#genre: psychological

[cinema-hallucinations]

Prompt: create a movie concept for a psychological horror story that centers around undone laundry.

Title: Laundry Day

Tagline: Can a stain of the soul ever be cleansed?

Logline: Eleanor, a once-proud homemaker trapped in a web of obsessive-compulsive disorder, drowns in a sea of unwashed clothes, each garment a canvas of imagined bloodstains echoing a past sin she desperately tries to scrub clean. Reality and delusion collide in a horrifying climax that forces her son to confront a truth more terrifying than he could imagine.

Characters:

Eleanor (50s): A woman consumed by guilt and delusion. She was once a meticulous housekeeper, now lost in a world of unwashed laundry and haunting memories.

Leo (30s): Eleanor's estranged son, concerned but unable to break through the wall of her paranoia. He seeks help from a therapist to understand his mother's condition.

Dr. Park (40s): A compassionate therapist struggling to decipher Eleanor's fractured reality and the truth behind her crippling fear. (deceased by climax)

Plot Summary:

Eleanor's once-immaculate home is now a suffocating prison of unwashed clothes. The crisp whites are replaced by a sea of grays and faded colors, each garment a suspected canvas of crimson stains. Haunted by a past she can't articulate, Eleanor believes these stains are proof of a horrific act that remains shrouded in secrecy.

Leo, estranged from his mother for years, arrives to find her drowning in self-inflicted filth. Desperate to help, he seeks the counsel of Dr. Park, a therapist experienced in treating OCD and trauma.

Dr. Park enters a twisted world where laundry becomes a sinister entity. Eleanor speaks in hushed tones about the "blood clothes," each piece a constant reminder of a past sin. She fixates on unseen stains, imagining them staining her own skin, mirroring Lady Macbeth's desperate handwashing. Dr. Park, with a combination of patience and skillful prompting, manages to coax a confession out of Eleanor.

Whether the crime is real or a figment of Eleanor's illness becomes irrelevant in the face of her escalating mania. The act of confessing, even to a single person, shatters the fragile barrier she has built around her delusions. Driven by a warped sense of needing to "cleanse" herself completely, she attacks Dr. Park in a sudden burst of violence.

Leo, alerted by the commotion, arrives to find his mother attempting to hide Dr. Park's body amidst the piles of laundry. The task is gruesomely made more difficult by Eleanor's self-mutilation, which has resulted (amongst others) in her severing her own left hand entirely. Her other hand, raw and bloodied from her own obsessive scrubbing, is a chilling testament to her mental state.

Themes:

The destructive power of guilt and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

The blurred lines between reality and delusion in mental illness.

The burden of a hidden past and its devastating consequences.

The lengths to which a disturbed mind can go to achieve a twisted sense of peace.

Ending:

The film offers no easy answers. The ambiguity of the crime remains. The final scene could depict Leo, heartbroken and terrified, standing amidst the mountains of laundry with his wounded mother. Sirens wail in the distance, signaling the arrival of the authorities. Eleanor, her eyes vacant and glazed, reaches out to touch a white garment hanging on a nearby line, its pristine innocence a stark contrast to the horror that has unfolded. The closing shot focuses on Leo's face, etched with a mixture of grief, fear, and a chilling uncertainty about the truth behind his mother's murderous act.

[theannypetite]

Nan Chan vol. 1

Time to Read: 5 minutes A carp in a bowl had gained consciousness as it lives with Jinglin, a recovering man who mostly slept. It had gotten into its head that it wanted to devour its caretaker. And when Cangji gained a human body as a result of nearly becoming fish feed himself, that’s the pledge he made… But it would have to wait because their lives were further flipped upside down when…

[danmeiblr]

Just finished Dangerous Husband. The author’s notes and metas kept taking me out, it’s like I was reading a draft that shouldn’t have been published yet. The prose was engaging enough for me to stick around, but how I wished they stopped talking about their writing process in between chapters coz they ended up giving away the plot...

