Dear Summer of Horror Creator (2023)
May. 16th, 2023 09:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
scioscribeThank you so much for writing for me! Horror is the genre of my heart, and I can never get enough of it, so I'm already really looking forward to whatever you create. I've added some prompts, but definitely feel free to go your own way. Please think of the requested horror tags as more directions than anything else—it's more than okay if something blends subgenres or doesn't fit in neatly.
I have more prompts for some fandoms than others, but that's just because of what I could think up or because of how many different characters or relationships I was requesting; I'd be equally happy to receive gifts for any of these requests.
I'm![[archiveofourown.org profile]](https://p2.dreamwidth.org/b164c54b26e4/-/archiveofourown.org/favicon.ico)
scioscribe on AO3 and ![[tumblr.com profile]](https://www.tumblr.com/favicon.ico)
scioscribe on Tumblr. All requests this year are for fic.
Likes
hurt/comfort, emotional hurt/comfort, ensembles, enemies-to-lovers (or friends), friendships, friends-to-lovers, opposites attract, conflicting worldviews and priorities, emotional vulnerability, fix-its, casefic, canon-style adventures, crack played straight, moral complexity, nuanced bad guys/terrible people with moments of goodness or vulnerability, redemption, pining, obvious feelings that don’t quite get admitted to, unconventional gestures of affection, complicated relationships, partnerships, power dynamics, shippy gen and ambiguously intense relationships, intimacy, found family, first-time stories, established relationships, character death, amnesia, characters forced to cooperate, forced proximity, bedsharing, huddling/cuddling for warmth, 5 + 1 fics, slow-burns, fake/pretend relationships, arranged marriage/marriage of convenience, sex pollen, made them do it, noncon-related hurt/comfort, rape recovery, power couples, age gaps, worldbuilding, undercover work, loyalty, tenderness, protectiveness, acts of kindness, trying to do the right thing, identity porn, canon-divergence AUs, added supernatural/fantasy/sci-fi elements
General Sex Likes/Kinks
clothed sex, wall-sex, rough sex, teasing, anal play/sex, oral sex, rimming, frottage, fingering, gags, dirty talk, hand and finger kink, hair-touching, nipple play, characters giving orders/instructions, roleplay, casual D/s, spanking (including breasts, thighs, and pussy), talking during sex, emotional sex, sleepy/lazy sex, humorous sex scenes, enthusiastic sex, tenderness, loss of virginity, bad/awkward sex (either charmingly funny or downbeat), coming untouched, coming in pants, voyeurism, exhibitionism, collaring, people getting mussed, orgasm delay/denial, overstimulation, edging, begging, historical period- or location-specific sex, sex toys, praise kink, possessiveness, marking/bruising/biting
Bonus Horror Likes
horror-related hurt/comfort, haunted houses/hotels/etc., unsettlingly perfect small towns with dark secrets, "everything here seems superficially fine except someone's eyes are screaming," lingering trauma, bonding through trauma, courage, mutual protectiveness and self-sacrifice, comfort sex in the midst of horror, trying to survive an apocalypse together, mutating landscapes, "it's a bad idea to go into the woods," hunted for sport, finding evidence of cult-like religious practices and old beliefs with terrifying implications, ghosts, haunted spaceships, haunted regular ships, mass disappearances and abandoned locations, coming into possession of a cursed object that has unsettling or dangerous effects, supernatural or paranormal casefic, technology has turned on you, many people really are out to get you, dark carnivals, "it's a challenge to reach the end of this Halloween haunted house but—surprise!--it's actually really haunted and/or the hosts are trying to kill you," spending all night in a haunted house, quietly unsettling horror with little elements that are just slightly wrong, reality is slippery, trapped in a cave, snowbound in a haunted location, investigating supernatural phenomena, the ghosts are personally connected to you and it's tragic, the ghosts are only pretending to be personally connected to you and actually they're not ghosts at all, creepy mirrors, creepy doppelgangers, lured into a dangerous situation … and many more things
Some Favorite Horror and Horror-Related Movies
Re-Animator, Carnival of Souls, The Haunting, The Stepford Wives, The Ritual, The Descent, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Don't Look Now, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Seven, Zodiac, Memories of Murder, Get Out, Us, The Night of the Hunter, Cat People, The Shining, The Exorcist, The Perfection, Cam, The People Under the Stairs, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Haunt, Dawn of the Dead, Night of the Living Dead, The Orphanage, Pan's Labyrinth, The Others, The Mist, Society, Candyman, Scream, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Blair Witch Project, Ginger Snaps, It Follows, Black Christmas, 28 Days Later, The Babadook, Night of the Demon, The Witch, Lake Mungo, The Vanishing, The Sixth Sense, Eraserhead, Dead of Night, Eyes Without a Face, The Wicker Man, The Birds, Poltergeist, Freaks, The Fly, Let the Right One In, The Innocents, Jaws, Alien, The Thing, Black Box
DNW
ageplay, mommy/daddy kink, explicit sex for characters under sixteen, scat, bestiality, necrophilia, literal and real fire-and-brimstone hell, literal demons/devils
Biggles - W. E. Johns
Biggles & Ginger Hebblethwaite & Algy Lacey & Bertie Lissie & Erich von Stalhein
James "Biggles" Bigglesworth & Ginger Hebblethwaite & Algy Lacey & Bertie Lissie
James "Biggles" Bigglesworth & Erich von Stalhein
Dark Fantasy, Folk Horror, Killer Horror, Monster Horror, Paranormal Horror, Supernatural Horror, Survival Horror
I love Biggles/von Stalhein, Ginger/Algy, any and all friendships (whether tentative and prickly or ride-or-die) within the character combos, gen ensemble closeness, and every shade of ambiguity in between. I'm good with both happy endings and tragic/unsettling endings—I just don't want the characters' relationships with each other to end the story in a worse place than where they started.
Fandom-specific DNW: Period- or canon-typical racism. For stories with von Stalhein, I don't want WWII settings or any mention of Hitler or Nazis. If there's Ginger/Algy, I would prefer Ginger to be 18+.
* The team investigates some kind of unsettling mystery, like an aircraft carrier that's become a ghost ship or reports of long-dead pilots suddenly being spotted around a particular aerodrome. I'd just love to see them tackling some kind of supernatural or otherwise spooky case.
* Von Stalhein's Soviet handlers are slowly (via magic or science) transforming him into a literal monster, and the team gradually figures out what's happening. Biggles is the only one who believes he can get through to him and either reverse the process or figure out how von Stalhein can safely live in his new form without hurting people.
* Chedcombe is haunted, and Bertie needs the team's help to figure out what's going on and how to stop it. Bonus points for Towser sensing that something's wrong.
* They fly through a mysterious shimmering light in the sky, and it turns out that they really, really shouldn't have. Did it awaken an eldritch horror? Send everyone onboard into a washed-out shadow-side world full of monsters or into a much darker parallel universe? Make everyone's memories go blank, and they wake up with markings they can't explain? Does one of them seem like he might not be quite the same version of himself, but only a very good and eerie counterfeit, with unknown intentions?
* Someone is bitten by a supernatural creature, and the bite may cause horrible, transformative effects or a complete loss of reason and restraint, and everyone else has to deal with it and with the transforming person's own horror at what's happening to them. This can lean into body horror, if you'd like, with creatively awful transformations; I also like both werewolves and vampires (and the latter can certainly lead to dramatic, weirdly tender and/or erotic "you can drink my blood" scenes).
