Weirdo southerners and their wacked out families. Cormac McCarthy and Pat Conroy. Paris Trout, Bastard out of Carolina, Secret Life of Bees and stuff like that.
I’d be a much better writer if I was born southern poor white trash and beat up by my dad while trying to protect my mother and having sex with a relative.
I’m still pretty weird, but not THAT WEIRD.
I am constantly drawn to stories with a bit of a mystery that’s supernatural or religious in nature. Like when the X-Files was really good – when there was some unexplained element that may or may not be real, and may or may not be explainable by science. But just hints of it. I get turned off if a story goes full blown into the realm of fantasy.
I also get suckered into Dan Brown types of stories, because I find the ancient mystery, altered gospel, hidden powers, alternate “universe” type stuff very fascinating. I cringed through The Da Vinci Code, actually, but better-written books with a similar premise are what I like. Unfortunately, that type of fiction has a lot of really bad writing, so I end up wading through a lot of crap.
Any of the following:
Heists
Zombies
Submarines
“MacGyver” situations
Snipers/Assassins/Hitmen
Sadly, there seems to be a rule that every good assassin plot ends badly when a female love interest arrives and screws everything up.
Apocalypse themes.
Sports movies where the underdog wins.
Poor kid makes good.
Stories about the South - like Steel Magnolias, Fried Green Tomatoes, Prince of Tides
If that is what you like, I strongly recommend Wild Things (1998), but don’t turn off the movie too soon; it has three radical twists after you think it is finally over!
I am a sucker for psychics, tarot card readers, mind readers, palm readers, astrologers, etc. who make startling predictions…that come true! Not that I believe in any of that, but I find it irresistible.
No, but now I’m intrigued. What’s it called?
And I thought of another plot I like: Re-imagined fairy tales.
I watch a lot of anime, and that’s something that anime often does well. It can just be role reversal (e.g., Toradora, where the male protagonist is the good cook and housekeeper while the female protagonist sucks at it), or it can be gender change (e.g., Kashimashi, where the protagonist is changed by aliens from a boy into a girl, making the central love triangle into a lesbian threesome, complicated by the protagonist’s male best friend now having romantic feelings for his now female friend).
Action movies with female leads who actually kick ass and not whimper, cry and need to be saved all the time.
Aliens
The Long Kiss Goodnight (man, that was great. Why doesn’t anyone know about this movie?)
Tank Girl (even though Lori Whateverhernameis annoys the living crap out of me, still enjoyed the movie.)
Aeon Flux, the Resident Evil franchise-- I’ll even add The Fifth Element, even though LeeLo would have been pretty helpless all by herself.
And the grandmother of them all, Gloria (the original is better).
You know, I can’t think of any books that fit this theme.
ZOMPOCALYPSE. Really, you had me at, “Authorities report that the dead are coming back to life.”
Zombies.
Apocalypse.
Plots that are like that story The Most Dangerous Game. I love it when the hunted turns the tables, gets all MacGyver, and knocks off the hunters one by one. If somebody could work a storyline like that into a zompocalypse, I would probably jizz in my pants.
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies?
Lizzie and Lady Catherine totally kick butt.
There are lots of urban fantasies like this. Try Ilona Andrews’s Magic Bites.
Hmmm.
Zombie beauty pageants in a post-apocalyptic wasteland?
Pirate beauty pageants in a post-apocalyptic wasteland?
Ninja beauty pageants in a post-apocalyptic wasteland?
I think I’d go with ninja. And add whacky.
No zombies, but Louis L’Amour’s Last of the Breed might interest you.
I like horror movies of all sorts, but there’s a special place in my heart for one odd little subset.
I divide horror movies into three broad categories, for which of course there’s a lot of overlap: Creatures, Creepers, and Slashers. Creepers are the most difficult to make, because they require good writing. A Creeper is a movie with a strong story that makes you very, very uneasy. Think of that sense of creeping dread, that something awful is about to happen. That’s a Creeper. I’d put The Blair Witch Project into this category.
Slashers are obvious: movies about death and killing, sometimes but not always graphic. Most modern “torture porn” movies go into this category, as well as any of the “crazed killer” movies like Halloween or A Nightmare on Elm Street.
And then there are the Creatures. A Creature movie features something, such as an animal or a Nameless Lurking Thing, that enslaves/mangles/eats/kills until it is stopped. A Creature can be human or part-human, and it can be sort of insubstantial, as in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. More often, though, it’s just a brutal force of nature or mad science, as in Feast or The Thing.
But there’s a subset of these Creature films that I have a soft spot for, and that’s what I call the “Giant Killer Something” movie. Some animal, real or imagined, gets really big and goes on a rampage. Sort of like Godzilla, but with more of a horror slant than a science fiction one. Giant spiders, giant mantises, giant snakes, giant bees, giant rats, whatever, I can’t get enough of them.
Another vote for con games.
Also, gratuitous female nudity. Fine, YOU may not think of it as a plot…
Thanks for the suggestion.
I have an ungodly love for superhero and/or comic book movies.
Female protagonists who can kick ass and take names.
Alternatively, stories that put tanks in the spotlight. Mecha are easier to find, but I like tanks better.