I had a dream last night that there was a bedwars where each of like twelve teams started on the radial edge of a space station and mined into an endstone asteroid toward each other.
Percabeth daughter asks Annabeth who Luke is and annabeth replies :"hes the first person who loved me" Percy's on his way to kill the Chases Sally is already there and Paul is dialing a therapist.
I love Astarion. I think he is one of the most beautiful and ethereal group of pixels/polygons/1s&0s what have you in existence. And I love taking photos of him. But these. These will haunt my dreams. And now they will haunt yours too.
If there's one horror trope (other than the jumpscare) that you could get rid of, what would it be?
I think the one that annoys me the most is cell phones. The dead battery trope, or the inexplicably lost signal trope - I understand why they exist, because it's very hard to justify why people can't use their phones as life lines in a horror movie.
I've even gone as far as to lean toward setting things in different decades just to avoid the cell phone problem. It's one of the reasons Bly Manor was set in the 1980s, because we knew that the entire ensemble having access to cell phones would make the plot almost impossible to advance as the story progressed.
I suppose the other ones I dislike are the "Just a Dream" scares. There are some examples of these done very well - THE DESCENT has a gorgeous one in the first act, which sets up an absolutely heartbreaking one in the final act - but for the most part, these are an excuse to sneak a scare into a story without reason or consequence. I'm guilty of using these myself - sometimes there is huge pressure from above to add scares, and it's too early to let the characters in on the supernatural events - but sometimes these moments are just cynical and frustrating.
As for jumpscares, as the current Guinness World Record holder for Most Jumpscares in an Episode of Television - more times than not, they work against the horror. There are beautiful examples of scares done magnificently well, but 99/100 of them diffuse tension, I believe.
I was on a short school bus going places and the bus stopped for a light and for some reason there was a girl skipping rope at the "stop". We didn't want to let her on, so we kept the door closed but she was a ghost so she came on anyway and turned into a Deadite (from the Evil Dead series). The accompanying jump scare woke me up.
Jump Scare, a new quarterly horror zine, has launched its first issue for $5. Created by journalist Matt Cohen, it includes essays on experimental horror and nu metal horror, an interview with Scream VI writer/producer James Vanderbilt, and more. Stephanie Monohan illustrated the cover art.