#Forest Horror

[ronandreams]

does anyone have any good forest/nature focused horror movie recs? i'm watching lovely, dark, and deep right now, but i need some more ideas 😊

i've already seen both blair witch movies, evil dead 2013, the forest, cabin in the woods, the witch, backcountry.

[minloe]

I love the horror trope of fucked up deer

It’s so simple yet so effective

This post gets me

I love fucked up deer

(Fucked up deer below the cut) (spooky)

Just look at those guys. Perfect for a forest horror. If I saw that I would be terrified. 10/10 deer.

[booreadsbooks]

Don't Let the Forest in, C.G Drews; A review

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

I'll start off by saying, if you are a lover of horror, you will probably love this book.

To be completely honest, I am like, a very minor horror fan. I like it in small doses. I figured this being YA would make it easier to digest, but I think it actually just made it harder because I felt bad for them because they were so young.

I also went into this expecting monster scares, and you definitely get that!!! The monsters are horrifying and scary and very very good. There are some absolutely gorgeous illustrations, which were a lovely surprise. But you also get major psychological horror vibes, and really gruesome body horror.

I loved the prose, I loved the story. I took so many notes while reading this once I realized the direction it was going, trying to pull together clues and fit together the story perfectly how I wanted it in my mind...

But at the end of the day, I don't know how I really feel about it. This story will be on my mind for a long time, I think. I originally was going to write a whole essay about my thoughts, my interpretation, my preferred way of viewing it. But then I decided I've already spent so much time with it, that I need a break. But maybe I'll come back at some point, when my thoughts are less scattered.

I genuinely believe, if the content warnings don't turn you away (and if you have any sensitivities, I encourage you to find the content warnings and assess whether you would like this), that this is a great novel that horror and dark fairytale fans should read right away, and write your own essay in your notes about how you think it should end. If you love psychological horror, monsters and nightmares, a forest so alive it feels like when you touch it it touches you right back, this is for you.

But for me? I really didn't love this book. I don't even know if I liked it. But I was intrigued with it, invested in it, thinking about it constantly even when I wasn't reading it. That seems just as important as a silly thing like "liking a book."

Author ends the acknowledgements with "hope this one haunts you." Haha. Loser. Maybe it will.

Quotes below the cut, might be spoiler-y (content warnings for visceral imagery in some of these)

"It didn't hurt, the day he had cut out his own heart. Answer had written about it later in spidery lines from a sharp pen— a story about a boy who took a knife to his chest and carved himself open, showing ribs like mossy tree roots, his heart a bruised and wretched thing beneath. No one would want a heart like his. But he'd still cut it out and given it away."

This is the opening— immediately engaging, and tells you exactly what kind of story you're in for.

"He drew like this because Andrew wrote like this. They fed off each other relentlessly, their fever dreams bleeding through their eyes long after they woke."

This line had me in a chokehold for reasons.

"The wind picked up and scatter leaves over the path as they set off to hunt. No use waiting for the monsters. The night pressed close to Andrew's spine, cool hands sliding up his sweater and over his ribs. It seemed fascinated with the concept of his beating pulse, and it left inky fingerprints along his collarbone. If it asked to kiss him, he thought he would say yes."

This reminds me of being a teen, living in the woods, sneaking out in the middle of the night because I loved feeling like the world was awake with me while everyone else was asleep.

[girlscoutbrownies]

Fandom: School Bus Graveyard

Word Count: 1241

Summary:

What do people say again? Time flies when you’re having fun? They’d be right, except he’s not really having fun right now.

He’s not really having much of anything. He’s just… there.

Additional Notes + Content Warnings: Descriptions of disassociation, mild forest horror. Aiden is very much an unreliable narrator here.

This is not posted on ao3.

—

Aiden Clark does this thing where time flies sometimes.

That’s not really the right word for it, though, because saying that time is flying implies that he knows that it’s moving. He really doesn’t.

He blinks and he’s lost hours. He loses time. Yes, yeah, yeah - losing time. That’s the term.

( Actually, he’s been told that it’s disassociation. He doesn’t really care for those big words, though. )

Something’s off, he thinks, the first time.

