They’re here!
Merry Halloween my little apple carts, may all your disturbing dreams come true and your stomachs explode with sugary delights. I asked people to send me their own crappypastas, which are terribly written internet horror stories. Enjoy!
The writers are:
Sitcoms can be quite odd. Often a vacuum of humour, they’re mostly born of a Network’s desire to keep things inoffensive and entertain the whole family, dulling any creativity on the way (Big Bang Theory and Citizen Kahn, I’m looking at you). Sometimes they break free and become something great, for example Nathan Barley, Silicon Valley, Spaced, The League of Gentlemen, Fleabag, The Mighty Boosh and Atlanta (technically a comedy drama but I highly recommend it, particularly the BET episode. My stomach hurt during that).
Most of the time, though, sitcoms are just the same old thing in different settings, cobbling ideas together from already successful shows during a very desperate board meeting. Sometimes they have an original idea, but it’s so outlandish that you can’t quite believe was pitched let alone accepted.
Bosom Buddies
Tom Hanks’ first screen appearance seems to be inspired by Some Like It Hot only more stupid and less funny. Some Like It Hot had to be in black and white for audiences to accept Tony Curtis and Jack Lemon as women, but the Bosom Buddies creators thought nah, it’ll be fine.
Tom and his chum find a cheap apartment to rent but oh, curses, it’s a hotel for women. Did…did those exist in the 1980s?
My Mother, The Car
Wanting to capitalise on the success of fantasy sitcoms like Mr Ed and Bewitched, with a little oedipal complex thrown in, the reviews for the sitcom in which a man’s dead mother is reincarnated as a 1928 Porter were so bad that it wasn’t picked up for a second series. I suggest you watch The Simpsons parody Lovematic Grandpa instead.
Diff’rent Strokes – The Paedophile Episode
I had to include this. Generally a regular, unfunny situational comedy, it took a dark turn when the writers decided to highlight the dangers of paedophiles.
While I think it was well meaning and may have done some real good, the story slips down a rabbit hole of inappropriate laugh tracks and wise cracks while the action onscreen grows ever more disturbing. If you’ve ever watched the Butter’s Very Own Episode of South Park you’ll know what I mean, only this was unintentional.
The Flying Nun
“There’s this nun, see.”
“OK?”
“And she can fly.”
“What? Why?”
“She weighs just 90 pounds and…and…when the wind is strong it catches that funny hat they wear, and off she goes!”
“Tere, your mother and I are very worried about you.”
Mr Smith
The orangutan from Any Which Way But Loose landed a speaking role in this short-running sitcom. Apparently transformed into a genius after drinking an “experimental mixture” (pesky stuff) he becomes a political adviser (?) while his assistant and secretary try to keep his ape identity a secret. Yes, I’m sure it was hilarious.
Bonus! full episode of Heil Honey, I’m Home
Hitler and Eva Braun live in an apartment next to a Jewish couple in this British parody of American 50s sitcoms which aired for a single episode. I suggest you read this review of the shockingly unfunny programme here. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
P.S. The writing at the start is fiction.
First off I just heard that The Wicked Library podcast will be reading the short story on my previous post in December, so that’s exciting. It also kind of illustrates the point of today’s post.
A while ago I shared some online interactive horror stories (look through if you haven’t already, they’re very good). The evolution of storytelling is an endlessly fascinating subject for me, from folk tales passed by word of mouth to the invention of the printing press to creepypasta and reddit. Now we can upload a book immediately onto the internet for anyone in the world to read or add a piece to a collective mythos like the SCP Foundation.
In the video below Fredrik Knudsen (whose YouTube channel is a very interesting mix of weird fiction and oddball internet personalities, you should follow him) tells the story of Mother Horse Eyes, the author of strange and disturbing reddit comments which developed into something unexpected.
Look out for the moment when Mother Horse Eyes reveals themselves to be a Douglas Adams fan.
Next up is an interview with Don Coscarelli, director of the film adaptation of David Wong‘s John Dies At The End. He discusses how the book started off as a series on Wong’s website and was recommended to him by an automated Amazon robot.
