Back and looking for Blood!

[Spectre]

 Hey E!

Long, long, LONG time no see.
Was missing the excellent writers and the vibrant community and so I’ve breathed new life into my account, And hope to find some chilly tales of horror and suspense to help beat the mid summer heat.

Quick OverVeiw:

I’m Spectre, and I am the resident weirdo of my community. I love all thing Spooky Scary and with a dash of skeletons, So if your ideas have any thrills, chills and scares, please send me a Pm!

10+ years of writing to various degrees of professionalism, big on character and world building, lover of all things in the thriller and horror genre! I stick to First and Third person, novella styles, with varying degrees of length. Willing to write all sorts of genres and characters, depending on what my partner and I decide on.

Concepts:

A Hunting We Shall Go:

Looking for a story of the chase and the hunt!
Heavily inspired by home invasion horror stories or tales of folks going on vacation and finding someone lying in wait for them in unfamiliar lands.

Maybe it's a weekend away with friends, a romantic getaway or simply a day home alone, Y/C will suddenly realize that they might not be as alone as they thought.

Stalker, mysterious person, an uninvited guest, or just the subtle unshakeable feeling on being watched, Y/C must face this with the age old question: Fight, or Flight?

My thoughts:
I pulled from Movies like Hush or The Invisible Man, and want to play with the cat and mouse tension of the main character becoming acutely aware that someone is hunting/toying with them and that it could very well turn deadly.
The apex of the story will likely be a chase, be it in a home or in the wild.
As far as character, I am particularly interested in playing the antagonist, though I would also be interested in playing a side character ( partner, friend, family etc,) so Y/C has something to play off when danger is not directly imminent. They can always be a tragic loss later.

Ideally I would like to keep this story in the realm of realistic, and have the horror be about other people with terrible intentions rather than anything supernatural.

.lefthanded:

Based on many of the popular analog horror stories, this story would revolve around the sudden and horrible discovery that someone or something has taken the place of a friend or loved one.

It would be small changes at first, a growing sense of uneasiness as old familiar habits become strange and different. And then it becomes sinister. Threatening. Even Uncanny.

Y/C will panic and reach out to M/C, desperate to prove that something isn't right, maybe reach out for reassurance that they aren't jumping to conclusions or simply seeing things, and we endeavor to find out the truth.

And when we finally find something solid, we find out that we haven't been as careful as we needed to be and whoever or whatever has taken our friend's place is aware of our meddling.

Whether this is a creature of trickery and deceit, a flesh and blood human trying to masquerade as someone  else for criminal reasons or worst of all, a folie a deux, a madness or paranoia that has spread between us and the only shift has been within us.

My thoughts:
I love a lot of the body horror/uncanny valley monsters that take human form to mess with people, and while the initial idea was meant to be a creature feature, I am pretty excited by the other two ideas as well.

I like the idea of our two protagonists being the focus, while we switch off writing the flavor scenes for whatever our enemy is. I don't have a hard rule on who the replaced person is, but making it someone close to one of our main characters, ( partner, roommate, coworker, sibling or familial member in regular contact) would be the most interesting and have the threat alway looming.
I want to make sure the changes start really small and increase to a really terrifying degree, and had always considered adding body horror elements, especially when the Other has noticed our meddling and keeping track of it.


Fanclub:

This one might be based on my own frankly unhealthy levels of interest in consuming true crime media in nearly all it’s forms with all the grisly details.
This story is meant to be a little more light-hearted, ( what concerning sentences to place back to back,) and will center around two characters that might not otherwise have connected in the other areas of their lives, but have grown very close due to their shared passion for True Crime content.
Maybe they have a podcast they work on together, a bookclub that focuses on memoirs of criminal detectives and the survivors of grisly attacks, or frequent the same online spaces solely dedicated to the discussing and possible solving of cases gone long cold.
The two characters could be simply friends, co-workers surprised to cross paths in this strange hobby or even the spark of something romantic, but the amusement  comes that one of them will be the serial killer thats been successfully camouflaged for 10+ years as a normal average citizen, and the armchair detective that coming terrifyingly close to catching them. And who wouldn’t want to share such an achievement with a good, honest friend? 

Alternate concept involves the second character being an enthusiastic if slightly overzealous copycat killer, ready to catch their idols attention/eclipse their achievement, and the copycat murders have now focused the spotlight a bit too close to both of them.

My Thoughts:
This is probably a strange place for levity but I imagine this as the exact opposite of a buddy cop story, and that concept is really funny to me. There might even be a sweet story of friendship overcoming differences or a heartwarming mentor/student relationship growing from adversity, but it will be absolutely splattered in gore and loss of human life.

What if NBC’s Hannibal was a comedy?
Also, I think it might be sweet ( again, concerning way to describe it)if our killer kind of had a soft spot for our would-be detective, and decided to sort of help them along in their “investigation” because they are fond of their friend and want to support them. And who else would our detective want by their side for the big case than their best friend from Crime Club?


Archival Assistant:

This one is just a blatant fixation of mine, as I have recently started listening to the Magnus Archives podcast ( please go listen and enjoy it) and have fallen so hard in love with the characters and story telling so much that desperately wish that it was a Really place and I would sign up so fast, Ceaseless Watcher, be damned.

I am only in season 3 at time of writing, but I spoiled most of the endings for myself with wiki surfing, and so in lieu of following any established canon, i just want to play around with the idea that a dusty old library in London might have actual evidence of the paranormal, and we would be the people that live, work and learn the unfathomable horrors of the truth.

I don’t have a hard plot here, but i think I would prefer OC Archival assistants versus playing canon characters, and see them along the path of taking statements and researching the horrors behind them, Maybe a passing guest appearance by a canon chaarcter might be nice, but I would like to focus more on what we discover. Below this point, I will list some concepts but have them hidden as some off them have spoilers and I want to respect those who want to go in blind.

Spoiler Territory

Spoiler: Click to Show/Hide

*Several episodes have mentioned other Libraries around the world that have knowledge of the Avatars and the Fears, so we might be the employees of one of those other facilities. Without the vast resources of the Magnus Archive, we have to use what resources we have available to conduct our research.

* The Rituals: A few of the rituals have been mentioned but we could have discovered someone trying to create new ones, a modern ritual for a modern age. Maybe the Fears are updating their practices are being thwarted? Smaller rituals to create pockets of control for the Fear?

* to that end, A new Fear, a yet unidentified power gaining followers presents itself and we have to scramble to identify and do something about it.

* Follower of a certain fear, forcibly claimed by another Fear and seeks the help of an archivist to break their link in order to return to their first Fear