Currently enjoying: Horns by Joe Hill. This book. This has such a unique premise. I would never want anyone to tell me all their truths and innermost thoughts. That would be scary and uncomfortable as hell. But it’s useful when you’re looking for a murderer.
Currently enjoying:Drawing Bloodby Poppy Z. Brite. I’ve reread this one a lot, because I like coming back to Missing Mile. I adore Trevor and Zach and love a good haunted house story, and this one is excellent.
I recently worked on a short story for Dylan Dog colorfest n 39 ( “ Dio di corda e miseria” story by Lorenzo Palloni ). This is an illustration I made months ago just to get into character and atmosphere of the story.
in the book of ezekiel, angels are described as eyes on their wings. sound familiar?
so what i want to know is what the hell type of predator was preying on biblical angels to make them evolve eyespots
possibilities include:
what the hell else were the Old Gods supposed to feed on?
theAngelusgenus contains a diverse array of species whose members regularly cannibalize each other
the Holy Spirit swoops around heaven clicking its tongue like a bat out of hell, and in this manner echolocates and consumes thousands of pesky angels every night, thus maintaining the celestial ecosystem’s delicate natural balance
God keeps swatting them
Ancient humans monster fuckers liked it and furthered the bloodline of eyes-patterned wings through intense breeding.
you know that guy who gets bit by venomous insects on purpose and rates the pain on a numerical scale?
ok so a scientist who gets bitten by a vampire specifically so she can use herself as a test subject to rate cross-cultural religious objects on their effectiveness as anti-vampire deterrents. sure there’s anecdotal evidence that crosses probably work, but here is hard scientific data that vampires can also be threatened with menorahs
the christian cross and the pagan pentagram are equally effective. the eye of horus has a surprisingly strong bite given that it should be expired by now. the symbol of mjölnir invokes a migraine AND ear ringing that lasts for days. the star of david cremates the scientist instantly on the spot; her ashes have to be shoved in a jar and sprinkled w/ blood so she can reshape overnight. (the last discovery is going to make yom kippur at grandma’s house VERY awkward this year)
I like the implication that atheist vampires need the intervention of, like, a theoretical physicist brandishing recent journal articles at them. Effectiveness of publications vary by the rigor of the peer review involved in the publication process.
Scientist vampire branches out into rating academic journals’ peer review processes by how much they burn her when she picks them up.
(Just to be on the safe side - I’m just spitballing here, I don’t actually have a secret research paper about this secreted away. So, YMMV and all that.)
The reason why a vampire can be defeated by a holy man/ an object of faith is because they are the antithesis to what that religion views as good, as the spark of the divine that actually created a human, whatever creation myth you subscribe to. Being turned into a vampire means falling from grace, being cut off from the congregation, having lost your way. For obvious reasons, the figure that we would identify as a vampire in a piece of media is usually coded in the framework of christian faith, maaaaybe in the framework of jewish faith, though I have a hard time to come up with concrete examples where it is treated straight instead of just as a throwaway joke. It is because the first novels that wrote about vampire and codified the lore were usually written by european authors and even if they haven’t been christian, they would still probably have been influenced by the dominant faith. (But there are also throughout different cultures also various vampire-like myths. They are probably not what we would usually be able to identify as such, because despite slight variations - sparkles or no-sparkles, daywalking or nocturnal - the vampires as an established genre fit in a pretty narrow narrative purpose - and the folk-tales fit their cultures).
What I mean is, a christian-coded vampire is depicted the way he is for a reason. Because he is an agent of chaos and evil, he is a poor man’s devil. So it stands to reason that a jewish or a muslim vampire would be different from a christian vampire, according to those religions idea of evil. I don’t know enough about both faiths to even start speculating about it.
Which has hilarious implications. Namely, that a someone who upholds science as their foremost guiding philosophical framework (I hesitate to say an atheist vampire, because I have dealt with enough atheists who were science deniers - and there are enough scientists, who can follow both faith and science without finding one contradicting the other) - that person, upon being turned into a vampire would turn into a science denier and probably lose their ability to conduct those experiments.
The scientist-coded vampire is probably an anti-vaxxer and a conspiracy theorist.
I’m Muslim, and the idea of Muslim vampires is killing me. Here would be some things that would probably happen:
A Muslim vampire will be heavily irritated when people start reciting the Ayat ul Kursi. Which will be often, because Muslim communities are VERY jumpy. They see pale creepy person with sharp teeth, and they will be chanting it out before he can blink.
