#horrorwriting

I live alone. I’ve always kept my bathroom light on at night—habit from childhood, nothing more. But last week, something changed.

I got up at 3:12 AM (I remember because my phone lit up), walked past the bathroom, and saw myself in the mirror... already standing there. I hadn’t even stepped in yet.

She smiled. I didn’t.

I froze. It mimicked every move I made—but a second too slow. Like it was watching and deciding how to be me.

I’ve tried covering the mirror. It doesn’t help. Every night since, I’ve woken up at the same time.

She’s always there. Closer.

Last night, she didn’t copy me. She waved.

Where the Cakes Are Stale, the Candy Might Kill You, and the Smell of Burnt Flesh Just Adds to the Ambience

Ah, the Hive City Bakery and Sweets Market—where sugar, despair, and the faint scent of industrial lubricant mix into an unholy cocktail of culinary horror. If you’ve ever wondered what a post-apocalyptic bake sale looks like, congratulations, you just found it.

What’s on the menu, you ask? Oh, just the most depressing, borderline-toxic confections you’ve ever encountered.

1. “Corpse-Starch Croissants” – You Don’t Want to Know What’s in Them

Ever had a croissant so dry it doubles as sandpaper? Now imagine it was made from the recycled bodies of the unfortunate. Congratulations, you’ve just bitten into the Hive’s signature Corpse-Starch Croissant.

✨ Flaky! (Like the guy who swore he’d pay you back.) ✨ Filling! (In the same way that eating drywall is.) ✨ Sustainably sourced! (From yesterday’s unlucky citizens.)

Eat it. Don’t ask questions. If you’re hungry enough, you won’t care.

2. “Sludge Pies” – Now With 40% Less Industrial Waste!

A “pie” in the loosest sense of the word, Sludge Pies are served warm—mainly because they’re still fermenting in their own filth.

🥧 The Crust? Half-burnt, half-raw, 100% regret. 🥧 The Filling? A mystery slurry that probably started as something edible but has long since become a sentient goo that might fight back. 🥧 The Experience? A 70/30 chance of immediate food poisoning or enlightenment.

Perfect for those with no self-respect or functioning taste buds.

3. “Synth-Sugar Candies” – Sweet, Addictive, and Probably Illegal

Ever wanted to taste cavity-inducing regret with just a hint of chemical burns? Welcome to Synth-Sugar Candies, the Hive’s answer to real sweets—except engineered in some back-alley lab by a guy named Grim Jax.

🍬 Glows in the dark (definitely not natural). 🍬 Might contain traces of actual sugar. Maybe. 🍬 Side effects include dizziness, hallucinations, and brief moments of cosmic awareness.

Kids love them. Authorities hate them. That’s how you know they’re good.

4. “Meat” Puffs – But What Kind of Meat? No One Knows.

Listen, in the Grimdark Hive, you don’t ask what the meat is. If it smells vaguely edible and doesn’t actively try to crawl off your plate, it’s dinner.

🥩 Possibilities include: ✅ Rat? Maybe. ✅ Some dude who owed money to the wrong people? Could be. ✅ Industrial waste reprocessed into something “protein-adjacent”? Most likely.

Either way, slap it in some questionable pastry dough, deep fry it in yesterday’s recycled grease, and BOOM—you got yourself a Meat Puff.

Hope your stomach can handle mystery protein.

5. “Recaf ‘Delights’” – Wake Up and Regret Your Choices

Need caffeine but also mild psychosis? Try a Recaf Delight, a pastry infused with enough synthetic stimulants to make your teeth vibrate out of your skull.

☕ Baked fresh-ish daily. ☕ Tastes like burnt battery acid. ☕ Comes with a free existential crisis.

Pairs well with crippling debt and the weight of existence.

⚠️ WARNING: Consumption may cause:

☠️ Instant regret & irreversible digestive trauma. ☠️ Hallucinations, organ failure, or spontaneous mutation. ☠️ Your food to fight back. ☠️ An unshakable feeling of being cursed.

👀 If your Meat Puff twitches, chew faster.

💀 NO REFUNDS. NO LIABILITY. NO SURVIVORS GUARANTEED.

🔥REBLOG If you want more! 🍳

leon isnt stars so nemesis has no reason to hurt leon

long as he doesnt touch that stars badge of course :}

Buddy Cop Apocalypse (Leon and Nemesis)

🧟‍♂️✨ CRACKFIC SPOTLIGHT ✨🧟‍♂️

LEON & NEMESIS: BUDDY COP APOCALYPSE - A Resident Evil One-Shot

What if Leon S. Kennedy’s first day in Raccoon City meant making friends with the city’s scariest bioweapon? Chaos, comedy, and unexpected bromance await!

Author’s Note:

Big thanks to the anonymous requester for this adorable, chaotic prompt—this one’s for you! Hope you enjoy Leon and Nemesis causing mayhem and redefining the meaning of “first day jitters.” If you have more ideas or want a sequel (Jill cameo, anyone?), drop your suggestions below!