* Kidnapped with sinister goings-on! Being held in some in-between world by unnerving, eldritch fae? Kidnapped by an unexpectedly vicious and threatening killer, with extreme hurt/comfort? Buried alive and needing to be dug up in time? Hunted for sport by a psychopath?
* Struggling to survive during a zombie apocalypse, with horror and h/c and mutual protectiveness and the constant awareness of danger and the possibility of disaster.
* A small, out-of-the-way village seems like the ideal place for them to rest and recover after a bout of malaria or some particularly exhausting, damaging mission … except the village has peculiar little beliefs and may just sacrifice a stranger (or several) every year. Or it has peculiar little beliefs that seem strange until it turns out that they're complex rules for appeasing some kind of monster or cosmic force that lives in the forest/caves/etc.
* Biggles and Co. bemusedly take in a slightly down-at-the-heels carnival, maybe in some seaside town they're staying in, or duck into one to escape some pursuers, only to find that the carousel horses look like they have sharp teeth and the hall of mirrors is full of horrors and all the games seem to have oddly, terribly high stakes ….
* Pre-Hatchet, von Stalhein is haunted by something that looks like Biggles but isn't—an incubus? Some kind of manifestation of his own complicated feelings of longing and resentment? Some kind of brought-to-life-by-dark-magic fake the Soviets have created to test von Stalhein's loyalty or as a kind of twisted reward for a job well done? An attempt to satisfy any temptation he might have so he stays on their side? Does von Stalhein know that it's not the real Biggles? Whatever the doppelganger is, it's getting more and more violent and taking more and more from him, and the real Biggles will eventually have to defeat it.
Carrie - Stephen King
Solo: Carrie White
Solo: Sue Snell
Susan Snell & Carrie White
Dark Fantasy, Folk Horror, Gothic Horror, Institutional Horror, Paranormal Horror, Psychological Horror, Supernatural Horror
I like Carrie/Sue (both dark/horrifying/nonconny/dubconny and more hopeful/romantic) and gen (and all potential shades of ambiguity in between). All kinds of endings are fine.
* Carrie doesn't go home after the prom; instead, she leaves town with a terrified Sue as a hostage.
* Carrie lives on as a ghost in Sue's mind. If you take this in a shippy direction, I'm open to everything from nightmare noncon/dubcon to dark romance to something more wistful. Or maybe Carrie lives and blows town, but she's haunted by the prom ghosts and/or the ghost of her mother? Can she overcome them, banish them, or lay them to rest, or will they get the upper hand? Does she have genuine regrets?
* I also love the idea of Sue being haunted by prom ghosts, especially while she's trying to deal with being ostracized by the town and having so much survivor's guilt. Or Sue starting to investigate paranormal/psychic phenomena, going headfirst into what scares her. Or Carrie/Sue with them partnered up in looking into these cases. Carrie/Sue vs. haunted houses and other people with wild talents.
* Feeling like a monster, dealing with enormous power and the temptation to use it to do terrible things to people, PTSD and nightmares, physical deterioration and the knowledge that you're going to die young (or, if Carrie/Sue, the knowledge that the person you love is going to die young).
* Carrie somehow manages to bring her mother back, but she Comes Back Wrong.
* Carrie's intrusion into Sue's head gave her unwanted telekinetic powers that she's horrified by, and it's making people suspicious of her.
* In the aftermath of prom night, Chamberlain develops some peculiar rituals for detecting people with telekinetic powers, and everything slowly becomes oppressive and/or retrograde-creepy with beliefs about witchcraft. Or a folk horror AU where everything is superficially modern, but this is still a world where people are alert to signs of "witchcraft" and ready to turn on Carrie as soon as her powers start manifesting and they want to stone her in the public square.
* Carrie gets captured by the government/the Shop/some nefarious lab, either before or after prom, and they start experimenting on her and trying to control her, with a possible rescue attempt by Sue. Or a possible scenario where Sue is also brought into keep her company/help control her. Can they escape? How do the researchers control Carrie? If they offer her praise and support, does she even want to get out?
Dare Me - Megan Abbott
Beth Cassidy & Addy Hanlon
Body Horror, Dark Fantasy, Folk Horror, Killer Horror, Psychological Horror, Supernatural Horror
Addy/Beth is very welcome! (And Addy/Colette, Addy/Casey Jaye, and Addy/RiRi are all good if you want to include background pairings or make Beth extra jealous.) Any kind of ending is fine.
* Cheerleading asks more and more out of them every day—i.e., body horror that doubles-down on all the physical strains in canon and gets worse and worse, with surgeries and mutilations and the supernatural all potentially stepping in to make sure the girls can look and perform the way Colette expects them to. Permanent smiles? The Flyer is made extra-light by having her bones hollowed out? Jewels set in your skin for extra glitter?
* Cheer camp, slasher movie edition, with a masked killer prowling the woods even as Beth seethes over Addy making friends with Casey Jaye. Eerie campfire tales told in a miasma of lust and love and jealousy. If the bodies start dropping one night, does Addy wonder if Beth might be the killer? (Is Beth the killer? Is Addy?) Does Beth try to convince her it's Casey Jaye? How can they use their skills to fight back and survive—or can they even get out of this alive without sacrificing each other, or without one of them sacrificing herself?
* Beth dies during her final stunt, but that doesn't mean her ghost is going to leave Addy alone. Is there ghost sex? If Addy eventually tries to exorcize her, does that feel like it's as much of a betrayal as Addy gravitating towards Colette? If Beth sticks around even as Addy gets older, does her presence start to become poignant and even nostalgic after a while?
* Obsession and fixation, from all possible angles. Beth starts stalking Addy? Addy starts stalking Colette, and her obsession turns violent and leads to a murder that only Beth can help her cover up? Does Beth find out some horrible secret about Colette, like she's a vampire out to seduce Addy and drain her dry, and she has to try even harder to win back all Addy's attention?
* Colette is actually a cult leader priming all the girls to die in some kind of sacrifice at the end of the season, and Addy is lured in—both wanting to die for Coach and wanting to believe that Coach would let her live, or thinking she knows the whole story when she doesn't—and Beth is slowly trying to unravel it all and use this information to her own advantage. If there's magic involved, or some force generated by the sacrifice, does Beth try to take control of it? Does she try to beat Colette to the punch by killing most of the team herself in an effort to win Addy's love?
* Addy's selective memory is actually a kind of half-conscious superpower letting her edit reality to fit her needs, and Beth—due to their closeness—is one of the few people who can pick up on this. But that doesn't mean that Addy never uses it on her.
The Long Walk - Richard Bachman
Ray Garraty & Peter McVries
Dark Fantasy, Institutional Horror, Psychological Horror, Supernatural Horror, Survival Horror
I love Garraty/McVries, Garraty & McVries, and all shades of ambiguity in between. I'm fine with any ending that doesn't feature the two of them turning on each other or starting to dislike each other—basically, whatever happens to them and whatever they might do, I want them to still have each other.
* AU where their world takes a different approach to its distracting-the-populace death competitions. Maybe the boys all get stranded in an isolated location with few-to-no resources and the last man standing wins? Maybe it's gladiatorial combat, with awkward amounts of time to tragically get to know each other between fights or melees? Or a Hunger Games-style contest? Maybe they're all hunted down by the Squad, with the hunt televised?
* Similarly, I'd love to see a Walk in a different kind of setting or in different weather—subject them to blizzards or heat waves or force them to walk through a bunch of fire ants, if you like. Just do bad things to them and let them care about each other throughout.