His room is dark. It’s always dark in his room. Very, very dark. Dark, so that he doesn’t have to see the empty cans on his table and the stacks of cup ramen.

It gives off, automatically, the sense of someone is sleeping here, but they’re not living.

And maybe that’s corny, but is he alive?

He doesn’t feel alive right now. Alive people feel the mattress under their feet and the blanket over their legs.

God, his inner monologue is always kind of depressing. Seasonal depression, maybe? It is winter.

It’s always winter, though.

Maybe the seasons are changing, and he doesn’t know, because the sky outside of his window is dreary and sad and depressing and he’s not quite sure when the cold stops and the warm begins, because he doesn’t know what warm is like.

The monitor is dark, too. He thinks that sometimes, all he does is watch himself lay in bed, from inside some inner world where nothing can hurt him, the childhood monsters-in-his-closet latching onto him like some fucked up koala. No, koalas aren’t the ones that latch. Those are sloths.

He’s alive, actually. That’s kind of sad. Wait, no, it’s not. No, no, no, Aiden. Being alive is good.

( Sometimes he wonders what it’s like to die. It’s not in a suicidal way, though. Not really. )

He wonders if dead people still need to eat and live and breathe and order things at restaurants, except he’s seen enough movies and read enough books to know that the only dead people that do that are the zombies.

He wonders if zombies have to make eye contact and ask for consent before they bite people. But only alive people do that, because alive people know what it’s like to feel bad. Corpses don’t make eye contact.

Corpses don’t feel anything at all.

( If he thinks ahead, outside of this memory, he wonders if all of his intentional eye contact is just a weird way of him scrounging up whatever sense of identity he has left, a way of saying I am here and alive and you will have to look at me, or if it’s just another byproduct of never interacting with other people his age, not until Ben. Maybe it’s both, actually. )

He is alive. He feels his heart beating sometimes, a steady familiar song that he knows the exact tune to. You’re not supposed to hear your heartbeat, though, are you? Not unless you’re in a hospital, strapped to wires and stripped to the bone like a weird fucking mannequin on display.

That’s funny.

Well, it’d be funny, except he’s not laughing. That’s typically the baseline for something considered humorous.

He’s not doing much of anything. Right, what was he doing again? The blanket. It’s there. He feels the blanket, bunching it up in his hands. It feels fake, but he knows it’s real. The world isn’t advanced enough for something like that, not yet at least. It feels like something sheared too quickly and never processed and rough and it’s a disgusting horrible shade of gray and—

Right, what was he doing again?

Five senses. He can feel his veins twisting underneath his skin and blood flowing in an unending path to his heart to keep him alive. That’s not quite how you phrase it, he thinks.

He turns his hand. It’s pale and the blue lines stand out prominently, not faintly like a normal person’s would be. They snake under his bones like vines in a forest, grabbing hold of his bones and muscle because he can’t have anything, he’s surrendered it to rot in this room and he’s suddenly sharply thrusted out of this shitty memory—

( He doesn’t really like the forest. Maybe he did, once before, but a long, long time ago, he’d been told that bad parents send their children to the woods to die and that really, he should be grateful he has a house and a place to stay in.

The forest swallows up everything. It’s a wonder humanity hasn’t burned it all to the ground, honestly. Setting ablaze to his nightmares, the ones he has when it’s getting particularly bad and he sits in a dark clearing and watches nature reclaim its score. This was never their place to live.

It gets worse after the phantom dimension. Pillars of rock soaring into the sky, something that shouldn’t be possible because of the “laws of nature,” but nature follows its own set of rules, doesn’t it? It doesn’t care about us. He’d envisioned, the night after, when he’d finally managed to drift off, the forest grabbing onto Tyler and never letting go. Sinking into mud and dirt and decaying to the bone.

He doesn’t really like the forest. )

Right, he was doing… something…

Oh, he’s in bed. He’s in bed and the shutters have been pulled wide open, bright sunlight filtering through the glass. Wasn’t it just dark out?

“Aiden?”

His eyes snap towards the voice blocking the doorway. No, that’s not right. The voice near the doorway. His therapist told him to stop treating everyone like video game obstacles. Oh, well. Who was she kidding? It’s not like he told her anything, anyways.

