Horror Story Prompts

Collection 1

Prompt 01

A pedophile priest runs a small rural church behind a pumpkin patch. Something paranormal causes the pumpkins, or something among the pumpkins, to bring retribution against the priest. A key scene involves the pews being full of glowing, glaring pumpkins while the severed head of the priest is on the altar, and pumpkin vines snake about the church. 

Prompt 1B

A pumpkin seed grows over the body of a boy that was a victim of a pedophile priest. The unmarked grave is in the churchyard. The pumpkin vine is slowly making its way inside the church to take revenge, and the closer it gets to breaching the sanctuary, the stranger and stronger the paranormal activity inside and outside the church. 

Prompt 02

Bodies keep turning up in places that are cold on a property. In the snow, but also freezers of convenience stores, refrigerators with no regard to limits of space and volume, frozen lakes, etc. The bodies all appear to be staring at whoever discovers them. Evidence leads back to the scarecrow on the property as the killer. 

Prompt 02B

Everyone who makes eye contact with a certain faceless scarecrow is overcome by a terrible chill that progresses to being frozen solid. The frozen victims move about when nobody is around to see them and they kill indiscriminately. The bodies are eventually able to breathe jets of frozen air that lead to near-instantaneous frostbite injuries. 

Prompt 03

A condemned mausoleum becomes the source of several sightings of “green lights” and “emerald fire.” The mausoleum was exclusively for cremated remains. Something is causing the ashes to take the form of the people they used to be and suck the life force out of living victims by engulfing them in a phosphorus green miasma. Victims dry up like mummies. Survivors don’t last long. The big reveal is that the stolen life essence is being used to nourish a Lovecraftian being that is nesting in the recesses of the mausoleum and is using the ashes of the deceased as worker bees for harvesting and transferring its sustenance. The reanimated dead have the overall texture and substance of wasp nests, papery and airy. Their eye sockets are lit with green fire. 

Prompt 03B

Cthulhu has bound one of his alien servants into a book that serves as a ledger, recording everyone and everything ever sacrificed to The Old Ones. The Ledger looks like any old heavy tome, except parts of it shift back and forth to its true form. Pages will writhe, a tentacle may flick from between the pages. The Ledger can be accessed in a dream state, where the psychic space of the Ledger manifests as a mausoleum of infinite halls and alcoves made of sandstone. The sacrificial victims can be visited and conversed with. At dire cost, they can be temporarily released from the Ledger.