Hounding from the Depths of Perdition

Lillith1991

The Hobbit-Vulcan hybrid
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*goes for her bloodwine*

Guess who's writing an updated version of Carmilla and Christabell, hounds?

Me! I just started writing it and I think I'm in love. It's a sorta Dark Fantasy/Horror/Gothic Fiction-ish story that's also YA. I actually liked the name Christabelle from the original poem so I kept it. It sounds like something someone would use if they liked unusual names and gave birth to a kid in the mid-late 90s. I'm still trying to figure out the name of my Carmilla/Geraldine character however, and it's not going that well. I'll happily take any suggestions for a 250 year old vampire name.
 

tiddlywinks

Chaser of Shineyyyy Plot Bunnies
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*huddles in bone pile*

Anybody else see Dark Was The Night? M'yeah. Shouldn't have watched that just before bedtime. Nice and creepy...at least until they went a little hokey and showed the monster at the end. (My imagination was doing a fine job filling in the blanks.)

Guess I'm not sleeping any darn time soon.

*should probably have her horror card revoked*
*notes it kinda looks like the movie outside right now though, so, um...*

Back to editing.

And twitching.
 

ShaunHorton

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Hiya Tiddles!

I did actually see Dark Was the Night. I thought it was really good too. I thought it was going to be a Jersey Devil movie until they finally had the reveal at the end.

Thankfully though, even the reveal is kept in shadow, which unfortunately still wasn't enough to hide the bad CGI job. Still, it was a nice attempt, and the final final reveal made me giggle.
 

ShaunHorton

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I just had an idea for a collection of Horror stories called "Happy Endings". Where it's just your basic horror stories, but the "Happy Endings" are things like the serial killer getting away, the horrible monster getting a meal, the demon possessing the child, and the ghosts causing the death of their house's new tenants.

How much hate do you think that would get? :p
 

TedTheewen

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slcboston

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I just had an idea for a collection of Horror stories called "Happy Endings". Where it's just your basic horror stories, but the "Happy Endings" are things like the serial killer getting away, the horrible monster getting a meal, the demon possessing the child, and the ghosts causing the death of their house's new tenants.

How much hate do you think that would get? :p

I'd read this.

:D
 

slcboston

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My only caveat is that you have to earn it. Silence of the Lambs did this well. Fallen with Denzel Washington... not so much. In part, I think that's a case where the former established a character that, while clearly "evil" by the usual standards, had the kind of charisma you could get behind and root for. The latter... not so much.

You can't twist just for twist's sake. (Looking at you, Mr It-Was-The-Trees Shyamalan.)
 

soapdish

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Yeah, I worry about doing the twist for twist's sake. More that my twists come off like that when in reality it's just that I didn't get what was in my head down on the page well enough for it to make sense and feel appropriate. Sometimes it's in there, it just doesn't...make it all the way to the reader.
 

slcboston

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They can be hard to do right, as you have to set them up far enough in advance to be believable, and you have to have the characters to make them work. I watched a British crime flick yesterday that was one long set of twists and cons... and it fell flat a bit, in no small part because the characters weren't given the time to develop all that well. Movie needed about another 20 mins just to flesh everybody out, so that even though you knew parts of it were coming, it was still entertaining.

Hitchcock was good at that, as well as those little details you almost always miss the first time around that end up being so important. Like when Cary Grant signals the waiter in North by Northwest.
 

soapdish

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They can be hard to do right, as you have to set them up far enough in advance to be believable,
Which is why long form doesn't have any excuses for bad twists. Short stories are tricky though. I often don't feel I have the space to set them up. I guess I just hope readers are more tolerant of it as a symptom (or side effect?) of short fiction. :Shrug: