#lite horror

[blatherpuss]

Those cross cookies really are good!

[rowlight]

[canisalbus]

Y’know, I’ve seen your characters as just these happy gay dogs in love so often, *that I forget there’s actually like. Traumatic backstory to them.*

Like “oh, look at these two wonderful lads, I m sure nothing bad has ever happened-“ AND THEN I REMEMBER

.

[loversandantiheroes]

Not to put too fine of a point on it, but if you're any sort of creative artist that struggles with mental health and the way it affects your ability to create the way you want to (and perhaps feel you need to), please play Alan Wake 2.

Sam Lake gets it.

[scholar-of-yemdresh]

Bare with me now but I think certain portions of fandoms reactions to a piece of explicitly aromantic media is telling in a way.

So I think TSV's lack of romance from the get go probably weeded out most of the types of people who aren't capable of interacting with media beyond shipping or romance. But even still I see the occasional er take or reaction to the SV's handling of & lack of romance.

I love how the most impactful plot and story relevant relationships are non romantic. I love how almost romantic relationships/attractions are exes,in the past, made the F up (Hayward the F we're you yapping about man?)or not on screen... All but one which brings me to the reason for my post.

But the strong reactions to episode 36 are tickling me.

A lot of people are upset about the ending specifically how they think the tragedy is excessive and depressing for no reason. Personally I belive Sebastian and Devereux did make it out at the end and that last bit was a ptsd flashback to the incident and I do agree that it'll be a bit much for the NPCs we've been following for a whole 1 hour+ episode will meet a grisly end for horror reasons I guess.

BUT the reactions by people who's interpretation of the ending as being more tragic I feel is interesting. I do not believe people would be as upset if it wasn't a romantic relationship that was centered. If Seb & Dev had been unambiguously "just" friends getting sucked into some nightmare Scooby Doo plot, if it was centered primarily on Dev & his sister, if it was only about those non romantic relationships and an unambiguous Bad End, I Don't believe certain portions of the fandom would've cared as much.

I feel people were waiting for a romantic narrative, wanted their cute assumed white yaoi boys to ship as a reward for "sitting through" all the aromantic relationship stuff. Were hoping for a cute soft fluffy romance that they could ship, the right kind of queer representation.

The aro/ace older woman, the Achillean trans man, the sapphic trans woman, all the myriad NB/agender main/major characters is fine...but where's the cis (white) yaoi boys?(nevermind that both of Seb & Dev's VAs are POC)

Idk I guess this is a fundamentally uncharitable assumption to make about people but I notice things and maybe I'm projecting too much

[miscelliteeous]

Underrated 2020s Horror Movies (So far!)

Making this list because these are all good or at least fun or interesting horror movies that I genuinely think need more love!

Freak (2020) - Gory slasher movie where the killer is played by a really gnarly puppet!

Cadaver (2020) - Artsy post-apocalyptic horror inspired by Sleep No More!

Bloody Hell (2020) - Ex con gets captured by a cannibal family!

Hunter Hunter (2020) - Sad and BRUTAL story of a family in the woods finding bodies!

Spare Parts (2020) - Girl punk band vs weirdly Mad Max-esque cult!

Fear Pharm (2020) - Corn maze full of a family of killers with moneymaking aspirations!

The Oak Room (2020) - Slowburn thriller taking place in an almost empty bar!

Anything For Jackson (2020) - Grief drives old couple to demon worship!

Vicious Fun (2020) - A loser gets caught up in a support group for serial killers!

Bingo Hell (2021) - Deadly bingo game with Richard Brake being weirdly hot as always!

The Cursed (2021) - Period piece werewolf movie with very creepy werewolves!

The Final Rose (2022) - The Bachelor but with a slasher on the loose!

Gatlopp: Hell of a Game (2022) - Horror comedy about a cursed drinking game!

Moon Garden (2022) - A little girl in a strange, surreal world tries to get home!

Requiem For A Scream (2022) - A slasher who records his victims screams for music!

Onyx the Fortuitous and the Talisman of Souls (2023) - Obnoxious guy and a group at their magician idols spooky mansion!

