To celebrate the first day of October, we are paying homage to the late horror legend – Wes Craven – with a marathon of his best works. If it’s not Krueger, Ghostface or a Hill Person, it’s not claiming us today.
Here’s me, movie marathon ready, sporting my A Nightmare On Elm Street clobber:
I’ll leave you with some words of wisdom from Scream’s own Randy Meeks to see you through the horror movie season – stay spooky:
Genre bending #2 – choose a well-known horror story and give it a new genre.
Wes Craven’s Scream
NOTE: This is very much the same case as yesterday since I am no way near finished with this, but I will publish the completed thing once I’ve had the chance to polish it off. It’s a little rushed, but I hope you enjoy my little slice of e-scream-pionage nonetheless.
“Welcome to Woodsboro.”
Randy Meeks observed his audience as he smoothed the coarse hair of his goatee using his thumb and index finger. They were a gang of misfits, comprised of a doe-eyed teenage schoolgirl, a sharp-tongued ex-journalist, and bumbling moustached man with a past in the police force. He wondered to himself what it was that had attracted the nominating committee to them. Whatever it was, it must have been something special for them to have gotten even this far.
“Before you commit yourselves to Woodsboro, you need to know that there are certain rules that one must abide by in order to make it through the training programme.” He held up three fingers in demonstration. “Number one: you must abstain from sexual activities. Number two: you must abstain from drink and drugs. And number three: you must give yourself entirely to the Woodsboro Secret Service. Once you have done so, there will be no walk-outs or hiatuses, no ‘I’ll-be-right-backs'” He paused to study their stony faces for any flicker of trepidation and found that there were none. “If anyone wishes to leave, do so now, otherwise, you are bound to hold your tongue ’til death.”
No one so much as breathed.
***
Back in the trainees’ dorm, Sydney Prescott was reading over the letter she had just penned to her father back in California. The handwriting was rushed and spidery, almost indecipherable. She had barely had a second to blink since arriving at Westboro, never mind compose a coherent letter.
She was about to shove it under her pillow and finally get some rest when a slim manicured hand snatched the paper away from her.
“What the hell is this?” Gale Weathers demanded, without bothering to scan the contents for herself. “They would kill us all if they found out one of us was slipping information to people on the outside. I gave up my camera for the programme and you can’t even refrain from spilling your guts out on paper for our sake.”
“Take it easy, Gale.” Dewey Riley was perched on the end of his bed at the other side of the small, clinical room, rubbing his hands together nervously as he spoke. “Letters to family members aren’t forbidden. They censor them anyway. Lets not turn on each other so early in the game.”
Gale exhaled deeply through her nose then reluctantly handed the letter back to Sidney. It was obvious that she had a soft spot for the ex-deputy. Had it have been anyone else who had dared to confront her, they might have lost their head.
Taking the letter from Gale, Sydney was preparing to dish her out a piece of her own mind but was interrupted by the sudden absence of light. Feeling her heart rate quicken, she felt blindly around her bedside table in the dark. Her fingertips met with a cool, cylindrical object which she immediately recognised as being her torch.
With a tremulous hand, she aimed the torch into the body of the darkness and flicked the switch.
Sydney recoiled in horror as the light illuminated a ghost-white face with morphed, empty eye sockets and a mouth melted into a frozen scream. The intruder lunged at her as if it were a moth attracted to the light, but she was too quick for it. She brought the torch up into its jaw with so much force that it shattered the light a second time and sent her assailant sprawling backwards onto the floor. Immediately, the followed the sound of pained groans and saddled them on the ground, pinning their arms to their side and ramming the torch up into their throat.
“Hello, Sydney,” the intruder coughed up at her.
Sydney recognised the voice. She slackened the choke before asking; “who is this?”
Someone somewhere flicked a switch and all the light was returned to the room. Gale and Dewey were close by, holding the first items their hands fell on as weapons in case their assistance was needed.
Sydney was staring down at the person beneath her and came to realise that the contorted face that had lurched at her from within the shadows was actually a mask; a replica of those worn by the Ghost Face agents of the Stab Organisation that Woodsboro had been aiming to take down for years.
Tentatively, she reached out a hand and pressed her fingers against the sooth, plastic surface. Then, holding her breath, she tore off the mask…
To be continued…
By Tyler Turner
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