* Garraty wins and gets the Prize—and he asks to have McVries brought back to life. There is some institutional-but-eldritch process that leads to an eerily revived McVries, but being brought back by a dystopian police state is non-ideal, and McVries Comes Back Wrong. Sleepwalking, memory gaps, trouble feeling any physical sensation? Does he need fresh blood to live (either Garraty's or someone else's)? Maybe he's still decaying and only back for a short time. Maybe he has destructive murder blackouts. Maybe the Major uses him as a weapon. (Don't worry about this touching on the necrophilia DNW, if you want to do Garraty/McVries; as long as McVries is not just a corpse without consciousness, we're good.)
* Alternatively, Garraty's Prize is a resurrected McVries, and the two of them play a long game inside the dystopia, eventually leading to Garraty becoming the new Major and taking down the system from within—but having to see and even do a lot of horrible things in the process, including witnessing plenty more Long Walks.
* Post-canon encounters where McVries is a ghost, and his feet are still bleeding and he can't stop walking. (Other dead Walkers are also welcome to appear as ghosts!) Or a more wistful ghost story where Garraty eventually lives to see the Major overthrown and the Long Walk banned, but he still sees ghosts walking across his lawn or alongside the road as he drives? Does he manage to give ghost McVries a ride one day?
* The longer the Walkers walk, the more the landscape around them seems to mutate and the weirder it seems to get, like reality itself is eroding along with their health and sanity.
* Sometimes a monster is a (mixed) blessing—one night on the Walk, something out in the darkness starts stalking alongside them, killing the Squads even as it also kills or savages some of the Walkers? Is it a physical monster? A living shadow? An embodiment of the Walkers' collective fury and exhaustion? Along with the horror, does it also offer Garraty and McVries a chance to escape?
The Blair Witch Project
Heather Donahue & Michael Williams & Joshua Leonard
Solo: The Blair Witch
Cosmic Horror, Folk Horror, Psychological Horror, Supernatural Horror, Survival Horror
I have no particular ships here but am fine with any pairings you may want to include. Any kind of ending is fine. I haven't seen Book of Shadows or Blair Witch, so I'd prefer not to get a gift that relies on being familiar with the sequels.
* I love the folklore we hear about the Blair Witch, and I'd love to see more of that. What other legends surround Burkittsville and the woods? Are the townspeople motivated to cover up for the witch or to direct victims to her? I'd also love to see fleshed-out versions of the stories that do come up in the movie, like Rustin Parr or the men slaughtered at Coffin Rock.
* Heather, Mike, and Josh become part of the Blair Witch legend, and future filmmakers, folklorists, and curious campers encounter them in the woods in some capacity. Do future campers encounter them as they wander endlessly through the woods? Do they become dangerous specters who, like Rustin Parr, function as another way the Blair Witch menaces people? What stories are told about them?
* Maybe the Blair Witch isn't really the source of the horror: it's something deeper, more primal, and more cosmic, maybe something related to the woods. (Shades of Algernon Blackwood's "The Willows," maybe?) Maybe the witch was just the first notable victim or priestess of a mind-bogglingly alien presence. Do Heather and the others discover this as they're lost in the woods? What would their experience look like with a more diffuse, eldritch horror plaguing them?
* Canon-divergence AU where Heather, Mike, and Josh don't die, no matter how hungry or cold they get or how terrorized they are. Instead, they just keep walking in circles, caught in some kind of time-bubble they can't escape even if they'd be willing to die to do it. Maybe the camera batteries never run out, and even worse things happen to them if they try to stop filming, like the Witch wants to be documented? Maybe if they're very, very diligent about filming, they get tiny rewards like a scrap of food or a sunnier day. Do they manage to hang on to any sense of sanity or self at all, or do they just succumb to misery? How do they interact with each other? Do they eventually start developing a weird sense of serving the Witch on an almost religious level?
* Heather, Mike, and Josh discover a way out of the woods: two of them can escape, but only by sacrificing the third in a brutal improvised ritual. Who turns on whom? Do they draw lots? Does the original victim manage to get the upper hand and turn the tables?
* Heather, Mike, and Josh wind up back in time. Maybe it's all a self-fulfilling loop, and Heather becomes the Blair Witch? Do people in the past have mysterious encounters with them and not know what to make of it?
The Descent
Sarah Carter & Juno Kaplan
Solo: Juno Kaplan
Solo: Sarah Carter
Cosmic Horror, Monster Horror, Psychological Horror, Survival Horror, Violent Horror
I like both Sarah/Juno and gen (and either of them/Sarah's husband can come up as backstory); I'm also completely fine with any of the other characters appearing. Any kind of ending is fine.
* I absolutely would have watched a version of this movie without the monsters: the trapped-in-a-cave suspense is so terrifying and grueling. I'd love to see more of that, so if you want to do a canon-divergence AU where they wind up trapped but don't run into any cave-dwelling monsters, I'm so here for it. Stick them in the dark, give them rope-burned hands and broken bones, make me feel excruciating secondhand claustrophobia, show me them scrounging for mushrooms or fungus or slugs or eyeless fish to stay alive, and just generally make it agonizing. They can all get out—I love clever problem-solving—or one/some of them can, but they don't have to.
* Either Sarah or Juno (or both) survives inside the cave and is slowly (and unwillingly?) dragged into crawler society, such as it is. What's it like to be surrounded by people you can only perceive as grotesque horrors? Do they have to struggle to be seen as crawlers rather than prey? How do they earn respect? Do they eventually wind up getting worshiped by the crawlers? Do they acclimate to life underground so well that they eventually don't want to escape, or so well that they become the monsters to future cavers?
* Instead of caving, the group of friends agrees to a different kind of risky, thrill-seeking trip that comes with its own dangers (and maybe even with its own monsters). Do they wind up stranded in a snowy wasteland? In the desert? Halfway up a mountain that's nearly sheer rock? Do they—for a different direction—decide in a tongue-in-cheek way to take on a challenge to spend the night in a haunted house, just on the way to their real destination, only to find that they picked the wrong house and landed themselves in a nightmare? Or do they wind up stuck in their once-cozy rental cabin, besieged by mysterious creatures?
* Sarah dies in the accident too, but on a future caving trip, Juno encounters her ghost: some kind of spirit that only exists in dark, forgotten places. Is her ghost leading Juno on to her doom, like a will-o'-the-wisp luring her down tunnels she can't get out of? Or is she wistful and just wanting to reconnect? Or does she want to kill Juno for company rather than revenge?
* Instead of having an affair with Sarah's husband, Juno was having an affair with Sarah. The two of them eventually go off on a trip by themselves, but Sarah's grief and guilt flare up when she and Juno start being haunted by the ghosts of her husband and daughter.
* The unmapped cave keeps leading down deeper and deeper, until the group gets to a terrifying underground world, a buried cosmic horror, some crack in reality, etc., and Go Mad From the Revelation. Can they deal with it at all, even if they escape, or are they forever haunted by the knowledge of how thin and flimsy reality really is? Are they driven to go back to the cave?
* The monsters down in the cave are different monsters: creepy plants/fungi, tentacles/worms, living shadows activated by their lamps and torches, the sense of something breathing in the darkness, living rock where the cave tries to tighten up around them to swallow them whole ….
Re-Animator
Daniel Cain & Herbert West
Body Horror, Cosmic Horror, Folk Horror, Medical Horror, Monster Horror, Paranormal Horror, Science Fiction Horror, Supernatural Horror
I love both Dan/Herbert and Dan & Herbert, and past Dan/Meg or Dan/Francesca are both totally fine. I'm good with any kind of ending as long as the two of them don't completely destroy their relationship in the course of the story.