They will probably make a point to face away from the Qibla. (The Qibla is basically an imaginary straight line that goes from the Kaaba to every other place. To face the Qibla means to face the exact point where, millions of miles away, the Kaaba lies) Facing the Qibla will make their power levels drop slightly. Not much, but every bit counts.
People fighting Muslim vampires will carry around these babies
That, my lovelies, is a pocket Quran, and they are roughly the size of an incredibly tiny keychain. People will launch them out and pull them back in like yoyos to fight vampires. Trust me, it’ll work.
Forget about the dismemberment. They will go straight for the burning.
As for what the vampire itself will be like:
Two of the most commonly agreed upon no-nos in Islam is usury and alcohol. (Gambling, Zina, and consuming pork are the others. Everything else is up for interpretation. Do not fight me on this, the Quran said it itself)
Usury is financial interest. You know the loan kind?
Anyways, so basically, a Muslim Vampire is most likely to be an alcoholic islamophobic banker. Thank you for coming to my tedtalk.
Gambling and zina (nonmarital sex) also imply the banker frequently flies out to Vegas for a weekend of dabauchery. But I cannot get over the pork thing, because that, combined with the alcoholism and islamophobia, means that a Muslim vampire is exactly the sort of asshole who would wear one of these:
normal halloween fantasy world w/ vampires & monsters & all that good jazz but the skeletons are just normal people who happen to be deceased but stuck around
like ghosts get the option to stay w/ their corpses instead of passing on so now everyone’s family is made up of like 3 living generations and your great-aunt Bernadine
sometimes family members die but decides to like. stick around. there’s a polite period of seclusion while their corpse goes through the decaying process, bc of hygiene reasons. then once the bits and pieces fall away you get a nice clean skeleton haunted by the un-aging spirit of a family member. and it’s not like they’re another mouth to feed, so they just spent their afterlife being passed around by relatives and offering free babysitting i guess
But, you know, you can technically speed up the decaying process. I could go feed a big ass murder of crows. And then have a nice bleach bath to get rid of the itty-bitty bits that got stuck. And then go to a bone engraver to get very unique designs, to make sure its hard to fake my identity. And also to be a really cool tattooed skeleton. I’d get back to my family after a week tops. The future grandchildren could color in my cool tattoos.
Fuck you, now I want to be a cool ghost skeleton. And I can’t. Fuck you
1. everything about this comment is good and right, catch me laying my skeleton out to feed the birds
2. i completely FORGOT bones could be CARVED, and for that i am shamed
gonna be the most badass skeleton babysitter
if you were a bare skeleton anyway I bet you could just Meccano in spare bits of unoccupied bone
wanna be a bone centaur? find an unhaunted horse skeleton & stretch your legs
art prompt: BONE CENTAUR
I know your whole shtick is cursed-content but I couldn’t help but make something a little wholesome. An elderly couple, Liam (the skeleton) and Rose (the little old lady). Liam passed away before Rose, but he chose to stick around and take care of her since they live alone.
oh my bleeding goodness i love it
“Its great great great grandpa’s turn to take care of the kids.”
This post gave me a surge of inspiration so here ya go. The big sis is painting a dragon on her old man’s arm, while the little bro is placing a flower crown on his head. Sorry its a bit blurry.
oh my goodness. i would absolutely love to see this in color if anyone is interested
@biggest-gaudiest-patronuses I never wanna do bones again with so many details, you’ve killed me you damn yogurt of hell, but this helped break through a bit of a art block so hindsight thank you XD
My comic for the @builtonstrangeground anthology, about that one time in which my grandma was almost kidnapped by chaneques (a type of duendes from mexican folklore)
Recently, I’ve been thinking about whether or not to join a dating website but I have heard many horror stories in the press about them. People pretending to be someone they are not…
I think I will give the idea a miss for now and remain a virgin.
In the short story “Dark Angel” by Edward Bryant, a modern day witch-for-hire gets revenge on a man who has wronged her by using voodoo to make him pregnant. This is played for horror because A: a condition of the spell is that no one else will know what’s wrong with him and B: he has a uterus but no birth canal.