But then again, I’m reading on an aggregator site so maybe the original is much cleaner. God, I really have to get my Haitang credentials fixed already. I can’t read the original coz I can’t fucking log in 😭

[goryhorroor]

horror sub-genres: psychological

[alivingmel]

I don't know what I was expecting when I looked up manatee anatomy the other day, but it was not that manatees have like. . . Fully-fledged hand bones.

(They're incapable of individual finger movement but still, according to someone on Reddit that had a male manatee fall in love with her, THEY HAVE A VERY STRONG GRIP.)

[gl4m0ur0us]

women in horror: red

carrie (1976)

house (1977)

suspiria (1977)

pearl (2022)

the shining (1980)

the love witch (2016)

black swan (2010)

us (2019)

terfs dni with this post

[waspgrave]

Love how anytime you ask someone who is nostalgic about dao’s ‘dark fantasy’ just what made it gritty/dark for them and why they like it so much, and their answer is always like, ‘men suffer battles while women get assaulted by darkspawn and made into broodmothers’. Like they can’t actually name anything beyond that and parts of the Blight. But they never delve too far into what made the Blight horrible beyond….you guessed it…broodmother lore. Odd

[skunkes]

longlegs fucking sucked 😭

[idiot-business]

saltburn is to 2023 what kill your darlings was to 2013 i think

[fyepertine]

Demon at the Temple

[awkwardplant]

out of all the horror podcasts i've listened to, i am in eskew is probably the most horrifying setting. if you even THINK about leaving, the sentient town is like "fuck you!" *removes your fourth dimension*

[cinema-hallucinations]

Prompt: generate a movie concept for a slow moving psychological drama involving heavy gaslighting and workplace abuse between the workers in a shoe store.

Title: The Instep

Tagline: A Descent into Retail Hell

Logline: Trapped in a dead-end shoe store job, a meek new employee is slowly broken down by a manipulative coworker, blurring the lines between reality and manufactured insecurity.

Major Characters:

Evelyn Thorne (30s): Soft-spoken and eager to please, Evelyn takes a job at The Instep to support her art career.

Mavis Gary (50s): The store manager, Mavis is a seemingly friendly veteran with a sharp tongue and a talent for passive-aggressive manipulation.

David Flores (20s): The only other employee besides Evelyn and Mavis, David is observant but avoids confrontation.

Plot Summary:

Evelyn lands a job at The Instep, a small, struggling shoe store in a decaying mall. Mavis, the veteran manager, takes her under her wing, showering her with praise and "helpful" advice. However, Mavis's compliments quickly turn into subtle criticisms of Evelyn's appearance, work ethic, and artistic aspirations.

David, the other employee, witnesses Mavis's behavior but remains silent, fearing for his own job security. Evelyn, desperate to please and naive to workplace dynamics, begins to doubt herself. Mavis strategically withholds training, assigns impossible tasks, and spreads rumors about Evelyn among the store's few customers.

As weeks turn into months, Evelyn's self-esteem crumbles. She questions her own memory and perception. Her artistic pursuits fall by the wayside as she becomes consumed by the daily emotional beatdown at work. The once bright and hopeful Evelyn becomes withdrawn and paranoid.

The film follows Evelyn's slow descent, punctuated by moments of clarity where she glimpses the truth of Mavis's manipulation. The climax arrives when a new shipment arrives, and Evelyn, at her wit's end, explodes, confronting Mavis in front of a bewildered customer.

Themes:

The insidious nature of gaslighting and emotional abuse.

The power dynamics within a seemingly mundane workplace.

The struggle to maintain self-worth in a toxic environment.

Visual Style:

The film utilizes a muted color palette, reflecting the drab and sterile atmosphere of the shoe store. Long, static shots emphasize the monotony of Evelyn's daily routine. Close-ups capture the subtle shifts in facial expressions, highlighting the psychological battle between Evelyn and Mavis.

The Instep is a slow-burn drama that explores the devastating effects of emotional abuse in an unexpected setting.