Fandom-specific DNW: Beyond Re-Animator canon.
* Dan and Herbert awaken or otherwise attract the attention of some kind of eldritch entity—maybe by entering the wrong cave or isolated pocket of woods in search of some potential reagent component, maybe by messing around with life and death in the first place—and now it's leaking through their reality, giving them nightmares, manifesting with horrible physical side effects, etc.
* They wind up snowbound in a haunted hotel. Herbert is contemptuous of ghosts, but eventually even he can't deny that they're a real threat. It would be really interesting to see them dealing with a less immediately tangible form of horror—can they use their medical/scientific expertise to fight it in some way? Can they manage to force the ghosts into a physical form?
* Herbert dies at the end of the first movie but sporadically makes ghostly appearances in Dan's life to protect him, bug him about working on the reagent, and just generally be in love with him?
* AU where Herbert tries to conquer death in a different way. Maybe he's experimenting with chemically engineered vampirism or trying to preserve disembodied consciousness after death, and whatever the process is, it has its own dangerous fallout.
* Any kind of horror-related hurt/comfort. Chased and hurt by monsters and/or zombies? Attacked by people Trying to survive in a zombie apocalypse? Dealing with reagent addiction side effects or slow, grotesque physical transformation? Feel free to go all-out on the body horror, whether it's violent, deliberate, or accidental and science-fictional and normally impossible. Maybe Herbert starts using his own body to produce certain reagent components, so there's something growing inside him or on him?
* Instead of coming back as zombies, the dead resurrected by the reagent come back and immediately start morphing into grosser, weirder, and more grotesque forms.
* Dan and Herbert in space! Maybe they've engineered some kind of organic spaceship made out of the vaguely living dead, or out of a resurrected cosmic creature? Do they encounter mind-boggling space horrors on a regular basis? What kind of SF medical horror could they get up to with things like nanobots or cryogenics or alien flora and fauna involved?
* Dan keeps dying, and Herbert keeps bringing him back, but every time, he comes back a little bit more wrong—needing to feed off blood (Herbert's or other people's), afflicted with a newfound ability to see eldritch colors and lights in the sky that signify cosmic horrors breaking through, a craving to eat dead people, etc. Herbert is flexible, though. He can deal with this.
Thoroughbreds
Amanda & Lily
Gothic Horror, Psychological Horror, Supernatural Horror
I ship Amanda/Lily, but anything with their fucked-up combination of intimacy, manipulation, and loneliness would make me incredibly happy, whether it's shippy or platonic. Any kind of ending is fine, even them murdering each other, as long as they don't wind up 100% hating each other or totally indifferent to each other.
* Tim kills Mark, but Mark hangs around as a vengeful ghost, and now Amanda and Lily have to deal with a haunted house. They've gotten away with murder, but how do they handle the supernatural? Does now-dead Mark know that they're responsible for his death, or does he target Tim first? Do the girls sacrifice Tim in the hopes of buying off Mark's ghost, only for this to somehow tip Mark off to their role in his murder?
* Amanda and Lily get away with murder (via the means of your choice), and murder becomes an easy solution to their problems, especially from Lily's POV. What other murders over the years does she enlist Amanda to help her with? Do they tip over into killing for pleasure? Does Amanda start wondering if Lily is someone the world would be better off without, or if they both are? Does Lily start thinking about eliminating her accomplice? Or do they develop an intense mutual loyalty despite all the death and dysfunction, and then keep choosing each other over everyone else?
* Amanda and Lily both get sent to Brookmore, as girls with severe behavioral problems, and the school is haunted, evil, terrifyingly abusive, home to sinister experiments, hired by their parents to kill them, etc. Any evil school trope you can think of, however plausible or implausible, I'm all over it.
* Historical Gothic romance AU where Lily's mom doesn't know about Amanda's history, and she hires her to be Lily's live-in companion in their gorgeous but cavernously empty house? Old-fashioned sinister Gothic goings-on, dark secrets, and a murder plot against Mark?
* Anything playing up the blend of obsession, possessiveness, attraction, manipulation, and longing between them, or anything that delves into Lily's selfishness and concern for image over substance or Amanda's supposed lack of emotion and takes those things into some weird psychological horror places.
* Lily has some kind of ability to manifest people who can help her, and she conjured Amanda into existence to express all the messiness and apathy and amorality she's tried to hide. Maybe Honeymooner was actually Lily's horse, and she first created Amanda to help her put him down? Is she secretly made out of things like twigs and clay and Lily's hair and blood, and does she need regular maintenance to keep this from showing? What's their relationship like when you add a whole twisted Frankenstein's monster angle to it? How does Amanda feel about Lily? Can they use Mark's death to make Amanda more real? Does Amanda need to feed off blood or sex?
* The girls are budding witches, and they need to kill Mark as a blood sacrifice to gain more power.
Evil
David Acosta & Kristen Bouchard & Ben Shakir
Ben Shakir & Karima Shakir
Solo: Ben Shakir
Solo: David Acosta
Solo: Kristen Bocuhard
Cosmic Horror, Dark Fantasy, Folk Horror, Institutional Horror, Monster Horror, Paranormal Horror, Psychological Horror, Science Fiction Horror, Supernatural Horror
I like gen, Kristen/David/Ben, Kristen/David, and Kristen/Ben (and all potential shades of ambiguity in between). Background Kristen/Andy is also fine. I prefer everyone to still be alive, on good terms with each other, and not completely psychologically destroyed at the end of the story, though being traumatized or experiencing ongoing unease/lingering horror is fine.
* Horror-related casefic (or a snippet of casefic) in general would be excellent, whether the resolution is supernatural, human, or a mixture of both (or people making things look supernatural). I especially like their weirder cases and incidents that aren't demon-related, like the Haunted Girl VR game, the "Pudsy's Christmas" video, Brenda at the girl's Halloween party, David and Kristen at David's father's party, the Elevator Game, the totally-not-Amazon zombies, etc.. I'd love to see them investigating a new incident, whether the focus is on the trio, just one of them, or on Ben and Karima.
* Going off the above—there's really no kind of horror I wouldn't love to see them encountering or exploring: Haunted houses and hotels. Creepy small towns with peculiar rituals where everyone is friendly but strangers tend to disappear. Viral videos and creepypasta with suspicious origins. Past cases come back in a horrible fashion, like a return of the nurse from Room 320. Nightmares and nightmare-sharing. Dark prophetic dreams. Character Has the Creeping Sensation Things Are No Longer Real. Techno-horror. Possessed technology. The fabric of reality is thinner than we thought, and there are strange things underneath. Terrifying time loops. Creepy forests and deserts. Creepy submarines. Isolated settings: snowbound, stuck in a torrential downpour, etc. Haunted dolls. Haunted ventriloquist dummies.
* Zombie apocalypse or any other horrific, world-shattering event that leaves the characters clinging to each other as all they have left in a terrifying world.
* Extreme hurt/comfort: kidnapped by a serial killer, kidnapped by someone who believes in torturing people until they achieve transcendence (a la Martyrs), sexually menaced, mind-controlled and made to do terrible things (that the others may help them cover up), mind-controlled by Leland specifically and trying to fight it off, stuck in an awful nightmare.
* One of them wakes up in what seems like a completely different life, but they still remember "their" reality and have to try to figure out a way to get back to a world everyone's telling them doesn't exist.