Now and then, I write things that could serve as the start of a story, though I never actually use them. Here, I’m sharing a few that lean toward the darker side. Feel free to use them as prompts, and have fun with them.

The house had been empty for decades, or so they said. But when I stepped inside, the floor creaked underfoot as if it remembered every step ever taken, every secret ever buried.

There was a strange comfort in the darkness, a place where shadows whispered the truths the daylight refused to see.

The wind outside howled, but the sound inside was worse—soft footsteps echoing through the empty halls.

I thought it was just a nightmare, until I woke up with the dirt still under my fingernails.

They said I wouldn’t feel a thing, that I’d be free once it was over. But as the needle slid in, I realized I was still very much alive—and trapped.

(Do you want a part two?)

They spend hours 

Measuring every pore and dimple,

How my jade-green scales crackle and hiss

When they press their fingers in,

Until my voice throbs with pain,

And they laugh, 

Rattling the bars of my cage. 

I am the balm holding this village together—

Pierced with needles and tickled with feathers. 

Some drool at a woman who slithers, 

And shove foul tongues into my slick-fanged mouth. 

I want to slide between those icy bars

And dig my fangs deep into their necks,

But what will they do when they catch me,

The wild, hungry snake-woman?

I can’t hold their coins,

By Tabby Knight (instagram - tabby.knight6)

Artwork by Dy Dawson @xgardensinspace

If you’ve seen all of the Children of the Corn films in the franchise (dear God) I’m both somewhat impressed and also vaguely concerned for your mental wellbeing. I counted a total of 12 entries in the series, including the 2020 reboot and the 1983 short film Disciples of the Crow. Not bad, considering Stephen King’s original short story clocks in at approximately 10,000 words, and ends with a degree of finality that doesn’t exactly invite a sequel.

For those unfamiliar with the source material, Children of the Corn was originally published in Penthouse Magazine in 1977 and later reprinted in King’s short story anthology, Night Shift (1978) and follows a young married couple who accidentally hit a child with their car while driving through rural Nebraska. Burt and Vicky, who are road tripping to California in a last-ditch attempt to save their marriage, decide to put the boy (dead) in the back of their car and drive to the nearest town, Gatlin, for help. The shock of hitting the boy has been abated, somewhat, by the fact that he was likely already dead when they went over him — his throat's been slit from ear to ear. They are a little disturbed, however, to find a crucifix made of corn husks in the boy’s suitcase.

They arrive in Gatlin only to find it deserted, and the only building showing any sign of recent activity is the church, which is defaced, trashed, and decorated with corn. Inside, Burt also finds a record of births and deaths, and manages to piece together the town’s dark history: some twelve years ago, all the adults in town were massacred, and the children appear to have created a corn-worshipping cult in their absence. Since then, every registered death in town has occurred on the victim’s nineteenth birthday.

By the story’s conclusion (Spoilers) Vicky’s been mutilated and crucified on a cross of corn, and Burt finds himself trapped in Gatlin’s cornfields, pursued — and ultimately consumed — by a mysterious entity that lives amongst the rows. It ends with the children, who are informed by their nine-year-old cult leader, Isaac, that He Who Walks Behind the Rows is displeased with their inability to dispatch Burt, and has lowered ‘the age of favour’ from nineteen to eighteen as a punishment. As a result, the town’s eighteen-year-old residents march into the corn to sacrifice themselves to their god. One of those dispatched, Malachi, leaves behind a pregnant girlfriend, who fantasises about setting fire to the corn in retribution. We end with a line that still sticks with me years after I first read it: “Dusk deepened into night. Around Gatlin the corn rustled and whispered secretly. It was well pleased.”

And there you have it. It’s not King’s best short story by any means, but it’s far from his worst, and it has its own grim, mystical charm that appealed to me as a teenager and still appeals to me now. The cult operating in Gatlin works primarily because of its elusiveness, and its ambiguity. We don’t see the children overthrow the town, we see very little of the entity that lurks in the corn, and there’s no flashy final showdown. There’s a tragedy to the children that fails to translate to the films, a quiet sort of helplessness emphasised by their final march into the cornrows. The conclusion feels inevitable – this is the way things are in Gatlin, and it’s horrendous, but it’s unstoppable. It just is.

To the best of my knowledge, none of the film adaptations manage to capture this same sense of quiet horror, the idea that those who commit such atrocious evil are themselves victim to a larger, far more powerful force that cannot be overthrown or disobeyed.

It’s a shame, then, that the very first film adaptation – a 1984 venture starring Linda Hamilton – dispatches this sense of ambiguity and dread entirely. Instead we are left with a standard, far less eerie narrative structure, in which Burt rescues Vicky, teams up with a couple of the less murderous children, and manages to set fire to the cornrows, ostensibly killing (at least temporarily – 5 sequels and several reboots, remember) He Who Walks Behind the Rows. Instead of the quiet despair of the short story, emphasised by the pregnant Ruth’s secret desire to see the corn burn, we get a final jump scare and a happy ending as Burt, Vicky, and the two kids they appear to have adopted set out for Seattle on foot.

