This week’s been a real cooker down here in the dusty desert metropolis known as Phoenix, Arizona. All the heat’s serving up a wide variety of sweaty, fantastic ideas, some of which are best left until cooler moments to reconsider. Yet I feel this Wednesday’s Monster Laboratory may well leave a deep mark for its springs from the darkest childhood memories I posess. My deep fear of elves.
No laughing, Merry Readers, I’ve borne enough torture without the added burn of mockery, thank you. As a tiny tike I’d not really had the idea of elves fully explained to me. I’d not yet been exposed to Tolkien’s slender woodsmen variety and Keebler
’s pint-sized cooks didn’t really register as elves. To me, elves took the form of tiny people, about the size of your average 3.5 inch action figure. However, the word "elves" sounded innately "evil" so I figured the truth about elves must be sinister.
Darby O’Gill and the Little People didn’t help things out. I knew those "little people" were far too large to be accurate. In my pre-grade school ponderings I put together a portrait of elves as being the size mentioned above, as quick as mice but with the temperment of angry Gremlins. Viscious beings well-fed by our scraps having no other purpose that to hide until such time as they might spring from beneath your bed and attack, laughing in Kreuger-esqe fashion as they superglued the door shut so they could keep you in your bed room, attacking endlessly to the soundtrack of piercingly high-pitched cackles.
That’s probably why my parents didn’t let me drink pop after 5:00pm. My imagination respects no boundaries, Merry Readers, even in those single digit years my mind ran maverick. The tiny people might rig booby traps all about, use needles for spears and otherwise possess strength far superior to our own in terms of size to power ratios. Once I learned about the Irish legend on leprechauns, I realized I couldn’t be the only one who knew the true nature of tiny people. Leprechauns lusted after gold, told lies and made you search for special clovers that didn’t exist. The mythology mutated in my mind, growing darker, more terrible.
Maybe my parents began to see signs. When I began kindergarten, they forbid Lucky Charms as part of my nutritious breakfast, keeping me towards Raisin Bran or Wheaties, the choice always being mine. Because I knew Wheaties to be the breakfast of champions, I chowed down each morning in the hopes of maintaining the strength I’d need to fend off any incoming leprechauns.
Around first grade, a darker shadow overtook the leprechauns. I’d begun to stay up later and witness commercials for scary movies. Films featuring those fanged abominations known commonly as vampires. The terror struck deep and spawned a realization: the tiny people must be vampiric! That’s how they could be stomped, thrown against walls or pinned beneath heavy objects and never be badly injured! The day I made this connection a chill shot through me. Tiny undead leprechauns? Why, they’d be as close to invincible as any monster could possibly be!
And that is what I’ve revived in the Monster Lab this week: the bane of my childhood, Leprechaun Vampires. Now that I’m a real grown-up, I’m able to properly evaluate these childish fantasies and measure them against today’s standards. When I did that, I understood that little me came up with nothing short of pure brilliance. Not scary to you, yet? Allow me to elaborate, then.
Let’s use the setting of a movie. We’ve got a family consisting of a single mother and two young kids, a boy and a girl. They’ve gone through some hard times with mom’s old boyfriend which means they’ve lost their house and been forced to move into a large city so mom can be closer to work. Since she’s not even got a car at this point, she’s having to take the city bus. This means she’ll have to leave for work before the kids go to school and won’t get back until long after they’re home again. It’s the only way to pay the rent and the children, ages nine and eleven, fully understand.
Of course, these kids now have a whole bunch of alone time since a babysitter costs too much. They’re on the eighth floor of a massive old apartment complex which means they’ve got to pass any number of drunken bums or twitching crack addicts on their way up the creaking stairs to their apartment. These moments raise great fears, more for the older sister who’s aware of how dangerous people in this city can be. She hurries her brother to and from school, trying always to avoid speaking with anyone. Once they’re home they throw the locks and prop a chair against the door. From time to time they hear screaming, sirens and the occaisional seasoning of automatic gunfire. They try to drown it out with daytime television.
Life in old building’s usually feels spooky. There’s a haunting sense you get when you enter vast brick structures constructed a century ago. Thousands of people have lived, given birth and died within the walls of the Chesterfield Heights housing project. Constructed to house a booming population of impoverished city dwellers long ago, no one chooses to move into Chesterfield Heights. You go there when every other option’s been exhausted. As a result, the place reeks of despair, madness and the unique shade of bitter hatred poverty brings to the world. A setting that calls out to monsters who feed on those negative energies, nourished by suffering and sheltered by the fact that no one else in the city ever wants to investigate problems that go down in Chesterfield Heights.
The kids struggle to stay happy for mom who’s constantly exhausted by her day job. They never tell her about the scary things: the weird laughter that seems to come from the bath tub, the scurrying sounds in the heating vents or the numerous small items that disappear and re-materialize in their rooms almost daily. Little brother desperately wants to tell mom about the strange happening but older sister threatens him. She says mom doesn’t need the stress and that it’s probably rats doing all those things. She never seems to see the evidence he sees.
As winter sets in, the circumstances grow bleak and events ever stranger. Both children begin to wake each moring to tiny cuts in various parts of their bodies. Mom notices, but she says it may be fleas. Even though people aren’t allowed to have pets, many hide their cats. Plus, a great many stray cats sneak in when the outside doors get blown open at night. Fleas, she tells the children, promising to buy a powder to get rid of them as soon as possible. Little brother knows it’s not fleas. He’s awakened once in the middle of the night to see a small shadow creep across the bedroom floor. When he gasped, a tinkling sound of evil laughter came from that direction and the shadow vanished. He’s young enough to be terrified and old enough to realize no one will believe him if he tells what he saw. So he sets to work.
There we go, the perfect set up for the vampiric leprechaun movie. These things can disappear in a New York minute and fight meaner than New Orleans hooker! Sharp teeth, vision take allows them to see in complete darkness and being so miniscule, they need only small quantities of blood at any given time. In fact, in the Chesterfield Heights basement they farm rats to use as a back up supply, milking them for blood whenever there’s danger of them being discovered. Through a network of sewers and other pipes they’ve got something of an infrastructure. Groups trade with other groups, warning each other of any incoming danger of humans discovering them.
Always, the leprechaun vampires stick to isolated targets. Children left alone, single people with no social lives or even the elderly. They prey on those who haven’t got the ability to call in back-up. They thrive on the terror they’re able to evoke from their victims. They’re also nearly impossible to kill. They can hold their breath for hours (allowing them to ride through pipes in your house), be run over by cars and come out unscathed - even a grown man of tremendous strength could not close his fist around any but the weakest LV.
They fear two things, bullets and fire. Good luck hitting one with a bullet though, you’ve got better odds of knocking down a squirrel as it’s charging you and since they stick to indoor areas, you’re basically NOT going to hit them. Stick to fire. It’s cleansing properties cause the LV’s to tremble with terror. The pure heat utterly destroys them and they cannot revive themselves from a pile of ashes. Even candles scare them off fairly effectively. The only way to deal with an LV infestation is to firebomb the place. This also gives our movie series the chance to showcase awesome pyrotechnics which audiences adore!
Promotional gimmicks? Yes, I’ve thought of that, too! Action figures, Merry Readers, the Leprechaun Vampire action figure line would be a hot seller. Take a piece of the tiny terror home with you! In fact, an Asian variant could arrive during the opening scenes of the movie. Imagine a child purchasing an action figure, pleased as peaches with his new toy. He’d never notice the fact that it occaisionally moved, but we viewers would. We’d know that given the chance that LV would chew through the packaging and be free to rampage. Entire colonies of them sneaking into Hong Kong toy factories and disguising themselves as the latest, most popular must-have figures of the day. Then once they arrived in the stores, freeing themselves in their new city and setting up homes. Watch out, Wal-Mart, you’ll spread the undead plague!
Now comes the call to action. It’s your job to find the producers, directors and actors needed to get this show on the big screen. Leprechaun Vampires promise to re-invent cinematic horror. Nothing’s scarier than a little evil - there’s your tag line!
Until next I present you with a startling horrific Hollywood revolutionary, this has been GlowStormLion reminding you that it’s never to late to burn your home to the ground for safety’s sake.
-- by GlowStormLion of
http://www.happyhorror.com
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. I love the whole concept of freeform play with the ability to still have a storyline. As much as I enjoy watching characters move around the screen, though, one of my dreams has been a game I could play with physical characters. It’d be sort of like going back to my 