House of Dolls (2023) - Artsy slasher about sisters who stay in a giant doll house to win their inheritance!

Baby Blue (2023) - It's like The Ring meets Nightmare on Elm Street meets Slumber Party Massacre 2!

Bring Her To Me (2023) - Weird dreams bring a woman to a strange realm with a demon who wants her!

Dante's Hotel (2023) - Slasher set during a New Years Eve ball, very similar tone to Ghost Ship!

Renfield (2023) - Renfield tries to leave his abusive relationship with Dracula!

Bury The Bride (2023) - Evil rednecks target a bachelorette party!

You Shouldn't Have Let Me In (2024) - Sexy vampires target a bachelorette party!

Abigail (2024) - Kidnapped rich girl fights back against her kidnappers!

[i-mean-technically]

So I saw your humans are space horror series, and I was thinking wouldn’t the kids pick up cybertronian ( or whatever there language is called) I mean there around the bots 24/7.

Plus if they did I fell like that would freak the bots out because they did that purely from exposure and not lessons

Sorry for rambling have a good day! :D

Never apologize for rambling!

And absolutely the kids would pick up Cybertronian like how people pick up random bits of language. Like I know ranfom phrases in german and japanese and don't speak either one of those languages dndnfnfn

So when Ratchet is grumbling under his breath about how shitty our tech is, Raf is listening.

When Bulkhead trips and falls, swearing in Polyhex, Miko is listening.

When Optimus is reading outloud to himself (a hold over from his days as Orion Pax the archivist that he did when he was relaxed), Jack is listening.

The kids quickly pick up all the Bad Words and random phrases.

But the 'bots don't realize it until Miko drops her guitar case on her foot and she screams out some choice phrases she picked up from Wheeljack.

Needless to say, Ratchet is horrified, Optimus is shocked, Bulkhead is mortified, and Bee thinks its hilarious while also covering Raf's ears.

(Later on, Optimus quietly corrects her pronunciation and offers to teach all the kids how to speak the simplified Common Language of Cybertron. Bc they can't make some of the proper noises, or use their electromagnetic fields to add meaning to words.)

[lavampira]

speaking my truth but if I have any notp in this game it’s the portrayal of romantic fraysid ngl

[theaccidentfactory]

10 year old me: I need to get a bible. to fix me. (plagued by internalized homophobia and religious guilt about liking girls)

19 year old me: I need to get a bible. to fix me. (so I can write the crazy yuri sex in my blasphemous biblical horror podcast more accurately)

[ebonytails]

⚠️ WARNING ⚠️

Heart rate has reached dangerous levels❗️

Initiating culling procedures.👁️‍🗨️

[worldbeyondzine]

Video description: Sped up timelapse of a white man creating vintage styled lite brite art of a jack o lantern. Spooky music plays in the background as he works, and the video ends with the text: "Happy Halloween from the World Beyond Team, WorldBeyondZine.BigCartel.com."

Happy Halloween from the World Beyond Team!

if you're in the mood for something spooky, you can pick up a digital copy of our transmasc horror zine today!

[betaorionis-fr]

Shigeru (重) #79400010, he/him. musician, evening shift at the teahouse. something like a bakeneko.

[image: a male-pose Snapper with Plague eyes, White Poison and White Shimmer, wearing Unlucky Vial, Gothic Towel, Lovebirds Dried Tea, Crimson Rogue Cape, Ash-Edged Claw. Also wearing skin: Snowy Meow. /end id]

[silbeni]

My TSKRLA Kosaku body snatcher on the mind. Some thoughts abt it

Body horror/ animal death / biiiig warning for unsanitary stuff involving mucus

Same as in the show, Shinobu and Kosaku have a strained relationship.. they argue, and at best they simply coexist in the same household

This obviously sucks for Hayato, but it starts sucking more because he realizes his dad is not his dad

There's a noticeable change in his behavior.. it's like he's a completely different person. His parents are getting along which should be great? But something is seriously off

He has these strange habits... methinks he constantly keeps his skin lubricated. Some skin cream would be fine but he reapplies every 10 minutes- which gives him this glazed donut appearance. Wkdhskdh he looks wet most of the time (possible origin of the slicked back hair look)

He leaves grease stains anywhere he sits, it's DISGUSTANG.