Ashlyn is standing there, looking worried enough that he almost feels warmed by the concern. Almost.

They make eye contact, too prolonged and too vivid. He thinks he’s making her uncomfortable. That’s a shame.

Five senses. He can’t feel the blanket. It’s soft, isn’t it? He combs through his memories, knowing what it’s supposed to feel like. It’s silk or something, or maybe it’s fleece. He doesn’t know which one this is; they’re all the same colour, and he can’t feel. The texture is wrong.

It doesn’t feel like anything. He’s supposed to feel things. That’s his whole—pardon his redundancy—but that’s his whole thing. He’s the bouncy one, up and alive and too many feelings, to compensate for when the others are down.

Off topic. He’s getting off topic again. This isn’t a lecture, though; he’s not following a lesson plan. He’s just here.

“Um… are you… okay?”

“Yeah, of course,” he says with little hesitation. He thinks to himself that he really doesn’t care for speaking right now, but the familiar words roll off his tongue like…

He’s not that great with analogies. Similes. Whatever.

“You’re still in bed. It’s nearly two in the afternoon.”

Is it? He hadn’t realized time passed so quickly. Or, flew. Disappeared.

“Ben said that you were probably sleeping in, but, well…” She looks over, rather confusedly, at his unmoving form. He’s been sitting here for a while, hasn’t he?

“I’m hungry,” Aiden announces, pushing himself off the mattress. He feels it under his hands, which is good. It’s not the same softness as it should be, but it’s still there. It’s there, and this is real. He’s real.

“Do we have anything to eat?” The wood paneling is hard and cold under his feet. He wishes he’d gotten carpet.

It’s still cold in here.

[oingus-boingus]

Pretty Horror for Halloween ~ Longlegs (2024) - Oz Perkins

Part XI

[hiddenrainforestghost]

~deep in the forest~ 155 words 

“Before there were children in the forest, it was so quiet…..

I miss that time…….”

“….. maybe it was for the best that it changed though I’m not sure the trees liked the silence. They've certainly quieted down since the children came cleaning each one with their charming little tokens…….”

“I still haven’t made up my mind about the children…..”

“Sometimes they leave me acorns and little shells. It’s strange, but I find myself fond of them…..”

“….I hope they’re still here after what’s to come…….Most of us will try to protect them, I think……”

“their innocence is charming in a way even if it can be destructive at times……..”

“I’d like their gifts to be somewhere a little safer they might roll off the cliffs where they are……”

“…..I would move myself, but I’m not entirely sure I can anymore It’s been so long since I moved…….”

[imerson]

[areyousanguine]

The Forest Calls... Will You Answer?

🌲 Blackthorn Woods beckon... but tread carefully. 🌲 They say the forest protects its secrets with ancient magic. Strange ruins hide in the shadows, and paths disappear in silence. But the greatest danger? Leaving the trails... and not being let go.

Explore a supernatural roleplay that blends suspenseful horror, dark fantasy, and character-driven stories. Whether you’re a human, vampire, or dhampir, Sanguine offers a thrilling world for you to uncover.

🖤 Are you brave enough to answer the call? 🖤

[Join Early Access on Our Discord] 🔗 [Guidebook] | [Sanguine RPG] | [Quick Start Guide]

[rezdragon]

In 1982, an artist locked herself inside of a cabin deep in the woods of North Idaho...

First track from the new concept album is unleashed on the world.

I haven't decided on a name for the album yet, but I know the sound design direction I'm going to go: Rez's Office 2024. Sample heavy as fuck.

There are no instruments in this track.

[ex0skeletal-undead]

Made of Blackness by Ben J

[bequietanddrivefarawayy]

[sleepycuga]

This is just a sketch it’s still in progress

Don’t know if I should finish it

I tried to go for forest cryptic horror stuff

[studiolemonboy]

THE WITCH HOUSE

Illustration from my YA cosmic horror comic about a club of middle school cryptid hunters in 1990s New England. This is the Witch House, the local abandoned manor house at the edge of town that everybody heard from their uncle’s neighbor’s cousin about the ghost they saw wandering around in the 70s. Some of the different color options, line art, and value sketch

[xaoca]

[eerieeccentrix]

[guardcanine]

Photographed by Yvan Fabing