Language Battle

A necromancer, a corpusvaticinator, and a lich-seer walk into a bar, except they call it three different things. The important thing is that the first is common, the third could see use, and nobody will ever use the second, proving that Latin is the least ominous language except when chanted. Even then, maybe other languages are scarier but don't get chanted as much.

An Experiment in Horror

Weird tales of a certain sort rely on subtle feelings of wrongness and such. I wasn't convinced that's actually scary, but I know better than to allow my beliefs to go untested. That's why I made sure the Flash Sunday post would be up on Sunday. It certainly was an eerie and offputting circumstance, and I felt the full impact of non-Euclidean post timing as if from some alien world known perhaps to our ancestors but distorted by myth, for no human intellect could fathom it. I suppose it's impossible for me to tell if I've gone insane, but I'm definitely not terrified. The experience has merely confirmed me in my resolve to post at a different time next week, the equivalent of nudging a picture so that it looks straight though in fact it already was.

Movie News

Here's the latest! Movies that aren't horror are still coming out, but they probably shouldn't! That's all! Forever!

Science Fiction Horror

Here's the setup: It's the future . . . but we don't have spaceships. Boo!

Chilling Science Fiction Tales

In the distant future, people will think of coal as a rare and valuable present because only Earth has any. Boo!

Horror Has Been Missing This Simple Trick!

Flowerew. Think about it.

I just thought about it and realized this would only work if a bunch of murders were happening in a hippie commune and it turned out one of them was a werewolf, so I think we might have missed the boat on this one.

How to Integrate Mechs Into Your Setting

Do it on page one.

En Route to Terror

"Captain, it's November Standard. Isn't it time to take that jack-o'-lantern out of the exercise room?"
"What jack-o'-lantern?"
"The one you bought at port, stored away all this time, and put there for Halloween. It was a nice gesture though."
The captain frowned. "I didn't buy anything of the sort."
A chill gripped the crew of the Calvary, three months out from Sofia on its five-month journey . . . through the depths of space!
Finis




Boo!
Actual Finis

The More Modern Prometheus

"I have created life!" the scientist proclaimed.
"That's great, though that sounds more like an engineering problem!" the crowd cheered.
"I have decided not to be evil," the scientist's creation announced.
"I really don't see why that was in question!" the crowd cheered.
The End

"That was an awfully short story."
"That's right. You're now trapped in a world where stories lack conflict . . . Forever! Muhahaha!"
"Nooooooo!"
Finis

The Principles of Horror

"Any sufficiently scary moment is indistinguishable from a jump scare." - Artur E. Parte
"A fright is a jump scare with a legion of defenders." - Max Spinestrike
"I scare, you spook, he indulges in jump scares." - Bootrand Rustling

Addendum

The reason is that clowns are far too scary. It was crippling the economy because nobody wanted to come out from under the bed.

Halloween Roundup

Is anyone still trying to pretend clowns are scary? I think that died out, and for good reason.

Halloween Sorting

Let's examing the categories of how people celebrate Halloween in particular and October generally.

Halloween Horror Type: These people watch well-reviewed horror movies and play Alien: Isolation.
Halloween Irony Type: These people watch Friday the 13th movies after the first one and play Unity asset flips.
Halloween Spooky Type: These people carve jack o'lanterns, put skeletons in their yard, and play Castlevania and Disgaea.

There is a group which does nothing at all, but it's better not to say anything about that. The important thing is to find your faction and coordinate to win the Splatoon Splatfest which will have this as its theme any day now. Spooky Type is clearly the most popular, but Irony Type probably has better players.

Addendum

"Demon credits" might actually be worse, but there's an ambiguity there that will detract from the horror till the reader becomes accustomed.

How to Inform the Audience of the Grim State of the Setting

"Demon dollars." That's the currency. It can't get worse than that.

How to Make Your Book More Cinematic

Now that we don't use physical books, you can put your text at a Dutch angle. How unsettling!

A Brutal Takedown

More like Dorkula and Van Smellthings! Wait, did Mad Magazine already do that?

Joke Corner

Q. Why aren't there more horror science fiction stories?
A. Because they're post-scarity!
Q. There are quite a few horror science fiction stories.
A. Shut up.

New Ghost Era

The mood in the room was weighty, still, an elephant grown past easy handling. "Ladies. Gentlemen." The chairman did not try to relieve the seriousness. Doing so would have been futile. "The matter before us today is serious. Do we get rid of human ghosts?" The next person along the table nodded. "AI ghosts are much spookier."
The one after agreed. "Their utterances are impossible to follow but give the impression you can if you listen harder. Very spooky."
"They have the wrong number of everything. The more you stare, the worse they look."
"They don't rely on stale techniques like dripping blood or detaching their heads."
"People have started to feel bad for real ghosts instead of themselves."
All the way down the table and all the way back up, the opinion was unanimous. The decision was handed down, and soon all spirits trapped in this world were at last released from their torment to be replaced by AI ghosts. Thus shall it be forevermore.
Finis

Addender

It's tough to explain curseships because they're uninterested in communication, but an unnamed space pirate can handle it.