So, when I was about 8 or 9 years old, I once went to this dentist by where I live. Now, as a kid, I didn’t have the best oral health, so I was going in for a root canal. I had been to this dentist before for fillings and cleanings and stuff, but on that particular day, my dentist was out of town, so I got a different one. Now I go in and sit down, she introduces herself, whatever, that whole thing. After that, she gives me the novacaine, which is one of the parts only because of the damn needle they have to shove in your damn mouth. So it starts to make my mouth numb as usual, only this time something was a little off. I noticed that I could still feel the area around my tooth she would be working on. I tried to tell her, but she waved me off saying that I was imagining it. Then the drill came out. She told me that if I felt any pain to raise my hand, and that’s what I did almost as soon as she started drilling. And I shit you not, she put my hand down and told me that I shouldn’t be feeling it, and to stop lying. It is, to this day, the most painful thing I have ever experienced in my life. Pure, unrelenting, pain. The thing was too, that she didn’t even finish, they had to the rest of it another time. From that point on, I LOATHED going to the dentist, and I still flinch whenever I hear that damn high pitched drill noise. So yeah, fuck that dentist chick.
She had heard the app described as addicting. And, yeah, sure, sometimes she could lose track of time when on it, but it wasn’t like she was obsessed or anything and she certainly was not addicted. She just liked it.
She enjoyed the community that was ever present. She enjoyed the outspoken anonymity. She had maybe 1000? 2000? Followers on the app. But none of them knew her. She could be an extrovert in silence and she adored it. Not to mention she could project whatever she wished onto the people, the endless faces, she saw scrolling across her screen.
He seems nice she’d think to herself as she sipped warm cider, a book forgotten on her lap and her phone firmly in her hand, thumb moving carefully over the screen. She didn’t know him. Barely seen small pieces of him, but she thought he seemed nice.
God she’s gorgeous she’d blush as a pretty girl smiled at her through her screen. She wasn’t one to date, not normally, but she fell in love with strangers on the internet everyday. And she adored it.
She had things she hated on the app too. She would admit that she was a vain person, selfish, and set in her ways, but that was fine. She could easily cater her own experience to keep the people she found distasteful away from her feed. But the app wasn’t perfect, is anything? And sometimes people who cross her screen and she would sneer. She’d laugh with cruelty, or roll her eyes.
Some unattractive man in his bed, shirtless, complaining about some video game. He was disgusting, she’d decide with no evidence. And she would move on, hoping it would be a while before she would have to see something like that again.
And that was her life. Work, chores, bills, and the app. Sometimes she’d go out, but not often. Sometimes she’d find a new hobby but they quickly got abandoned for the app. And that’s what had happened on that day. She’d been scrolling casually, a cross stitch abandoned on the sofa near her. She was smiling, just slightly, as new faces that she would rapidly forget flashed past her.
Until one didn’t. It didn’t flash past. The next face was the same as the last, and again, and again. She furrowed her eyebrows and groaned. What is this some new trend? Some political thing? It’s stupid. Her thoughts were clear. She didn’t try to hide her disgust at both the repetition and the face itself. It was vile, ugly, and she didn’t want to see it anymore.
She kept scrolling. But it was there. It was getting bigger. It was smiling. It was terrifying. She bristled at it. And it bristled back.
But… no. She must’ve been imagining it. It was static, only existing in her phone. It wasn’t real. It couldn’t see her. It couldn’t see her, right?
Her finger moved towards the off button on her phone, but the thought of turning off her screen, of returning to the boring life outside of the app, filled her with a sense of fear much deeper than it possibly could.
The app was addictive. And she was overdosing.
She was lost. It was everywhere and it was all over her. It’s long tongue snaked it’s way into her ear. It’s sagging skin rubbed against her arms. It’s teeth sunk into her thigh. It’s eyes never left her own. She couldn’t blink and it burned, but she couldn’t turn her eyes away from the app for long enough even to do that. It was everywhere and everything. And it was seeping into her skin. She couldn’t remember anything besides it. What was her name? Surely she had one. Where did she live? Did she have a house? What even was the name of this app? Why had she downloaded it?
She could not remember. All she knew was it. It was around her and it was her. She was it. It was it.
Sometimes she thought that maybe she had turned off her phone and that she was just staring at herself reflected back on the black screen. She looked like it now. She was it now. She figured that soon enough she wouldn’t even be she. She would fully become it. But then something would lurch and she would be staring out at a new face. Not the way she had before. Not from the outside, but this time from the inside. She was stuck in the app, stuck as it, and she was screaming for help.
