can understand, and other times it's one beyond it, moving through geometry like some Lovecraftian perception of irregular space. A Haunted House already is a living thing, in some ways, as some great horror has shown to excellent effect.Mariner's Revenge Song said:
So, why not go beyond biblical? Cosmological in the cosmic horror? Plenty of mythologies and religions throughout history have emphasized the physical world is something divinely physical. The Corpses of Tiamat, Geb, Gaea, Ymir, Tlaltecuhtli, entire faiths tapping into the idea of us being part of some thing quite literally grander than what is perceivable. All kinds of abstract and terrifying things could be told through a metaphor of expansive flesh—a market that, although not nonexistent, I feel doesn't really get to the, to excuse a really bad pun and yes there will be now more puns hereon-in, meat of the matter.Anatomy by Kitty Horrorshow said:
The few stories that do use some body of flesh for their horrifying world rely on just that for the horror. An entire planet of just a singular body horror, and leave it at that, letting that little kernel of implausible biology and maybe the sheer abstract horror of such a thing to exist like that, to be the Horror, and end it right there. A suggestion of cosmic horror, by absolute means of indifference, and which usually doesn't care at all for the actual biology, be it of their setting (aside from perhaps "Man, that poor fucked up whatever it was that became everything") or their themes. Unsurprisingly, the entire thing is impossible so understandably they don't dive into the deeper ideas for it, but even then, the idea and execution is usually surface level; not even skin deep, skin level.
And frankly that just feels like frustrating lost opportunity.
A story about the literal depths of the human soul as people survive amidst the titanic corpse of some forlorn God and do anything to hold onto such an existence, the obvious themes of mortality that come from residing in a world grander than you but, in many key ways, no more than you, and a trillion different takes on how one can interpret identity in conjunction to a story literally inside the existence of another—the Freudian Subtexts alone or metaphor for the world around us and socially constructed constraints, macro-scaled endosymbiosis, a world made of dysphoria.
There's a endless width of executions here, and frankly I wish that, as niche specific it may be, that more people dug into that sorta body horror and fleshed stuff out like that. A little more beyond the initial abstract and simplistic terror of "big".
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Maybe they shut it down because people DID get messages, and it was driving them insane.
Perfect Vermin has an interesting take on this.
Perfect Vermin – Download Game | Free Game Planet
Perfect Vermin is a delightfully destructive and increasingly unsettling little first person horror game where you attempt to locate flesh monsters that are posing as office furniture, then pulverize them with a sledgehammer. Created by ItsTheMaceo (creator of the excellent Swallow the Sea and...
www.freegameplanet.com
Playthrough
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Tomorrow, SETI gets a signal. As is their preexisting procedure, the signal is promptly publicized and every single amateur and professional cryptographer in the world races to be the first to try and make sense of it. This takes a surprisingly short amount of time, given that the signal is actually fairly simple. Lots of images in sequence and an accompanying soundtrack, making up approximately ten minutes of video.
There are two creatures in a room. They look completely unlike anything anyone's ever seen before. One of them is holding a camera and filming the video. The other takes a tubular writing implement, possibly some kind of alien pencil or paintbrush or piece of chalk in one pseudopod and uses it to draw a complicated pattern on the floor. The video regularly cuts to showing step-by-step diagrams of the pattern. Once finished drawing, one of the creatures takes a small knife, nicks itself and dribbles a few drops of a purplish fluid that apparently serves it as blood into a specific portion of the pattern. Then the two creatures chant a series of incomprehensible nonsense. The video ends without showing what, if any, effect the ritual had.
Given human nature, how long do you think it'll be before someone attempts to repeat the ritual here?
Xantalos
Turtle-Speed Writing
I'm reminded of the Dogscape setting/stories, though it doesn't fit perfectly with what you're describing. It's close, though.
Dmol8
The Undead Unhinged Lunatic of the Web
- Location
- Belgrade,Serbia
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
Have you tried Where No Light Shines?: Where No Light Shines It has a frozen mummy on a spaceship. Pair it with this music:
if you want to get a feeling of a frozen corpse being right behind you.
On unusual horror mindsets try Black Thorns: Warhammer Fantasy: A Dynasty of Dynamic Alcoholism . It doesn't just use the fear response as it's main ingredient in making the reader feel horror.
In a way, the concept of the mummy is one suffering from changing viewpoints, much like a lot of lovecraft's work.
Imagine you're an explorer in the classic pulp style. You believe yourself to be more knowledgeable than the locals. Then you encounter the mummy. It proves they're objectively correct, you've been missing something important about the nature of the world as a whole, their mysticism works.
SCP-5140. The mummies of mount Everest. And there are a lot more of them than you thought.
- Location
- SV's Only Complete Persona Quest
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I've been curious if there's a work like Misery, but in reverse? Like a creator psychologically torturing a captive fan? Reason I started thinking about this is, when it came to examples of how parasocial relationships turn bad, both stalker fans and creators exploiting and manipulating their fans came up.
Of course, thing to keep in mind about Misery is it was apparently meant as a metaphor for cocaine, so that adds a second layer.
Of course, thing to keep in mind about Misery is it was apparently meant as a metaphor for cocaine, so that adds a second layer.