There are merits to the first film, at least. John Franklin makes an iconic and genuinely menacing (if a little campy) villain out of Isaac, who outshines the elusive creature behind the rows as the primary antagonist. Courtney Gains makes for a memorable Malachai - morally grey and surprisingly likeable, far more fleshed out than his literary counterpart. The supporting cast of Gatlin kids are suitably freaky, at least until Sarah and Job are established as good kids, which diminishes the effect somewhat, especially when the short story did so well as to establish the children as equal parts good and bad, victims of a larger system as well as perpetrators of violence.

By creating a binary in which children like Sarah and Job are “all good,” while those such as Isaac and Rachel (the crazed adolescent responsible for that final scare) are “all bad,” we lose that sense of dread. Worse still, we lose the last remaining shred of realism in a film that has Burt pursued through the corn by a tunnelling monster right out of Tremors. As I said, we essentially lose the very point the source material is trying to convey.

That’s not to say it’s a wholly unlikeable film, of course, or that it’s universally hated by horror fans. Lots of people, myself included, look at the film with a great deal of fondness. But that doesn’t change the fact that it falls into that famed category of questionable Stephen King adaptations. It also doesn’t change the fact that it didn’t warrant a sequel, let alone five, and a string of ill-fated reboots with sequels of their own.

Horror movies and sequels go hand in hand, obviously, but unlike the other sequel machines of the 1980’s, the Children of the Corn franchise lacks the same fanatical following. When quizzed on franchises and their sequels, diehard horror fans tend to have very specific preferences. They have a favourite Nightmare on Elm Street, (Mine’s 3) a preferred Jason Vorhees (8-bit video game Jason, though I suspect I’m an outlier) and strong opinions on the superior Child’s Play film (It’s Bride). But with Children of the Corn, that level of diehard devotion appears to be lacking. I’ve met a lot of horror fans, and I’ve never had any of them tell me that Children of the Corn V: Fields of Terror, for example, is the best of the lot.

I don’t want to generalise, of course, because I’m sure someone out there is getting ready to contact me and tell me of their undying devotion to Urban Harvest. I only mean that as a collective, horror fans are incredibly tolerant of sequels, and often can discuss the merits of part six over part ten. A cursory glance at cinema attendance for the new Halloween and Scream sequels alone indicates a market for the same formula over and over again. I would argue, however, that Children of the Corn doesn’t necessarily fit into that category. With the possible exception of 666, which promises the return of the first film’s Isaac, none of the sequels on Wikipedia’s handy-dandy list either catch my eye or spark my memory, and I can’t be the only one.

The question, then, is why keep churning them out? Let’s not forget that this isn’t just a case of a one-off direct-to-video sequel, or even a trilogy. We’re talking about five direct sequels to the 1984 film, plus three maybe sequels (Revelation, Genesis, and Runaway) and two reboots (2009 and 2020/23).* The obvious answer is of course, money, but you can’t seriously tell me all these direct-to-video sequels are churning out bucketloads of profits. They’re certainly not churning out rave reviews, either from critics or audience members.

My best guess is that, like me, people continue to be drawn to and affected by the original source material, and want to create a film in that same vein. But if that’s the case, why the continual failure to accurately adapt that same source material? Why create a narrative in which He Who Walks Behind the Rows is easily dispatched by outsiders, when the real terror of the story (at least in my opinion) stems from His unrelenting hold over the children, even in the face of their growing resentment?

The 2020 adaptation, much like those that have come before it, has received mostly negative reviews, with an 11% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, a 22/100 on Metacritic, and a staggering 1.6/5-star rating on Letterboxd. While I haven’t seen it myself (yet – if I do, it’ll bring my total number of CotC films up to…3) what I can glean from Wikipedia, Bloody Disgusting, and Letterboxd is that once again, the film fails to either accurately adapt the source material or, at the very least, capture the same spirit of terror the original story managed to convey.

In a perfect world, such universally abysmal reviews would signal a long-overdue death for the franchise, and I’d like to say I’m optimistic enough to hope for its end. But this is horror we’re talking about, and we appear to be in an age of unrelenting sequels for all genres regardless. And worst of all, there’s a backlog of twelve films whose very existence leave me pessimistic and cynical.

Incidentally, if you’d like to catch a Children of the Corn film that kind of captures the spirit of the original, consider checking out the aforementioned 1983 short film Disciples of the Crow. It’s not a perfect adaptation (Burt and Vicky still manage to escape unscathed, god damnit) but it goes a long way towards establishing that eerie sense of mindless violence and inevitability I talked about. It’s campy as hell, of course, terribly acted and not exactly scary, but it is only 18 minutes and free to watch on YouTube, and not too bad for a student film. At the very least, Burt isn’t pursued by a tunnelling monster as he attempts to set fire to a cornfield.

Can a writer truly scare a reader with just words? How can you, as a writer, utilize the elements of horror to create a story that not only instills fear but also captivates the reader? The Essence of Horror Horror as a genre has been chilling readers to their bones for centuries. The primary objective of horror is to evoke fear and discomfort, making readers confront the darker corners of…