It strikes me that the lyrics to “Mr. Sandman” are inordinately concerned with ensuring that the resulting man of our dreams has only the customary complement of various anatomic features.
“Two lips”?
“A pair of eyes”?
As opposed to what?
“Two lips like roses and clover,” as opposed to “a gaping, lipless maw that I suppose smells like roses,” “two leathery black lips, dripping with blood,” or “six lips arranged such that the mouth looks like a three-leaf clover when fully opened.”
“A pair of eyes with a come-hither gleam,” as opposed to “one eye, hypnotic and unblinking, which will rob you of your free will upon first eye contact,” “two eyes that barely bother to look at me, and really don’t care if I’m around or not,” or “six hundred eyes nested in a body of pure flame, like the angels of old, that no mere mortal can resist.”
Honestly, I’m not sure they were specific enough about the sheer banality they’re hoping to receive here. They didn’t specify the number of arms and legs, for example, so they could totally end up with a centaur or a mermaid. And that line about “lots of wavy hair like Liberace,” which entirely fails to specify where that hair should be? Might as well be asking for a particularly well-groomed Sasquatch at that point.
Just saying. If you’re going to ask a supernatural being for a favor, be very specific, because it probably won’t make the same basic assumptions about desirability that you do.
To be fair, we can’t say for certain that the vocalist wouldn’t be perfectly happy with a well-coiffed Sasquatch.
Brazilian graphic designer and illustrator Butcher Billy got the idea of turning famous love hits into book covers of horror master Stephen King.
Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” The Smiths, “Head Over Heels” by Tears For Fears and many others were portrayed in a very unusual way.
“This series imagines an alternate universe where some of the most desperate and tragic romantic songs in the ‘70s and’ 80s are actually books written by Stephen King. The concept is to look at the dark side of love by the vision of pop culture, bringing aspects of its classic stories to play the true meaning of the songs – this can be completely subverted or stressed strangeness, while paying tribute to the vintage design of the original covers,” Butcher writes on his Behance.
They find a book written in Latin… one guy doesn’t take Latin and doesn’t want to mess up the pronunciation. The girl is studying Mandarin. Another guy recommends sticking it into Google Translate but that’s likely to land them with gibberish. They leave it alone.
The car won’t start. They call an Uber.
The vampire captures the girl and insists that she wears the gown to dinner. The gown is actually hella cute. Only problem is it’s not in her size. Oh, it only comes in 2’s and 4’s? Sorry, vamp, you want me in that dress you contact the goddamn company and tell them to get their shit together.
“How did you possibly know that? It saved our lives!” “I’ve got two degrees and I spend way too much time on Wikipedia.”
They encounter a spirit that gains power the more people believe in it. One girl makes a vine and uploads with, “fakest ghost ever!!! Right??” Twenty minutes later the spirit is destroyed.
The circus is in town tonight. Except she’s lived her whole life here and the circus has never come before… it’s also in a pretty sketchy part of town, not somewhere you’d want to walk alone at night. She goes to a movie instead.
“You’d need an ARMY to fight this evil!” “Okay. I’ve got 20,000 followers, lets see how many can make it.”
The Evil Whispery Voice of Doom tells the jock that it’s going to kill his pretty blonde girlfriend. The jock gets offended because, excuse me, Cindy and I are just friends. However, Marty over there is my boyfriend and I’m not saying you should kill him, just stop making assumptions yeah?
“This spirit tried to convince me it was Jerry when it texted but its texting style is COMPLETELY DIFFERENT so yeah that didn’t work.”
We could have easily gotten lost and ended up at some creepy cabin in the woods, but luckily we all had functioning GPSs. Beach party, we’ve arrived!
“We have to find a way to destroy it! We—what are you doing?” “Looking up ‘exorcising demons’ on Google. Oh look, first hit.”
The child she bares will be the devil’s spawn. Good thing she doesn’t want kids. Or if she changes her mind she can always adopt.
“How can we possibly outwit this serial killer…” “… There’s gotta be an app for that. Lemme look.”
Only the virgin will survive… Turns out they’re all virgins. One is asexual. One wants to wait until marriage. Two just haven’t found the right person yet. One is meh about sex. So we all survive, yeah?
The girl does not fall. She was on varsity track.
“Quick! We need someplace to hide the artifact. And then decoys to confuse the beast! What have we got?” “… I’ve got a hundred plastic bags stuffed into another plastic bag.” “PERFECT.”
i would pay to read a book of a collection of modern horror stories
They’re trapped in a haunted cabin one of them inherited from a Weird UncleTM. Mysterious figures, things going flying, screams and drumbeats and chanting, blood pouring down the walls, the whole bit. They pull out the Ouija Board.
“BRO, WHAT IS YOUR DEAL?”
S…A…C…R…E…D…L…A…N…D
“Oh.”
“Oh geez. Oh no. This is Native American land. Oh goodness I am SO sorry.”
“Um so, like I inherited this property and a couple acres, can I like…donate it?”
W…H…A…T
“Yeah man like, what tribe are you? I don’t want to live here, this cabin is grody and Uncle Tim was a fuckin’ weirdo. It’s your guys’ land, just like, what tribe?”
C..H…U…M…A…S…H
“Cool. Uh, I guess we’ll…call them…in the morning?”
