Vaguely inspired by this Metafilter thread about how Lovecraft’s works are too familiar to be truly horrifying these days, I had an idea for a thread here: Can we come up with a few new ideas for horror?
My idea is a bit of Lovecraft, add a dash of Heinlein (bonus points to anyone who names the specific work), and some real-life/real-Internet experience for flavor.
Imagine going about your daily life, living as you have been, when people slowly begin to hate you. Just absolute, pure, motiveless hatred, ramping up from peevishness to people becoming rather adamant about getting as far away from you as possible, to the more susceptible becoming violently aggressive towards you, like aggressive sundowners’ syndrome, except the sundown, the factor they absolutely cannot tolerate, is you. Taken to its furthest extreme, it would be I Am Legend without the apocalypse, a fully-functional world of people who are driven to utter, foaming, ranting, violent fury at the very thought of your continued existence.
Like most good ideas, a version of it has already been written - Harlan Ellison’s short story “The Man Who Was Heavily Into Revenge” (1978), reprinted in the Ellison collection Shatterday.
I believe the great dread motivating anyone under 40 at the moment is Fear Of Missing Out. Its probably been done already but a perhaps a millennial driven to madness at being unable to access information until it was gasp a day or more out of date?
Imagine the horror, if you can, of finding out about something cool the day after it happened, people saying the darndest things and then going unchallenged for what seems an eternity, not knowing what the food your best friend looks like until they describe it to you after its already been eaten! I’m trembling just writing this. I know one 21 year old who would be curled up in a foetal position at the mere thought.
How about the Curse of Zombie Fingers? Your fingers are no longer detected by touch screens/pads. A stylus will only work for a couple of minutes, then stop working for you.
Something like The Truman Show, but when you escape you find you’re in hell and all the bad things in your “life” are punishment for sins in a previous life. Mabye you even find out you were somebody horrible who deserves to be punished.
There was a pretty decent low budget horror film from around 10-ish years ago (between 2004 and 2011, I think) where a teen girl is murdered. Then it starts over, and she gets murdered by the same guy again, but differently. Then again, and again, etc… She starts remembering the loops, and tries to unravel the mystery but keeps getting murdered. Finally at the end she discovers the truth:She is not the girl; she’s the murderer guy, who died, and is now in hell, endlessly reliving the horror he put his victim through.I don’t fully remember the very end, but I think the final scene is the start of the loop again, her memory of the loop gone, and it’s murderin’ time again.
Very cool movie, and I wish I could find the name. I remember each loop starting with a (blue?) pickup truck arriving at her house, possibly to pick her up for school.
You can argue they already did this with Nosedive.
There was a New Twilight Zone (the 80s version) based on a famous short story where as a punishment for a crime someone gets completely ostracized from society where he lives his life but everyone ignores him. It’s not exactly the same but close.
I recommend Robert Aickman, though he’s not exactly “new” (died in 1981). His “strange stories” contained worlds that were all just a bit askew and subtly terrifying. Unlike any other horror writer I’ve read.
A couple of my favorite short stories are “The Cicerones,” “Pages from a Young Girl’s Journal,” and “The Wine-Dark Sea.”