He has a huge appetite... He'll ask for thirds, fifths.. grocery bill is SKYROCKETING. and Hayato spots him still going through the fridge at night

Weirdest thing is that Shinobu doesn't mind this at all. She'll happily cook more food for him and she doesn't even flinch when he leaves a wet spot on her cheek when he kisses her. (EUGHH)

This is accompanied by the other sketchy behavior he shows in the show- like practicing signatures

A couple weeks into this he also starts looking. Visibly ill. Cheeks and eyes r sunken in. He looks 20 years older because his skin is losing his elasticity- sagging and sallowing.

Also he's RANK. no amount of cologne can hide his musty smell, even Shinobu seems to notice this.

Shinobu begins to get concerned calls from work. He won't do any of his office duties because he'll be in his cubicle applying and reapplying moisturizer. also the body odour, and the slime....

Hayato keeps trying to warn his mom, but his words go in through one ear and out the other. She doesn't even listen to the people at his job. she's just sort of... vacant

He's put on a leave bc the people at work think he's seriously ill, so he's home a lot more. Meaning Hayato has to see more of him.

Things get scarier when he catches Kosaku eating a dead animal one night.

OOOOUH I wanna get into the little gory details so I will... So this thing killed Kosaku after he ate it and it grew inside of his body. It is sort of like the tongue parasite but this creature is a lot bigger (it grew) and it's more like a slug. His skin started sagging cos it ate everything on the inside so now there's slack. only thing left of Kosaku is a skin suit and the essential structures of his body so it can maintain the shape of a human.

Very gross: it actually liquified his organs and slurped them up. It doesn't have teeth so that's how it eats things. After Kosaku's teeth fall out it starts having to do that with all its food too

Shinobu (and everyone except hayato) is under a sort of supernatural effect that makes him seem normal. but people can still smell him, see the stains he leaves around and know that hes acting strangely.

Shinobu is affected the most since she's around him the most.

So obviously he needs to get rid of this thang. Unsure how ATM? Maybe salt cos it really is a big wet thang. He makes a trap? I'll have to come back to this.........

[silverspleen]

Green is always fun 'cause I can push him around into various gentle places I like to draw. Bought TREPANG2 and haven't even started playing but listened to the soundtrack enough before bed that I had to Creative a little bit.

[yakketymax]

What's Funnels favorite body part to remove?

Their head, by far. Funnel loves to take their head off for pranks and shenanigans, their favorite being "let me ask my associate" where they remove their head and regard their body with the question at hand as if they were separate people. It's not uncommon to see Funnel with their head removed for one reason or other, be it for a joke or just because they wanted to at the time.

But because of this casualness they have for taking their head off and since they're still refining how to behave around regular Gingerfolk, Funnel will sometimes remove their head like it's a regular thing to do at inappropriate times. Which is like... all times outside of the circus and their house. They still feel guilty for accidentally scaring their neighbors that one time...

Bonus discord shenanigan screenshot:

[chrisairgames]

Time to Play Curios: Albrecht Manor

When it's Halloween, I like to play creepy Halloweenie games. Ok, well I might like spooky games all year-round, but for the horror season it's time to pull out all stops. When I received this package in the mail last month, I knew it'd be perfect for the weekend before Halloween:

Curios: Albrecht Manor is "an epistolary horror mystery experience" by Seb Pines, the first in the new Curios series from Good Luck Press. There is no single person who runs the game. No one knows what they're about to open, other than what you see on the blurb.

The notion of the game is that the players are "Researchers" of "The Archive" who receive evidence and ephemera leftover after the appearance of supernatural phenomena. The details on the Archive is sparse, but you an unbothered dayjob vibe oozes from the tone. This manila envelope is all you're going to get, and your job is to make some declarative statements by the end of the research.

It's a fun space to play. I could see the experience of play spanning the spectrum between a total LARP and completely player-facing. For our game, we were closer to the player-facing end of that spectrum, and had a fabulous evening.

What's inside?

