It's hard to scare these days, reality is worse than literature. What could bring back to the readers the true horror? Creepypastas new epigons seem to be drowning too.
>>25351916Like all literature, it will be replaced by AI in ten years
>>25350653
>>25351916LinkedIn is my source of contemporary horror. You can go mad if you read too much of that shit.
>>25351916
>>25352582OP actually was asking for the future, but the pic well describes what happened indeed
>>25351916>It's hard to scare these daysWhy?
I think expressionist depiction of labor alienation or social alienation, like in the vein of Kafka's Metamorphosis or Amerika, but with the horror elements of David Lynch. For a while now horror's premise has been to set up a naturalist world intruded upon by by something outside of it, whereas the fear that people relate to today is feeling that they are trapped in a nonsensical nightmare
>there was once this planet of countless cultures and fascinating peoples>and then at some point it became a planet occupied by billions and billions of pajeets living in data centers turning themselves on wheels of pain to power an AI system with the owners long gone and dead>the waterways turned into the ganges>they idolized cow pee>god simply was asleep and did not do anything to bring about the end times>the end
>>25352582If you weren't thoroughly sick and fucking tired of slashershit by now, that's YOUR fault.
>>25352582imagine a post-ai where machines talk to machines, and we are there brairotting and spectating, without even understanding why (as always)
>>25352835btw, this pic is ai generated. that's part of the new era of horror: the lack of will to do anything at all
>>25352835wow malevolent AI and post human dissolution? such novel concepts surely not rooted in 20th century thought lol!
>>25352992lol>>25352638Sounds like Yorgos Lanthimos
>>25353021>Yorgos LanthimosPretentious.
This is legit the scariest thing I've ever read, and it's non-fiction.
>>25352992So what are you guesses onto the next 20 years?
>>25353028lol. nah, they're fun.
>>25353036I grew up with duck and cover drills. That shit is real to me. Lucifer's Hammer and the day after were how I expected to grow up.
>>25353134*how I expected to live as a grown up. Also obThread:>going outside>no internet running
>Lamenting the loss of shit like Freddy Krueger and Pennywise Gen Xers are fucking pathetic. Freddy was never scary. Halloween was always boring fucking trash.
>>25353134>I grew up with duck and cover drillsNo you didn't. You wish you did. I'm not buying it, LARPtranny.
>>25351916I remember this topic. Still, nothing serious has been said about it imo
>>25351916What do people fear these days? Being cringe. Thus, effective horror would be about malevolent forces that cause one to be cringe against one's will. A cringe curse. A cringe possession.Consider this scenario: protagonist enters a room and speaks out loud how they really feel, despite not wanting to. The filter is gone. In mute horror they watch as the people around them mock this sincerity they never intended.This is it. This the deepest horror. To be stripped of your ironic mask, to be left naked before the judgement of your peers and to have your innermost self rejected by them. For being cringe.There would naturally be a cringe compliation somewhere online, or accessible via an app no one remembers downloading but that's on their phone nonetheless. Ignore it and nothing happens. Get curious and get infected. You open the app to go see the cringe and you yourself will be reduced to cringe.How's that?
>>25354038that's a good guess. in the social media era everyone lurks for admiration, everyone cares for the image of himself others have in their mind. once you aknowledge all the others think something inconvenient of you, you are trapped in endless torture by your own mind's judgment.
the true horror is the lack of true readers
>>25354077What's a true reader?
>>25354038Now I want to see a horror villain with mind altering powers who ruins the lives of influencers and socialites by giving them very mild autism
>>25354436>villain>targets influencersThe audience would root for him
>>25352582>a guys girlfriendwhat is this supposed to be? Not the girl from the Ring surely?
>>25354496No, the Ring is old. This is about Obsession, which is in theaters right now.
>>25354510Ahh, I haven't seen a mainstream movie in more than a decade.
>>25354522Well don't start now, it's worse than ever. The director said the idea for the movie came from "that Simpsons episode with the monkey paw in it"
>>25351916almost everything has been said. new books are just remixed old stories
>>25353178Whatever helps you sleep kid
>>25352582This is a pretty good summary of where horror is going.The idea of shocking anyone today is an alien one, so monsters, gratuitous violence, taboo subjects etc are pretty passe. So too is the idea of something otherworldly taking place in an unmapped remote environment (cults, mythical beings, sea creatures, cave monsters, extraterrestrials). We live in a world where the fog of war cheat has been activated and there's pretty much no room left for traditional horror to reveal itself beyond the ken of human knowledge.What this leaves is the horror of the familiar, expressed in that pic by the disquiet of a placeless office space and the latent weirdness of emotional longing. It's essentially an inward horror, where the backrooms represent a character's inner turmoil and traumatic memories, and the obsessive girlfriend the manifestation of a character's supposed fantasy. Both are external representations of a character's internal mental state, and therein lies the horror. The most familiar and mundane aspects of an unremarkable life (a job, a relationship) become the source of modern horror. Nothing otherworldly or alien is called upon to deliver the weirdness and dread.I predicted this a few years ago when Cat Person was released. The author had made her start by writing horror fiction, and although the aforementioned story was seen as a kind of weird literary fiction story, it was essentially a horror story without the traditional tropes (e.g., character revealed as a killer). Another example appearing not long after was The Feminist, which was a very similar kind of story albeit from the perspective of the opposite gender. One story carefully depicts the horror of a relationship in a modern setting, in which two isolated strangers meet in what otherwise would have been a cute way, only for their romance to be tainted by the lurking horror essentially caused by their atomised lives, i.e., she likes him but has no idea if he is a serial killer, he likes her but is embarrassed by his age and inability to perform sexually. The latter story depicts another deeply isolated character whose inability to parse an increasingly complex and seemingly hypocritical social system leads him to reject it entirely and lash out towards it.The monsters of modern horror are isolated, frustrated individuals who succumb to loneliness and fear of people who would in older times been their friends, compatriots or neighbours. We have found ourselves alone, frightened, neurotic and angry, and modern horror reveals the evil that spreads through such lives.
>>25356400that's a pretty good analysis. but what about the future? we all know that society canons are getting quicker and quicker, so I suppose in 5/10 years this kind of horror you depicted will leave the place to something else. But what will it be?
>>25352626Being scared from a book, which was almost impossible in the best of days, requires attention (which suspense depends upon) and imagination, two qualities lacking in zoomers.
>>25356424Personally I think the future horror will focus on an uncertain grasp of reality, what is real and what isn't etc. A good example would be Perfect Blue (movie thoughbeit). Characters trapped in a virtual world, or in contact with people who may or not be real, or a social system which is dictated by some impersonal malevolent force. I still think online horror has great potential for modern audiences. Bendrowned was a good example although I think it wouldn't really work today as the internet isn't so new and the average user age probably skews older and thus less believing. I even think /lit/ could orchestrate a good story which begins in a mundane way and then progresses into horror with elements of conspiracy, paranoia and questionable mental health of the main character.