In 1954 Roald Dahl’s short story The Great Automatic Grammatizator, in which a computer writes a novel, was published. In March 2016 a short novel by a Japanese AI “almost won a literary prize…” though the narrative of robots rising to overtake their human overlords falls apart under inspection. Much of the work was done by humans and the first rounds probably had fairly simple requirements. Still, pretty darn impressive.
By the way I recommend following the twitter mentioned in the article, Magic Realism Bot, it’s highly entertaining.
To finish off here’s a video I uploaded today of my adventures with online interactive horror fiction. Toodle pip!
Quick announcement: Bill and I are having a holiday at home, so after this post I shall see you in two weeks’ time.
Before the motion picture industry solidified in the 20s, The tens and 1890s were a period of gleeful experimentation, much like the advancement of YouTube from dramatic gophers to defined communities and vloggers.
From the cinéma vérité of the Lumière Brothers, the fantastical whimsy of Georges Méliès, the glamour and fun of Alice Guy-Blaché and the innovation of the world’s first animators, everyone had something they wanted to test. Vaudeville stars of the Belle Epoque and big events were a natural draw, but sometimes events don’t go according to plan, vaudeville acts seem alien to modern eyes and other things… are just odd.
The Balancing Bluebottle/The Acrobatic Fly (F. Percy Smith, 1910)
I honestly felt sick after watching this. It’s fascinating though and I couldn’t look away. But…yeah I still felt sick.
A fly is glued to a matchstick by the wings, it’s strength tested by placing objects onto it’s flailing legs, one of the objects being a dead fly. Yep, it spins around the corpse of it’s brethren on frantic arthropodic feet. You know that shudder Bart does in the Simpsons…
Fish (Bert Williams, 1916)
This next one isn’t creepy so much as sad. Bert Williams wrote and directed two films, unheard of for a person of colour back then. However this two reeler is very light on humour and audiences had a hard time accepting him, as a 42 year old man, playing a boy. Added to the mix are parents played by white people in black face with incredibly poor comic timing and pathos that leaves the viewer depressed.
Bert was never able to reach his full ambition, stuck as he was in ‘black’ roles often in blackface. Friend and fellow vaudevillian WC Fields said “Bert Williams was the funniest man I ever saw and the saddest man I ever knew.”
On stage and in his other short he was a more subtle comedian. After the disappointment of Fish he returned to live performances.
Death jump from the Eiffel Tower, 1912
On the 4th February, 1912, Franz Reichelt was scheduled to test his homemade parachute by jumping from a great height. Nobody in the watching crowd or French and British media thought to tell him it was a bad idea and off he went, falling from the tower to his unfortunate death.
The Dancing Pig (1907)
The internet is quite familiar with a small section of this vaudeville performance, namely the titular pig gurning grotesquely at the end. The rest is pretty darn odd too, involving public humiliation and torment. All in good fun though.
The Cameraman’s Revenge (Wladislaw Starewicz, 1912)
Perhaps it’s my phobia of dead bugs (live ones I’m fine with though, no idea why) that leads me to find this film so shudder inducing. It’s a shame because this satire by the Polish, Russian and French stop motion animator is really incredible.
The cast of deceased insects perform an operatic melodrama of betrayed love and revenge in a mischievous swipe at popular theatre.
Monkeyshines 1, 2 and 3 (Thomas Edison, 1889 – 1890)
These ghosts from the past were captured during Edison’s first attempts to record image on film.
The Consequences of Feminism (Alice Guy-Blaché, 1906)
Either this film is meant to show the absurdity of men who protested against the suffragette movement or it’s an indictment of what could happen if allowed to continue. Seeing as Alice was a filmmaker herself I’d prefer to believe the former, but we just don’t know.
The Inferno ( Francesco Bertolini, Adolfo Padovan and Giuseppe de Liguoro, 1911)
This ambitious project was one of the first feature length films ever made (the first being The Kelly Gang, 1906). It’s packed with disturbing imagery from cannibalism to tortured souls and remains hauntingly fascinating to this day.