* Evil doppelgangers that the other characters have to gradually identify even when a lot of the impersonation is nearly perfect—just that creeping sense that there's something off about the way someone smiles and that getting worse and worse until something finally gives.
* One of them stumbles into horror in their off-hours, and they have to do a private investigation of some weird phenomena that one of them has to be vulnerable enough to open up to the others about, or one of them starts remembering some repressed past horror from their years before and needs help exploring and processing it.
I have more prompts for some fandoms than others, but that's just because of what I could think up or because of how many different characters or relationships I was requesting; I'd be equally happy to receive gifts for any of these requests.
I'm
Likes
hurt/comfort, emotional hurt/comfort, ensembles, enemies-to-lovers (or friends), friendships, friends-to-lovers, opposites attract, conflicting worldviews and priorities, emotional vulnerability, fix-its, casefic, canon-style adventures, crack played straight, moral complexity, nuanced bad guys/terrible people with moments of goodness or vulnerability, redemption, pining, obvious feelings that don’t quite get admitted to, unconventional gestures of affection, complicated relationships, partnerships, power dynamics, shippy gen and ambiguously intense relationships, intimacy, found family, first-time stories, established relationships, character death, amnesia, characters forced to cooperate, forced proximity, bedsharing, huddling/cuddling for warmth, 5 + 1 fics, slow-burns, fake/pretend relationships, arranged marriage/marriage of convenience, sex pollen, made them do it, noncon-related hurt/comfort, rape recovery, power couples, age gaps, worldbuilding, undercover work, loyalty, tenderness, protectiveness, acts of kindness, trying to do the right thing, identity porn, canon-divergence AUs, added supernatural/fantasy/sci-fi elements
General Sex Likes/Kinks
clothed sex, wall-sex, rough sex, teasing, anal play/sex, oral sex, rimming, frottage, fingering, gags, dirty talk, hand and finger kink, hair-touching, nipple play, characters giving orders/instructions, roleplay, casual D/s, spanking (including breasts, thighs, and pussy), talking during sex, emotional sex, sleepy/lazy sex, humorous sex scenes, enthusiastic sex, tenderness, loss of virginity, bad/awkward sex (either charmingly funny or downbeat), coming untouched, coming in pants, voyeurism, exhibitionism, collaring, people getting mussed, orgasm delay/denial, overstimulation, edging, begging, historical period- or location-specific sex, sex toys, praise kink, possessiveness, marking/bruising/biting
Bonus Horror Likes
horror-related hurt/comfort, haunted houses/hotels/etc., unsettlingly perfect small towns with dark secrets, "everything here seems superficially fine except someone's eyes are screaming," lingering trauma, bonding through trauma, courage, mutual protectiveness and self-sacrifice, comfort sex in the midst of horror, trying to survive an apocalypse together, mutating landscapes, "it's a bad idea to go into the woods," hunted for sport, finding evidence of cult-like religious practices and old beliefs with terrifying implications, ghosts, haunted spaceships, haunted regular ships, mass disappearances and abandoned locations, coming into possession of a cursed object that has unsettling or dangerous effects, supernatural or paranormal casefic, technology has turned on you, many people really are out to get you, dark carnivals, "it's a challenge to reach the end of this Halloween haunted house but—surprise!--it's actually really haunted and/or the hosts are trying to kill you," spending all night in a haunted house, quietly unsettling horror with little elements that are just slightly wrong, reality is slippery, trapped in a cave, snowbound in a haunted location, investigating supernatural phenomena, the ghosts are personally connected to you and it's tragic, the ghosts are only pretending to be personally connected to you and actually they're not ghosts at all, creepy mirrors, creepy doppelgangers, lured into a dangerous situation … and many more things
Some Favorite Horror and Horror-Related Movies
Re-Animator, Carnival of Souls, The Haunting, The Stepford Wives, The Ritual, The Descent, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Don't Look Now, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Seven, Zodiac, Memories of Murder, Get Out, Us, The Night of the Hunter, Cat People, The Shining, The Exorcist, The Perfection, Cam, The People Under the Stairs, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Haunt, Dawn of the Dead, Night of the Living Dead, The Orphanage, Pan's Labyrinth, The Others, The Mist, Society, Candyman, Scream, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Blair Witch Project, Ginger Snaps, It Follows, Black Christmas, 28 Days Later, The Babadook, Night of the Demon, The Witch, Lake Mungo, The Vanishing, The Sixth Sense, Eraserhead, Dead of Night, Eyes Without a Face, The Wicker Man, The Birds, Poltergeist, Freaks, The Fly, Let the Right One In, The Innocents, Jaws, Alien, The Thing, Black Box
DNW
ageplay, mommy/daddy kink, explicit sex for characters under sixteen, scat, bestiality, necrophilia, literal and real fire-and-brimstone hell, literal demons/devils
Biggles - W. E. Johns
Biggles & Ginger Hebblethwaite & Algy Lacey & Bertie Lissie & Erich von Stalhein
James "Biggles" Bigglesworth & Ginger Hebblethwaite & Algy Lacey & Bertie Lissie
James "Biggles" Bigglesworth & Erich von Stalhein
Dark Fantasy, Folk Horror, Killer Horror, Monster Horror, Paranormal Horror, Supernatural Horror, Survival Horror
I love Biggles/von Stalhein, Ginger/Algy, any and all friendships (whether tentative and prickly or ride-or-die) within the character combos, gen ensemble closeness, and every shade of ambiguity in between. I'm good with both happy endings and tragic/unsettling endings—I just don't want the characters' relationships with each other to end the story in a worse place than where they started.
Fandom-specific DNW: Period- or canon-typical racism. For stories with von Stalhein, I don't want WWII settings or any mention of Hitler or Nazis. If there's Ginger/Algy, I would prefer Ginger to be 18+.
* The team investigates some kind of unsettling mystery, like an aircraft carrier that's become a ghost ship or reports of long-dead pilots suddenly being spotted around a particular aerodrome. I'd just love to see them tackling some kind of supernatural or otherwise spooky case.
* Von Stalhein's Soviet handlers are slowly (via magic or science) transforming him into a literal monster, and the team gradually figures out what's happening. Biggles is the only one who believes he can get through to him and either reverse the process or figure out how von Stalhein can safely live in his new form without hurting people.
* Chedcombe is haunted, and Bertie needs the team's help to figure out what's going on and how to stop it. Bonus points for Towser sensing that something's wrong.
* They fly through a mysterious shimmering light in the sky, and it turns out that they really, really shouldn't have. Did it awaken an eldritch horror? Send everyone onboard into a washed-out shadow-side world full of monsters or into a much darker parallel universe? Make everyone's memories go blank, and they wake up with markings they can't explain? Does one of them seem like he might not be quite the same version of himself, but only a very good and eerie counterfeit, with unknown intentions?
* Someone is bitten by a supernatural creature, and the bite may cause horrible, transformative effects or a complete loss of reason and restraint, and everyone else has to deal with it and with the transforming person's own horror at what's happening to them. This can lean into body horror, if you'd like, with creatively awful transformations; I also like both werewolves and vampires (and the latter can certainly lead to dramatic, weirdly tender and/or erotic "you can drink my blood" scenes).
* Kidnapped with sinister goings-on! Being held in some in-between world by unnerving, eldritch fae? Kidnapped by an unexpectedly vicious and threatening killer, with extreme hurt/comfort? Buried alive and needing to be dug up in time? Hunted for sport by a psychopath?
* Struggling to survive during a zombie apocalypse, with horror and h/c and mutual protectiveness and the constant awareness of danger and the possibility of disaster.