[theannypetite]

Omega Files

Time to Read: 1 minute Due to a bizarre suicide case, Song Bei asked the eccentric medical examiner Shan Bo for help. Shan Bo reluctantly agrees, and the two set out to solve the case. In the process, Song Bei learns of Shan Bo’s unusual autopsy method. Continue reading Omega Files

[danmeiblr]

Jiang Daoyun hugged me, his hands gripping my sleeves. I could feel how afraid he was from how his whole body was trembling. He had run over without an umbrella, so he was soaking wet as he leaned against me pitifully. With tears still in his eyes, he stretched out a hand to gesture to me. I didn’t push him away and just let him hold on. The rain was still falling. I looked up at the sky and fell into a trance. It felt as if he was giving himself to me. His life just fell into my arms. I accept it.

[monakisu]

p5 mementos thoughts

i know it's meant to be an adaptation of jung's collective unconscious shenanigans but i think it'd be SO Cool to imagine mementos as some sort of living creature...

it's an amalgamation meshed with tokyo's urban metropolis environment so you'd notice the familiar stuff first, like train tracks and stations, but staying long enough in mementos reveals that it's still very much alive. you're exploring its innards! the walls are fleshy and veiny and pulsate verrryyy slowly to the rhythm of breathing or heartbeats, the wandering shadows can be thought of as bacteria or protein, and the reaper's obviously the immune system kicking in with its very determined white blood cell gunning to eliminate you the virus!!

and i like to think that metaverse costumes not only serve Stamina and Style (the two essentials) but also sorta trick mementos into thinking you "belong" in its body—at the very least, you're not food anymore! like, if the world's luckiest unluckiest human managed to noclip into mementos and somehow avoided evisceration via shadows, imagine if the floors and walls have been secreting a subtle acid and by the time this human notices their sneakers corroding away and how moist and raw their palms have gotten, they finally realize that they've been caught in the process of digestion! but of course metaverse users are safe and sound from turning into a goopy gooey mess :]

i especially enjoy likening mementos to the tunnel in Coraline that connects the real world with the other world + the Mystery Flesh Pit National Park in Texas :D both are creatures so massive that they breach eldritch proportions, and you the human are sooo itty bitty you've basically only been wandering in a single blood vessel out of an entire circulation system! or something like that!!

[sagaubeloved]

I don’t know if this is something I READ or something I thought of in passing and just kept forgetting about, but the basic idea is that the things the Creator comes into contact with (mainly literature) is recreated within Teyvat.

But it was more in the sense that even if the Creator hadn’t read the book it would still appear. However, those books that weren’t read would be faded, barely there scribbles that are not discernible and thus not as important to the Creator in comparison to the things they have read.

In that way, I thought how funny it would be that if-and-due to the Creator being a college student there are all these various poems, post-colonial literature, plays, biology, communications, etc just popping into existence and the people of Teyvat believing that the Creator really enjoyed knowledge and the arts.

(Maybe that can cause a long standing argument between Sumeru scholars and those who prefer the arts?)

Would this include the things the Creator writes? Essays and such? Yes, because it is something the Creator interacted with, and no less created themselves!

For me I really like essays, but it also depends on what it is the essay is going to be about, that’s where it can turn from an essay of 10 pages easily or a trudging essay with blurbs. (Just imagine seeing your school essay glorified somewhere as fact and your just there trying not react because you wrote that one thing while sick, and high as a kite at 3 am on a school night; wtf is it doing in that glass casing for all of Teyvat to witness??)

Similarly, if the Creator enjoys reading in general, all those things come into existence even if those things existed by way of technology only, ie. Fanfiction.

So imagine when the Creator descends they are at first confused and then upset because I still have so many things to read! I still have so many things to write! I had a project due in a week! And then stops in bewilderment because —

Wait, isn’t that… isn’t that the novel they had in their To Read list?? Wait isn’t that a story they already read?! Oh no, everyone is witness to your reading habits!!