馃 The Torchwood Fan Fests HALLOWEEN FEST is back! 馃
October has arrived, a date which marks the return of聽the spookiest of all our fests. Back from its unholy rest, having clawed it way out of its own grave, is the one, the only, the newly undead Halloween Fest!
Starting today, October 1st, and until November 6th we will be doing the 2022 edition of our Halloween Fest 馃巸
This fest doesn鈥檛 require signing up! All you have to do is create a halloween-themed fanwork and submit it to us at any point up to November 6th 2022. (Please remember to add any relevant content warnings!)
We are providing 20 optional prompts for this fest. We provide these prompts with the intention of helping creators by hopefully sparking some interesting ideas; however, we will not require that submissions fit into one of them, so long as they fit the general theme of Halloween. You can take them or leave them!
The prompts are: 1) horror classics, 2) myths and fairytales, 3) halloween traditions, 4) creature feature, 5) witches, 6) cryptids, 7) body horror, 8) cursed objects, 9) precognition, 10) scary settings, 11) haunted, 12) undead, 13) existential horror, 14) spooky classics, 15) doppelgangers, 16) taken by the rift, 17) possession, 18) nightmare, 19) dark wonderland/freakshow, and 20) trapped/hunted.
All types of fanworks are accepted for this fest, with the usual requirements: 聽the minimum word count for writing is 500 words (fic, meta, not!fic, and headcanons; poetry is exempt from this requirement), 30 seconds is the minimum length for videos, and 3-songs plus a short explanation for why you picked each song 聽is the minimum for music playlists. If you have an idea for a fanwork that seems unconventional or less common, send us an ask! We welcome all types of content for this fest and we will be happy to hear from you :)
As usual, we鈥檒l have an ao3 collection for this fest.
All links will be in the notes.
If you have any questions, don鈥檛 hesitate to send us an ask!
A story about an eldrich goddess trapped in a hand mirror, her so called blessing and the Torchwood agent whose week was ruined.
Or
That time Gwen unknowingly set free an eldrich goddess from her fancy hand mirror prison , got blessed ( more like cursed ) as gratitude , dreamt a whole backstory, had almost every man in her orbit get into a freak accident , tracked the eldrich goddess, got unblessed and saved the day.
This is vaguely inspired by the scrapped season 3 episode Jinxed.
For the Torchwood Halloween 2022 Fest - using prompt : 8.cursed objects (the mirror) ; 20.trepped/hunted ( Gwen tracking her ) ; 18.nightmare ( Gwen dreaming the goddess's horrible past and this whole situation ) and 2.myths and fairytales ( the eldrich goddess,kinda )
Suzie/Ghost!Gwen AU where Suzie gets trapped in a haunted movie treater , meets the ghost of the theater and gets a girlfriend or how Gwen went to the movie treater, got riftnaped into the future and turned into a ghost, haunted the treater, met a cute girl and got a girlfriend.
For Torchwood Halloween 2022 Fest using prompt: 10.scary settings (the movie treater) ; 11.haunted (Gwen) ; 16. taken by the rift (what happened to Gwen) ; 20.trapped/hunted (Suzie is trapped)
So the 4th prompt is creature feature. My question is what does it mean .
Hello!
A 'Creature Feature' is a generic name for any horror movie featuring a monster or creature. So this prompt is about monsters and creatures, especially classic horror monsters or stories that follow that kind of structure with an original or more modern type of creature.
All the Universal Monsters fall into this category (Dracula, Frankenstein's creature, the Mummy, the Wolf Man, the Creature From The Black Lagoon, etc.) as well as Japanese kaiju (Godzilla, Mothra, King Kong, etc.); and, for the purposes of this fest, any horror monster or creature from more recent media counts as well, such as the Amphibian Man from Shape of Water or the Demogorgon from Stranger Things. Obviously, original creatures are welcome and encouraged as well.
As you can see, there is a lot of overlap between the prompts, that is because they are not meant to be restrictive. For example, a Dracula-inspired fanwork could fit the prompts for 'horror classics', 'creature feature', and 'undead' all at once. You can choose which prompt(s) you want to submit any fanwork as in these situations.
I hope this helped. Let us know if you have any further questions!
For the halloween fest optional prompts, what would you say is the difference between horror classics & spooky classics?
Hi!
I would say the main difference betwen a horror classic and a spooky classic is that while horror intends to be frightening, spooky is a celebration of the horror aesthetic and horror tropes without the intention to shock and awe or otherwise be scary.
Spooky is camp, it's fun, it's a love letter to horror suitable for all audiences which unlike proper horror doesn't normally show explicit violence or terrifying implications that may keep you up at night, or sexual themes. And when it does refer to these, it does so in a jokey or roundabout way that takes away its power or makes it palatable.
This will be a heavily biased sample list, but for me, some examples of horror classics are: Dracula, Frankenstein, House of Wax, Psycho, The Exorcist, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream, and Stephen King's It.
Some spooky classics I'd mention are: Hocus Pocus, The Addams Family, The Munsters, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Casper, and Hotel Transylvania.
To give you an idea of what I meant earlier about spooky media presenting horror tropes in a way that makes it fun, palatable, or takes away its power, in The Addams Family movies, the children are shown to be torturing each other for fun and even try to kill their baby brother. In a horror movie, this would be portrayed as horrifying, something that shows these people are eerily and terrifyingly different from normal, something to fear and repudiate. But because these are not horror movies, this is shown as a fun eccentricity of the Addams family, something intended to make the audience smile instead of gasp in horror.
As to what makes something a classic, that is up to you to decide. We lean towards being as inclusive as possible, so anything horror or spooky will do.
I hope this explanation helped. If you have any further questions, you can send us another ask.
Owen/Andy Vampire (sort of,not your classical vampire but the kind that also eats your flesh raw) AU Moodboard for The Torchwood Halloween 2022 Fest using prompt: 07.body horror (mild , the second picture) ; 10.scary settings (the castle) ; 12.undead (Owen ,kinda)