* A small, out-of-the-way village seems like the ideal place for them to rest and recover after a bout of malaria or some particularly exhausting, damaging mission … except the village has peculiar little beliefs and may just sacrifice a stranger (or several) every year. Or it has peculiar little beliefs that seem strange until it turns out that they're complex rules for appeasing some kind of monster or cosmic force that lives in the forest/caves/etc.
* Biggles and Co. bemusedly take in a slightly down-at-the-heels carnival, maybe in some seaside town they're staying in, or duck into one to escape some pursuers, only to find that the carousel horses look like they have sharp teeth and the hall of mirrors is full of horrors and all the games seem to have oddly, terribly high stakes ….
* Pre-Hatchet, von Stalhein is haunted by something that looks like Biggles but isn't—an incubus? Some kind of manifestation of his own complicated feelings of longing and resentment? Some kind of brought-to-life-by-dark-magic fake the Soviets have created to test von Stalhein's loyalty or as a kind of twisted reward for a job well done? An attempt to satisfy any temptation he might have so he stays on their side? Does von Stalhein know that it's not the real Biggles? Whatever the doppelganger is, it's getting more and more violent and taking more and more from him, and the real Biggles will eventually have to defeat it.
Carrie - Stephen King
Solo: Carrie White
Solo: Sue Snell
Susan Snell & Carrie White
Dark Fantasy, Folk Horror, Gothic Horror, Institutional Horror, Paranormal Horror, Psychological Horror, Supernatural Horror
I like Carrie/Sue (both dark/horrifying/nonconny/dubconny and more hopeful/romantic) and gen (and all potential shades of ambiguity in between). All kinds of endings are fine.
* Carrie doesn't go home after the prom; instead, she leaves town with a terrified Sue as a hostage.
* Carrie lives on as a ghost in Sue's mind. If you take this in a shippy direction, I'm open to everything from nightmare noncon/dubcon to dark romance to something more wistful. Or maybe Carrie lives and blows town, but she's haunted by the prom ghosts and/or the ghost of her mother? Can she overcome them, banish them, or lay them to rest, or will they get the upper hand? Does she have genuine regrets?
* I also love the idea of Sue being haunted by prom ghosts, especially while she's trying to deal with being ostracized by the town and having so much survivor's guilt. Or Sue starting to investigate paranormal/psychic phenomena, going headfirst into what scares her. Or Carrie/Sue with them partnered up in looking into these cases. Carrie/Sue vs. haunted houses and other people with wild talents.
* Feeling like a monster, dealing with enormous power and the temptation to use it to do terrible things to people, PTSD and nightmares, physical deterioration and the knowledge that you're going to die young (or, if Carrie/Sue, the knowledge that the person you love is going to die young).
* Carrie somehow manages to bring her mother back, but she Comes Back Wrong.
* Carrie's intrusion into Sue's head gave her unwanted telekinetic powers that she's horrified by, and it's making people suspicious of her.
* In the aftermath of prom night, Chamberlain develops some peculiar rituals for detecting people with telekinetic powers, and everything slowly becomes oppressive and/or retrograde-creepy with beliefs about witchcraft. Or a folk horror AU where everything is superficially modern, but this is still a world where people are alert to signs of "witchcraft" and ready to turn on Carrie as soon as her powers start manifesting and they want to stone her in the public square.
* Carrie gets captured by the government/the Shop/some nefarious lab, either before or after prom, and they start experimenting on her and trying to control her, with a possible rescue attempt by Sue. Or a possible scenario where Sue is also brought into keep her company/help control her. Can they escape? How do the researchers control Carrie? If they offer her praise and support, does she even want to get out?
Dare Me - Megan Abbott
Beth Cassidy & Addy Hanlon
Body Horror, Dark Fantasy, Folk Horror, Killer Horror, Psychological Horror, Supernatural Horror
Addy/Beth is very welcome! (And Addy/Colette, Addy/Casey Jaye, and Addy/RiRi are all good if you want to include background pairings or make Beth extra jealous.) Any kind of ending is fine.
* Cheerleading asks more and more out of them every day—i.e., body horror that doubles-down on all the physical strains in canon and gets worse and worse, with surgeries and mutilations and the supernatural all potentially stepping in to make sure the girls can look and perform the way Colette expects them to. Permanent smiles? The Flyer is made extra-light by having her bones hollowed out? Jewels set in your skin for extra glitter?
* Cheer camp, slasher movie edition, with a masked killer prowling the woods even as Beth seethes over Addy making friends with Casey Jaye. Eerie campfire tales told in a miasma of lust and love and jealousy. If the bodies start dropping one night, does Addy wonder if Beth might be the killer? (Is Beth the killer? Is Addy?) Does Beth try to convince her it's Casey Jaye? How can they use their skills to fight back and survive—or can they even get out of this alive without sacrificing each other, or without one of them sacrificing herself?
* Beth dies during her final stunt, but that doesn't mean her ghost is going to leave Addy alone. Is there ghost sex? If Addy eventually tries to exorcize her, does that feel like it's as much of a betrayal as Addy gravitating towards Colette? If Beth sticks around even as Addy gets older, does her presence start to become poignant and even nostalgic after a while?
* Obsession and fixation, from all possible angles. Beth starts stalking Addy? Addy starts stalking Colette, and her obsession turns violent and leads to a murder that only Beth can help her cover up? Does Beth find out some horrible secret about Colette, like she's a vampire out to seduce Addy and drain her dry, and she has to try even harder to win back all Addy's attention?
* Colette is actually a cult leader priming all the girls to die in some kind of sacrifice at the end of the season, and Addy is lured in—both wanting to die for Coach and wanting to believe that Coach would let her live, or thinking she knows the whole story when she doesn't—and Beth is slowly trying to unravel it all and use this information to her own advantage. If there's magic involved, or some force generated by the sacrifice, does Beth try to take control of it? Does she try to beat Colette to the punch by killing most of the team herself in an effort to win Addy's love?
* Addy's selective memory is actually a kind of half-conscious superpower letting her edit reality to fit her needs, and Beth—due to their closeness—is one of the few people who can pick up on this. But that doesn't mean that Addy never uses it on her.
The Long Walk - Richard Bachman
Ray Garraty & Peter McVries
Dark Fantasy, Institutional Horror, Psychological Horror, Supernatural Horror, Survival Horror
I love Garraty/McVries, Garraty & McVries, and all shades of ambiguity in between. I'm fine with any ending that doesn't feature the two of them turning on each other or starting to dislike each other—basically, whatever happens to them and whatever they might do, I want them to still have each other.
* AU where their world takes a different approach to its distracting-the-populace death competitions. Maybe the boys all get stranded in an isolated location with few-to-no resources and the last man standing wins? Maybe it's gladiatorial combat, with awkward amounts of time to tragically get to know each other between fights or melees? Or a Hunger Games-style contest? Maybe they're all hunted down by the Squad, with the hunt televised?
* Similarly, I'd love to see a Walk in a different kind of setting or in different weather—subject them to blizzards or heat waves or force them to walk through a bunch of fire ants, if you like. Just do bad things to them and let them care about each other throughout.
* Garraty wins and gets the Prize—and he asks to have McVries brought back to life. There is some institutional-but-eldritch process that leads to an eerily revived McVries, but being brought back by a dystopian police state is non-ideal, and McVries Comes Back Wrong. Sleepwalking, memory gaps, trouble feeling any physical sensation? Does he need fresh blood to live (either Garraty's or someone else's)? Maybe he's still decaying and only back for a short time. Maybe he has destructive murder blackouts. Maybe the Major uses him as a weapon. (Don't worry about this touching on the necrophilia DNW, if you want to do Garraty/McVries; as long as McVries is not just a corpse without consciousness, we're good.)