The Albrecht Manor manila envelope contains 11 letters and two postcards, along with a short mailing notice and the "Archive" report card. Like any good horror story, the letters start off tame with bits of weird, yet quickly start including photos, newspaper snippets, blueprints and administrative papers.

From tearing open the letters to the difference in paper textures, styles and handwritten bits were thrilling to handle. We were surprised how each piece, and sometimes innocuous details at first, came back to have us rifling back through what we'd read before.

Play Experience

With the stack of letters in the center of the table, without prior discussion, we naturally began to play by each picking up a letter/postcard, and circling, writing notes, and sharing weird details. This created a fun, anachronistic revelation of details, as sometimes one bit would go unremarked earlier would pop up in someone else's letters.

When an important detail came to the forefront of this developing narrative, I appreciated how the spotlight would pass around each of us adding more context or details or asking questions we weren't sure how to answer. But it's extremely difficult to discuss direct details without spoiling the contents of the letters. The discovery of certain documents and finding the inter-connectivity is the fun of this game.

The game comes with a single paragraph of instruction, which can seem daunting, but I was in awe of how the physical presentation made space for our own curiosity to define the bounds of how we approached the mystery. We examined photos under different types of lamplight, tried using the zoom on our smartphones as impromptu magnifying lenses, and folded paper in all sorts of ways. Most importantly, we were enraptured by this game for nearly three hours and were astonished at how fast the time passed.

We all appreciated how there is no direct, singular answer, and that we the players were the ones to define the story from our collective interpretation. It's not a good mystery, especially a ghost story mystery, if you're not left with more questions by the end.

Spoilers at the next heading!

Three specific moments literally gave me chills. I don't want to spoil those here. After the photo and line break is the report that was sent to the Archivist at curiosarchive.net. I realize now that we didn't "even "formally" discuss how we would classify the Albrecht Manor phenomena, but the classification is hinted at.

While I don't intend to spoil specific details in the letters, the submitted report has major spoilers. So if you haven't played this game, don't read any further!

Submitted Report to the Archivist

29/10/2023

Dear Archivist,

The first sentence on the first postcard, unwittingly, says it all, "the house is a dream."

This group of Archive researchers have deemed this household, built by one Damian Albrecht, to be a spiritual machine. This trap inhabits the mind of its occupants, and grows and shifts according to its creator's and past occupants' hopes and dreams of a warm household. The researchers are even hesitant to call this a haunting, but agree the house appears to be a spatio-temporal machination propelled by the spirits it is required to consume to keep operating. The fire, in this interpretation, is a convenient excuse for the house to re-enter its slumbering stasis. The researchers' consensus is that there must be only one true fire, but could not access WHEN that may be.

The researchers agreed, though without substantial evidence, the purpose of this machine is to sustain not only long life to its creator, Damian Albrecht, but also to impose HIS dream onto others, and subsume their dreams to feed his own. Again, the fire is a convenient cover-up for the displaced spirits Albrecht has trapped.

The researchers were divided on several facets, foremost questioning the actual existence of the principal figures: Alex Dunn and Anne Wilson. Could it be that Alex Dunn is in fact Albrecht? Has the persona of Alex Dunn created the character of Anne Wilson to represent the inhabitants of St. Ann? Will there be an all-consuming fire that destroys the town, and this house (and letters) are calling the community to action, as a sort of warning? Does Albrecht Manor's machinery twist and channel the powers of the Catholic Saint Ann, whose emblem is a Door, to imbue itself with supernatural power? If Alex Dunn is/was a real person, were they drawn to the house due to past trauma involving Anne and the implied kitchen fire that took place in the past? Did this oft-alluded-to fire kill Anne?

Many loose ends remain, but these Archive Researchers remain confident that the initial readings of the Albrecht Manor as deviating from the traditional haunting are correct. The "ghosts" are most likely Albrecht himself, and the temporal echoes of the Manor's past occupants. We put forth that through mechano-spiritual insights, "Damian Albrecht" built Albrecht Manor to trap people into its/his dreams of a perfect home. As a single household can never be "perfect" in his madness, the Manor and its master yearn to consume more ideals to feed this imperfect spiritual machine.

Thank you for reading, dear Archivist.

All best, Chris Air & Friends.