Good day weary popcorn snacks, I’m so close to completing a third novella/connected short story collection/thing I can almost see it in my hand.
Recently I made a post on my favourite crime/creepy info YouTube channels but was unaware of the hidden gem of Obsolete Oddity. Serial killers, creepy twins, old ladies locked in rooms for decades… if you have a spare ten minutes visit his channel and give one of his videos a watch, there’s plenty more where these came from.
The Strange Case of Emilie Sagée & her Ghostly Twin
The French Socialite Locked in her Attic for 25 Years – Blanche Monnier
The Pickled Human Flesh Seller – Karl Denke
The Booby Trapped Hoarders Mansion – The Collyer Brothers Documentary
True Unsolved Crime – The Locked Room Mystery – 1929
The fear countdown continues! Commence terrified screaming and running about in 5…4…3…
Or…do something fun for Halloween like go on a horror bus tour of London, mwa ha haaa
Promo:
OK, I don’t personally believe in ghosts, but I do suspend disbelief for entertainment purposes, especially around this time of year. Also the tour focused on gruesome events more than haunting ones, so you’re fine either way.
Instead of pointing out pretty buildings (although there was some of that too) we were shown the spot where the largest gallows stood and the place where people were boiled in oil. I won’t give away too many stories else there’ll be no reason to go but I must share one in particular.
We stopped at an unassuming side street called Cock Lane. In 1762 one of the houses was the site of a reported haunting. Apparently the ‘ghost,’ named Fanny, was given to odd scratching sounds in the night, thus a number of newspapers gleefully reported on Scratching Fanny of Cock Lane. Bear in mind that in the UK fanny means a lady’s front parts and not someone’s bottom.
Incidentally the group who exposed the case as a fraud (sorry) included Samuel Johnson, writer of the first English Dictionary. 
The bus looks great, I was pleasantly surprised to see it was black: 
And inside there are spooky lamps dotted about and curtains awfully reminiscent of a hearse. I was certainly nervous:
The video below gives you a good idea of what it looks like inside, plus the tour guide from our particular trip:
The guide had to fight against a number of things including slow traffic and rain obscuring the windows, but he was very good at incorporating things around us and making everyone laugh. The tour itself included some spooky theatrics which were enjoyable, campy, Gothic fun. All in all we had a very good evening and I think you should go.
Hello all! This is the last day of the October Frights blog hop, though the other authors will be adding content tomorrow so be sure to click the button below.
Here’s a little story about a support group with a difference. Ta ta!
Visit here for more horror/weird short stories
If paranormal/horror/gothic erotica is your thing visit here
And there’s my youtube channel for more free story videos
Visit other Blog Hop authors
Doesn’t the air smell of faded leaves and over excitement?! I for one can barely wait to start digging up bodies and spoon feeding them cake and chocolate. That’s what you do, right?
The evenings are drawing in and what better way to relax than with a few informative, yet suitably weird, documentaries?
The Addams Family
These first three really count as one. I’m not sure what TV channel broadcast them first or if they were DVD extras, but it’s a 2007 look at the TV series and original cartoons of the Addams Family.
The Aswang Phenomenon
If you’ve seen bizarre cult classic Mystics of Bali you may have heard of the witch who separates her head from her body and floats through the air…her lungs and spine dangling beneath. Well, apparently they have a similar creature in the Philippines, the Aswang, who oddly seems to take many other forms according to whoever tells the story.
Ripley Believe it or Not!
Ripley’s Museum of Oddities will always hold a special place in my heart as Bill and I visited for our second date (my choice of course).
This documentary charts Ripley’s beginnings from cartoonist to global weirdo phenomenon, celebrating those who always felt a bit different on the way.
Frankenstein and the Vampyre, a Dark and Stormy Night
Two legendary horror monsters were created during the same holiday in Geneva, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and the modern, aristocratic vampire by John Polidori. Also with them were poets Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont.
Their trip isn’t just famous for their creative output, however, there were also drugs, sexual confusion and scandal. Exciting!