* Alternatively, Garraty's Prize is a resurrected McVries, and the two of them play a long game inside the dystopia, eventually leading to Garraty becoming the new Major and taking down the system from within—but having to see and even do a lot of horrible things in the process, including witnessing plenty more Long Walks.
* Post-canon encounters where McVries is a ghost, and his feet are still bleeding and he can't stop walking. (Other dead Walkers are also welcome to appear as ghosts!) Or a more wistful ghost story where Garraty eventually lives to see the Major overthrown and the Long Walk banned, but he still sees ghosts walking across his lawn or alongside the road as he drives? Does he manage to give ghost McVries a ride one day?
* The longer the Walkers walk, the more the landscape around them seems to mutate and the weirder it seems to get, like reality itself is eroding along with their health and sanity.
* Sometimes a monster is a (mixed) blessing—one night on the Walk, something out in the darkness starts stalking alongside them, killing the Squads even as it also kills or savages some of the Walkers? Is it a physical monster? A living shadow? An embodiment of the Walkers' collective fury and exhaustion? Along with the horror, does it also offer Garraty and McVries a chance to escape?
The Blair Witch Project
Heather Donahue & Michael Williams & Joshua Leonard
Solo: The Blair Witch
Cosmic Horror, Folk Horror, Psychological Horror, Supernatural Horror, Survival Horror
I have no particular ships here but am fine with any pairings you may want to include. Any kind of ending is fine. I haven't seen Book of Shadows or Blair Witch, so I'd prefer not to get a gift that relies on being familiar with the sequels.
* I love the folklore we hear about the Blair Witch, and I'd love to see more of that. What other legends surround Burkittsville and the woods? Are the townspeople motivated to cover up for the witch or to direct victims to her? I'd also love to see fleshed-out versions of the stories that do come up in the movie, like Rustin Parr or the men slaughtered at Coffin Rock.
* Heather, Mike, and Josh become part of the Blair Witch legend, and future filmmakers, folklorists, and curious campers encounter them in the woods in some capacity. Do future campers encounter them as they wander endlessly through the woods? Do they become dangerous specters who, like Rustin Parr, function as another way the Blair Witch menaces people? What stories are told about them?
* Maybe the Blair Witch isn't really the source of the horror: it's something deeper, more primal, and more cosmic, maybe something related to the woods. (Shades of Algernon Blackwood's "The Willows," maybe?) Maybe the witch was just the first notable victim or priestess of a mind-bogglingly alien presence. Do Heather and the others discover this as they're lost in the woods? What would their experience look like with a more diffuse, eldritch horror plaguing them?
* Canon-divergence AU where Heather, Mike, and Josh don't die, no matter how hungry or cold they get or how terrorized they are. Instead, they just keep walking in circles, caught in some kind of time-bubble they can't escape even if they'd be willing to die to do it. Maybe the camera batteries never run out, and even worse things happen to them if they try to stop filming, like the Witch wants to be documented? Maybe if they're very, very diligent about filming, they get tiny rewards like a scrap of food or a sunnier day. Do they manage to hang on to any sense of sanity or self at all, or do they just succumb to misery? How do they interact with each other? Do they eventually start developing a weird sense of serving the Witch on an almost religious level?
* Heather, Mike, and Josh discover a way out of the woods: two of them can escape, but only by sacrificing the third in a brutal improvised ritual. Who turns on whom? Do they draw lots? Does the original victim manage to get the upper hand and turn the tables?
* Heather, Mike, and Josh wind up back in time. Maybe it's all a self-fulfilling loop, and Heather becomes the Blair Witch? Do people in the past have mysterious encounters with them and not know what to make of it?
The Descent
Sarah Carter & Juno Kaplan
Solo: Juno Kaplan
Solo: Sarah Carter
Cosmic Horror, Monster Horror, Psychological Horror, Survival Horror, Violent Horror
I like both Sarah/Juno and gen (and either of them/Sarah's husband can come up as backstory); I'm also completely fine with any of the other characters appearing. Any kind of ending is fine.
* I absolutely would have watched a version of this movie without the monsters: the trapped-in-a-cave suspense is so terrifying and grueling. I'd love to see more of that, so if you want to do a canon-divergence AU where they wind up trapped but don't run into any cave-dwelling monsters, I'm so here for it. Stick them in the dark, give them rope-burned hands and broken bones, make me feel excruciating secondhand claustrophobia, show me them scrounging for mushrooms or fungus or slugs or eyeless fish to stay alive, and just generally make it agonizing. They can all get out—I love clever problem-solving—or one/some of them can, but they don't have to.
* Either Sarah or Juno (or both) survives inside the cave and is slowly (and unwillingly?) dragged into crawler society, such as it is. What's it like to be surrounded by people you can only perceive as grotesque horrors? Do they have to struggle to be seen as crawlers rather than prey? How do they earn respect? Do they eventually wind up getting worshiped by the crawlers? Do they acclimate to life underground so well that they eventually don't want to escape, or so well that they become the monsters to future cavers?
* Instead of caving, the group of friends agrees to a different kind of risky, thrill-seeking trip that comes with its own dangers (and maybe even with its own monsters). Do they wind up stranded in a snowy wasteland? In the desert? Halfway up a mountain that's nearly sheer rock? Do they—for a different direction—decide in a tongue-in-cheek way to take on a challenge to spend the night in a haunted house, just on the way to their real destination, only to find that they picked the wrong house and landed themselves in a nightmare? Or do they wind up stuck in their once-cozy rental cabin, besieged by mysterious creatures?
* Sarah dies in the accident too, but on a future caving trip, Juno encounters her ghost: some kind of spirit that only exists in dark, forgotten places. Is her ghost leading Juno on to her doom, like a will-o'-the-wisp luring her down tunnels she can't get out of? Or is she wistful and just wanting to reconnect? Or does she want to kill Juno for company rather than revenge?
* Instead of having an affair with Sarah's husband, Juno was having an affair with Sarah. The two of them eventually go off on a trip by themselves, but Sarah's grief and guilt flare up when she and Juno start being haunted by the ghosts of her husband and daughter.
* The unmapped cave keeps leading down deeper and deeper, until the group gets to a terrifying underground world, a buried cosmic horror, some crack in reality, etc., and Go Mad From the Revelation. Can they deal with it at all, even if they escape, or are they forever haunted by the knowledge of how thin and flimsy reality really is? Are they driven to go back to the cave?
* The monsters down in the cave are different monsters: creepy plants/fungi, tentacles/worms, living shadows activated by their lamps and torches, the sense of something breathing in the darkness, living rock where the cave tries to tighten up around them to swallow them whole ….
Re-Animator
Daniel Cain & Herbert West
Body Horror, Cosmic Horror, Folk Horror, Medical Horror, Monster Horror, Paranormal Horror, Science Fiction Horror, Supernatural Horror
I love both Dan/Herbert and Dan & Herbert, and past Dan/Meg or Dan/Francesca are both totally fine. I'm good with any kind of ending as long as the two of them don't completely destroy their relationship in the course of the story.
Fandom-specific DNW: Beyond Re-Animator canon.
* Dan and Herbert awaken or otherwise attract the attention of some kind of eldritch entity—maybe by entering the wrong cave or isolated pocket of woods in search of some potential reagent component, maybe by messing around with life and death in the first place—and now it's leaking through their reality, giving them nightmares, manifesting with horrible physical side effects, etc.