If someone who’s face looked kind appeared she’d beg them for help. They all scoffed or rolled their eyes, some even screamed in disgust. They hated her. They hated it. And she was trapped, calling for the people whom she knew but didn’t to help her. Knowing they never would.
You know that feeling of stupid heaviness weighing down your heart with emotions yet unexplained by the greatest of all writers, that lump in your throat making it almost impossible to swallow, so you wither with each passing moment -becoming a different version of you. Are you still alive? You’re not even sure. You’re a ghost -a memory within a memory. And that is your fate -so you haunt the cascade of happiness, turning sunshine into a dark dawn. An echoing silence, getting louder and louder. You shut your eyes. The silence isn’t peaceful. It’s deafening. And then you finally hear a scream -a cry before it all ends. But it doesn’t end. You wake up again.
Years ago, ABC Family aired a special on The Catacombs (below), which focused on a camcorder discovered deep within.
Allegedly, in the early 90’s, a man decided to explore The Catacombs on his own. He never resurfaced, although his camcorder and cassette were found.
As the video progresses, the man appears to become more panicked as he tries to find his way back out.
In the video, you’ll see the man at 288 feet below (street level) catch a glimpse of something. Eventually he drops the camera, leaving it rolling as his footsteps disappear off into the darkness, never to be heard from again.
Kinda has ‘The Blaire Witch Project’ feel to it. It’s creepy in it’s own way, but we never really see the main creature (as we never saw the Blaire Witch), and we never really know how it ends - both the movie and that film ending with the camera being dropped.
I wake up to a sharp pain in my neck. A woozy, tingling sensation overtakes me, disseminating through my bloodstream. I think nothing of it until I go to touch my neck to investigate the stinging, discovering that there is a person sucking my blood. The room is too dark to see who or what it is; I only see a dark figure disappearing into the shadowed cloak of night. I try to wake my wife up, but she continues to snore heavily.
This next day is a strange one. There is nothing unusual about its happenings— same wife, same breakfast— two scrambled eggs and toast— same job. The only difference is the feeling in my body, almost an aching, like my bones and muscles themselves are crying out to me. This weariness is unbreakable all the way back home after a long day of work.
I walk into our living room, my wife looking up something on her phone as she leans on the kitchen counter. She looks up to ask me how my day was, and I gripe to her about my pain ever since last night. She looks stunned when I explain what I thought was a dream last night.
“And I was asleep throughout all of this?” she starts to pace.
“Well, you’ve always been a heavy sleeper,” I try to chuckle lightheartedly with her, but her grimace remains.
She mutters, “I thought we moved far enough away.”
“You’re scaring me,” I swallow hard before placing my steady hands on her delicate, trembling shoulders. “Can you please tell me what’s going on?”
She looks to me, her darkened eyes sending shock waves down my spine.
“My brother— the one I told you was delusional and dangerous— he’s found us.” Her words are fast, but her voice still wavers. “We need to go— tonight.”
A dark story about love gone wrong. A young woman waits on her husband to return home, but he vile stepmother who has come to live with them while she is ill, continually abuses and degrades her.
Female Main Character x Male Human (both cis)
////
They thought living in the country would be best for Bernadette. The time spent at her family’s summer home out near the lakes were some of the best times of her life, so surely rural living would be the best for her after what happened.
The house was surprisingly chilly, but there seemed to be no attempts at making it warmer, and Bernadette was surprised by the dust on the mantels and the claustrophobic rooms. She walked through the house, thinking she didn’t want it to seem so inhospitable when her husband returned. She wanted to have the place renovated and beautiful, but everything just seemed to keep getting in the way of that goal.
Due to a childhood ailment, Bernadette was almost mute, and could barely speak above a whisper. Most of the time she had to communicate through letters. In youth she had carried around a notepad and pen at all times, so at least she had beautiful handwriting.
But now, in this lonely house, Bernadette often kept to herself, walking around, staring out the windows, and feeling the listlessness that came with nothing to do. The planned renovations were put on hold, due to constant heavy rain that felt endless. Some of the walls had already been taken down exposing the hollow, dusty boards beyond.. It made the house feel even more desolate.