The amount of times I could have been that white girl in the horror movie could honestly be a movie in itself and it’s honestly a waste that my entire life isn’t constantly recorded on film because it would be HILARIOUS
1. That one time I decided to see what was past the old gate in the woods, but when got there it had been smashed in half and there was a decapitated sheep head with no skin just off the trail, so instead I just turned around and went home.
2. That time some friends and I went camping and we found a pile of bones wrapped in a garbage bag buried under a log, but the adult supervisor told us it was nothing, so we just put it back and didn’t talk about it again.
3. The time I was getting chased through the woods at night and I realized “wait it’s dark as fuck” so I just held still until the guy gave up and left.
4. The time this dude said he was in love with me and so he was going to cut my head off and dump my body in a lake, so I told him to grow the hell up, but then he got caught stealing girl’s underwear a day later and I never saw him again
5. That one time in college where I was taking a shortcut on my home at night and a car followed me into a dark alley, so I stared directly into the driver’s side of the window and walked towards it to psych them out
6. The night I was out on a walk and this old guy told me he’d locked his keys in his truck and that he needed someone my size to crawl in through the back window for him, so I told him “you know that sounds super suspicious right” and told him where to find a pay phone for a tow truck instead
7. The one time this random guy on the street said he was in love with me and so he was going to follow me home on my bus, so I clapped him on the shoulder and told him that if he got that close to my bus then I was going to throw him under the wheels, but then this really nice homeless man from Nigeria told the guy to fuck off and then checked to make sure he didn’t follow me onboard
8. That big cat with yellow eyes who I found in a well and brought home who used to put rotting meat in my closet and wake me up by chewing on my face, until I put him back outside and never saw him again.
9. My one cousin who used to come over for the summer who kept calling me ‘piñata’ and hitting me with sticks, until he went back home and was sent to juvie cause he finally got caught torturing animals
10. The time I got lost on the way to a meeting and wound up at a circus tent instead, and got followed by a full-out clown for three vacant street blocks
11. The pet hamster I had when I was seven who would scream all night and eventually escaped by ripping a bar out of its cage and wiggling through the hole. My mom caught it and put it back but it lived another year and a half until one night the screaming just stopped
12. The time I was whistling in the woods and something started whistling back, so I went home
13. That one night at summer camp where a group of girls got together to play ‘bloody mary’ in the lavatory and invited me to come with them so I said “no thanks” and stayed with the camp councillors and drank soup instead.
14. The old abandoned house I just moved into with the door that leads into a big empty room full of dirt and empty cooking pots that I just sort of… locked up forever and never go near
15. Once when I was at an ihop I saw a coffee mug do a full 360º spin with nobody touching it, so I said ‘that was neat’ and never ate there again
16. The time I took a photo of a big old raven sitting on the crucifix on top of the old town church cause it was the most goth thing I’d ever seen, right? But then it swooped down towards me, so I apologized immediately for being rude, and I felt a little silly for a while but the car that hit me on the way home didn’t even leave a bruise so idk be nice to birds
Sorry I know I bring this shit up a lot but sometimes im awake at night and I just. keep thinking
I think the secret to survival is to be good to animals, stay away from men, and say “no thanks” to everything else
cut to me, playing my horror instrument at 4 am; my downstairs neighbors bang relentlessly at their ceiling with a broom stick, trying to stop me from summoning witches
There is a specific and terrifying difference between “never were” monsters and “are not anymore” monsters
“The thing that was not a deer” implies a creature which mimics a deer but imperfectly and the details which are wrong are what makes it terrifying
“The thing that was not a deer anymore” on the other hand implies a thing that USED to be a deer before it was somehow mutated, possessed, parasitically controlled or reanimated improperly and what makes THAT terrifying is the details that are still right and recognizable poking out of all the wrong and horrible malformations.
hey I totally fucked up and forgot the 3rd type, which is “Is Not Anymore And Maybe Never Was” monsters
“The thing which was no longer a deer and maybe never was” implies a creature that, at first glance, completely appears to be a deer, but over time degrades very slowly until you realize (probably too late) that it is not a deer anymore, and had you seen it in this state first, you wouldn’t have recognized it as a deer at all, and there’s a decent chance that it was never actually a deer to begin with but only a very good mimic, and what makes this one scary is the slow change from everything being right to everything being wrong, happening slowly enough that you don’t even notice it until its too late, as well as the fact that something now so clearly not a deer could have fooled you to begin with.
And the fourth type, which is, “I dunno, but it sure ain’t a deer.” Which implies complete confusion about what the creature could be, to the point that even a person as comfortable in this world as someone who would use the word ain’t unironically is uncertain, which should horrify you to the deepest depths of your soul.
one that i particularly enjoyed was the ‘nonesuch’, a beast which when you see it your brain convinces you ‘nope, no way that shit is real’. on some level it becomes less real after having been seen by someone who disbelieves its existence as well
May I propose the additional type of “that’s definitely a deer but deer are much more fucked up than previous realized”, because turning the corner on a trail and having half a dozen deer suddenly turn and look up from eating Thier companion’s remains is a special kind of spooky.
Had a dream where I was sitting in a dark office and reality felt really altered and strange and there was just a fishtank illuminating the room and then this fuckin fish looked at me and grinned with human teeth and in this super deep voice said “you’ve been here awhile, better wake up before you forget how to” and I fuckin woke up in a cold sweat
Steel Phoenix Studios 