* They wind up snowbound in a haunted hotel. Herbert is contemptuous of ghosts, but eventually even he can't deny that they're a real threat. It would be really interesting to see them dealing with a less immediately tangible form of horror—can they use their medical/scientific expertise to fight it in some way? Can they manage to force the ghosts into a physical form?
* Herbert dies at the end of the first movie but sporadically makes ghostly appearances in Dan's life to protect him, bug him about working on the reagent, and just generally be in love with him?
* AU where Herbert tries to conquer death in a different way. Maybe he's experimenting with chemically engineered vampirism or trying to preserve disembodied consciousness after death, and whatever the process is, it has its own dangerous fallout.
* Any kind of horror-related hurt/comfort. Chased and hurt by monsters and/or zombies? Attacked by people Trying to survive in a zombie apocalypse? Dealing with reagent addiction side effects or slow, grotesque physical transformation? Feel free to go all-out on the body horror, whether it's violent, deliberate, or accidental and science-fictional and normally impossible. Maybe Herbert starts using his own body to produce certain reagent components, so there's something growing inside him or on him?
* Instead of coming back as zombies, the dead resurrected by the reagent come back and immediately start morphing into grosser, weirder, and more grotesque forms.
* Dan and Herbert in space! Maybe they've engineered some kind of organic spaceship made out of the vaguely living dead, or out of a resurrected cosmic creature? Do they encounter mind-boggling space horrors on a regular basis? What kind of SF medical horror could they get up to with things like nanobots or cryogenics or alien flora and fauna involved?
* Dan keeps dying, and Herbert keeps bringing him back, but every time, he comes back a little bit more wrong—needing to feed off blood (Herbert's or other people's), afflicted with a newfound ability to see eldritch colors and lights in the sky that signify cosmic horrors breaking through, a craving to eat dead people, etc. Herbert is flexible, though. He can deal with this.
Thoroughbreds
Amanda & Lily
Gothic Horror, Psychological Horror, Supernatural Horror
I ship Amanda/Lily, but anything with their fucked-up combination of intimacy, manipulation, and loneliness would make me incredibly happy, whether it's shippy or platonic. Any kind of ending is fine, even them murdering each other, as long as they don't wind up 100% hating each other or totally indifferent to each other.
* Tim kills Mark, but Mark hangs around as a vengeful ghost, and now Amanda and Lily have to deal with a haunted house. They've gotten away with murder, but how do they handle the supernatural? Does now-dead Mark know that they're responsible for his death, or does he target Tim first? Do the girls sacrifice Tim in the hopes of buying off Mark's ghost, only for this to somehow tip Mark off to their role in his murder?
* Amanda and Lily get away with murder (via the means of your choice), and murder becomes an easy solution to their problems, especially from Lily's POV. What other murders over the years does she enlist Amanda to help her with? Do they tip over into killing for pleasure? Does Amanda start wondering if Lily is someone the world would be better off without, or if they both are? Does Lily start thinking about eliminating her accomplice? Or do they develop an intense mutual loyalty despite all the death and dysfunction, and then keep choosing each other over everyone else?
* Amanda and Lily both get sent to Brookmore, as girls with severe behavioral problems, and the school is haunted, evil, terrifyingly abusive, home to sinister experiments, hired by their parents to kill them, etc. Any evil school trope you can think of, however plausible or implausible, I'm all over it.
* Historical Gothic romance AU where Lily's mom doesn't know about Amanda's history, and she hires her to be Lily's live-in companion in their gorgeous but cavernously empty house? Old-fashioned sinister Gothic goings-on, dark secrets, and a murder plot against Mark?
* Anything playing up the blend of obsession, possessiveness, attraction, manipulation, and longing between them, or anything that delves into Lily's selfishness and concern for image over substance or Amanda's supposed lack of emotion and takes those things into some weird psychological horror places.
* Lily has some kind of ability to manifest people who can help her, and she conjured Amanda into existence to express all the messiness and apathy and amorality she's tried to hide. Maybe Honeymooner was actually Lily's horse, and she first created Amanda to help her put him down? Is she secretly made out of things like twigs and clay and Lily's hair and blood, and does she need regular maintenance to keep this from showing? What's their relationship like when you add a whole twisted Frankenstein's monster angle to it? How does Amanda feel about Lily? Can they use Mark's death to make Amanda more real? Does Amanda need to feed off blood or sex?
* The girls are budding witches, and they need to kill Mark as a blood sacrifice to gain more power.
Evil
David Acosta & Kristen Bouchard & Ben Shakir
Ben Shakir & Karima Shakir
Solo: Ben Shakir
Solo: David Acosta
Solo: Kristen Bocuhard
Cosmic Horror, Dark Fantasy, Folk Horror, Institutional Horror, Monster Horror, Paranormal Horror, Psychological Horror, Science Fiction Horror, Supernatural Horror
I like gen, Kristen/David/Ben, Kristen/David, and Kristen/Ben (and all potential shades of ambiguity in between). Background Kristen/Andy is also fine. I prefer everyone to still be alive, on good terms with each other, and not completely psychologically destroyed at the end of the story, though being traumatized or experiencing ongoing unease/lingering horror is fine.
* Horror-related casefic (or a snippet of casefic) in general would be excellent, whether the resolution is supernatural, human, or a mixture of both (or people making things look supernatural). I especially like their weirder cases and incidents that aren't demon-related, like the Haunted Girl VR game, the "Pudsy's Christmas" video, Brenda at the girl's Halloween party, David and Kristen at David's father's party, the Elevator Game, the totally-not-Amazon zombies, etc.. I'd love to see them investigating a new incident, whether the focus is on the trio, just one of them, or on Ben and Karima.
* Going off the above—there's really no kind of horror I wouldn't love to see them encountering or exploring: Haunted houses and hotels. Creepy small towns with peculiar rituals where everyone is friendly but strangers tend to disappear. Viral videos and creepypasta with suspicious origins. Past cases come back in a horrible fashion, like a return of the nurse from Room 320. Nightmares and nightmare-sharing. Dark prophetic dreams. Character Has the Creeping Sensation Things Are No Longer Real. Techno-horror. Possessed technology. The fabric of reality is thinner than we thought, and there are strange things underneath. Terrifying time loops. Creepy forests and deserts. Creepy submarines. Isolated settings: snowbound, stuck in a torrential downpour, etc. Haunted dolls. Haunted ventriloquist dummies.
* Zombie apocalypse or any other horrific, world-shattering event that leaves the characters clinging to each other as all they have left in a terrifying world.
* Extreme hurt/comfort: kidnapped by a serial killer, kidnapped by someone who believes in torturing people until they achieve transcendence (a la Martyrs), sexually menaced, mind-controlled and made to do terrible things (that the others may help them cover up), mind-controlled by Leland specifically and trying to fight it off, stuck in an awful nightmare.
* One of them wakes up in what seems like a completely different life, but they still remember "their" reality and have to try to figure out a way to get back to a world everyone's telling them doesn't exist.
* Evil doppelgangers that the other characters have to gradually identify even when a lot of the impersonation is nearly perfect—just that creeping sense that there's something off about the way someone smiles and that getting worse and worse until something finally gives.
* One of them stumbles into horror in their off-hours, and they have to do a private investigation of some weird phenomena that one of them has to be vulnerable enough to open up to the others about, or one of them starts remembering some repressed past horror from their years before and needs help exploring and processing it.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-05-17 10:57 am (UTC)