If you’d like to see more documentaries on romantic gothic literature, including the Brontes and Edgar Allen Poe, toddle off to this link here.
Urban Legends
An atmospheric wander through urban legends that turned out to have some basis in fact, whether before or after the telling. Remember, Halloween wouldn’t be the same if we didn’t all think nice old ladies were trying to kill us with sweets (candy).
Sacred Weeds: Henbane the Witch’s Brew
This was one of the oddest documentaries I remember from the 90s. It seemed to me that during that period everything went very sun and moon and incense, and to be honest I still secretly love it. There were four episodes in the series; Blue Lily, Henbane, Salvia Divinorum and Fly Agaric, but Henbane deals with Gothic folklore and witch trials.
The premise is what makes it so strange, two people turn up to a castle in the middle of nowhere so scientists in suits can watch them trip out of their tiny minds. The scientists argue before the trial and after, not a single one agreeing or changing their mind in the least. To be honest, though, fair enough if you’ve done the research and others clearly haven’t.
Watch out for the man who seems to have wandered in from some fetish dream, declaring with little to no evidence that witches definitely rubbed ointment on their vaginas and held naked sabbats.
It’s almost Halloween! OK it’s still technically summer but by golly if you squint really hard and pinch your nose against the delicate scent of flower blossoms it could be autumn.
With this in mind I went on a hunt for the spookiest, scariest, creepiest online horror stories. Some are more inventive than scary but please be aware there is a chance you may scream very loudly, causing any housemates, friends or partners to come running.
This Weird Fiction tale is the reason I delved into the world of interactive stories. It’s cleverly done, subtle and very creepy.
Wear your headphones to get the best from the sound effects. You have to click the words in bold to get to the next part, and there is one section where you’ll need a little patience. You’ll know the bit. And keep going if you’re not sure, it will be abundantly clear when you’ve reached the end. Good luck!
The story is entertaining though not terrifying, but what makes it even better is the number above. Call the number after finishing the story and you’ll see what I mean (please check for potential charges though, I have poor impulse control and am now waiting to see if I get an abnormal bill).
This intriguing tale begins with a series of emails you have to click through. At the end, if you click on the Updates page, you’ll find more ‘information’ and links to other sites corroborating the story. It’s very clever and the story itself is fascinating.
Similar to Annie96 Is Typing (another good ‘un) this story appears as a chat history needing the click of your button to show the next piece. Not only that but a link to a wikipedia page correlating with the story appears which is a nice touch.
Annie96 may be slightly creepier but this one is still good. I think the thing that tips it for me is the friendship between the two girls.
If you haven’t seen this one yet you’re in for a treat. Keep scrolling down and make sure you’ve been to the toilet beforehand, that’s all I can say.
If you like scary webcomics try The Split Lip or the Midnight Tea Party anthology serieseseses. Well, what’s the plural of series? Series’? Serieses? I’m tired.
My Dead Girlfriend Keeps Messaging Me On Facebook
Though not interactive, this creepypasta makes good use of facebook chat and pictures. Plus it genuinely gave me the creeping willies so there was no way I wasn’t going to share it.
ALSO…
There’s a few fun interactive spooky stories on youtube including The House, A Knock At The Door and Stillshore Cottage. Enter if you dare, mwa ha ha!!! Um, that’s about it, until next time…no, really, that’s it, I’m going to make tea now, you’ll have to get off the porch. Bye!
Bonjour, como ca va? Bien!
I hope you’ve been having wonderful, liberated fun out in the corn fields of happiness. Now that summer is approaching it’s time to think about cool clothes and ice cream. However, I don’t think you’ve seen adverts like this before, though it definitely made me want ice cream.
This company’s web ads have introduced a kind of Welcome To Night Vale horrific nightmare surrealist poetry to their frozen products and I urge you to watch them all. Because I love you I’ve also added the making of and frequently asked questions at the end. Ta dah!
This Is A Special Time:
Lick Lovers:
Check Out Our New Package:
Eyes Scream:
Doug Garth Williams Answers Your Frequently Asked Questions:
Madeleine Swann 