Free story idea – Two spooky ideas

I have a lot of ideas for stories.  Like, if I wrote a novel’s worth of them every month, I’d still most likely die before getting through them all.  I will admit that some of the ideas probably suck, but I think there are some that a good writer could make something of them.  I’ll just never get a chance to.  So, I give them to the world.  If you can make something of these, go right ahead.  And if these are the ideas I’m giving away, maybe check out the ones I keep.

For this spooky month, I have two ideas: one for a movie – maybe a series of movies – and one for a … are they still TV shows if people stream them on a computer?

Horror Movie Idea

Whether this is an October or January horror movie will depend on the budget, acting, script, etc. 

A group of white college kids from, let’s say California, go camping somewhere in the southwest.  Something happens and some monster comes after them.  It tells them it is named Bugee, or something, and it will kill them off one by one each day.  Once they finish panicking, they do a search for Bugee, and find that it’s a Navajo boogey man that can only be defeated by the sound of a rattlesnake rattling.  So they go off to find a snake, one of them gets bit, but they have one when Bugee comes back.  One guy holds the snake up to rattle, but Bugee just laughs and kills the guy.

The group takes the bit one to a hospital, where the doctor turns out to be Navajo.  They ask why the rattlesnake didn’t work on Bugee, and the doctor has no clue what they are talking about.  They show them the webpage on Bugee, and the doctor reads it and goes, “This is bullshit, it has nothing to do with our culture.”

Turns out, the entity currently going by Bugee is just some demon that likes fucking with people.  Centuries ago it was terrorizing people as a giant wolf, but then someone shot it with a silver bullet, and it pretended that killed it, just so for centuries it could laugh as people tried to kill it with silver bullets which do nothing.  As to the rattlesnake, long ago it was attacking some of the first white people in the area, and there just happened to be a rattlesnake nearby, and it pretended that the sound of the rattle drove it off.  The survivors tell the tale, and after a few rounds of racist telephone, it gets written down and many years later ends up on the internet. 

All of this can either be shown in flashback, or maybe Bugee tells the last surviving woman that if she, I don’t know, has sex with her dead friend, it will explain how it can be stopped.  She, reluctantly has sex, to be scarred for the rest of her life, and Bugee explains that nothing humans can do can stop it.  It then laughs and leaves.  The End.

And this could be a franchise.  All you have to do is get a new group of people, and find fun ways for Bugee to fuck with them.  You could even have prequels of Bugee fucking with Huns, or Romans, or hell, Neanderthals.  You have to admit, that would be a fucking weird movie.  Probably the only thing to keep in mind, is there shouldn’t be any continuing characters.  Or if that last woman does run into Bugee decades later, it just kills her without hesitation. 

Horror Series Idea?

For historical reasons, I see this series set in France.  I’m sure it could easily be set in other parts of the world, but I know European history better than other parts of the world.

The first episode starts with a guy in say, 1830, riding a horse across France.  He’s trying to get to some place, but makes a wrong turn.  As the sun is about to set, he comes across a small village.  He stops at the first house to ask where he is and if he could stay the night.  A man opens the door, and starts yelling.  The wife and kids also start screaming, and then the man grabs a fire poker or something and beats the Traveler to death.

Cut to the Traveler waking up, in a crypt.  He freaks out a bit, but crawls out.  There are several other people there, including one who looks like the guy who beat him to death, only several decades older.  Some of the people greet each other like old friends, and then one asks the Traveler his name.  The guy gives it, and then wants to know what is going on.  One, maybe the Mayor, says it’s a long story, and to come with them.  They go outside, and there’s this weird, metal carriage that doesn’t need a horse. 

The Mayor takes the Traveler through the village which has several damaged and burned houses to a less damaged house, and after some food, he explains the history of the village.  Long ago, there was a Witch, who as she was being burned, cursed the village to always have the same population at sundown.  Meaning, if someone shows up right before sundown, then somebody at random in the village would have just fallen over dead.  It might be the Traveler, the wife of the house he stopped at, the two-year-old next door, all had an equal chance of just dying.  Which means, there are no guests in the village.  And if a child is born, they’ll have already worked out who will leave the village, usually to live in the smaller village just outside of the cursed area.

But the curse also works the other way.  If somebody dies, and it’s early enough in the day, they’ll bring someone from the smaller village back.  But if somebody falls down the stairs and breaks their neck just before sunset, then someone in the graveyard will come back to life, healed of whatever killed them.  At first, people would be resurrected only to die trying to dig out of their coffins, so they started just putting people in an easy to access crypt.  The reason so many came back today, is that it’s the middle of WWII, and a stray bomb killed ten members of an extended family.  Although, once the sun sets, one of them comes back.  This is Lady.

There’s a lot of stuff that can be done with this.  Like, maybe the Mayor’s “grandmother” is actually his so many times great-grandmother.  Maybe, she died back in 1720, but was resurrected in 1845 and lived another thirty years, only to die and be resurrected a second time.  The cancer or whatever killed her has been cured, but she’s still someone with a 120 year-old-body. 

What the town is really waiting for is some specific person to be resurrected because they’re the one who buried the Witch – outside the village – but never told anyone where.  The villagers assume the only way to break the curse is to find her body, hope she is resurrected, and then lift the curse. 

The Traveler is very confused by all of this, meaning we the audience can follow along as he slowly comes to grips with everything.  Like maybe the next day some Nazi soldiers show up to check out the bomb damage, and the Traveler has to be hidden because he doesn’t have any papers, and all the villagers know to keep the secret, but can they trust this outsider? 

If they don’t trust him, then why did they bury him in the village to be resurrected?  Well, maybe there was some disagreement about it at the time, but the guy who killed him felt bad.  And since they were both resurrected, he and the Traveler build an odd friendship.  Like, maybe the Traveler was a poet, and the guy found his book of poems and really enjoyed them, and started writing poetry himself.  So they end up with stuff to talk about.

Another storyline could be the slow building of a relationship between the Traveler and Lady.  Maybe the Mayor is putting her and Traveler up in his house since so many houses have been damaged.  And she’s teaching him all that’s happened in the past century.  At first, he’s put off by this “modern” woman, but he slowly comes around.  Hopefully, whoever ends up writing this doesn’t do some cliched bullshit of “she looks just like the woman he was going to marry back in 1830.” One … I don’t know if it’s an issue, but it’s a thing, about Lady is that she’s secretly happy her husband and his family are dead, because he abused her and they treated her like shit.  Death parted them, and she might not see any of them in her new, second life. 

As I see it, there are basically three ways the series could go.  The first is it just keeps going.  Once you get all the weird stuff out of the way, it just becomes what happens in a small French village for the last few years of WWII.  And on occasion someone dead comes back to life.  The second would have the one who buried the Witch finally resurrect, like that’s how they end the first season.  And season two is trying to find where he buried her.  Like, “I buried her under that really big tree,” doesn’t mean much after three or four hundred years.  And then the third season would be they find the Witch, and cart all the bodies out of the crypt and someone stands outside the village, so she has to be the one who resurrects.  And then they try to convince her to lift the curse. 

The second way would be okay, except that’s a pretty standard way to do such a series.  The first way could be fine, except we know network executives would want to add more, like, what if there are now werewolves, or something.  They’d take an interesting idea, but so much crap would be added to it to keep it going, it would become mostly crap.  So my preference would be a third way, which is basically just two, maybe three seasons of exploring the weirdness of this situation, and then ending.  Nothing is resolved, but we’re left knowing the weirdness just continues.  Maybe, it could end with the Traveler and Lady getting married, so there’s a bit of a happy note.